Miss Jane (2 page)

Emmalene stood waiting for the doctor in a corner of the bedroom, flickered by firelight from a small woodstove against the far wall. She had heated a pot of water and put a basket of clean rags at the ready. She watched Mrs. Chisolm there in her bed, sweating, pale, tears in her eyes. She said a silent prayer, asking please God let this child be well. When Mrs. Chisolm cut her eyes over as if she could hear the woman's thoughts, Emmalene turned away and busied herself checking the hot water, the neat little stack of clean rags.

On a small stool in a darkened corner of the room, silent, looking at the floor, elbows on her splayed knees, sat the older daughter, Grace, so still she was practically invisible. When she blinked her eyes Emmalene noticed and startled, as if the blink itself had
materialized the girl, brought flesh and blood into being, revealing her sullen presence there among them.

DR. THOMPSON LIVED
just two miles south of the Chisolm farm, on the semi-rural outskirts of the small but bustling city of Mercury. When Chisolm arrived at two a.m., the doctor was awake, sitting in the dim moonlight that fell through the windows of his study, unable to sleep. He heard the shod hooves on the road, then in his front yard, and stepped out onto the front porch in his nightgown.

The man sat bareback and silent, hat crammed down on his head, skinny shoulder bones rising like bumps inside the loose cotton blouse he wore.

“Aren't you chilled in this evening, Chisolm?”

“Cold don't bother me, no, sir.”

In the bedroom he took up his clothing from the day before, quietly as he could. The coin change in his pants pocket jingled and his wife groaned, turned over in sleep. He went back to his study to dress. In the yard, Chisolm was hitching big Rufus to the buggy.

He finished dressing, checked his medical bag, then stepped out, shutting the door quietly behind him. Chisolm stood holding his mule by the reins in one hand, Rufus in the other. The doctor pulled his lanky frame up into the buggy, packed and lit a pipe of tobacco, pulled an old blanket over his legs against the chill, and they began the two-mile trot out to the Chisolm place.

Rufus, his big bay gelding Missouri Fox Trotter, with a smooth gait and agreeable disposition, was good company on a night ride. The doctor could have taken his Ford, but reserved that for when
he had to cover a lot of ground and make several stops in a day. He'd named the horse Rufus because noble as he was there was something of the jokester in his eye and disposition. The name seemed to fit.

He felt illogically happy to be out on this errand. The ghost of a friend's imminent death seemed to trail out of him like wisps of smoke from the pipe. He'd briefly thought to take a little cocaine to pep himself up but resisted. He knew well enough to be stingy with that stuff, save it for extreme fatigue. He felt instead an itch for a drink. Chisolm made a good batch of whiskey, aged in an oak barrel that he charred on the inside, just like the fancy distilleries in Tennessee and Kentucky, so the whiskey had a nice mellow brown color. He tested each batch by taste for proof, added branch water to bring it down to what the doctor judged was close to ninety, then strained it through cheesecloth into pottery jugs and corked them with stobbers of whittled sweetgum sticks. All in all, a first-rate operation.

He hummed another tune, the words in his head,
Let me call you “Sweetheart,” I'm in love—with—you
, trotted the rig down the wide dirt highway, the man and mule close behind him in blue silhouette. “Get up, Rufus,” he said, tapping the reins against the horse's flanks.

He took the narrow access road to Chisolm's farm, barely lit by stars and sheen of moonlight, through hushed and tunneled woodland, beside pastures silvered with an evening frost on the grass, a waxing moonlight on them like blued silver dust, and down into the draw over the creek. He heard Chisolm's mule veer off the road into the woods, taking a shortcut. He slowed to cross the bridge, little more than a couple of square-hewed logs supporting a narrow pallet of oak planks. The creek was quiet,
low. More than once Chisolm had toppled his wagon off the bridge into the creek, taking it too fast or careless and slipping a wheel off the edge. And more than once the doctor had been summoned to peer into his dilated pupils seeking evidence of concussion, or to reset a dislocated shoulder, and thrice to set a broken arm and make sure a broken rib had not pierced a lung or other vital organ. Every time, Chisolm had been coherent enough to have one of his family place a fresh jug into the back of the doctor's buggy under a feed sack before he left. The wife would have made sure that he toted a full stomach of chicken and dumplings or cornbread and greens back to the wagon. He'd sip from the jug on the way home, suffering no grievous consequences aside from his wife's quiet indignation, half from the whiskey drinking itself and half because the rich food plus whiskey invariably gave him a case of flatulence that drove her from their bed and into the empty bedroom in the back of the house, to fulminate and toss and turn and fuss her lot as a country doctor's wife. For that reason, he had adapted by staying up, sipping late into the evening, settling onto the sofa in his office or in front of the fireplace to snooze away the rest of the night in pleasant dreams and uninhibited, flatulent segregation from the niceties of marital diplomacy.

