You would not think someone so afflicted would or could be cheerful, not prone to melancholy or the miseries. Early on she acquired ways of dealing with her life, with life in general. And as she grew older it became evident that she feared almost nothing — perhaps only horses and something she couldn’t quite name, a strange presence of danger not quite or not really a part of the world.

She didn’t fear a fever of the kind that had taken brother William at the age of three, before she was born. To her mind such fate belonged to that child, not her.

She wasn’t afraid of snakes, not even the poisonous kind, for she believed they wouldn’t bite her if she simply left them alone. Mosquitoes, for some reason of their own, did not bite her, although she took no precautions against them.

She did not fear chickens, because she found them to be comically sage — in spite of what people said about stupid chickens. The same with pigs, although their frequent, abrupt, chaotic, or oddly orchestrated and deafening panic at first frightened her, until she saw the comical in that. The panic was sudden in its arrival and departure, both. Cows were so obviously a threat to no one, if you did not threaten a mother’s calf. The bull was safely penned in his separate small pasture.

She didn’t fear the coyotes that sang at night in the open fields, nor the panthers that sometimes screamed far off deep in the woods. She loved to kneel at the open window and listen to the coyotes sing and imagine what they were singing to each other, what their singing meant to them. She did not mind them tearing mice, rabbits, and squirrels to pieces, nor running down newborn fawns. Nor the panthers sometimes taking a newborn calf. Her odd fear of an unnamed beast, something we might call mythical, came from having thought she once heard one grumbling near the house at night, and she was terrified then.

She was not afraid of screeching owls in the night, nor of the possibility of coming upon wild hogs during her walks in the woods, nor packs of wild dogs that sometimes roamed the pastures and were to everyone more fearsome than the coyotes or panthers or bears, their having no fear of man. She was not afraid of rabid coons or foxes, of her father’s guns, being a ten-gauge shotgun and a Winchester rifle. Nor of the hatchet used to decapitate the chickens, nor the long knives used to butcher the hogs, nor the smaller knives used to skin and butcher the occasional deer, nor the saws used for sawing their bones. Nor the large black kettle, used to boil water for washing soiled clothes and also for making soap in the yard, that she was told to stay clear of when she was small. Nor was she afraid of hell, although the preachers on the circuit warned of it, but she was not afraid of eternal fire or demons and the devil himself. She could not properly conjure them in her mind without a comical air. Jane, who rarely even went to town as a child, could not imagine going to hell, her imagination being neither successfully cross-country nor subterranean.

She was not afraid of cyclones in the darkest bile-green-and-black skies during storms that cracked off the limbs of oaks and the tops of pines and made the tin roof of the house and gallery pop and groan and bend upward at the edges. Nor of the hail that pocked the tin like buckshot raining down. Nor of lightning that split trees their length and left smoldering charred skeletons rooted to the wet, scorched earth. She was not afraid of God, with his sly and untrustworthy balance of love and wrath, who was yet curious enough to make himself vulnerable and walk among humans just like herself in the beautiful, harrowing embodiment of Jesus.

She feared horses because when they yanked their heads skyward and rolled their eyes she imagined they knew better than her what there was to fear in the air, in the inescapable physical world. She did not fear mules, which her father explained were smarter than horses and predictable, and later she liked it when she learned that they had no lineage. When she was small she feared standing bodies of water because for some reason she thought they were bottomless, but her father cured her of that by taking her fishing at their pond and coaxing her to wade in, cool off, feel the muddy earth safely there beneath the surface. Still, she would never learn to swim.

Her mother was more of an enigma than a threat, tending to lash out but seeming more angry at something inside herself than at others. Jane learned to weather the harsh and dark words, no more than a passing foul breeze in a world of variable winds of variable intensities but ephemeral and of no real consequence in a life.

She did not like the vexation of her incontinence, and wished she would outgrow it, but eventually accepted it as part of who she was, no matter how unsavory. She determined that she would live like any other girl as best she could, and when she could no longer do that, she would adjust her life to its terms accordingly. So she did not fear her own strangeness, even though her awareness of it grew and evolved as she got older.

In time her gaunt, dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty would be altered and sharpened by age, a visible sign of her difference, her independence, and a silent message to all that her presence in the world was impenetrable beyond a point of her own determination.

She was born into that time and place, in the farmland cut from the pine and broadleaf woods of east-central Mississippi, 1915, when there was no possibility of doing anything to alleviate her condition, no medical procedure to correct it. It was something to be accepted, grim-faced, as they accepted crop failure, debt, poverty, the frequent deaths of infants and small children from fevers and other maladies.

Her mother was thirty-nine and had not intended to have another child. Five years earlier she’d lost what she thought would be her last and youngest, a boy named William, who contracted a fever and died. The next year an unplanned child, her second girl, died stillborn. On William’s stone were the words, How desolate our home / Bereft of him. The stone for the infant girl read simply, Chisolm Infant, with the identical dates of her birth and death engraved below.

For the first few months she was pregnant with the girl who would become Jane, she pretended that she was not. That it was a false pregnancy, simply her body fooling with her, playing an evil joke. This figment of a child in her womb would go away, disappear like some temporary derangement of the senses brought on by God or the devil for reasons she could not divine. But at four months she could feel it quickening, and by five months it had begun to move around quite a bit, to thrust and kick and stretch, so she could not pretend it was anything else. By seven months in she had begun to talk to it. I will try to do right by you, she said, if you promise that you will try to do right by me. Do not die before I do. Do not come out a defective child doomed to unhappiness or an early death.

When she spoke to the child, the fetus, in this manner, it would go very still, as if listening, considering her terms.

The night her water broke, her husband summoned the midwife named Emmalene Harris, whose family sharecropped forty acres on their property, to tend to his wife until he could fetch Dr. Thompson. His two sons were already near-grown and working their way through the state college up north, so he had to make the errand himself. He feared complications, given his wife’s age and her darkened mental state.

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.

Ida Chisolm weaned her new one at little less than a year old and the baby took to her mush of peas and sweet potatoes with the same toothless puzzlement, then gluttony, as any child. Grace, whenever she wasn’t at school, went about her babysitting duties in silence. At eleven years she had the demeanor of a disgusted, life-strangled sixteen-year-old. As if to speed up and thereby shorten the period of being harnessed to the task, she worked hard to train her little sister on the chamber pot, then the outhouse, and taught her to clean herself. But soon enough recognized a problem and complained about frequent accidents and once the doctor confirmed the incontinence it was a matter of either getting the child to run to the outhouse or to drop her drawers (the loose diaper she had continued to wear, in any case) wherever she stood in the yard, or pasture, or at the edge of the woods, by the barn, wherever. Since she was just a toddler they allowed it, since she did not like soiling herself and wanted to go like everyone else. She tried. A good-humored, even cheerful little child. She seemed intelligent enough but not dangerously impulsive, so Grace let her wander by herself around the house and yard barefoot (except in winter) as freely as a child at least a year or two older. It became a familiar sight to the family and the sharecroppers and tenants, this small scrawny creature baring her bony bum and relieving herself whenever and wherever like one of the animals in their care.

Watching this from the front porch at churning, or from the back porch washing dishes in the pump sink, or emerging from the privy, Grace indulged in what little humor she had in her system, smiling a tight smile and muttering to herself in a low chuckle, shaking her head and going back to work, keeping one eye loosely on the child. Jane was indeed like some kind of herky-jerky windup toy that never wound down till sometime in the evening right after supper when the winder just stopped and clump, down she went. Clean her and put her to bed.

When she got a break from her babysitting Grace would sneak out to the barn and go around it to smoke a cigarette from the Luckies she now kept hidden behind a loose chink in one of the foundation posts. Got to where she liked them so much she began sneaking one after supper, too, watching from shadows for when the washbasin was unoccupied, then hurrying to wash up, brush her teeth, before going to bed without a word to or a glance at anyone. They were all used to that.

When little Jane noticed a rag doll in the Sears catalog, Grace put one together for her using material from a flour sack and filling the shape with hard corn kernels cracked with a hammer. She let Jane help draw on a face with India ink, then stitched over that with blue thread. They made a tiny skirt for it and drew a pair of slippers on its shapeless feet.

She’d thrown her own similar doll into the bushes along the road one day years before, suddenly embarrassed and disgusted with herself for still carrying it in her school satchel. Now, young as she was, she felt a twinge of lost childhood and tried to steel herself against it, turning her thoughts once again to getting away. But she could not harden herself entirely anymore against her feelings for this little girl, her baby sister and the only one in her household she could enjoy even a little bit being around. With her yellow hair and blue eyes, she felt like a changeling left at the door of this cantankerous woman and gloomy man, yet here was this child, this odd one, a defective, dark like their parents but with blue eyes even bluer than hers. She did not want to love her, or as she sometimes referred to her, it, but she thought, I have to love something.

She sat on the porch one afternoon during the autumn Jane would turn three and watched her wander out into the yard and over near the shed across the drive, stop, squat, and instead of what Grace expected from that, saw her reach down and pick something up, hands working like she was winding something around them as she walked, stopped at the edge of the porch, hands raised, eyes wide open with the secret hidden in them.

“Well, what is it?” Grace said. She was looking on this strange and beautiful child, big eyes so expressive, as if wiser or more knowing than possible.

Little Jane opened her hands and a tiny garden snake no bigger around than a night crawler and no longer than the length of a knitting needle popped up and curled around her hands as if it were the strange birth of an extra, wild, writhing digit. Grace stood up as if called to military attention, not knowing whether to go knock the snake from the child’s hands or trust to luck it was a harmless one.

“Put it down, now,” she said as calmly as she could. But Jane closed her eyes and laughed and ran past her into the house and in a moment she heard her mother shriek and holler to “get that thing out of this house right now!”

Later, she looked on as their father gave Jane a lesson on which snakes were safe and which were not. He drew pictures of the poisonous snakes’ broad, triangular heads, and brought out an old rattle from one he’d killed in the yard, shook it for her. “You hear that,” he said, “you stop, stand real still, figure out where it is, and you back away. You see this here cottonmouth moccasin, you run,” and he described and drew one, told her their coloring and shape. Told her about coral snakes: Red touch yellow, kill a fellow; red touch black, friend to Jack. She liked that rhyme enough to mimic it back to him, making him smile a rare smile.

He said, “Anyway, you see one of those snakes, you hightail it out of there. And if you can’t tell, don’t chance it.”

She asked if she could have the rattle to keep on a string around her neck.

He seemed amused by this but said he thought not, as it might attract another snake.

“All right,” she said, handing the rattle back. Her father put it away in the little box on the mantel where he kept it along with a bear’s tooth and the tiny mole skull Jane herself had found one day, just roaming around the yard.

When they left, Grace went to the mantel, took out the rattle, and made herself a necklace of it by poking a hole in the open end and lacing through it a length of pale thread. She made it long enough so the rattle would be hidden by her blouse. She hooked a finger under it and gave it a little shake, and something about the sound made her heart beat a little faster.

Little Jane heard it one day and was excited. “You made a rattle necklace!” she said. “Papa wouldn’t let me.”

“I know.”

“He said it might make a real snake come after me.”

“I doubt that,” Grace said. “You want it?”

Jane seemed to think about it, then shook her head with a mysterious grin.

Her mother asked Grace one day what she had on that thread around her neck.

“Nothing,” she said.

“I can see there’s something on it, there under your blouse. I can hear it making some kind of little noise when you move around.”

“Nothing but the rattle of my little old heart,” Grace said, and ignored the look her mother gave her.

By late spring of the year she would turn six, a more complex awareness of her difference had begun to shape itself in her mind like the root of some strange plant down deep in the woods. She had moments when she felt like a secret, silent creation, invisible, more the ghost of something unknowable than a person, a child, a little girl. More than once she felt the light slap of her mother’s hand against the back of her head, the voice saying, Snap out of it, have you gone deaf and dumb and blind, now? For a second it was as if something just as ethereal as herself, a harsh and spiteful guardian angel, had snatched her back into the world against her nature, then whooshed away again on invisible wings.

She began thinking about what it would be like to go to school. She couldn’t go the following year because of her late November birthday, but she began to wonder what it would be like, among strange children — and adults — who did not know about her. Would her mother or father tell them and would that make everything all right? She had played a game of checkers one day with Mister, the doctor’s housekeeper’s son, out on the doctor’s back porch. They’d been watching the doctor’s new peacocks in the yard, but Mister got bored and suggested checkers. She said, “When did he get those peacocks?”

“I ’on’ know,” Mister said. “Recent. It’s a strange bird.” They watched the birds, several of them, peck about the yard and stand every now and then to fan their tails. “Said he just liked to watch them. Mama says he’s been lonesome since his wife died.”

He was a skinny boy, with his hair clipped close to his head and baggy clothes that’d been handed down from his cousins.

“They sure are pretty,” Jane said. She could see their deep, shiny blue neck feathers gleaming in the sunlight.

Mister went to get the board and chips. She was a bit sketchy on the rules, so when Mister made one of his pieces a king she insisted that he allow her to make one of hers a queen.

“Ain’t no such thing as a queen in checkers,” he said. They were on the back porch just off the kitchen, and Mister’s mother Hattie kept a close eye on them.

“If you get to be a king, then I get to be a queen,” she said.

To which Mister replied, “That ain’t how the game works. You got to get all the way to the top. And they call these pieces ‘men’ and that’s why it’s a king when you get it there. Plus, you stink.”

“What?”

She’d become so accustomed to her accidents that unless she was in public she sometimes didn’t even attend to them right away.

Then Hattie came out where they were and told him to hush, he was being rude.

