“He did it on purpose, didn’t he?” she said. “I’ve thought so, ever since the day.”
The doctor looked straight out over the yard, stone-faced.
She said, “You know yourself what can be done and what can’t. Don’t you? If you just own up to it. You want me to see these people because they’re the best experts, but you have been talking to them, corresponding with them, all of my life. You would know if they were able to fix me. Has your doctor friend in Baltimore actually given you some kind of confirmation?”
“What if they were at least able to repair the incontinence?”
“Has your friend actually suggested good odds on that? The man in Memphis said the way I’m made makes that highly unlikely. Has that changed?” Then she said more softly, “What are the odds, Ed? I think you want to believe it, but I think in your heart you either suspect or know that at this point they still cannot. What would be the point, if we’re honest?”
He looked startled, emotion in his face. Then looked away.
She thought of her father and her mind felt inflamed with unchecked emotions. She looked out to where she’d left the tomato worm. It was gone, leaf, stem, and all.
“I don’t want to make your life more complicated,” he said. “I thought, possibly, just the opposite, in the long run.”
“Well,” she said after a moment, as if to the yard, or to the strangely ravished, vanished worm, the billowing sky, the somewhere-feasting little wild bird — probably the flicker that was gone now from the apple tree, silent.
“Well,” she said. “It’s not complicated.”
They were quiet then in the still of the afternoon. The storm that had threatened seemed to have lost its strength and moved away. And then the doctor got back into his truck and left. She watched him drive off in a late afternoon light that seemed flickering, like the clickety light in a motion picture, color draining as if it, too, were in black-and-white, controlled by a steady hand turning a handle to keep the world in motion, by and by.
What the doctor had said to her, about caring for her. Some part of her was trying to absorb it, to understand how he had always helped her to feel less alone in the world. Less strange.
Dear Ellis,
I presented Miss Jane Chisolm w/ new possibility of at least marginal surgical repair to her condition. She is skeptical, and unwilling to bother without a greater degree of certainty on our parts. No more exploratory action, I’m afraid. She does have a good measure of her parents’ obstinacy, in addition to her own very independent nature. I offered to pay for it, myself. I cannot abide the idea of not at least trying. Finding out what can or cannot be done. Perhaps it is selfish, but I cannot abide such stubbornness, damned country stubbornness, when there is absolutely no practical reason not to seek the medical certainty, and every reason to move ahead should it be possible to do so.
I did not and never have even brought up the idea of colostomy. Personally, I wouldn’t see it as enough improvement, especially considering the risks for infection, etc. All things considered, she’s been very lucky in that way.
She believes her father caused his own death, w/ purpose. It would be impossible to know, of course, given his condition and habits. Beyond the philosophical sense, of course. How much this may have to do with her decision, I couldn’t say. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a powerful influence.
Such quiet in this house in the evenings, with my Lett gone now almost twenty-two years. I have not and I suppose will never entirely surrender my grief. My peacocks, now so numerous, are a comfort though they are at least half-wild and sometimes their calls and cries bring up a feeling of loneliness as much as comfort. A strange beauty. Sometimes I wonder should I get a dog, maybe, and wonder why the hell I never did, especially after Lett died. I suppose it makes no sense to avoid it now simply because I’d most likely outlive it. But I probably won’t go to the trouble, at this age. Janie Chisolm would take it in, I believe, but I wouldn’t want anyone to be beholden.
Ed
Otherworldly Birds
And then there was the long quiet afternoon of autumn, then middle and late winter. Crows angling curious over the fields. Hawks hovering for mice exposed in sparse cover. A light cold breeze. Hard frosted soil. Evergreen pines seen through bare limbs of oaks, sycamores, sweetgums, hickories, maple, poplar, beech. The crooked, crazed, leafless pecans in the neglected grove, the weathered barn, rusted roof tin, rusted barbed wire, implements. Huddled cattle. Weathered grazing horse and mules. Gray scudded sky. She’d made arrangements for Harris, with new help from the return of Mister, to take on another twenty acres. Another eighty came under the hand of a man named Moss and his family, who were friends with the Harrises. The doctor had recommended she take on more colored people instead of whites. “More reliable, more trustworthy,” he’d said. “You learned that the hard way.” Moss was a big man, with a good sense of his own dignity. She gave him halves, and let him and Harris use of any of her father’s equipment they might need, at any time, if they promised to maintain it. She would pay for fuel and major repairs. She told him that if he needed to add on to the cabin the Temples had once occupied, she would supply him with lumber and nails.
All she really had to worry about was preparing her garden and making it good the following summer. She used money from her father’s final crop and cattle sales to get through the winter, although, it being only her, there wasn’t much cost. She kept her insurance money in a safe-deposit box in town. Days, she could take walks, and talk to Harris or Moss, or Emmalene, or Mister if she caught him out and about. Sometimes she ran into him in the woods, her walking, him hunting with his mutt dog for squirrels. He was still skinny and comical. Even though they’d been childhood friends, he always took his hat off when he spoke to her. He seemed a bit of a rascal, even so, and she didn’t doubt what Hattie had told about his rather active nightlife in town. It being still winter, he would disappear down to there when he could, and when he came back Mr. Harris his grandfather would be cloudy for a few days about it.
She discovered, on a dark shelf in the back of the shed beside her father’s still, several jars of his apple brandy. Had her mother not even known it was there? Jane would have a little, sometimes, in the evenings on the porch or beside the kitchen stove in winter.
She asked Dr. Thompson if he would recommend a good radio, and the next time he visited he simply brought her one. She set it up in the kitchen, as the only electric outlet was in the bulb socket there. Sometimes she convinced him to come by and stay for dinner, if he had stopped by earlier in the day on his rounds. They would have a little of her father’s apple brandy afterward, and listen to a program. Then he would make his way home before too late. If she thought he’d had too much to drink during the day, which was rare enough, she kept on him until he agreed to sleep in her parents’ old room across the breezeway. Always, she would hear his car or truck crank up before she could even rise to make coffee, and hear him grinding off down the drive and out onto the road.
Sometimes she would stop in at his house and stay for supper there. Hattie was always glad to see her. She had never married, never had another child. She had grown stout, like her mother Emmalene, but unlike Emmalene she was of a lighter disposition. Jane supposed her life here, as the doctor’s housekeeper and helper, was a good bit easier than the life her mother had led growing up and growing old, a midwife and the wife of a sharecropper. Well, of course it was.