He pulled up at the Chisolms' gallery, noted the mule already hitched to the post there. Chocked the buggy's brake and climbed down as the side door to the house's main room opened and a long rectangle of weak yellow light spilled out into the breezeway of the dog-trot house. Chisolm's long angular face peered out, then pulled itself back inside. It was a dog-trot house but grander than most, larger and kept-up, and clean. The hound that had bayed at his arrival had quit and disappeared. Once in the
house's breezeway he could smell the dying scents of fried pork, stewed vegetables, fried bread, and molasses from the kitchen. He entered the house through the large common room, heard a low guttural moaning, and felt a tingle in the air of physical discomfort and alarm. Smelled the odors of labor, sweat and blood and fecal matter. Marveled that probably Mrs. Chisolm had done most of the dinner work herself before rolling into the bed to have this child. He was glad it was not her first.

Chisolm sat hunched in a straight-back chair before the fireplace, a loose-rolled cigarette burning down to the knuckles in one long bony hand. Nodded at the fire as if to the doctor, without looking up. The doctor caught the glint of a glazed jug in the shadows to one side of his weathered brogans.

He went on into the bedroom. A pot of water steamed on the small woodstove against the north wall. The midwife had hold of Mrs. Chisolm's hand, another hand on her left leg, the covers tossed away. A hand dark as black coffee against skin pale as a blinding cataract. And there, in the mussed bedding, between the poor woman's scrawny splayed thighs, the crowning head of what he hoped would be their last child.

Over in a dark corner of the room the daughter, Grace, sat on a stool looking grimly at nothing. She didn't look up when he came in. He figured her to be about ten years now. Seemed older by a couple, at least.

He walked over to the bed and spoke to the midwife.

“Get me a bowl of that hot water—you boiled it? Good—a bar of soap, some of those clean rags, and set them on that bench. Light the lantern on that table beside the bed, there.”

She went over to the stove and came back in a minute with the water, soap, and rags and set them on the trunk that sat at the foot of the bed. Struck a match to the lantern wick.

He spoke to Mrs. Chisolm.

“You ready, then, madame?”

She gripped his wrist in a sweaty tourniquet. Her voice was a low whisper, her words reflecting her desperation.

“Where in hell have you been?”

“The usual purgatories.”

He detached her hand from his wrist, gave her a near-placebo dose of laudanum, washed his hands and forearms, carrying on a one-sided conversation as he went to work, as if he were dressing a simple wound. Generally this helped to calm people, baffling them into a kind of confusion that settled into a calmer state.

She was a veteran. Most of the hard work already done, she was finished in fifteen minutes. No stitching required. He snipped the cord, and took a good look at the child, who'd come around to crying a bit. He didn't say anything. He looked at the midwife. She stared through narrowed eyes but kept her lips pressed shut. He gave her the child to wash, turned his attention to the placenta and cleaning up Mrs. Chisolm with warm water and disinfectant. The midwife helped him roll her off the soiled sheets and sop rags and took away the afterbirth in a pail, brought in fresh sheets, helped him get them under her. He washed his hands and forearms again as the midwife covered Mrs. Chisolm with a fresh sheet and clean counterpane. He took a lantern over to the crying child in the little crib padded with a folded quilt. It was squeezing its hands and crying well, head to one side. He looked closely, prodding a bit, peering through his spectacles in the poor light. He pulled a small notebook from his vest pocket and wrote something, put it down, and probed a bit with a blunt instrument. Picked up the notebook, wrote again. Then he drew a sketch in there on a fresh page. Looked at the child, back at the sketch, then put the notebook away.