“Well, she does,” Mister insisted, and that got him a light whack on the noggin and a scolding, and by that time Mister’s words had sunk in and Jane had become acutely self-conscious and smelled herself. She got up and ran inside the house to the doctor’s indoor privy, stripped off her diaper, cleaned herself, ran water in the tub, and scrubbed the garment with soap, rinsed it, squeezed it as dry as she could, washed her hands, then put it back on, cold and wet against her skin beneath her skirt. Then she rinsed the tub good and turned off the water.

Mister called from outside the locked door, “Why you taking so long in there?”

“Hush up, Mister,” she heard Hattie whisper, and then the sounds of her pulling him out of the room over his protests. She waited on the front porch until the doctor came home from the emergency call he’d made, and asked him to take her home.

“Are you all right?” he said.

“Yes,” was all she would say in reply. But after that she didn’t want to play with Mister, and would demur when the doctor offered to take her to his house for a visit. Sometimes she would ask him if he would just take her on a drive in his car or a ride in his buggy, since she didn’t want him to think she didn’t like him anymore. If he had other patients to see she would wait outside until he came back out and took her home again. If there were other children about she would stay in the car or buggy and decline their offers to come play.

Her parents and other members of her family had got to where they never said anything to her about her “problem,” except to tell her quietly to go change herself if she forgot about it, especially before a meal or if someone was dropping by for a visit.

But now she thought about it quite a lot, through the winter and into the spring. How she was different. It descended more deeply into her mind that she was the only one made the way she was made. That she was strange. She became accustomed to that flushing sense of shame that could come on and heat your face and make your scalp tingle and make you want to cry.

Summer came early, and then came on hard in June. It was very hot. She took to wearing light dresses and leaving off her diaper, and staying outside in the shade most of the day, hopping behind a bush or tree when she felt something coming on, instead of out in the open as she had when she was younger. She kept with her a catalog page she would tear a piece off of, use, and discard. And she would feel that flush of shame whenever it happened, and her mind would bristle with the sense of that strangeness. Ever since the day playing checkers with Mister, she had taken to washing her own diapers down at the creek instead of letting her mother or Grace take care of it. She would not put them in her mother’s boiling pot for sterilizing washed undergarments until all the others’ had been removed.

She was past her sixth birthday that November before it occurred to her that no one had even mentioned the possibility of attending school the next year.

She went to where her mother sat mending a shirt on the front porch.

Her mother looked up as she stood there.

“What’s the matter?”

“I guess I won’t be going to school next year like the rest.”

Her mother stopped her mending, though she looked down at it for a bit before meeting her daughter’s eye again.

“No,” she said. “I don’t see the sense in putting you through it.” Then, more to herself, she said, “Most girls, I’d say it’s a waste of time, anyway.” She looked a long moment at Jane again and said, “We will have to figure out something that you can do.”

Her mother and Grace taught her simple sewing, her mother offering single-word corrections now and then, while Grace did the hands-on teaching. Jane’s hands were small and clumsy and she pricked herself, her bottom lip trembling when she tried not to cry. Be patient, her mother said, and she tried, and got better. The idea was it might be something useful in life when there was no more mother, no more father, nothing but the farm, which would probably be sold by her older siblings. It was understood that Grace would have to make do on her own soon enough, as well. Either get married or go to find work in town.

She got better at sewing and soon even enjoyed it, applying a child’s blind concentration to the task, from mending seams and sewing patches into quilts, up to eventually using the machine to make simple smocks and skirts and then dresses. She liked the rhythm of pumping the machine’s treadle to keep the stylus going and guiding the material through. She had to stand to reach it with her foot. Everything else disappeared from her mind. She was more like her father than her mother. He did not mind work, easily focused on a task.

Perhaps as a consolation for not having school to look forward to, she was given freedom to wander about the whole place as she wanted. She walked the path through the woods that were charmed with their strange stillness and the scents of various plants and rich earth beneath moldering leaves. She walked the path down to the beaver pond, which was so much prettier in its wooded canyon than the cow pond sitting in the open and surrounded by hoof-cleaved muddy banks at the edge of their south pasture. She came out and sat on the hill above those woods and watched, at the juncture of field and woods down below, a pack of scruffy stray dogs that she imagined were the wild dogs she’d been cautioned about. They skirted the field in a silent little troop, tongues lolling, then disappeared into the undergrowth again, as if they’d been a ghost pack not really having been there except in her own mind.

Anyone could tell something was up with Grace, these days. It was her last year of school. She seemed distracted, more than usual, and even more silent. Jane spied on her when she wasn’t aware of it. She was distracted and strange, like one of the chickens when it got what her mother called “broody” and wouldn’t leave the roost or just wandered about if her mother shut it out of the pen and henhouse, like it didn’t know what to do with itself and was ornery.

Finally Jane said, “Grace, you have a secret,” and Grace surprised her by seeming to snap out of it: “Yes, I do, and that’s the reason it’s none of your business.”

That didn’t stop Jane from pestering her, whispering when they were alone, “Tell me.”

“I’m working on my ticket out of here, that’s all I’ll say.”

Several times, she’d been late coming home from school, and when their father and mother questioned her about it, she tried to ignore them. But one afternoon she came down their drive toward the house, a bit of a spring in her step, and found them waiting on her. Jane was spying from inside the screen door. Her parents, like two still and silent buzzards on a limb, watched Grace approach.

“Where you been, then?” her father said, his voice and eyes level.

“With friends,” she said.

“Which?”

“Just some of the dumb girls at school, is all.”

He looked at her long and steady and said, “Better be the truth, girl.” Then he said, “I want you here right after school’s out, every day, to help your mother and your little sister with chores around the house. Like you’re supposed to.” He got up and walked over toward the hog pen. Her mother sat in her chair and continued to give her the glare.

“I don’t care if you don’t believe me,” Grace said to her.

“That is one thing I know for sure,” her mother said before rising and going on inside. She saw Jane squatting there, in her spying position, and pulled up briefly, gave her a look, and went on.

At supper there was silence. Jane watched Grace furtively, and watched for any telling looks between her mother and father, or between one of them and Grace, till her mother told her to eat her supper and stop dawdling. In the quiet after that, a sound seemed to arise in a small but regular way with Grace’s movements, like occasional hard grains of rice dropped into an empty gourd. No one said anything. But when their father finished eating, ahead of the others, he stood up without a word, walked around the table, took out his pocketknife, and opened it. He lifted the thread from Grace’s neck, to which she had attached the rattlesnake rattle, held the rattle in his palm for a moment, then cut the thread and removed the rattle from it and took it into the other room. When Jane peered around through the doorway she saw him throw both thread and rattle into the coals there, and then stoke them with a small handful of kindling on top of which, after a moment, he placed a solid chunk of dry oak. And then he went out.

That Friday, Grace came home from school on time, helped her mother put on pots of greens and peas to slow-boil, scrubbed the kitchen floor, then quickly cleaned up after throwing out the scouring water at the edge of the yard. Jane followed her at a safe distance, pretending to work but mostly watching. Something was up. Grace put some lotion on her hands, arms, neck, and face, and, after wandering with Jane awhile to let the scent of it dissipate, told her mother she had forgotten her homework at school and needed to go back so she could do it over the weekend.

Her mother stopped cutting slices from the ham she’d taken from the smokehouse and looked at her, the carving knife in her hand.

“I’ll take Jane with me,” Grace said. “The walk will help her sleep tonight.”

“She sleeps fine,” their mother said. Then after a moment she nodded and said, “Don’t dawdle. We’ll eat in a couple of hours.”

They walked slowly, as Jane tended to dawdle. Grace grew impatient enough to grab her by the hand and pull her along faster.

“Why’re you in such a durn hurry?” Jane said.

Grace looked at her, then stopped. She leaned down to put her face at Jane’s level. The seriousness in her look made Jane back away.

“What?” she said.

“We’re not going to the school,” Grace said.

“But you said we were.”

“And if Mama or Papa asks you if that’s where we went, you just nod and say, ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and nothing else, you hear me?”

Jane looked at her, not comprehending.

“Why?” she said.

“Because I said so,” Grace said. “This is real important.”

She went over to the side of the road, reached behind a tree there, and came out with her school satchel.

“So, see? We went to school and I got my homework.” Jane looked at the satchel, then at her sister.

“See?”

Jane nodded. They went on. A little farther, they cut off onto a trail. When Jane lagged behind, distracted, Grace caught her up again. When they reached a little clearing, Grace took her by the hand and guided her to a spot about thirty feet away just behind a thick dewberry bush.

“You stay here at the edge of this where you can see through but not be seen. Don’t make a sound and stay real still, okay? Whatever you see going on with me and this boy, you just watch and be quiet.”

“What boy?”

“Never mind that. Don’t get scared, I know what I’m doing and you don’t have to be afraid. I just need you to watch it so you can say you’ve seen it if I ask you. I won’t have to, though, all right?”

Jane just looked at her from where she sat on her rump. She put her arms around her knees and looked off into the woods, then back at her sister.

“Okay, but why?” she said.

“Just hush and do what I say. And you listen here.” She knelt down and got her face close to Jane’s. “You don’t say a word about this to anybody unless I tell you to. Do you understand me, Jane?”

Jane was a little scared — it was really more of a thrill than a scare — but nodded.

“Don’t be scared. It’s like I said.”

“What are you going to do with the boy?”

“You’ll see. I’ll explain it to you later. Now, can you do this?”

Jane nodded.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded again. Grace’s eyes looked positively wild. It was thrilling.

Grace looked long and quietly at her, then ruffed her hair with a hand and said again, in a whisper, “Be real still and real quiet. I’ll come get you when it’s time to go.”

Grace walked away and into the clearing and stood there as if she had turned into some kind of picture of herself, and it would have or could have become just that if not for the birds that began to move again, inside the bush and from tree limb to tree limb, fluttering and alighting, hopping to the ground to peck and then flying up again to a branch in the bush or a tree. Jane could see through a little seam in the thickly leaved shrub. She knew it was a dewberry because of her mother’s teaching, and knew the root was good for an upset stomach. The berries made a good jelly, too. A couple of squirrels played a game of chase around a big pine tree nearby, their claws scrabbling on the soft bark, and chittering. It was hard for Jane not to laugh out loud at them. But she stayed still and quiet. She became part of the bush, her feet and bottom rooted down with its roots. Her hair its leaves, her eyes its berries. Then she saw something and the boy came into the clearing and she went still in her mind as well. Grace didn’t move as the boy came up to her. He was a tall boy with coal-black hair, and skin browned from the sun, and bright brown eyes. The two of them stood there like that for a little bit, looking at each other. She could see them breathing hard, their chests moving out and in, up and down. Then they took off their clothes, Grace just lifting her dress above her head and dropping it to one side and unhooking her bra and dropping that, too. She wasn’t wearing any underpants. She didn’t take off her walking shoes. The boy took off his shirt, which was just a dirty T-shirt, the same way Grace had taken off her dress, and his overalls fell to his feet. He was like a stinkhorn there. They grabbed each other and kissed for a minute, the longest kiss Jane had ever seen, as if they’d fallen asleep kissing except they were moving their hands over each other like they were looking for something in different places on their bodies. Then Grace’s hand stopped and Jane saw she had ahold of him and she thought, Don’t break it off. It didn’t break off. They knelt down to the ground and he got on top of her. She helped him put it in her and they started pushing against each other. It was a little more like the dogs than the pigs but face-to-face, and she realized, later, that she hadn’t thought people would do it differently. The boy’s black-haired head was buried into Grace’s shoulder and she saw Grace look over and make eye contact with her. She soiled her diaper, it took her so by surprise, Grace looking at her with this look on her face, her mouth just barely open, like to say, You see and you keep quiet. And then the boy raised his head and she thought he was going to look at her but he was just arching his head back and closing his eyes, and he pushed harder at Grace, who seemed to be looking over at her again but now it was like her eyes weren’t focused, and she heard the boy kind of grunt-groaning and then heard him heave a sigh. They lay there like that, him on top of her, for a little while, Grace stroking the boy’s back with her hands. Then they got up, him shiny and floppy now. They put on their clothes without saying anything. The boy looked at Grace for a second, then nodded like he was embarrassed, and trotted away from where he’d come. Grace had put her bra back on and slipped into her dress and was adjusting and smoothing it. She took a rag from her pocket and raised her dress and stood there a minute with it pressed to herself where she peed from, then rubbed with it vigorously, took the rag over to the opposite edge of the clearing, and tossed it into the woods there. She went over and picked up her satchel where she’d set it down. Then she looked back at Jane, and crooked her head as if to say, Come on, and Jane got up and went to her and together they headed back home, hurrying, Jane struggling to keep up, until they got to the bend in their driveway, where they stopped to catch their breath. Grace wiped perspiration from her face with the hem of her dress, checked herself down there for something, crooked out her thighs in a funny way like she was monkey-walking, felt of the insides of her legs, and, seeming satisfied, said, “Come on,” and together they walked up to the house. Grace tossed her satchel onto the porch and Jane followed her through the pecan grove to the barn, where Grace pulled a loose brick from a foundation post, came out with a packet of cigarettes, shook one, kind of flattened and crooked, into her hand, lit it with a match she took from a box in her dress pocket, and leaned back against the barn wall, smoking it like she was finally able to take an easy breath. She pushed her thick blond hair away from her forehead and blew out a big plume of blue smoke. “You all right now, little sister?” she said. Jane nodded. Grace kind of laughed and looked away, shook her head. “What a body will do just to get a little something she wants,” she said. She looked at Jane again. “We just went to the schoolhouse and got my books, you remember now?” Jane nodded. “But don’t you forget what you saw.” Jane nodded again. It was the most curious arrangement. But also it was simple enough. Grace smoked, in silence, and Jane watched her as if there might be some significance in that, too, somehow.

“Why were you doing that with him?” she said then.

“You’ll find out,” Grace said. “Maybe.”

