“Well,” she said. “It was kind of you to come. Thoughtful.”
He nodded.
“I confess I just wanted to lay eyes on you one more time.”
Her heart turned over. She swallowed.
“Your father was a good man,” he said.
“Yes, he was.”
“Did you know that he came to see me, after they sent you to town?”
“No. I had no idea. Why?”
“He told me that he was sorry about it all. That he knew I was a good boy. ‘Young man,’ he said. He said I should go on with my life, that you would be all right, he would make sure of it. He said, ‘I take care of my own, son.’ I guess I have to say it was something of a comfort to me then.”
He took her hand in his strong, callused fingers, leaned down and kissed the back of it, like some Old World gentleman. He took off his glasses and slipped them into his coat pocket, as if to let her see him without them again, then put on his hat and walked away down their drive. She heard a vehicle start up out there, then drive away.
Her hand burning where his lips had touched it. Or more like a tingling of the nerve endings that one can’t tell if it’s hot or cold, painful or pleasant. It was a lingering feeling, and then after a while, without her noticing its passing, it was gone.
EVERYONE HAD LEFT by midafternoon the next day.
“Leave me alone just tonight,” her mother said. And after receiving no answer, she said, “I’ll be fine. I would just rather be alone tonight.”
“All right,” Jane said then. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
And so the doctor drove his own way home, and she and Grace drove back to town, quiet, went to their separate rooms in the house. She stood at the window and looked out over the town, the sparse Sunday auto traffic, the trains coming from the east and the west. The steam from stacks at the power plant, the forge, the Nabs plant, the creosote plant, and the hospital’s laundry. Puffy white clouds drifting low over the hills to the south and making their way along the valley, moving northeast like a patient fleet of ghost dirigibles carrying the equally weightless, invisible souls of the dead. Quiet.
Grace drove her back up the next day. Surprising Jane, she proposed to their mother that she come to live with them in town.
After a long moment Ida Chisolm said, “I don’t want that. I’ve lived in this house since I was seventeen years old. I can’t even hardly remember living anywhere else. It’s just”—she waved a hand as if at a fly—“gone.”
She had indeed lost something. She slept in, a thing she’d never done. Jane milked their milk cow, gathered the eggs, made coffee and breakfast, although her mother would hardly eat. A few bites of greens or peas at supper. She disdained bread. She had taken up smoking a corncob pipe and would sit on the front porch puffing it.
“I’ve got half a mind to see if your father left any of his apple brandy down at his shed,” she said. And she laughed. It was a single sharp, Ha, as if to say, There, what do you think of that? But then she frowned and puffed some more on the pipe.
They endured that first winter alone. Her mother would wrap herself in a heavy coat and blankets to sit on the porch in all weather. As if she couldn’t stand to be inside except to sleep. Dr. Thompson visited them frequently, and would talk to Jane. When Mrs. Chisolm blurted out that she wanted him to give her laudanum, he hesitated, then said he would. After that, Jane’s mother slept in even later, and went to bed immediately after supper, what little she ate.
In the spring Jane went to work in the old garden, planting tomatoes, snap beans, butterbeans, a single row of sweet corn, yellow squash.
Whereas all her life her mother had more often than not been in conflict not only with others but with herself, her own circumstances, angry about one thing or another, mostly dissatisfied and even resentful of her lot in life, now she seemed to have let that go. But in its stead, there appeared to be nothing. As if she had finally fully burned her ability to care about anything in the long-stoked fire of her discontent. And now she was empty.
She did little beyond sit on the front porch, puffing at a corncob pipe and rocking. She spoke little. She made no effort to cook and ate almost nothing. It was difficult for Jane to convince her to wash herself, or even brush her hair. She began to look like those people other people called crazy. Those people who would wander the streets of town or even the rural roads, staring at nothing, acknowledging no one, talking to themselves. Her poor father had seemed to be losing his mind, during the hardest times, and here now her mother was losing hers in some different kind of way, not frightening or even bewildering but sad. If her mother talked to herself, it was a silent conversation. She took no interest in her grandchildren when Sylvester, Jr., and Belmont finally visited, and looked at them as if observing a stranger’s children, the reason for whose purpose in her presence she could not quite divine.
Jane dealt with what business there was on the farm, totting up the Harrises’ crop, selling off to a neighboring cattleman what beef stock her father hadn’t already sold. Selling his cattle truck and buying an automobile, a little yellow Ford coupe, for occasional trips to town. By the fall of ’39 she was considering whether to take on another tenant or sharecropper to farm or raise cattle on the land her father had always used himself.
Then an oddly hard cold set in one week in early December, and her mother slipped from the house in the middle of the night. The next morning Jane found her lying in the shorn cornfield, clothed only in her thin nightgown, curled up with her frozen fists to her face, her eyes shut and mouth open as if to take her last breath or mutter some kind of unimaginable prayer.
Jane called Dr. Thompson first, then Mr. Finicker at the funeral home. There was now a more or less permanent preacher at the Methodist church in Damascus and she decided just to let that man come if he heard about it and thought he ought, but made no direct attempt to contact him herself. She figured her mother would have left it at that, if it’d been her decision.
Dr. Thompson and Finicker arrived together, with two young men to help remove her mother from the field.
“Do you want Finicker to take her on to his place?” the doctor asked, to which Jane, after a moment’s hesitation, said yes. Funerals in homes were becoming a thing of the past in some quarters and the thought of having her mother’s funeral there, in her own home where she had so often been so unhappy, just seemed too dreary. Finicker’s men carried her mother on a gurney out to his long funeral car. She stopped them before they closed the door, reached in and pressed a penny onto each of her mother’s shrunken, shriveled eyelids. The men looked at her in something like muted astonishment. Then she stepped back and watched them drive her mother away into eternity, vested with her toll to the other side.
Worm
Then she was indeed alone, though Dr. Thompson still visited often. She made her own occasional visits to her tenants, to check in. She put in her garden. One day in July she stood beside the tomato row in a mild state of wonder, watching a doomed tomato worm eat her best plant. The worm’s fat, segmented body was studded with the rows of pure white cocoons that had grown from wasp eggs laid under its skin. They looked like embedded teardrop pearls or beautiful tiny onion bulbs growing from its bright green skin. Inside the cocoons, wasp larvae sucked away the worm’s soft tissue as casually as a child drawing malt through a straw. The worm seemed entirely unperturbed. No doubt a tomato worm is born expecting this particular method of slow death, a part of the pattern of its making somehow, something its brain or nerve center, whatever it has, is naturally conditioned to recognize and accept. Just as a person hardly registers, until near the end, the long slow decadence of death.