“What is it?” Mrs. Chisolm said, propped up now against the pillows by the headboard and sleepy with exhaustion.

He heard someone come up behind him and saw the girl, Grace, looking around his shoulder at the child, her eyes pinched. Then she left and he heard her open the door and go out, say something to her father in the main room. He spoke quietly to the midwife, asked her to pin a diaper on the child.

Chisolm looked in from the other room. His long face half in shadow.

The doctor picked up the diapered baby, who was crying with some vigor now.

“What, then?” Chisolm said from the doorway.

“Well,” the doctor said. “Let's have Mrs. Chisolm nurse and then we'll have a talk.”

“About what?”

“Good set of lungs, eh?”

The doctor took the baby over to Mrs. Chisolm, who looked at him as if he were some kind of threat, but took the child and bared a breast and let it nurse. The baby suckled furiously and kept its milky blue eyes on its mother's face, the infinite and divinely vulnerable eyes of an infant. Mrs. Chisolm looked as if she thought it to be some kind of potentially dangerous creature.

WHEN HIS WIFE
finally nursed the child to sleep and then dozed off herself, and the midwife had put the baby back into the crib, Chisolm went over to look. He loosened the diaper, gently raised the child's bottom, leaned sideways so as not to block the light. The doctor watched him but didn't come over.

“Good lord,” Chisolm said. “What trouble have we gone and brought into this world now?”

“Trouble for you and Miz Chisolm,” the midwife said. “But more trouble for the child, I expect, poor thing.”

Chisolm didn't look her way. He gazed at the child. The doctor was quiet.

“I 'spec so,” Chisolm said. He called softly to his older girl,
Grace
. The girl came slumping in.

“Get the doctor a plate like I told you. And some coffee.”

To the doctor he said, “I'll leave a little something in your buggy for the ride home.”

The doctor nodded and touched a finger to his brow in a gesture of appreciation.

Chisolm's jug was empty. He pulled on a barn jacket, took a lantern from where it hung on a nail beside the door, went outside, and stood on the porch. Maybe an hour till the full dawn, just a sense of its light in the sky. Against that stood the black outline of trees west of the house and the fields to the south, silhouette of the barn's pitch, and the shed. He lit the lantern and headed down the narrower of two paths into the woods behind the house, veered off that one onto an even more narrow and discreet one—no more than a game trail, at best—that led to his makings and storage. Light had begun to sift like faintly luminous dust into the trees. He could just make out the delicate shadowy patterns of the variously stubbled barks on the trunks, knots on limbs. Switch branches brushed his denim overalls like blind, limber tentacles noting his passing, allowing his pass. In a little clearing down near the creek was the squat figure of his still and the crude shed of rough lumber he'd built there with a heavy door and the padlock he left unlocked most of the time. Folks were aware of his habitual vigilance. He set down the lantern, removed the unhasped lock, and opened the door. He selected a jug from a middle shelf, set it on a broad stump near the fire pit. He went
back into the shed and fetched a small pail of kerosene-soaked sawdust, shook some onto the blackened wood in the pit, put the pail up, closed the shed door. He took some gathered limbs from a small stack next to the pit, set them on top of the old logs, struck a match to the sawdust, watched the flames come up and catch the fresh pieces. He took up the jug and sat on the stump, pulled the whittled beech stick that served as his signature cork from its mouth, took a good swig, forced it down, coughed, recorked, and set the jug on the ground behind him, back from the fire. The throbbing heat of the whiskey filled his chest and drifted in blood up into his mind and opened a little door, just a bit. He let out a heavy breath, took his tobacco pouch and papers from his overalls bib, and rolled a loose cigarette, lit it with a slender stick he held to the flames for a moment, blew out the stick and set it aside, and smoked.

For the devil of him, he couldn't recall exactly when it had happened. He supposed he'd been drinking or he wouldn't have entertained the idea. They'd had no need nor desire for another child. Would have gone elsewhere, if he could. Must have been that. A late hour, nowhere to go, an urge that overrode everything else. He thought,
Ain't I old enough yet to be over that?