She whispered, “Were you trying to make a baby with him?”

Grace gave her a sharp look, then ground out the cigarette with the sole of her shoe. She picked up the butt and stripped the paper from it, tossing the tobacco into the grass and rolling the paper into a little ball she flicked farther away.

“Maybe so. Maybe not.”

“Isn’t that what makes babies?”

Grace narrowed her eyes. “Now, how would you know that?”

Jane felt herself blush. She looked away, shrugged. Grace laughed then.

“I guess we do live on a farm, don’t we?” She laughed again, louder, even slapped her knee.

“What?” Peeved at being laughed at.

Grace stopped laughing, wiped her eyes. “Oh, sister. Whether I make a baby with that boy or not, I figure I’ll get what I want from him. And what he’ll want from me: gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Away.”

“But why? And why would you want to make a baby with that boy?”

“I don’t, dummy.”

Jane stomped her foot. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t expect you to.” Grace looked at her, lips pressed together in irritation. “Look,” she said then, “I want that boy to give me some money so I can move to town.” She got close to Jane’s face, serious. “He doesn’t want a baby, he just likes doing that to me. If I tell him we made a baby, he’ll give me money to go away.” She stood up straight again. “I know his family has money.”

“But I don’t want you to move to town.”

“Grow up a little. I can’t do everything in my life just for you. This is for me.”

Jane had been about to cry, but she held herself together. Then she said, “I don’t think I’d ever want a boy to do that to me.”

Grace looked at her a long moment.

“I don’t think you’ll ever have to, hon.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t have the right ‘equipment.’ You know that, don’t you? I don’t have to tell you that.”

Jane didn’t say anything to that, though she blushed and blinked her eyes.

“You know who that boy was?” Grace said.

Jane shook her head.

“His name is Arlo Barnett. You remember that. Just remember that, and you remember what it was we were doing. Could you describe it if someone was to ask you?”

Jane nodded. Then she buried her face in her hands in mortified embarrassment.

Grace said, “You just hold on to that, in case I need it.”

Jane nodded again, face still buried in her hands, burning with self-consciousness.

“So, anyway, you can see there’s not really a whole lot to it,” Grace said. “No different from some animal, in the end. Probably do you good to remember that about it, anyway.” She shook another cigarette from the pack, lit it, blew the smoke from the corner of her mouth. “You ought to go clean yourself,” she said to Jane then. Jane got up and ran toward the creek.

Always she would be haunted by the memory of seeing the boy on top of Grace, his white butt cheeks going at her like the big churning wheel on their hay baler. And never forget Grace’s face while he was doing it, eyes locked on her own, looking straight to where she was hiding beside and just behind the dewberry bush, right through the leaves that seemed to quiver in the stillness, as if they were about to burst into white-hot flame.

Dear Ellis,

I’ve decided — I suppose the impetus is the girl’s decision not to attend school — to arrange for an examination, if for no other reason than to find out if there is the possibility of sphincter construction or repair, which would at least allow her to be in social situations without embarrassment. There is no reliable urologist around here. I will be speaking with her, and of course with her parents, in the coming days. I understand it is a slim chance of good news. And will make sure they understand that.

It’s not that I think a life with romantic love — full-on or chaste — is necessarily something anyone and everyone should pursue, and in my opinion many I’ve known would’ve been better off following their solitary natures. But it seems wrong not to have the option. Her family trusts me and knows I have consulted with you on this a number of times, but I worry, still. I don’t want to have been mistaken and would very much like to be corroborated by such an examination by a specialist — I hear the men in Memphis are good, among the best.

I wish we could travel to Baltimore, but that’s quite an undertaking for a seven-year-old child, without her parents. It would be good to see you again. It would be a shame not to see one another again before we are old. You should consider a visit down here, in any case. Get out of the city for a while, have a little country vacation. We could go fishing or even quail hunting if I could rustle up someone’s dog. Let’s think on it together, though we are what seems almost a world apart.

Yrs,

Ed

Eldred O. Thompson, M.D.

North Poplar Road

Mercury, Miss.

Dear Ed,

I have, as I hope you know, been taking careful notes from your letters, concerning your monitoring and examinations of the Chisolm girl in your care. Recently I put them together in the most assimilated fashion I could and sat down with colleagues — and even managed to get the busy Dr. Young into the meeting. We had your notes, your drawings. We met quite a while, for meetings in this place — a good half hour or more. I must tell you that Dr. Young and the others — and I concurred — concluded that it is highly improbable anything can be done here to correct the girl’s condition, at this point in time, given what we know about what’s possible, surgically. I will say that Dr. Young raised an eyebrow at me and told me that he thought, and certainly hoped, and had good reason to think, that we or others to follow us will soon have the knowledge, skill, and means to correct her particular condition, but it is impossible to know, just now, exactly when. Dr. Young did say he was certain that a young woman he examined in the past few months has a condition almost if not identical to your Miss Chisolm’s, down to the length of the common channel, and he chose not to — could not with any degree of confidence for success — operate. I would imagine that, if there is anything definitive to learn by having someone in Memphis (I recommend Davis) examine her, it would be to find out whether or not sphincter work is possible, at this point. We doubt it.

You take care, now, Ed. Living alone, there, you take care not to over-indulge in your favorite vices. I would complain and urge you to work a little bit at marrying again but there is a part of me, as you know, that feels like you have always been the loner kind at heart, and that if you could get a bit of relief from wanton urges now and then you’d be fine. But, I know, small town, etc. etc. I do wish you had some closer poker or drinking buddies than those backwater snobs in your town. Take a vacation and come see us. Or hell, just hide out in a hotel and I’ll take you out on the town incognito.

Yrs.,

Ellis

It was not quite the end of childhood, but something between that and whatever would come after. After Grace left, she’d been essentially alone on the farm. The Harris sharecroppers’ children were either nearly grown or gone. The young tenant Lon Temple and his even younger wife had no children yet. She wanted to make friends with young Lacey Temple but she seemed hard to approach, somehow. So Jane was the only child around, and hardly ever went anywhere, the Chisolm girl who had something wrong with her, something mysterious, and who kept to herself with her family. Strange little bird.

She still had the thought, though, that maybe she could make friends with Lacey Temple, now that she was a little older herself. She walked down one afternoon, hoping to catch her alone. Lacey was sweeping her small front porch and wearing her bonnet, and when she looked up, startled, Jane saw a deep purple bruise on her cheekbone. Lacey set her broom aside and hurried into the house. Jane knew better than to follow. When she went home she commented on it to her mother, who stopped what she was doing and turned to give her a grim look.

“I knew that young fellow had a temper but I had hoped he wouldn’t be the kind to do that.”

“You think Lonnie hit her?”

“Well, how else do you get a bruise like that?” her mother said. “And who else do you think would or could’ve done it?”

Jane said nothing. She’d seen her father slap her mother that one time. They were at the dinner table, just the two of them, supper done. Jane watched from the breezeway through the screen door. In the middle of one of her mother’s rants her father stood halfway up from his seat, leaned over the table, and slapped her across the face, and she looked shocked but she went quiet and just sat there. In a minute they both began drinking their coffee again in silence, and the slap hadn’t left anything more than a red mark that disappeared soon after.

“I wouldn’t bet against that he knocked her down with a blow like that,” her mother said then, turning back to finish stirring her cornbread batter and pour it sizzling into the hot greased pan on top of the stove. The smell of the browning batter was delicious enough to distract Jane from her thoughts, but only for a moment.

“Papa ought to say something to him about it,” she said.

“Your papa is not the kind to interfere in other people’s affairs.”

“What if he was to really hurt her, I mean bad?”

“I reckon the sheriff would come calling if it came to that,” and then she said no more on the subject.

That weekend, late Saturday afternoon, they had a visit from her uncle Virgil McClure, her mother’s younger brother. Sometimes when he came by it was just for family matters and he would bring his beautiful wife Beatrice, with her abundant black hair, full lips, beautiful pale skin, dark brown eyes, and their two children, Little Bea and Marcus. But this afternoon he came alone, wearing his narrow-brim Open Road Stetson, and his business coat, and carrying the leather briefcase he used in his job selling insurance for the Rosenbaum firm down in Mercury. There weren’t all that many ways to get out of a farming life, but Virgil had the smarts to start selling insurance on the side and got good enough to do it full time. No one disrespected him for it.

He sat and had a cup of coffee with her mother while they waited on Jane’s father to come in from the pecan grove, where he had been up on a ladder all day pruning and trimming. Spring would be coming soon and they hoped for a good, heavy crop this year, as the year before had been a light one. Jane loved the pecan grove, the way you crossed through a narrow strip of woodland between the cotton field behind the house and the view opened up to the beautiful gray-barked trees with their crazy limbs splayed against the sky and how they leafed out in spring, their long, narrow leaves so green in the spring and summer, like precise clippings from larger leaves when they browned, shrank, and fell in the fall. You could walk around the field and woods but she liked taking the path through them. She loved walking through the grove after harvest and searching for pecans they’d missed and cracking two together in her palms to get the sweet nut meat from those that hadn’t rotted in the rains. She helped gather at harvest, and her father had explained to her how the catkins were the male flower and the little spiky new flowers were the female, and how they had planted two different kinds of pecan trees so that the differences between them would combine to make a robust crop. The wind would blow the pollen from the catkins to the female and the nut would begin to grow in the female flower, on the new growth. It was fascinating to Jane. It made the trees seem alive in a whole new way. They made their fruit, working together. It wasn’t just some accident of nature. It made her wonder anew about the strange miracle of creation, how the world came to be, and all the beautiful and strange plants and animals and insects that made it alive.

When her father came up onto the porch and into the house from the grove, he seemed surprised.

“Didn’t expect you today, Virgil,” he said, and Jane noticed her mother shut herself down in the secretive way she sometimes did when she wanted to hide something from you. Jane went silent and tried to turn her ears toward their talk the way a dog or cat would when it heard something curious and interesting.

Uncle Virgil had a quiet, soft voice and an old country way of not moving his jaw or mouth much when he spoke so that his words somehow always seemed private and friendly. Intimate, like he was chewing softly on the words. Even when he was speaking of hard matters, such as a death or someone in trouble, he spoke in the same even voice, and somehow that carried a kind of authority, his expression consistently one of earnest interest, not like he was amused but like he took it all in stride as part of life. He had briefly been sheriff in the county and had been good at it but did not run for reelection, saying it saddened him too much to see all the hard things a sheriff has to see. But the experience had made him more even-tempered than he’d been before.

“Well,” he said then, glancing at Jane’s mother and straightening his gaze onto her father. “I had me an idea. I don’t know as you’d like to spend the money, but it’s a pretty good arrangement and likely to help everybody out should there be an accident.”

Her father just looked placidly back at Virgil, waiting, seeming neither impatient nor overly interested. He could be a patient man when his work had gone well and he wasn’t itching for a drink.

“What I’m talking about is something more and more farmers are doing these days, and that’s taking out accidental death and dismemberment policies on their tenants and sharecroppers.”

Her father still said nothing, although he leaned his head just slightly to the side and his eyes registered a combination of wary curiosity and heightened interest.

“I take it you want me to continue on,” Virgil said.

Her father nodded, only then taking off his field hat and setting it on the table beside a cup of coffee Jane’s mother had set in front of him on a saucer. He brought the hot black coffee to his mouth and took a careful sip, set it back onto the saucer. Virgil did the same with his cup. Her mother occupied herself with mending a tear in the shoulder of a shirt she had in her lap.

Virgil took some papers from his briefcase and set them on the table.

“Now, these here pay you, the one paying the premiums, if one of the people you take out a policy on should die as result of an accident here on the farm or anywhere else, or if they lose a hand, arm, part of an arm, or a leg, even a finger or two-three. Anything that affects their ability to continue to work for you.”

“How much is it for each policy?”

“Here’s the price of the monthly premium, you can see it’s not much. You could pay for it easy out of their rent if they’re tenants and their crop if they’re sharecroppers. You just get a little less, but if something should happen to them, well, then you get paid this”—and he pointed to some figures on the papers—“for a death, and this”—he pointed again—“if it’s a dismemberment. It’s more than enough to carry you over till you find someone else to lease the land or sharecrop it.”

Her father looked at the papers and figures, blinking a couple of times, seeming to study them and to think.

“It’s an investment, Sylvester, if you think about it. Against potential catastrophic loss. You do have to put some money in up front, but after that you can figure it out of your profit from these sections, just like you would any other expense. Now, I know for a fact you’ve had it happen before. Accident, I mean.”

“That fellow name of Whitehead. Saw blade caught him in the leg right where the big artery sits, he bled out on the spot.”

“That’s right,” Virgil said. “Nothing anybody could’ve done. And you had to hire help to finish his crop. And still gave his widow a share of the profit.”

Her father nodded, still looking at the papers. He took a sip of his coffee, glanced at his wife, who got up and poured a bit more in to reheat it.

“And not to mention the poor Stephens woman helping her husband pitch hay and catches him right in the neck, that must’ve been a good ten, twelve years back.”

Her father nodded, sipped the fresh coffee.

“Ten,” he said.

“Now, if you look here,” Virgil said, pointing, “for just fifty cents more each premium, you get enough to cover a lost crop, should you not be able to get anyone in there to take it over in time, and still have money left over. I’d say it’s worth it.”

“And this all goes to me, something happens?”

“’Less you want to give something to the widow, or help out the disabled man, which of course some do, some don’t.”

“Let me think on it a little bit,” her father said.

“How many you got here on the place now?” Virgil said, although even Jane knew Virgil knew the answer to that. He was a good salesman, even to his own kin.

“Got the colored ’cropper Harris, and the young tenant Temple.”

“Each doing eighty.”

