“Better to have her upset with me than have her heart broken by that boy one day,” he said to himself.
“Of course,” his wife said, surprising him. He hadn’t known she was in the room. He looked at her, a bit irritated by her sneakiness and her sarcastic tone.
Things were getting no better moneywise, either. He would worry less, maybe, if she wasn’t around, if she was in town learning how to live off the farm, moving toward learning how to be on her own in the world. Once he’d really thought about it, he couldn’t imagine she’d want to live on this farm by herself when he and the wife were dead and gone.
And to himself he admitted he was drinking more. Craving it more. Slipping off to his makings shed more often. But after a few drinks he would forget or not care about discretion and bring the jug or jar back up to the house. He worried about her seeing that.
His wife suggested that Jane could take in some sewing, maybe from some of Grace’s customers, to help out with expenses. She might build up a little business of her own that way.
They presented Jane with the idea the next afternoon before supper. She looked at them, sitting there at the kitchen table beside which she stood, listening. Her face had taken on the kind of look she’d put on as a child, when something upset her.
“I’d rather just stay here,” she said. “I can earn my keep.”
“Well,” her mother said, deliberately not looking at her. “We think it’s the best thing for now.”
Jane went into her room and sat on the bed, hearing her father go out again and her mother get to work on the meal. In a while, she got up and went back into the kitchen to help. Her mother stopped to look at her, then went back to what she’d been doing.
“You could take in some sewing work, like I said, just to help Grace out a little,” she said. “She practically raised you, anyway.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jane said. “But don’t make me leave right now. Please. Not just yet.”
Her mother looked at her long enough for Jane to feel the room begin to close in on them, the outside world to disappear from her senses. “And why do you want to stay here, with just us? Why do you want that so much just now?”
“I’m not like Grace. I’ve never wanted to get away, restless. Let me stay at least through the spring. For the dances, then. I had such a good time.”
“Maybe you are restless,” her mother said. And they stared at one another until her mother stood up to leave the room.
“If you would watch those peas on the stove,” she said as she left, “I’d appreciate it. Don’t let them boil over. I need to get out of this house for a bit.”
“All right.” Although she said it softly and her mother didn’t appear to be listening, reaching for her tin of snuff up on the mantel before going out onto the porch to sit by herself for a while.
THERE WERE LIGHT breezes passing through the hay stalks, cotton bolls beginning to bloom, the corn leafed out deep green. Jane walked with the doctor down into the woods and around the fishing pond and he talked about his love for fried fish and potatoes and patted his growing belly. Occasionally he pulled his briar pipe from his vest pocket and loaded it with tobacco and stopped to smoke leisurely while she waited. He was getting on in years, not really old but seemed so to Jane, and he stopped often to catch his breath and sigh out about how he knew he wasn’t really getting old, but he sure wasn’t young anymore. When they came out of the woods and walked down to the pasture below the house, he paused in his gait, knocked ashes from his pipe, and said, “Well, I have put off showing you this, or giving you the information that I promised I would, but from what your parents say, you and the Key boy seem to be courting in earnest, and so I thought I should not put it off any longer.”
She listened, her ears burning with what she half knew and feared he was going to say.
“You showed me,” she said.
“I showed you the simple stuff,” he said. “And gave you a general explanation. What I have to show you now is more detailed and specific.”
“Okay.”
“I know you’re both still very young and I doubt seriously either of you has thought ahead to anything more serious between yourselves. But still.”
He pulled from the side pocket of his jacket a printed pamphlet, with illustrations, and gave it to her.
“My friend in Baltimore sent me this pamphlet. It’s part of their stock-in-trade, see. It explains — graphically and in detail — how it is that a man and a woman come to be with child,” he said. “I know you’ve seen things,” he murmured, almost to himself. “But. In any case, if you’ll pay particular attention to page three, the inside-view illustration there of the usual female anatomy. As I said before, while you were growing inside your mother, becoming who you are, something happened to alter or change the normal process of this development. Or more likely stopped the development before you were fully formed. But now, after you have read this and seen the illustration he’s made and put in here — after talking to me and to that Dr. Davis in Memphis — you will understand what I mean when I say that, in your case, conceiving a child and carrying it to term would be extremely unlikely without major surgical repair or alterations, and as I said, I believe that will be possible one day but there is just no way to say when. And if you, as you are now, were able to engage in intercourse or sexual relations — do what you’ve seen your sister and, ah, the others do — it wouldn’t be the same as it is with people who have what’s considered the ‘normal’ anatomical makeup. I’ve said that you are a normal girl, and you are. But inside you down there, because you stopped developing before everything was finished, and maybe some wires got crossed in the process — that is where you’re not ‘normal.’ I’m afraid that if the Key boy were to marry you, on your wedding night — I’m afraid he might feel confused and unsettled. He might even believe he had been betrayed. There is nothing in this world that saddens me more than to have to tell you this straight-out. But it simply is not right to get into a serious relationship with someone without everyone knowing the facts. Or at least enough of them.”
The doctor paused.
“You see the slip of paper there in the back of the pamphlet.”
“Yes.”
“You can look at that and compare it to the illustration in the pamphlet, which is a drawing of the interior female anatomy without any sort of complications.”
In the margin of the pamphlet on that page he had drawn an arrow and written, This is where one has access to the part inside that allows a child to be conceived. And there was another arrow pointing to the drawing of the male parts, without additional words, as if to say, This is self-evident, no?
“You can see the obvious and extensive difference if you look here”—and he pointed to the pamphlet graphic—“and then here”—and he pointed to the handmade drawing. It looked to have been traced from some professional document. Looking from the one to the other, the printed drawing in the pamphlet and the drawing on the slip of paper, she felt a cold heaviness flood into her heart. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known it anyway, on some level. But she had never really been able to imagine the details. Seeing it there, laid out so plainly, was a form or level of confrontation with the reality of her self that she had essentially avoided — just by being herself, she supposed. She dropped her hand holding the drawing and pamphlet to her side, fought back useless tears. There was no sense in being upset over what just couldn’t be. Or at least no sense in making a scene over it in front of anyone else.
He held out his long, big-knuckled hand and took hold of hers. She tried to withdraw it but he held on.