Sometimes there was a feeling of deep sadness, of being alone in a world that seemed all but empty of others. Occasionally she felt a momentary fear that something was going to happen, and she was not allowed to know what it was or understand it. She thought that it might be death, the fear of it. The expectation. An almost annoying sense of dread. She would have wept in such moments but for some reason the tears would not come, as if the expression of grief itself had abandoned her, the ability to express it too deeply sunk into her mind and heart. She had let it settle in so, in order that it might shrink to a nothing, like some miraculously benign and reticent tumor. But it had not.
She sat on the porch and watched the world around her. The yard, the shed, the garden, the empty pig pen beyond that. Pasture. Pond. Woods. A magnolia she had planted after her father died, along with a row of camellias that flowered every spring. So there were songbirds and squirrels, doves in the yard as well as flocks that flew swiftly over in the early fall, and wild ducks circling in dark, descending swoops to the ponds in winter. Quail bursting up in blustering coveys when she walked the pasture fence lines.
At the age of fifty-eight, simply to give herself a pleasurable vice that brought on memories, she looked for and found her father’s old cigarette-rolling machine, bought tobacco, and took up smoking in the afternoons and after her supper in the evenings. Never inside the house — except in winter, by the fire — but on her porch, as her father had so enjoyed doing, along with a little apple brandy from a bottle purchased in town, judging it not as good as what her father had used to make on his own.
The doctor’s wild peacocks left the confine of his woods as people and subdivisions indeed began to encroach upon the property, and they rapidly spread their territory out into the country, eventually into the woods around her house. As if they sensed the presence of someone they found familiar. They would leave the woods and strut and peck about the yard.
Sometimes their call in the distance, from down in the woods, was the loud, AhAHHah, and sometimes a call she did not like so much, a chilling, OWWWwww, that was far too much a cross between a yowling cat and a crying child for her comfort.
But the strange, guttural, jungle call that came late in the evenings, sometimes, a rhythmic, Oof-a-oof-a-oof-a, she loved to hear. It would lull her to sleep. She had made her bedroom area in the old living room and mostly kept to that side of the house. Her sleep was early, sound, and she woke early to the dawn and its first, smoky light. Moving about became slower, more effortful. She had lost interest in food and felt weak but not hungry. She would lose her breath in a task. Odd occasional dull pains behind her breast, and into an arm. Tingling hands.
She received a letter one day in 1982, when she was sixty-seven years old, from a doctor at Johns Hopkins. She was confused, wondering what in the world anyone there would be writing to her about at this point in time.
It was from a surgeon named Wilkes, who said he had been a protégé of Dr. Young et al. but especially of Dr. Ellis Adams, who’d been close friends with her own physician, Dr. Thompson. In brief, Miss Chisolm, the letter read, I am writing to tell you that we have just this past month performed the first entirely successful operation on a condition I am fairly certain matches yours, after many years of research and practice. And I am writing to enquire if you would like to take advantage of this, entirely at our expense, of course, in honor of Dr. Thompson and in gratitude for your having contributed to our research in the past. Yours, etc.
She felt an anger well up in her. She went out for a walk, venturing just to the edge of her woods. Tears welled up but she pushed them down in favor of indignation. She decided she had no anger toward this man or that place. They’d done what they could. But my God, why even bother to let her know, at this point? She went back to the house and composed a brief letter.
Dear Dr. Wilkes,
I thank you kindly for your letter informing me of the new advances and your offer to “fix” me, so to speak. I do appreciate it. But you must understand I am now an old woman, I live alone on my family’s farm, and have no interest in going through such an operation as I see no need for it, and there is certainly not the desire.
Yours truly,
Jane Chisolm
She sealed and put a stamp on the letter, walked to the end of the drive, put the letter into her mailbox, raised the flag, and slammed the mailbox door shut, muttering to herself about what idiots some people could sometimes be.
It seemed that her dreams had become more vivid, and there were more of them. More that she recalled upon waking, anyway. Mushrooms, covering the forest floor. A foreign forest. A fairy-tale forest. Awesome trees towering way, way up, blocking the sky. She sat plucking and eating the fungi, chewing the black dirt at the base of their stems along with their flesh. She’d never known they had eyes.
She woke from another sort of dream and went into the kitchen, and at the table there she wrote a letter, sealed it in an unmarked envelope, and tucked it into her chest of keepsakes at the foot of her bed.
Dear Elijah,
In my dream I walked alone in my meadow in the woods. I laid myself down in the wild grass there and let you gaze on me to see what I am. I let the sun beat down on my pale skin so it became transparent as the skin of an oyster — what is the word — translucent. And you could see the strange miracle of my body. In the world of us that gathered in my mind there was no need for physical perfection in order to enjoy the act of love. This I knew upon what I will call awakening.
J
It was late autumn, cooling down. The world had gone again. She wandered around the house in her slippers and a heavy robe, the propane space heater she’d had installed hissing its blue flame in the quiet living room where it sat on the old fireplace hearth. She was forgetful, leaving her cup of coffee or jelly jar of brandy in one room and forgetting to bring it with her to the next. Or setting down her reading glasses and being unable to remember where she’d set them down when she needed to read a label or an interesting item in the Sunday newspaper she had delivered each week.
She had all but forgotten that her life was compromised, had been compromised, in any way.
From the corner of her eye she saw a blur of bright color like the moving progress of a rainbow through the air of her yard. The peacocks, flying from one roosting tree to another.
She heard their calls through the afternoon, and in the dusk after sunset. Soon it would be winter and they would go quiet for a while. In the late evening she woke to them again, pulled on her robe, and shuffled to a window to look down on the overgrown pasture between the garden and the pond. The moon was almost full after several nights’ waxing in the clear cold sky. Its light blue-silver on the grass. At the edge of the yard, a single peacock stood alone, calling to the moon, displaying his magnificent tail as if to woo it, the moon itself.
She settled back into her bed. A cock somewhere deep in the woods gave out the haunting, lulling call that she loved and pulled her down into sleep. She came through her little meadow where the wildflowers trembled, then up the silvery trail and into the yard, where she stopped as if moonstruck. She’d entered a secret avian cathedral, filled with some kind of winged and feathered things she’d never seen. They stood very still, hushed, their gleaming black eyes fixed on her, white beaks open in a strange, alert anticipation.