“Right. I do my forty in cotton, tobacco, and corn. Ten acres in pecan trees. Rest in cattle pasture and the woods here behind the house. I keep it for hunting, fishing, and just pleasure, you know.”

“Well, you don’t have to cover everybody. I’d say the tenant, maybe. Maybe just Harris himself, not his sons.” Virgil scribbled some numbers on a pad. “This premium every three or six months, your choice. Feel safer, protected from some fool accident, or one couldn’t be avoided, for that matter. Happens.”

“Happens,” her father said, nodding. “And what about myself?”

“Wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Virgil said, scribbling again. “I can get you a discount on yourself, I’m pretty sure, you being the owner and taking responsibility for them that work your land.” He scribbled a little more.

Her father studied the new numbers a minute, nodded, went to the jar in the kitchen cupboard, and gave Virgil some bills and coins.

“All right, then,” Virgil said. “All I’ll need is for you to get their full legal names and dates of birth. You can tell them it’s like a liability policy on the whole place, as it is, practically speaking. This is completely legal, and as I said more and more common. Makes good sense in the farming business, all things considered. I can set up everything here, and you can fill out that information about these men when you get it, and I’ll come back by next week and get the papers.”

Then they both signed, and Virgil and her father stepped out onto the porch after Virgil had said good night to Jane’s mother.

Jane slipped out the kitchen door and crept through the breezeway to spy-listen on them there.

“I’m recalling that business up in Scooba,” her father said.

“Well,” Virgil said, “that was an unfortunate case.”

“I wouldn’t want anybody thinking I had anything like that in mind.”

“No reason anybody would, you got a spotless reputation.”

“Drinkin’ aside.”

“Well. You got a lot of company in that, I’d say. Now, like I said, this is becoming more and more common among your farmers.”

“Folks know I’m a good businessman, always aboveboard.”

“Yes, they do.”

“Anything was to happen, I’d hope nobody’d think anything underhanded gone on here.”

“No reason to think that. Besides, that thing in Scooba — I wouldn’t call a fellow dying of poison spasms exactly an accidental death. They got away with it for so long because that doctor up there was involved in it.”

They were quiet for a long moment.

“Well, Virgil, I reckon this is good business.”

“It is, Sylvester. You don’t have to think twice about that.”

“I generally think three, four times about most everything.”

“Well. That’s why people respect you.”

“I mean to keep it that way.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Want a little snort before you go?”

“I would, but Bea wouldn’t approve.”

“You stay on her good side, don’t you?”

“That’s good business, too.”

“How come you all don’t call this kind of thing ‘death insurance,’ since that’s what it is, wouldn’t you say?”

“That would be bad for business,” Virgil said.

The men chuckled together at that. And then there were no more words at parting. She heard Uncle Virgil descend the porch steps, make his way to his Ford pickup, and the pickup coughed and rattled and creaked on down the drive out to the main road. She heard her father descend the steps, walk across the yard to his little store, and then come back. When she heard him sit in his rocker and pull the stobber from his jug, she stole around and sat on the porch boards beside the chair.

“Want me to roll you a cigarette, Papa?”

“Here you go, girl,” he said, handing her a tin of Prince Albert and his little rolling machine. She rolled up a perfect one for him.

“Can I light it for you?”

He handed her a box of matches. She struck one, held the match to it, and sucked lightly on it.

“Mind you, don’t take it into your young lungs.”

She handed him the lit cigarette, held the warm smoke in her mouth and then puffed it out.

“I won’t,” she said.

“I don’t want you to take up smoking like your sister Grace.”

“I won’t.”

“You do, I’ll tan your little hide.”

They watched a mockingbird come down from his perch and peck at Top’s head as he tried to cross the yard toward them. The dog ducked his head, then leapt up to try to catch the bird in his jaws when it came at him again. They watched this dance until Top made it to the porch and the bird quit and flew off. The way Top looked at them then, the look on his face, like he was both happy and confused at the same time, just made them laugh again. The dog, embarrassed, went underneath the porch instead of coming up onto it with them.

“Oh, come on up, Top,” Jane said. “Come on up here.”

But they heard the dog sigh hard through his nose and flop down in the dirt.

“Sometimes that dog acts like he knows as much about what’s going on as we do.”

“He does, Papa.”

“Dog’s supposed to have it easier than that,” he said.

When the crash came in ’29, the farm soon felt the effect of it. Before it was over, they’d see prices for cattle and crops drop so badly that for some years they would live mostly on the garden, their own corn, the hogs and chickens. Chisolm increased the croppers’ percentages in an attempt to help them survive — to keep them from giving it up and leaving everyone all the poorer. He could see the worse times coming by 1930, so he scraped up the money to increase the product of his distillery, and this helped. He declined to charge more in hard times. Charged less for the younger batches. He managed to keep the little store he’d used to supply his neighbors and sharecroppers, even though it did less business. He even gave a little credit every now and then, taking the man’s word that he’d pay him somehow, when he could. He sold only the occasional cow, not nearly as often as he used to.

He’d always believed that a man could prosper at least modestly if he worked very hard and all the time. And so he worked even harder. And since he knew that if he was drinking he would not work as hard, he tried not to drink. Not too much, anyway. If you were drinking, you did not get to bed when you should. You could not get up as early as you should. You would not think clearly for much of the day. You would not pay proper attention to your animals. You would not spend time in the winter and on summer evenings mending harnesses, repairing machinery, taking stock of your stores and planning ahead.

So he would try especially hard not to drink in these times, or not too much, even though trading more of his makings kept the temptation high. Generally, when he worried, he drank, and now he worried more than ever. When he felt overwhelmed, he couldn’t help it and would drink. His moods became darker and he spent more of his time in front of the fire or on the porch, drinking and smoking one cigarette after another, going over and over what had occurred between him and this person or that, cursing them for making things more difficult for him or cursing himself for letting them do so. If his Mrs. bothered him when he was so engaged, he was quick to tell her to mind her own business and leave him alone. “You don’t think you are part of the problem here?” he said. And to himself he cursed her for being nothing but an ornery burden. Hardly even a decent cook and taking in no sewing to speak of these days and not even bothering to peddle butter and eggs for a bit of spending money, so what was a man to do all on his own with nothing left but a bitter, worthless woman as a partner in this world?

He had no more money in the bank to speak of, it was all in land and cattle. Even the money from Temple’s death was gone. When the banks and even the wealthy merchants stopped lending to farmers and cattlemen, and beef prices continued to drop along with the prices for crops, things began to shut down. He had done well enough by being careful, parsimonious, and having his whiskey and little store on the side. Now all that was not quite enough. Other farms began to lose their tenants and sharecroppers.

When he was drinking in front of the fireplace in the living room or on the porch, chain-smoking, Jane would come sit with him, making his cigarettes with the little red tin rolling machine, but he was so distracted it was hard to keep the fact of her presence in mind if he wasn’t taking one from her little hand. Whenever he had smoked one down, she would build another, and by the time he had tossed the butt of the one into the fireplace or the dry dust of the front yard, she would hand him the next. If they were by the fire he would light it with the end of a stick he kept by his chair, which he would lay into the fire for a moment until it caught, and then bring it up to his cigarette and smoke. If they were on the porch she would strike a kitchen match and hold it up for him, then let the match burn down in her fingers before blowing it out.

He talked to himself even when she was there beside him, forgetting he wasn’t alone there with the people who lived in his mind. “Is that what you think, then? I’ll tell you what I think about it, and you can have your damned opinion on the matter. But I’ll not abide such as that, by God.”

Or, quietly, “I have done my best, God knows. I have done my very best. A man can’t do better than that.”

One time his daughter’s small voice intruded on him while he was lost in such conversation, waking him to her presence, and asked him who he was talking to. He was startled out of his distraction and for a moment didn’t even recognize her, and it gave him such a fright he felt his heart might stop, and then a different kind of fear when he realized who she was, a fear that flooded through his body into his mind like the shock of sudden freezing cold. He began to tremble so badly that he had to get up and go walk it off, leaving the girl there looking as if she’d seen a ghost.

On the days when he would hitch mules to the buckboard and take what stock he could trade into town, he would not eat nor drink during the long ride down except for a little jerky and water, stopping at a creek beside the road to let the mules and cattle drink and graze a bit. He would deliver his cows to the market, make his meager deals, have a simple supper at the café next to the stockyard or just a hunk of cheese and a few crackers, and then begin the long ride home, which he would not complete until after dark. And invariably on the long quiet ride, no cattle tethered to the rig and making their sounds of adjustment and discomfort, just the creaking of rigging and suspension springs, the grunting groans of the mules, and the sound of many dissatisfactions and regrets inside his head, voiced aloud to the dark looming trees and shadows along the road, he would begin to drink. If he had made decent money on the sale he might have given in to temptation and bought a bottle of good bootleg rye whiskey from a man who kept it in the trunk of an automobile parked near the stockyard. A nice change of pace from the pure corn. If he had not traded well he would nip from a jug of his own distillation, as he always brought one along just in case he couldn’t stand being with himself without it.

On this clear night when the full moon rose into a sky still blue but darkening, he began to sip from the jug he’d brought along, at first corking it between sips and then just squeezing it between his boots on the buckboard planks and sipping more often. On his mind was a man at the stockyard who’d called him a swindler because he’d simply done what he did best: bought a cow that seemed worthless for next to nothing and nursed it back to health and sold it for a decent profit. It was the man he’d bought it from the year before who’d confronted him: “You knew it wasn’t sick and could have told me, but you taken advantage and now you’re making money off my misfortune.”

“It was sick and could have gone either way,” he said to the man then, and again to himself now, aloud. He hadn’t said to the man what he should have, which was, Ignorance don’t come cheap. Neither does foolishness. He said aloud again now what he had said then: “If you don’t know enough about your own animal to know it’s got promise, don’t know enough to keep it healthy on your own, then you get what you deserve, which is to lose the cow and lose money on it. I took my own risk, taking it on.” Then the man had said, You could have said it was a good cow and give me a little neighborly advice on how to bring it on back to health.

“Horseshit,” Chisolm said aloud again now, playing it out in his head and hearing his own words in the quiet night, angry again, but the sound of his words giving him some salve, knowing he’d defended himself with good reason. “I could have been wrong, too. I took a risk. And you think you would have taken my advice? You’d a sold that cow to someone else for more than I paid if you could’ve, but I gave you more than it was worth because I was willing to take on the risk, and that’s because I’ve taken a risk before, and made it work. You see all these others, you don’t see them taking risks with a poorly cow. I know you. I been knowing you many years and I know what you would’ve done and what you would not’ve. Call me a cheat? Then don’t ever look to me for help when you need it. Even when you deserve it.’”

He hit the jug again, stobbered it, and set it between his shoes.

When he got to the creek bridge just below his place, he stopped the rig and assayed the situation, still a bit lost in rumination. But he was just sober enough to dismount from the wagon and lead his team across the narrow wooden structure, then remount and cluck his mules to pull up the hill and turn onto the two-track driveway. Daughter Jane had heard him coming and was waiting to unhitch the mules and lead them to the barn. He saw her glance at the jug hanging from his crooked finger for a second before looking away and saying, “Yes, sir,” to his instructions concerning the mules.

Chisolm stood in the yard in the moonlight and took one more long draft from the jug before corking it and walking over to the shed and placing it behind a nail barrel there. Then he went into the house.

His wife was at the fireplace repairing a torn quilt and did not look up at him when he entered. He stopped and stared at her, angry, and only by a hair did he keep himself from taking it out on her, sitting there in her false, infuriating placidity. As if he were the problem, whereas if it wasn’t for him they’d be eating clay for sustenance. He said nothing but took the few bills and coins from his sale and dropped them into the jar in the cupboard. He went back onto the veranda and out into the yard, made a cigarette, and smoked it, watching the shadows from the coal-oil lamp of Jane and the mules in the barn as she brushed them down and forked some hay into their stalls, then gave them just a bit of field corn, not too much. Girl’s not a bad hand, he thought.

As the moon had risen high above the farm now, illuminating the plow and disc, harrow, baler, and the high sharp peak of the barn’s roof and the shed and outhouse off to the south of the yard and the shadowed chairs on the rough-hewn floor of the veranda, he walked over to the shed and retrieved the jug he’d set there earlier and brought it back to the veranda, where he drank from it and rolled cigarettes until the moon was down at the tips of the pines in its descent. He calmed a bit, but it wasn’t long before he resumed his low and angry conversation with demons real and imaginary in his mind. He hardly noticed when his wife came out and fetched the girl, hadn’t noticed she’d been over by the door, sitting in the shadows. Hardly heard their sibilant voices just inside the house, listening instead as he was to the louder voices inside his head.

Despite Jane’s isolation, she began to be interested in boys. It was a slow, gradual accretion, this new awareness. Of boys as boys, that is, strange creatures, like another species retaining the general physical qualities of her own but with hidden secrets, secret differences. Significant perhaps in some way to her in particular. She saw them when they passed by in buckboard wagons on the road sometimes, or at the occasional sermon she deigned to attend, and sometimes they would come with their fathers to shop at the store. She wondered, feeling foolish as she did, if they had heard that she often tended the store and had come along so as to see her. She had begun to notice them in a different way. Almost in the way a forest animal or bird, at rest and hidden safely away, may take notice of a new animal walking through its woods, walking upright, carrying with it some strong, exotic scent.

She did have a sense that she herself must be some kind of mysterious creature. People must gossip, for her mother gossiped about other people at times. Grace never had, of course. Grace had despised most of them to the point of disinterest, as far as Jane could tell. Jane could imagine coming upon some boy, somewhere, alone, maybe like in the clearing where she’d seen Grace meet and do it with the Barnett boy. They would both stop in their tracks, surprised. He would come closer to her. But then unlike the dumb Barnett boy he would be like Lon Temple with Lacey, tender, and would ask if he could touch her, but in innocent ways, on the cheek or her arm or hand.

