“In any case, there was a bit of a cooling of my interest, as I got older. And then I met Lett and medicine seemed like the pragmatic choice. And she wanted to live down here.”
Their glasses were empty and they went quiet, the doctor seeming lost in thought.
“You’re kind of talky, Ed,” she said. “Have you got into your medicine again?”
He mocked her expression. “Maybe a bit.”
“I should go on,” she said. “I don’t like to drive in the dark.”
One of the peacocks called loudly from the trees, another called back, and the others made a contest out of trying to join in, and then after a raucous bit of that all was quiet. Even the songbirds calmed down.
“The birds are going to sleep for a while,” the doctor said. “Roost in the trees down there. Maybe you should give it up and roost in the guest room here tonight.”
She thought about it.
“I might.”
“Good.” Then he said, “There’s just enough light left. Let me show you something. Come on.”
They walked to the edge of the yard, around Hattie’s cabin, then onto a trail into the woods, moving a bit slowly given his stiffness and her town shoes. The woods were pristine, had never been cut. She wished she had walked with him here before and couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t. The path declined through thick brush and then opened out into an expanse of mostly pine, sweet gum, and birch trees. The trees’ high, broad canopy had kept down most of the undergrowth, so that you could see almost the length of this little narrow forest. And there in the relative clearing, standing very still and watching them as if they had interrupted a party, were dozens of peafowl. For a moment it took her breath. Several of the cocks took steps toward them, stopped, and seemed to shudder throughout their bodies, and up went their long tails, fluttering, shimmering even in what little light was left in the day in these shadows.
“My god,” she said, “they’ve gone wild.”
“They were never tame,” the doctor said. “Not really.”
He knelt carefully down and brushed away leaves and pine needles and scooped up a small handful of dusty earth.
“This is what you do with my ashes when I’m gone,” he said, and tossed it into the air toward the birds, who seemed to come out of their trance at that. Some took flight toward denser foliage, and mixed in with the blustering of their wings made sounds like the little honk of a horn and a barking sound, almost like a wild turkey. Some squawked like a quieter imitation of a crank being turned to start an old car.
“You know one of the most interesting things about birds, Janie? It’s that most of them, all but ducks and geese and a few others — but all songbirds—” then he stopped himself, shook his head. “I may be a little loose-lipped with my bourbon and, uh — it’s brought out the awkward scientist in me.”
“No, tell me what you were going to say.”
He looked at her sideways.
“All right, then. I was going to say they don’t have obvious genitalia. It’s mostly on the inside. The males and the females have this little puckering down there, called the cloaca, and when they’re ready to mate the cloaca swell up, and they simply press their little puckerings together and the male’s sperm finds the female’s eggs and, voilà, baby birds. Do you know what they nicknamed this kind of mating, with birds? They call it a cloacal kiss. Now, don’t you think that’s just kind of endearing?”
She looked at his long, bushy-browed, kindly face in the fading light.
“I do,” she said. “Maybe I’m part bird.”
The doctor had a good little quiet laugh at that.
In a moment, she said, “How about the peacocks?”
“They’re that way, too.”
She could see them, becoming silhouettes as the light became dimmer in her vision, here and there in their roosts, settling in. She looked back toward the trail.
“It’s getting dark.”
The doctor said, “All you have to do is pretend that you can see in the dark, and then you can.”
She made a sound.
“No, really. Just relax your eyes. There. Like that. You see what you can see? You see the trail? You look for what is not the trail. See it?”
“I think I do.”
“All right, then,” he said. “That’s all you need.”
“Okay, then.”
He hesitated, then said, “You once asked me why I got those first birds.”
“I remember. You were lonesome.”
“I was. But really I got them simply because they’re beautiful, they’re strange. People don’t know what to make of them. I liked that. I suppose their role in nature is to help control the populations of the things they eat. They’re good regulators. And to feed the occasional fox or coyote, no doubt. But I like to think they really exist just because they are oddly beautiful. And are killed out of jealous envy. I like to think they enjoy the fact that we think they’re beautiful. I like to think they’re vain. I like to think that they think we think they’re gods, and that the reason we gaze at them in such wonder is that we are worshipping them. Look at them in there. Like shadows, spirits.”
He turned to her, looking unabashedly happy, his face a pale moon in the darkening woods.
“That’s what I like to think,” he said.
Toward the end she did not fear death, even as it took Dr. Thompson at the age of seventy-four, when she was just thirty-five herself. Somehow he had helped her in that way, too. He left her his house, his woods, money in the bank. He left her to provide a living for his housekeeper, Hattie. If Jane did not want to move in, he wrote, she could just hold on to it until town encroached to drive the price up to premium.
She stayed home, went to town as rarely as possible, grew tomatoes, butter beans, snap beans, yellow squash, onions, sweet corn, and the field corn she fed to the chickens. Greens well into the fall. Her hands, long and thin and strong, worked the good black garden soil. Occasionally one of her plump beefsteak tomatoes would shape itself into some kind of vaguely sexually suggestive conformation, which she would study with interest, standing or kneeling in the garden. Whenever she found one of these on the vine, ripe, she plucked it, studied it in a moment of wonder, and ate it there in the garden heat, her face flushed, the juices from the ripe fruit running down her chin and onto her bony sweating breast.
Her sharecroppers drifted away into time. Fields fallow, meadowed, becoming slowly the brambly woods they’d once been long ago.
Grace, who’d moved to New Orleans after Mercury’s brothels were closed during the war, wrote to her once from there, describing her new place of employment (Fancy, she wrote, but Minnie just had the most class), and then no longer wrote, not even in return to letters from Jane, until one letter came back to Jane with the words No longer at this address written on the front of the envelope beneath her return address.
Grace was finally rid of her despised family for good, was what Jane figured, although she was hurt that her sister had not at least made her an exception.
The occasional brief letter or postcard she got from Belmont’s or Sylvester’s wife in Wyoming was nearly incomprehensible. She had never seen mountains. Never seen endless prairie with no trees.
Cicadas pulsed in the heat of the day, and in the late afternoon, so loud as to overwhelm everything else, the very pressure in the air seeming to swell with their mad song. The all-but-every-day afternoon storms in the summer. Cyclone weather in spring, summer, and fall. Once she stood in the breezeway in such a bile-green darkness and lashing downpour that she was sure the roaring was a cyclone somewhere in the low black sky above, but if so it did not touch down and afterward the skies cleared to moonlight on puddles in the yard like broad, shallow ponds gleaming.