After Her Kind
So in the fall of 1932, when she was sixteen going on seventeen, she went to live with Grace in town. Grace’s personality hadn’t changed much, but it did seem that she took things easier here, on her own. She’d married the owner of the dry-cleaning business, a man with the unlikely name of Noble Sidebottom. Then Mr. Sidebottom — who must have truly had quite enough of Grace — ran off with an even younger woman, leaving Grace the business, house, and automobile but not a word of good-bye. Took what cash they had, too. Grace said she figured they hauled off to Mexico, where life was cheap. Some afternoons she drank beer or gin and smoked cigarettes, right out on the front porch where anybody walking by on the sidewalk could see.
Weekdays, Jane worked as a seamstress in Grace’s shop, mending and hemming men’s britches and shirtsleeves, repairing the stitching in winter coats, vests. She had learned while living with her mother to make dresses, skirts, shirts from whole cloth. She sat at her machine and pumped the treadle with her foot, humming tunes of her own making as she worked. She kept the big washing machine going for the laundry customers, and hung clothes on the lines out back, and helped Grace iron when she could. It was hard work.
She had ended her habit of fasting, as she had to keep her wits to get everything done. She had little contact with others, anyway, outside her very controlled environment. She’d taken to wearing several slips beneath her dress, as many as five or six, hoping that would muffle odors, and a protective rubber garment. And perfume, a slight distraction. And it was Grace who gave the customers their items and took their money. Jane stayed in the back, working. Clients came to the shop to drop off or pick up items they’d had repaired or sewn, but she rarely saw them.
Their house, just a couple of blocks north of the new hospital, was one of those plain Victorian homes of plank siding painted white, with tall windows and a second, attic floor with dormers, where Jane made her rooms.
The streets were paved to just north of Fourteenth Street, so in all seasons Jane and Grace could hear the clopping of horses’ hooves when wagons and buggies passed, going to the hospital or down the hill to town, and also the chustling of old vehicles and the whining acceleration of the newer motorcars owned mostly by townspeople who lived in the outlying areas. At all hours of the day and night came the plaintive steam whistles of freights and passenger trains plying the tracks along Front Street, south to Hattiesburg and the coast, north to Columbus and Tupelo, east to Birmingham, west to Jackson. To Jane, who’d never heard trains so close with such regularity, the wailing whistles and the banging of cars together in the rail yard, rumbling out of the valley in all directions, was comforting. Up in the attic apartment, her windows open spring, summer, and fall for breeze, she heard these sounds, along with the sloppy hard-edged language of men walking home from the saloons in late evening, and she felt most times as if she had little real privacy, so accustomed she was to the quiet farm with its occasional cow or bull sounding off, bellowing at the moon or calling a calf or hailing a harem of heifers, a horse blowing a big flappity sigh, restless in its stall, a dog barking, an owl hooting now and then, and the startled songbirds’ calls in its wake, or their silence. Coyotes. Crickets. Cicadas. Tree frogs, and bullfrogs down by the cattle pond. And during quiet moments in the summertime, the breezes rustling the full-leafed stalks in the cornfield.
If she was to stay there and live in Grace’s attic, then she was to be the primary cook, washwoman, and cleaning woman, in spite of the fact that she put in a full day six days a week at Grace’s shop for meager wages, as well. Grace was hard in her determination not to be soft in a world where men expected that of women so they could have their way.
In one of her more callous moments, she said to Jane, “You don’t know how good you have it, not even having to think about dealing with a man pawing at you all the time, bossing you around.”
They were in the kitchen, Jane having cracked several eggs into a bowl to scramble them. Grace leaned over to look into the bowl.
“You didn’t take out the little squiggly things.”
“Why should I?”
“It’s the rooster jism,” Grace said. “Sperm.”
“It is not,” Jane said, looking again at the eggs in the bowl with revulsion.
“Well, what would you know about it? You’ve never seen it.”
“That is just not possible,” Jane said.
“Sure looks like it,” Grace said.
WHENEVER HER FATHER would come to town to sell a cow at the stockyard, which wasn’t so often anymore, he would stop and pick up Jane and let her go along. It was always a Saturday, and he would always just pull up to the curb in front of the house and sit in his big cattle truck smoking cigarettes, until one of them would hear the cows in back complaining of being cooped up and go out to speak to him. If it was Grace, he’d nod and just say, “Tell sister to come on with me to the stockyard.”
“He must think I have an eye for cattle,” Jane said.
“What I figure is he knows he won’t drink till after the trading if you’re along,” Grace said.
Jane would try to talk to him but he had become a man of even fewer words. His lean and chiseled features now more lined, the jawline softer. Eyes seeming to go gray behind spectacles that gleamed in sun or streetlamp light like glass coins in filament frames. Just after the auction — and the loading of a cow if he’d bought as well as sold — he would go off by himself, come back, and begin to take furtive swallows from a pint bottle of liquor he’d acquired from some local purveyor or another hanging about the lot like a regular truck farmer. One evening they were driving back to Grace’s when a policeman pulled them over, ringing away at the bell on the roof of his car. Her father looked annoyed and puzzled. The policeman came up to the truck window and spoke to her father. Evidently he knew who he was. He looked around her father and tipped his hat to her.
“Ma’am,” he said, touching the bill of his policeman’s cap. Then, “Mr. Chisolm, did you realize you were exceeding the speed limit?”
Her father looked at the young man for a good long moment and said, “It’s getting late and I’m in a hurry to get home.”
“Yes, sir, I understand that. Have you been drinking, Mr. Chisolm?”
Her father just looked at him as if he hadn’t said anything at all. Jane took a furtive glance at the pint bottle lying beside her father’s leg on the seat.
“I need to get on,” her father said then. “I have to drop my daughter off at her sister’s house and then drive clear out to my place, a good five-six mile from here, and I like to get to bed early, you understand.”
“Yes, sir, I understand. If you could wait for just a minute, though, I’m afraid I’m going to have to write you a citation.”
“A what?”
“A ticket. For the speeding. I’ll let the drinking go, as you seem capable of driving, if you’ll keep the speed down.”
“All right, but I need to get on,” he said again then.