This was all soon accompanied by a kind of discomfort, a swelling or tightness in her lower belly, like things being squeezed up in there, and when she mentioned it, her mother stopped what she was doing and looked at her with eyebrows raised, and it seemed to Jane that she was looking at her in a way she hadn’t before. When a few days later she noticed what looked like blood in her diaper, she was frightened. Her mother said she needn’t worry, but seemed not to know how to talk to her about it and looked worried enough about it herself.

Soon followed a visit by Dr. Thompson, who sat her down and asked her some questions, examined her bloody diaper, and probed at her belly with his long, knuckly fingers.

“Well,” he said, “you are becoming a woman, after all.”

“What do you mean, ‘after all’? Besides, I’m only fourteen years old.”

“Comes to lots of girls even younger, and some closer to your age. A few even later, though rarely. Depends on the individual. Anyway,” he said, and sat to look her in the eye, “it is a good thing. In your case, see, even though we believed you wouldn’t have trouble with it, we couldn’t be entirely sure. Reasonably sure but not absolutely.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“I was concerned about the possibility of a blockage. Of the blood not being able to come out.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It could have been a serious problem. But now I don’t believe we have to worry about that anymore.” He pulled his pocket watch from his vest pocket, checked it, then settled himself in his seat, looked squarely at her again, and explained to her as best he could about menstruation. Though he didn’t talk beyond the bodily mechanics of it.

“And it happens for the rest of your life?” she said.

“No, at some point in a woman’s life, later on, it stops. And then she can no longer have children. It’s a natural thing because then she’s too old to have children without endangering her life or the child’s.”

She sat looking back at him, wondering whether to tell her secret. His kind, familiar, and calm gray eyes then set it free, and she said, “I know how people make babies.”

“Well, I did give you that pamphlet drawing, but of course there’s more to it than that.”

“I know that, too.”

He said nothing, his own bushy eyebrows gone up.

“I have to wonder how you know it.”

She told him, after making him promise he wouldn’t tell, about Grace and the Barnett boy. She didn’t tell him just then about Lon and Lacey Temple.

“I see,” he said.

“How come Grace didn’t have a baby, then, from that?”

“It does not always result in a child. Sometimes it just doesn’t take.”

“I know it won’t ever happen to me.”

Again he was gazing at her in that way he had of making her feel she could trust him with just about anything. Then he sat back and cleared his throat, and looked down at his hands as if to see that he held something curious there.

“Well. I believe that you have everything you’re supposed to have, inside. But whether or not you will ever have children—” He stopped and just looked at her for a long moment, which made her scalp prickle. “I guess I should speak plainly. It would be hard for a man to deal with the way you’re different. And even though you have everything inside of you that you need, I don’t know that the act of intercourse — that is what happened between your sister and that boy — would actually be possible, or at least not in a way that would result in your conceiving a child. Or if you did, I’m not sure you’d be able to carry it through gestation — the time it takes to grow inside you before coming out into the world.”

“I know that, too.”

“Do you, Janie?”

She didn’t answer, thinking. It was coming on late afternoon, and for a moment it was like she was in a dream she sometimes had, where it’s the gloaming coming on and the trees are a beautifully darkened green and the sounds in their shadowed crowns begin to rise like some kind of otherworldly singing inside of herself.

Yet outside the window now the trees were nearly bare in their early December secret trembling.

He put a hand on her shoulder.

“You’re essentially a normal child, Jane, as I’ve said. Complicated, but essentially normal.” He looked at her. “I’ll bring you something more to read about all this, what we’ve talked about. With more pictures. It’ll help you understand.”

He told her not to lose hope. That one day there would be a way to fix her. He just couldn’t say when.

“I believe it,” he said. “Maybe it’s wrong for me to say so, because I can’t say when. But I believe there will one day be a way.”

“I don’t deserve it,” she said. Then she couldn’t speak.

“Don’t say that. Here, now.” He gave her a clean handkerchief. “Why would you say a thing like that?”

She told him about spying on Lon and Lacey Temple and how she was afraid she had somehow tainted their union by doing it, and how Lacey had wept, as if she knew they had been tainted.

Dr. Thompson sat quietly, waiting her out. When her eyes cleared, he was gazing at her, a look a bit sad but simply calm, too.

“How could you not be curious?” he said then. “Natural curiosity. There was no harm in it. Not for you, anyway. For a grown-up, yes. But you are a special person. Just as the way you are denies you some things, it also gives you license that others may not have. In my opinion you live on a higher moral ground. I mean to say you are a good person. You were not being bad, doing that. You were trying to learn about things. And about yourself.”

“But how come they never had children, then? They’d been married long enough.”

After a pause, the doctor said, “Have you ever wondered why Lett and I never had children? We were certainly married long enough.”

She looked at him, not knowing what to say. Why had she never wondered about that?

“I am not able to have a child, Janie,” he said. “We tried. We did what you do, as you said, to make babies. But to use the phrase I used about Grace, it ‘did not take.’ And it’s because I am infertile. Like one of your pecan trees that won’t produce pecans sometimes. Or an ornamental fruit tree, a pear or peach, looks like any other pear or peach tree but no pears or peaches.” He smiled. “I hope that doesn’t embarrass you. But know this: You had nothing to do with those two young folks not having a baby. And like as not young Lacey knew why they couldn’t get pregnant. It had nothing to do with you, but with one of them. And that’s why she was crying, hon. Not because of some spell. Life is not fair in that way or any other way. We are who and what we are. It’s just what it is.”

The farm next to theirs on the west side was owned by a family named Key. One of them was a boy about her age, maybe a bit older, slim, with fair skin, sandy hair, and oddly beautiful pale blue eyes, not the deep dark blue of her own. And though she remembered him from her brief time in school as just another boy, not someone who’d made any more impression then than anyone else, now he set off a blushing, tingling feeling in her when they looked at one another in the store, the boy silent as his father gathered their few supplies and she totted them up. He looked back at her when they left and gave her a little wave that, when he’d shut the door, she thought might send her heart into a flutter-flump.

On her wandering one day she came up next to the boundary between their two farms, and saw one of the family hoeing weeds in the cornfield there. She thought it was him, that boy. He wore a broad straw hat, so she couldn’t quite see his sandy blond hair. She knew he had brothers. But when he got closer she could make out his features, and she stepped from the undergrowth and up to the barbed-wire fence at the edge of the field. In a minute he seemed to see her, stood up straight, turned away for a moment, then turned back and waved. She waved back. He set down his hoe and made his way through the dozen or so rows between them over to her, walking carefully. He wore a loose white work blouse, worn denim overalls, and a pair of old ankle boots that he stopped to shuck off before he reached her. He wiggled his bare white toes and looked over at her as if he may have embarrassed her, doing that, for some reason. And the look gave her that flushed feeling so suddenly that she felt herself having an accident, and so the feeling turned to shock, her face burning, and she called out, “I’ll come back here tomorrow sorry I have to run I forgot something important,” and she dashed back into the woods and ran all the way home, nearly in tears from embarrassment.

She didn’t stop at the house but went straight to the creek in the woods down the hill behind it. She was so overfull with emotion she couldn’t sort out, didn’t sort out in the course of her running so hard she could hardly breathe. When she got to the creek she immediately pulled up her dress, unpinned her diaper, wiped herself with a clean part of it, and plunged it into the creek. The bottom was sand, so she scrubbed it against the grit, then took wet handfuls of it and scrubbed straight into the soiled cloth until there was nothing but a dim stain that would take strong soap and baking soda to get out. She wrung it as dry as she could, fastened the pins into a part of it, sniffed her hands, took off her shoes, lifted her dress again, and lowered her bottom into the creek for a minute, the cool water running over her skin, a shock and then a pleasure. She stood up, calmer now, and walked back up the hill to the house.

She got soap and baking soda from the basin on the back porch, made a paste of the soda and water, but then she thought, What if he is still there? Then, What if he isn’t there tomorrow? She hastily washed her hands and, not even bothering to dry herself, began running down the drive and then through the pasture, still barefoot, dodging sharp sticks and fallen pine cones, one eye out for snakes, toward the narrow ridge of woods between their properties.

She came out of the brush and stopped, out of breath. He was not in the field. She could not see the hoe where he must have laid it down. She felt tears coming up again, this time from anger, then heard his voice call out to her. She looked to her right and he was sitting beneath an oak tree not a stone’s throw away, his feet still bare, a jar of what looked like tea beside him, and eating a sandwich. Probably ham or bacon with fresh tomato slices or just the tomatoes. And then she was impressed that he was eating a light bread sandwich in the middle of the week. Her family ever only had light bread on the weekends, on Sundays, and would finish it easily by the evening meal. She called out to him, and waved, feeling awkward.

“Come on over,” he called back. “You hungry?”

She walked toward him, staying on her side of the fence. And, nearing him, was suddenly mortified realizing she hadn’t put on a fresh undergarment and was naked beneath her dress. She stopped still, feeling the blood rush to her face, but luckily it caused no accident, and when he looked at her curiously, grinning in a questioning way, she tried to put the thought of her near-nakedness out of her mind and went on toward him. She was just a girl, after all, with no big hips to poke a dress out, no big bush of hair down there to pooch obscenely against the dress like she’d seen it do on Grace when Grace sat on the porch after a bath wearing nothing but a summer skirt herself, to cool down, the wet spot on the front of her dress gradually drying in the heat. Until her mother came and saw that and sent her inside with harsh words about the nature of her character. Grace said, “Well, who in Hades is going to be watching me sitting on a porch here in the middle of nowhere, I might ask?”

“God sees you,” her mother had said once, in as cool a tone as Jane had ever heard her use with anyone. Like you couldn’t be sure if she really believed God cared about such a thing or not but it was something she could use on you if she wanted.

Grace had said back, just as cool, “Does he like what he sees?”

And her mother had slapped Grace, not hard, but in a way that ended their exchange. Grace went inside and put on some underpants and a bra and shoes and took herself out to the barn, her brooding place.

Chisolm stood in the open double doorway and watched as the young folks made their awkward ways together. He was glad to see that the boys still acted like gentlemen with the girls, the way it had been when he was young. He pulled his hat down low on his brow so he wouldn’t seem to be staring, but he kept his eyes on his daughter, sitting there in a chair off to herself a bit, and even that made his heart heavy in his bony chest. It was hard for him not to feel he was somehow responsible for the child’s condition. He was ten years older than his wife and she’d been too old to have another, yet he’d had his way with her. Drunk. Too tight-fisted to buy a fling with a two-dollar whore. And the curse of it all coming down not on him, not on the wife, no matter how they both felt that at times. It came down on this girl here. Innocent. Pretty. And pretty much doomed to a disappointing life lived alone. But here she was, game, willing to risk her pride just to be like everyone else for a while. To be a regular girl going to a dance, dancing with boys.

The community center had been a large old barn, and everyone had pulled together to shore it up between his youth and Jane’s. Gone was the old hayloft where couples would sometimes sneak away for a little sparking. Now it was entirely open to the high ceiling, like a rustic cathedral, and there were polished wooden floors instead of hard-packed earth still smelling faintly of cattle and horse manure. When he’d met Ida at one of these dances almost forty years earlier he’d been about as full of himself as a twenty-seven-year-old farmer and aspiring cattleman could be, living as a single man working land his father had sold him without interest, on time. He knew he would do well. And feeling that way made others think the same about him. If he’d been the man he was now, mentally anyway, he never would’ve got her attention, and maybe that would have been a good thing, except that who knows what worse may come down the pipe at any time?

The old loft doors were thrown open to let out the heat, draft a breeze. The light came from crude Japanese lanterns and candles inside flues on stands affixed to the walls. So the light was adequate but romantically soft. The same as when he’d been young. Some of the ladies involved in the restoration had argued for keeping it that way. The men pretended not to be sentimental and argued for gas lamps but they’d given way easy enough. Who wasn’t sentimental about his romantic youth? And now his daughter was making sure she had it, even though it would no doubt be brief, and end with a swift finality that would indeed be hard to endure.

After his daughter’s first time there, when no one had ventured to ask her onto the floor, they rode home in silence. He thought she was trying not to cry, doing a damn good job of it. Just knowing that made it hard for him to control his own emotions.

And so he was relieved, his heart felt lifted, lighter, when at the second dance he saw the Key boy go over and speak to her, hold out his hand, lead her onto the floor. He was worried about that boy, but in the moment grateful, too. Then he remembered the first time — maybe it was the first time, hard to know for sure after all the years — laying eyes on young Ida McClure, only to see she was standing still and flagrantly staring at him and didn’t bother to avert her eyes when he caught her at it. Gave him such an instant rise he’d had to step out and subside before going back in, his will set against an obvious passion, to ask her to dance. Yet when they’d got on the floor it happened again and she brushed against him, he’d thought by accident but later realized it probably wasn’t, and locked her eyes on his in a way that just about took him over the edge.

Now he wanted to rush onto the floor and grab his daughter by the hand and pull her out of there, but summoned the restraint to stay where he was, peering at them to detect anything improper. It didn’t seem so. She looked flat-out blissful, and the boy seemed happy and bashful.

Well, of course he didn’t have a flagrant seductress by the hands out there, like he, Sylvester Chisolm, had nearly forty years ago. You could look back on a love and recall so clearly when it was good, joyful, wild. And also in some gray area you retained the images and moments marking decline. How could a man keep a woman from hating him for the very thing she wanted from him in the first place? Especially if both were disposed to darkness of spirit? How had he not known it, when they were young? Or maybe the question was, how had he managed to ignore the truth? Well, when you’re young you want what you want, right then, and that would be the simple truth of it.

It was over, then, the members of the little band putting away their instruments, people bustling to wagons, a few trucks and cars. He let Jane and the Key boy talk for a bit, not minding as long as he was looking on nearby, not minding that the others were clearing out, as he disliked a crowding of vehicles as much as if not more than a crowding of pedestrians all trying to get somewhere or away. And on the way home she still seemed as she’d seemed on the dance floor, just full of bliss, and not talky except to say, “Thank you, Papa, I had such a good time.”

“You enjoy the dancing, then.”

“Oh, I do,” she said. “So much. I’ve never had so much fun.”

“Not even as a little girl, when you had no cares?”

“Not even,” she said. “But even a little child has worries.”

“I guess I’d forgotten that, if it’s so. I guess most grown-ups do forget, at some point.” After a bit he said, “And you have no worries now, about how all this might turn out?”

She didn’t answer, and looked away, so he let her be. They were quiet the rest of the brief ride home then, his thoughts drifting away as they tended to do more and more often. He sat alone on the front porch, smoking and sipping a bit. Jane came out to sit with him for a little while, unable to go straight to sleep. Then she kissed him on the cheek and went in. His wife came out momentarily. He looked up at her standing there.

“She had a good time,” he said finally, after she’d said nothing. Her expression didn’t change. She went back in. He took a long drink, coughed, rolled another smoke. He heard a dog barking off somewhere, maybe at the Key place, and thought about old Hound. How had Jane known he’d put the dog down, back then? He hadn’t spoken of it at all. He’d noticed the dog losing weight, walking like a cripple, eyes looking in pain, though he wagged his tail when Chisolm took up his rifle. Said he was going deer hunting and walked far down into the woods with the dog hobbling along, grabbed a shovel from his still shed along the way. They walked through the woods and out into the far pasture there and over to the very far edge of that. When he stopped walking, the dog plopped down, exhausted. He knelt next to him, stroked his forehead with a thumb. The dog looked up at him without raising his head.

“You got a broad forehead here,” he’d said to the dog, whose long ears lifted just the slightest at the words, then fell. “So you been around people a long time, you and those you came down from. What they say. People like a dog they can pet. Partial to the ones with your wide-set eyes.” The dog looked up at him again, but only a moment, too tired to even move his eyes anymore.

So then he’d done what he had to do. Out of kindness, he liked to think.

And when he’d gone back to the house with no deer and no dog, no one had said anything to him about it. Nor he to them.

Elijah came over with a Brownie camera one day and took some pictures of her on their walk. He mailed the film to town to have them developed and printed. One, his favorite, was of Jane looking over her shoulder at him in a flirtatious way, and she made him give her the print of that one, she thought it was so funny. “But it’s my favorite one,” he said. “Well, you just get yourself another one made up,” she said.

Her mother and father, demure in their greetings but not impolite, watched them from the front porch as they would pause and turn to one another, as the Key boy would sometimes take her hand when he spoke to her.

After having seen the photograph and thinking about it as he sat before the fireplace late into an evening, her father had an idea to send Jane into town to live with her sister Grace, who was now proprietor of the dry-cleaning operation she’d started out with as a seamstress. Chisolm worried that living in town might afford Jane less freedom to get out and about — at least here she had roam of the property without socializing if it wasn’t convenient — but thought it might be a good thing to separate her from the Key boy, for the good of them both.

“Better to have her upset with me than have her heart broken by that boy one day,” he said to himself.

“Of course,” his wife said, surprising him. He hadn’t known she was in the room. He looked at her, a bit irritated by her sneakiness and her sarcastic tone.

Things were getting no better moneywise, either. He would worry less, maybe, if she wasn’t around, if she was in town learning how to live off the farm, moving toward learning how to be on her own in the world. Once he’d really thought about it, he couldn’t imagine she’d want to live on this farm by herself when he and the wife were dead and gone.

And to himself he admitted he was drinking more. Craving it more. Slipping off to his makings shed more often. But after a few drinks he would forget or not care about discretion and bring the jug or jar back up to the house. He worried about her seeing that.

His wife suggested that Jane could take in some sewing, maybe from some of Grace’s customers, to help out with expenses. She might build up a little business of her own that way.

They presented Jane with the idea the next afternoon before supper. She looked at them, sitting there at the kitchen table beside which she stood, listening. Her face had taken on the kind of look she’d put on as a child, when something upset her.

“I’d rather just stay here,” she said. “I can earn my keep.”

“Well,” her mother said, deliberately not looking at her. “We think it’s the best thing for now.”

Jane went into her room and sat on the bed, hearing her father go out again and her mother get to work on the meal. In a while, she got up and went back into the kitchen to help. Her mother stopped to look at her, then went back to what she’d been doing.

“You could take in some sewing work, like I said, just to help Grace out a little,” she said. “She practically raised you, anyway.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jane said. “But don’t make me leave right now. Please. Not just yet.”

Her mother looked at her long enough for Jane to feel the room begin to close in on them, the outside world to disappear from her senses. “And why do you want to stay here, with just us? Why do you want that so much just now?”

“I’m not like Grace. I’ve never wanted to get away, restless. Let me stay at least through the spring. For the dances, then. I had such a good time.”

“Maybe you are restless,” her mother said. And they stared at one another until her mother stood up to leave the room.

“If you would watch those peas on the stove,” she said as she left, “I’d appreciate it. Don’t let them boil over. I need to get out of this house for a bit.”

“All right.” Although she said it softly and her mother didn’t appear to be listening, reaching for her tin of snuff up on the mantel before going out onto the porch to sit by herself for a while.

So in the fall of 1932, when she was sixteen going on seventeen, she went to live with Grace in town. Grace’s personality hadn’t changed much, but it did seem that she took things easier here, on her own. She’d married the owner of the dry-cleaning business, a man with the unlikely name of Noble Sidebottom. Then Mr. Sidebottom — who must have truly had quite enough of Grace — ran off with an even younger woman, leaving Grace the business, house, and automobile but not a word of good-bye. Took what cash they had, too. Grace said she figured they hauled off to Mexico, where life was cheap. Some afternoons she drank beer or gin and smoked cigarettes, right out on the front porch where anybody walking by on the sidewalk could see.

Weekdays, Jane worked as a seamstress in Grace’s shop, mending and hemming men’s britches and shirtsleeves, repairing the stitching in winter coats, vests. She had learned while living with her mother to make dresses, skirts, shirts from whole cloth. She sat at her machine and pumped the treadle with her foot, humming tunes of her own making as she worked. She kept the big washing machine going for the laundry customers, and hung clothes on the lines out back, and helped Grace iron when she could. It was hard work.

She had ended her habit of fasting, as she had to keep her wits to get everything done. She had little contact with others, anyway, outside her very controlled environment. She’d taken to wearing several slips beneath her dress, as many as five or six, hoping that would muffle odors, and a protective rubber garment. And perfume, a slight distraction. And it was Grace who gave the customers their items and took their money. Jane stayed in the back, working. Clients came to the shop to drop off or pick up items they’d had repaired or sewn, but she rarely saw them.

Their house, just a couple of blocks north of the new hospital, was one of those plain Victorian homes of plank siding painted white, with tall windows and a second, attic floor with dormers, where Jane made her rooms.

The streets were paved to just north of Fourteenth Street, so in all seasons Jane and Grace could hear the clopping of horses’ hooves when wagons and buggies passed, going to the hospital or down the hill to town, and also the chustling of old vehicles and the whining acceleration of the newer motorcars owned mostly by townspeople who lived in the outlying areas. At all hours of the day and night came the plaintive steam whistles of freights and passenger trains plying the tracks along Front Street, south to Hattiesburg and the coast, north to Columbus and Tupelo, east to Birmingham, west to Jackson. To Jane, who’d never heard trains so close with such regularity, the wailing whistles and the banging of cars together in the rail yard, rumbling out of the valley in all directions, was comforting. Up in the attic apartment, her windows open spring, summer, and fall for breeze, she heard these sounds, along with the sloppy hard-edged language of men walking home from the saloons in late evening, and she felt most times as if she had little real privacy, so accustomed she was to the quiet farm with its occasional cow or bull sounding off, bellowing at the moon or calling a calf or hailing a harem of heifers, a horse blowing a big flappity sigh, restless in its stall, a dog barking, an owl hooting now and then, and the startled songbirds’ calls in its wake, or their silence. Coyotes. Crickets. Cicadas. Tree frogs, and bullfrogs down by the cattle pond. And during quiet moments in the summertime, the breezes rustling the full-leafed stalks in the cornfield.

If she was to stay there and live in Grace’s attic, then she was to be the primary cook, washwoman, and cleaning woman, in spite of the fact that she put in a full day six days a week at Grace’s shop for meager wages, as well. Grace was hard in her determination not to be soft in a world where men expected that of women so they could have their way.

In one of her more callous moments, she said to Jane, “You don’t know how good you have it, not even having to think about dealing with a man pawing at you all the time, bossing you around.”

They were in the kitchen, Jane having cracked several eggs into a bowl to scramble them. Grace leaned over to look into the bowl.

“You didn’t take out the little squiggly things.”

“Why should I?”

“It’s the rooster jism,” Grace said. “Sperm.”

“It is not,” Jane said, looking again at the eggs in the bowl with revulsion.

“Well, what would you know about it? You’ve never seen it.”

“That is just not possible,” Jane said.

“Sure looks like it,” Grace said.

Sometimes when one of Grace’s gentleman friends came over Jane crept out and walked the mostly empty evening sidewalks downtown. She liked the evening air, the slow and scarce traffic that rolled or clopped through town at that hour. The smells of the bakery baking on the night shift. The coal smoke from the trains. But she was lonelier than ever, and many a night such as this she longed just to be back on the farm, alone in that way. It seemed to her to be the place she belonged.

Occasionally one of the “friends” came over for supper, and sometimes he stayed later, when Jane had already gone up to her room, and she could hear him and Grace partly from the stairwell, their murmuring talk, and partly from the outside, where their voices drifted from the windows and into the air and back into Jane’s windows above them. On some of those nights, though they kept the radio on to cover their sounds, she heard the faint whine of the bad hinge on Grace’s bedroom door, the light metallic click of the door closing. And she might drift over to that side of the house, to the little sitting room she had arranged across from her bedroom, and sit beside the open window looking out over downtown below and listen to the sounds of their lovemaking, so carefully quietened they were, like the whispers of a lover in Jane’s own ears, burning with the shame of her eavesdropping.

One of Grace’s suitors was a man named Louis Fontleroy. He was a shoe salesman for one of the two ladies’ shoe stores downtown. He dressed as if he were more than that, and was handsome, although somewhat in the way of a handsome housecat, and younger than Grace. He wore engraved tie clasps on his silk ties, and ankle boots that to Jane seemed oddly effeminate, and smoked cigarettes he kept in a silver case. He was infinitely polite to Jane, even bending to kiss the top of her hand sometimes when she entered the room. Jane felt he was patronizing, yet she was polite in return. When they dined, he would make pleasant small talk, making sure to address questions to Jane as well as Grace. Once, when Grace had left the room for a moment, Jane was fairly certain that after remarking what a good cook she was, how excellent was the pot roast, he had winked at her. She blushed but when she looked back at Mr. Fontleroy he seemed to be examining his manicured fingernails as if to search for some flaw he might attend to when he returned home. She thought him a dandy.

One evening when Grace had said Mr. Fontleroy was coming for dinner and asked Jane to join them, Jane came downstairs and entered the parlor to find not just Grace and Mr. Fontleroy, but another man as well. She froze in the doorway to the parlor, her heart thumping and anger flashing into her mind, at the same time that both gentlemen stood, setting their coffee cups into their saucers on the coffee table with a little clatter.

“Won’t you join us, Miss Jane?” Fontleroy said.

“Come have a seat, Jane,” Grace said in a wry voice. “This is Mr. Fontleroy’s friend Gabe Satchel.”

“Miss Chisolm,” Satchel said, nodding, and then he took a step toward her on his long legs and extended his hand. She reached out and shook it, her palm damp, and then sat in the chair next to her sister, her cheeks burning, and rested the damp palm on her skirt to dry it. She hoped she wouldn’t have to rush off, embarrassing herself and Grace alike.

This Mr. Satchel was older, looked almost middle-aged, though what looked older in his features was mostly facial, and she sensed that some burden had made them lined in that way. There was also a kind of serenity in the way he listened when someone spoke, looked at them and seemed to absorb what they were saying as if it had kindled his deepest, most intimate interest. It warmed her and made her flush a bit, and she couldn’t help but feel drawn to him for this, if not for his looks. But what were looks? How long could anyone stay beautiful, if it came to that?

But then what would he see in her, no doubt still just a country girl, even if she had lived in town with Grace now for a good five years? And why should she even think about such a thing, given the realities of her situation? She’d come a long way toward coming to terms with that.

And yet she sensed in this Gabe Satchel some kind of sadness borne along by a natural kindness. It made her heart leap a bit, and made her feel, at the same time, as miserable as she felt the day she’d said good-bye to Elijah Key.

So now she knew why Grace had insisted that she cook an entire pot roast and more potatoes and carrots than usual, and why Grace herself had put together a salad of lettuce, tomatoes, and onions. And now she had little appetite, and her emotions were building inside her so as to make it impossible even to swallow without difficulty.

As they ate, Jane said little but was courteous. Mr. Satchel was tall, several inches taller than Jane, and slim but not nearly as bone-thin as her father, and as she was becoming. In the brighter light of the dining room (which she hated, preferring a lower light at meals), she realized that for all its almost enchanting kindness, his face was a little bit cockeyed, his ears a bit crooked. Even so, he had good table manners and was not overly loud in conversation. In fact, he was on the quiet side.

“Mr. Satchel was in the Great War,” Grace said at one point, to which Mr. Satchel said nothing but smiled faintly at his dinner plate as he cut himself another bite of the roast.

“Did you serve in France, Mr. Satchel?” Jane asked.

“That he did,” Mr. Fontleroy said. “He was in battle.”

“Well, I’m happy that you came home.”

“Mostly, ma’am,” Mr. Satchel said then in an odd way. “I was wounded, but thankful I’m alive and in good health. I was never gassed like a lot of fellows I knew.”

“Mr. Satchel’s family is from up around Tupelo,” Grace said, going around and filling everyone’s glass with more tea.

“What brought you down here?” Jane said.

“Work,” Satchel said. “I’ve been with the railroad since the war, and they transferred me to here a couple of years ago. I’m hoping what seniority I have holds me through these times.”

“Anybody’s lucky to be working or running a business in these times,” Fontleroy said. “I’m afraid the only way I’m holding on in the shoe business is by wearing the hell out of my own,” he said, laughing at his own joke.

“And you are doing well in your business, Miss Grace?” Satchel said.

“Well, if it wasn’t for Jane getting so good at repairing worn-out clothing and making it look new, and making new things for such a good price, I’m afraid we’d be in trouble ourselves,” Grace said.

“Don’t forget the practically-working-for-free part,” Jane said.

The evening went that way. Jane had little or no appetite but managed to eat a few bites from her plate. The whole situation was making her feel increasingly uncomfortable, though, as it couldn’t be anything other than what it seemed to be, a baffling bit of matchmaking on Grace’s part. Her discomfort was slowly turning into anger that Grace would put her in such a spot, and she grew silent. Mr. Satchel asked if she was all right. “I’m fine,” she said. Then she felt an accident coming on and started to get up and hurry upstairs but stopped, thought, Just let it happen. See what the matchmakers think of that. And after a minute, during which the unmistakable odor of bodily waste began to rise into the air around the table, she could sense the discomfort, see the awkward feeling creep into them, note their averted eyes. All but Grace’s, that is. Hers bored into Jane’s with unmistakable fury and disbelief.

The men stood to leave, thanking Grace, and Satchel thanking her, shaking her hand, making a valiant effort at normalcy. They’d skipped dessert and coffee. And as soon as she shut the door on their departure Grace spun around and came up to her, face distorted in disgust and anger.

“What the hell, sister?” she said. “What the hell was that all about?”

“Indeed,” Jane said right back. “What was it about?”

“I don’t doubt even Louis won’t come back here, after that little incident.”

“Too bad. Such a catch.” She thought Grace might slap her, but instead she banged into the kitchen through the swinging door. Jane followed, banging through herself.

“Seriously, you tell me, sister,” she said. “Were you really trying to set me up with a man? Never mind how humiliating to me — what about him? He’s a nice man, and a kind man, I can tell. What was he supposed to think when I just outright rejected him and couldn’t even tell him why?”

Grace started to speak, stopped herself, then kind of slumped in on herself, crossing her arms.

“Don’t get so damn mad,” she said. “Louis insisted that this man wanted to meet you.”

Jane stared at her for a minute.

“And why is that?”

“Says he’s lonely and hasn’t had a girl since the war, that he was wounded pretty bad. I get the idea, you know, it was something awful.”

“He doesn’t look wounded. I mean, he’s got two arms and two legs, his face is a little cattywampus but it isn’t scarred.”

Grace just looked at her.

“Maybe it left him like you, in a way. Unable to be intimate with somebody. I’m just guessing.”

To Jane it felt as if she could feel the color leave her complexion. If you could feel an almost mortal paling.

“Guessing,” she said. “You’d already told this Mr. Fontleroy about me? And I suppose he told Mr. Satchel?”

Grace worked her mouth, twisting a dishrag in her hands. Then she cut her eyes away. “Not everything,” she said. “You certainly surprised him on that front.”

Jane said, “How could you do that? Grace.”

“Well, goddamn!” Grace said, throwing the dishrag onto the counter. “Damn me if I bother to do anything to help you, sister. Maybe that man would be a good companion to you, what you think about that? Or is it that you just want to be an old maid your whole life?”

“Well, it’s what I already am, ‘old’ or not, isn’t it?” Jane said.

“Yes,” Grace said, settling just a bit, ears going from pink back to fleshy translucence in the kitchen light.

“So you think because this man cannot have normal relations with a woman he would want to be with me. You tell him I’m ‘deformed’ or something but I suppose you leave off the part about inability to control my bodily functions. That he would be the companion of a woman around whom he would so often enjoy the stink of the privy. That it would be like living with a grown infant always needing her ‘goddamn’ diaper changed. I don’t suppose you told him that, judging by his reaction at the table, poor man.”

“Poor man! Why did you let it happen that way? Why didn’t you excuse yourself and go upstairs, the way you’ve always done?”

After a long moment so quiet the air began to hiss like a tiny steam valve in another room, Jane said, “To make a point, I suppose. To not take part in a lie.” Grace said nothing. “I am twenty-two years old, Grace. That was old maid age, in the old days. And pretty much is for me now. If I have to accept it, you might as well, too. I imagine I am boring you to death, after all this time living here like that, like an old maid. So if you want me to leave, find my own place, you just say so.”

“I didn’t say that and I don’t mean that. You’re my little sister. I’ve tried to take care of you.”

“And I appreciate that, Grace. But if you want me to leave, want your privacy back, you say so. All right?”

Grace nodded.

“You’re not getting any younger, either, Grace,” she said, in a softer voice, not unkind. “I don’t want to be in your way.”

Grace seemed then on the verge of tears.

Jane left the kitchen and went straight up to her room, sat on her bed looking out the window at downtown, not hearing the sounds of it or smelling the smells of it nor even herself. Only seeing the city’s nightscape, and some part of her seeming to float out into it, undetectable by others, no more than a little pocket of warm breeze in the shade of a tree during summer, so subtle as to make one wonder at whether it was really there, passed, or was just a moment of one’s own disembodied dreaming. That ghost self that now so often seemed to be with her when she was alone.

Every now and then Dr. Thompson came by to get her on Sunday and took her for a drive in his car. They drove out to the airfield and watched the occasional airplane take off or land. He bought them a box lunch and they would have a picnic at Highland Park and stroll around and toss the ducks pieces of stale bread Jane would bring from Grace’s house.

Once, he convinced her to take a ride on the park’s carousel. It was a rather tame experience, as he was getting on in years and she did not want to straddle a wooden horse or lion or some other odd animal, so they rode in the sleigh seats. Even so, the whirling of the carousel as it gained speed was a thrill, with the world of the carousel house and the world outside its paned windows in slanting light becoming streaked as if in some kind of drugged dream. And when it slowed and came to a stop she had to clasp his forearm and beg a moment to regain her equilibrium, and then of course hurry to the public pool’s bathhouse with her bag in order to change herself, as the ride had made her forget herself entirely for those long moments and when she came out of it she realized that she had that business to take care of before they moved along.

After they had made their way back to his car and got in, he sat for a moment behind the wheel without speaking.

“What are you thinking about?” she said.

“Oh. Just my mind wandering. Got all whirled up on that carousel.”

They sat a moment.

“I want to ask you a question,” she said.

“Go ahead.”

“How come you never got married again?”

He frowned in thought. Then said, “I didn’t feel the need. Some people feel like they just have to be married, have a companion. I figured out, after Lett died, that I wasn’t one of them. I guess being married to her had helped me see that.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean to pry where I shouldn’t.”

“It’s all right. I don’t mind. Sometimes people get married because it just seems like a good idea at the time. That such-and-such a person would be a good mate, a good person to share a life with. Have children with. People will get married simply because they judge themselves to be compatible. Just because they figure they will get along.”

“Was it that way with you and Mrs. Thompson?” Jane said.

“We got along all right.”

She’d been rude again and wanted to kick herself. But she was curious. And still upset about Grace’s matchmaking, she supposed, taking it out in a way on Dr. Thompson. Her only real friend.

“I apologize for asking that,” she said. “I’d better keep my mouth shut.”

“I really don’t mind. We did kind of grow apart, there toward the end. I loved her. I think she loved me, too. But she began to have a hard time showing it. I think that toward the end I just wasn’t entirely the right man for her. I think she’d have preferred a life in town.”

“But your house is almost in town, barely outside it.”

He smiled, but just with one side of his mouth.

“I guess I mean she would’ve preferred a town life. Society.” He looked at her. “She was lonely for the kind of life she grew up with. Whereas I never really cared much for it.”

“How did you meet?” He’d never told her the story of that.

“Well, now, there you go. I was a biology student at the University of Alabama, intending to apply to Vanderbilt for medical school — although I wasn’t decided on that yet.

“In any case, one weekend I went home with my friend Nate McLemore, who was from here in Mercury, and there was a social on the lawn at someone’s home, I think it was a family named Meyer, and it was a very hot day. Several of the young ladies had parasols against the sun and heat. But as I was walking past this one girl, who did not have a parasol, she fainted dead away and landed right in my arms. I had her just like you’d bend someone down in a tango dance or something, and I had to hold her close for a moment or drop her, and before I could even lay her down on the grass she woke up, and looked straight into my eyes, obviously startled and shaken, and disoriented, of course. And for some reason, one of those odd things you do on impulse, I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m studying to be a doctor.’ And do you know what she did then?”

“Tell me.”

“She laughed, of course. She must have realized, even in her state, that I was as discombobulated as she was. So that was the start of it.”

“She got the chance to look at you close up and intimate. It was by accident but it worked.”

He cocked his head at her and let a vague smile come into his expression.

“Maybe.”

He heaved a sigh and seemed to laugh at himself. “I don’t know, I’m rambling.” He turned to her again. “I have been thinking about love. And I realize that I don’t have the slightest idea what it is. But you felt it for that Key boy, didn’t you? You believed you did.”

In spite of her blushing, she said, “Yes.”

He was quiet for a little while, seeming to study his fingernails.

“Jane. I have to say that I’ve never been certain that I was right to intervene the way I did, with you and that boy.”

“Do you think that’s what it was? That you intervened? You said you only told him I couldn’t have children.”

“That’s true. It’s all I told him. But I have to ask myself, why? Was I trying to prepare him in some way for — I don’t know, for what he would either learn from you being together, or what you might have to tell him yourself someday? I felt like it was my obligation somehow, to say something. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I should have just let things unfold however they might.”

Now she was quiet for a while. Then she said, “I thought about that. Of course. I was angry at first. I thought you should have let me tell him. But you ought to know. I decided that I wasn’t at all sure I could even do that. I think maybe I was grateful to you, for at least giving him something.”

And then she told him about the afternoon when Elijah came to see her and she turned him away.

“Are you saying now I should have stayed?” Jane said. “That I should have just told Elijah everything, and risk it?” Just the thought, just saying the words, made her heart race as if in fear.

“I don’t know anything for sure, Janie.”

“But if he had been unable to get beyond the facts of what I told him, like you said back then, wouldn’t my heartbreak have been even worse? And maybe even his, too?”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “I did think so at the time.” He looked at her. “And you thought so, too, didn’t you?”

She didn’t reply for a moment, felt her heartbeat begin to slow to normal again.

“Yes,” she said then. “I did.”

“But the truth is, we can never really know.”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose that is true.”

But now there was the problem of how to go back home. Not the simple act of going home, which could be accomplished by calling and catching a ride with the doctor, or being packed and ready to go home next time her father came into town. The problem was that if she went home she would be questioned about why she was returning, and why now, and what was going on with Grace, and so on. And she had never lied to them, not exactly, and she wasn’t good at prevarication, anyway. Lying, or attempting to, or even considering it, embarrassed her, which felt like an oddly humiliating weakness.

And so she lingered, which irritated Grace, although it didn’t seem as if Grace’s new work disagreed with her. If anything, she came home in a better mood than she’d usually enjoyed coming home from the dry-cleaning and laundry shop. Jane tried to stay on her good side by keeping the house spotless, and the garden in shape, and the yard, and always had supper cooking and dishes washed. Grace grumbled a bit but it was also evident that she was glad she didn’t have to do those things. She hadn’t done much in the way of those things since Jane had arrived six years earlier.

Then her father came one day — he was not going to the stockyard every week or even every month anymore — and when she went out to his truck, which had no cattle in the empty bed, and spoke to him through the open passenger window, he didn’t seem to hear her. She spoke louder, and he turned his head slowly. Then he said, “Why don’t you drive us on over, sister?”

He shut the engine off and slowly got out and made his way around the hood, keeping one hand on the truck. He looked shaky and his eyes staked his path but really seemed to see nothing, blind sight. She caught his arm and helped him into the passenger seat. He felt even more bone-thin than he looked. He smelled of liquor already, in late morning, but it didn’t feel like that was the governing problem.

“Where are we going, Papa?” she said.

“Stockyard,” he said.

“Are you looking to buy something?”

He looked at her as if she’d said something odd or mysterious, then craned his neck around to look into the truck bed through the rear window.

“Well,” he said. “I thought I brought along a cow.”

“Did you forget to load her up?”

He looked at her again with that look of incomprehension. Then settled back in his seat and looked out the windshield. Raised a hand forward as if to say, Let’s go on now, then.

So she drove him across town to the stockyard and sat with him through the auction, but he hardly reacted to the business going on. Every now and then he seemed to pay attention to an animal, watch it enter the arena, get shown, and exit. But most of the time he had that same long, unseeing stare he’d had when he arrived at Grace’s house. When they were leaving, he asked her to get him something to drink.

“From where, or who?”

He just looked at her.

“Papa, I think the last thing you need right now is liquor. I’m sorry.”

He blinked. Looked at her. Then walked unsteadily away and over to a pickup, where he spoke with a man, and came back with a bottle tucked into the front pocket of his overalls.

Jane said nothing but got in behind the wheel. He got in on the other side, pulled out the bottle, took a swig from it after they left the lot. Sipped on the way to Grace’s house.

It was late afternoon then, November. The summer’s heat finally fully gone, enough to feel a nip in the evening air now and then.

“Are you chilled, Papa?” Jane said. “Want to roll up that window?”

“I’m fine,” he said, showing no discomfort aside from his mouth being parted as if to aid his breathing a bit. Cheeks sunken, and weathered skin pulled taut against the thin line of his jawbone.

She parked his truck in front of Grace’s house and helped him inside and onto the sofa in the parlor. Grace came home while she was making coffee, took a look around, came into the kitchen.

“What’s wrong? He doesn’t look right.”

“He’s not. I don’t know what it is. It’s not just drink, though I guess it could be, if he’s been on a long bender. Mama is not telling us everything, I know that.”

She took a cup of black coffee in to him and Grace followed.

He looked at the coffee as if it were a strange thing, then up at Grace and Jane. To Grace, he said, “I know what you’ve been up to, daughter. Don’t think people don’t talk.”

“I’m making a living.”

“As a whore. Bringing shame on your mother.”

“I’m not a whore, I’m the manager of a brothel. I do my work on my feet and behind a desk. Big difference there, you know. And it’s my business what kind of business I choose to run, anyway. You and Mama can like it or not. We’re surviving, here. Are you?”

“I’m taking Janie home with me, out of this.”

“She’ll be glad to hear it,” Grace said. Then she grabbed her purse off the chair in the foyer where she’d left it and went back out.

Their father was shaking his head. He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. Jane was shocked. She’d never seen him express much emotion at all, much less break down.

“I’m so sorry, so sorry,” he said.

“Papa, for what?”

“For you,” he said. “For your life. What you’ve had to live with.”

“Papa,” she said, “I’m fine. I am who I am. I know how to live with that.”

He shook his head, put his glasses back on, and seemed to pull himself together.

“I’m going home,” he said.

“But you can’t drive in your condition.”

“I’ll ask you not to tell me what I can and cannot do, sister,” he said. “You can move back in with us in a couple days, after I settle some things and make sure your mama has your room ready. Do you hear?”

“All right.”

He looked up at her. “I want to say something to you.”

But he couldn’t seem to find whatever words he was looking for. He got up, put on his hat, and walked out. In a moment she heard the truck start up. She went to the window and watched it drive slowly away, her father stiff and steady behind the wheel.

It was nearing noon the next day when Jane came home from a walk to the grocery and saw the doctor’s pickup at the curb in front of the house. At first her heart lifted, but then she felt something cold and viscous flood into it.

When she stepped into the parlor, she saw the doctor and Grace sitting in the two chairs by the bay window, partially drunk cups of coffee on saucers on the table between them, seeming to have quietly awaited her arrival into the world from some long, childish dream. The doctor stood, his hat in his hands. She set her sack of groceries down on the floor.

“It’s Papa,” Grace said. “He passed.”

“What happened?”

“Went quietly,” the doctor said. “In his sleep.”

Dr. Thompson offered to drive them both up home, but Grace said she would drive her own car so she could come into town to check on things if she needed to.

“You know he came to see me yesterday, after leaving here,” she said. When neither replied to that she said, “He wanted me to quit my job.”

After an awkward silence, Jane said, “Was he still angry, Grace?”

Grace looked at her, an unfamiliar emotion in her face.

“He seemed more sad than angry, I thought,” she said. “I hate my last words to him were so harsh.”

No one said anything and it was quiet in the room. Death was in the room and they were quiet in its presence. Then Grace gathered her bag and keys and left.

Jane and Dr. Thompson were quiet during the drive up, the doctor taking it slow. At first they drove in the wake of billowing dust and slung gravel from Grace’s Plymouth until she pulled well ahead, out of sight. And only then, as if Grace could have heard them before, Jane said, “What happened?”

The doctor, who’d been seeming to chew on something, a habit with his mouth he’d taken up in his age, was quiet a long moment. Then he said, “No mystery. I guess he finally drank himself to death.”

“He’s been doing that a long time,” Jane said.

“Well. That’s pretty much how it’s done.”

They drove a good mile without speaking. The hem of her light fabric dress fluttered against the layered slips she’d taken to wearing and she pressed it down against them, to keep it still. She noticed the doctor glance over discreetly.

“I don’t really read it as liver failure,” he said. “Most likely his heart. Heavy drink will do that. Plus his heavy smoking.”

Jane watched the road ahead.

“I guess it was a worse binge than the usual,” the doctor said. “Or one too many.”

“How is Mama taking it?” Jane said.

“She’s quiet.”

After a while, Jane said, “Was he in the house?”

“She found him down at his shed. He’d been down there all night. She woke up and he wasn’t at the house, and she made coffee and breakfast, all but the eggs. When he still hadn’t showed she went down and found him there. Lying on the ground next to the little fire pit. It was just smoldering a bit. There was a nearly empty jug. Doesn’t mean he drank it all last night, though. He was lying like he’d lain down to go to sleep. Not like he’d fallen. Gets chilly at night, this time of year. Alcohol lowers the body temperature, actually. Could have been exposure involved, too. His little fire seemed long cold, time I got there.”

After a while, Jane said, “I wonder what she’s going to do now. She always seemed like she just wanted people to leave her alone, but being alone like this, with nobody. I’ll be around of course. I was going to move back, anyway. I can’t live with Grace. Not anymore.”

With that she gave just a glance at the doctor, who seemed to have taken on a momentary rictus himself.

He slowed and turned off the main road onto the dirt road that her father had taken so often on his trips to and from town, crossed the old bridge, and at the top of the rise turned left onto the drive to the home where Jane had grown up.

Grace was in the kitchen with her mother. A single bare bulb burned in its outlet in the ceiling there. They’d had a power line strung to the house the year before. And a phone line, too — the new crank telephone on the wall. Her mother’s face was set in some kind of slackened flatness, her hair combed straight back on her head. She looked up at Jane and the doctor, her face set and pale in the glaring light. Jane reached up and pulled the string to turn it off.

Her father was in the bedroom, in his clothes and shoes, on top of the made-up counterpane, arms crossed over one another on his chest. She was surprised, almost alarmed, to see that a bright copper penny rested on top of each of his closed eyes. She almost reached over to remove them but heard something and her mother came in.

“Well,” her mother said. “There he is.”

She took in a heavy, tired-sounding breath, and let it out.

Dr. Thompson said he would arrange for the grave to be dug, and that the notice would be in the next afternoon’s papers for the service and burial on Sunday.

“I’ll send telegraphs to your brothers, if you like,” he said.

“Thank you,” Jane said.

“He’ll be fine in there if you keep it cool, closed off from the heated rooms, with the shades down. Mr. Finicker will come by with a casket for when you have him cleaned up and dressed. I doubt you’ll need ice beneath him unless we have to wait for burial, but if you think differently, just give me a telephone call and I’ll have some delivered.”

No one said anything in response and the kitchen was quiet but for the ticking of the stove from the dying noon-meal fire in there.

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.

She bent over to dab sweat from her brow with the hem of her skirt. It was July-hot, but a bearable breeze lilted through the clearing where their house and barn and outbuildings had stood since long before her birth, a breeze hinting at something more from the large cumulus that seemed to grow by the minute, a towering mountain of billowing white to the south, its center like tarnished silver.

She heard what sounded like the doctor’s pickup coming down the main road, then its wheels bumbling across the bridge over the creek, beyond the trees between there and the house. Its engine churned it up the hill. She knelt and used her thumb and forefinger to pluck the worm from the leaf of the tomato plant — rolled it into her long narrow palm and cupped it there, feeling its weird little stumpy legs work against the tender skin, tickling, an odd stimulation. She snapped off the leaf stem where it had been dining and carried it to the edge of the yard, set it down, let the worm grapple back onto it. It set to eating again right away. For the worm, this stem and leaf were the whole world. Some bird would snatch it up directly. She walked quickly toward the house as the doctor’s pickup appeared around the corner of their long drive, a thin drift of red dust rising behind it. In the room she’d slept in growing up, she dabbed a bit of her best perfume onto her wrists, her neck, and dropped her soiled undergarment into a pail she kept covered in the corner, sprinkling in a bit of her cheaper perfume before replacing the lid. Washed herself with water and soap from the basin on the back porch and went back outside.

The blue pickup was parked there in front of the house. The doctor got out then, fanning himself with his hat. He spoke to her and joined her on the front porch, and she fetched them both glasses of sweet tea with chips of ice. A flicker sang its hard staccato song from a high limb in her mother’s beloved apple tree, singing against the softening light of the hot afternoon. The doctor sipped his tea, rocking, that closed-down expression on his noble but slightly birdlike face, eyes narrowed above his beak.

“You might as well tell me what it is on your mind,” she finally said.

He looked at her as if he’d been interrupted in thought, as if he’d been alone there on the porch with those thoughts. Not atypical. He smiled. He was a kindly man. Then he took on a serious look as if the thought in his mind had indeed become about her. He took a sip of his tea, ice chips tinkling against the glass, and set it down.

“All right.”

And he told her. He’d kept up with things, through his friend in Baltimore. There’d been a lot of progress since she was a little girl. He thought it was time they asked another specialist to examine her.

“The very best, so that you can know without doubt whether or not it’s possible to correct your condition. Or to do anything about it.”

“With surgery.”

“Yes.”

He said the work being done in Baltimore was remarkable. New developments every year. He didn’t think anyone in the country would be able to examine her with greater certainty than the men there.

“It may still not be possible yet. It may still be too complicated. You’ve been through this before. But they’ve made great advances in the last ten years, and I think the emotional risk is worth it. I think we should be aggressive. And if they cannot correct it now, they may at least know enough to give you a good idea of when they might.”

He spoke his words in a serious manner but still, as always, with the kind of gentle thoughtfulness that was his hallmark as a man and a doctor. His keen eyes in the squint they took on when he was talking seriously. As if he’d got a mote in his eye.

Her father’s eyes had seemed so haunted, there near the end. For years had, really.

She peered at the doctor a moment, then looked away, feeling strangely perturbed and not bothering to hide it.

“No doubt expensive,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course, now you have the money from your father’s insurance policy.”

She looked up.

“Did you speak to him about this?”

“I mentioned, years ago, when you were born, that he might put something away toward the possibility.”

“Recently, I mean.”

“I did tell him, when he asked a couple of years before his death — while you were living in town — that I thought the odds were getting better.”

After a moment of looking at him as if he’d said something incomprehensible, she stood up and walked to the edge of the porch.

“What are you saying?”

“Just what I’m saying.”

“About my father, I mean, and the insurance policy.”

“Just that I believe he would have wanted you to use the money for this, if you wanted.”

She turned to face him. He looked down, took out his pocketknife and a little piece of wood he was carving on. Trying to cut back on the pipe-smoking.

“I believe it’s what he had in mind,” he said.

“Had in mind,” she said.

She looked out over the yard, at the work shed, the now-empty hog pen and its ramshackle fencing, the pasture sloping down to the cattle pond, no cattle there in the midday sun. Hardly seeing it all, really.

“Jane,” he said. “You’re a hearty person, your condition has no real effect on that. You have no unhealthy habits that I know of. It is likely that you will outlive your sister and brothers, and be alone one day. Without family, if you were able to live a less restricted life—” He stopped there.

Jane said quietly, “This has come to feel pretty normal for me.”

It had come over her, some sense of what it would be like to be truly alone. Her mother had become someone who seemed barely there, anyway. The doctor was fading a bit, no denying it now. She felt a heaviness, an almost fluid infusion of a palpable isolation. She would always be the odd one, the one with the secret. Who hurried from company without a word, returned a while later as if nothing were unusual about it. Who had taken to wearing several slips beneath her skirts, and a bit of perfume, in a ridiculously vain attempt to mask the fact of her body, her embarrassment.

But did it matter, really, anymore? She had now lived nearly eight years since moving to town, since giving herself up to the truth of what her life would be. A year out here with her mother, alone, and half a year alone since her death. And she intended to stay. She was not unhappy, she wouldn’t put that word to it. In fact she would not know how, even at her young age of just twenty-four years, to start over. To become someone else entirely. But she took an oblique tack.

“Even if they could make it work, you know I cannot pay. I know my father left that money to me but it seems right that I would manage it, in case others need it in a bad time. For something practical.”

The doctor looked away and took a deep breath as if to calm himself. His right hand shook a bit and he placed his left hand there to still it. He closed his pocket knife and put it away in his vest pocket.

“I’ll pay,” he said.

“No.”

“I will,” he said. “You understand, Jane. You have always been more than just a patient, to me. Lett and I had no children. I have no one to leave anything to, when I go. I have no one in my life, not here anyway. And no close family left, no one I even really know among them anymore. If you would let me at least do this for you, I would feel as if I have someone in this world who might see me as more than an affable stranger.”

“You’ve never been a stranger.”

She looked at him. She thought that indeed he might love her, in some way. The love of one human being for another, which does not demand classification or mode.

“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

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.

She went into town often enough that people began to be friendly (beyond the general sense) to her, speak to her by name, know what she liked to order in the cafés. She would fast beforehand as always, so as not to worry about that. And so they were relatively normal outings. Driving her yellow coupe in her high fog was a kind of dreamy delight. She drove slowly, the world going by like a slow-motion moving picture in color.

Mercury had become populous enough that she was not thought strange for appearing only now and then. Even the somewhat scary-looking woman who ran the ticket booth at the movie theater, pale and skinny with garish makeup, knew her and made small talk. The woman had the voice of a crow. The Phipps couple who owned and ran the Triangle Restaurant were so nice to her — they had known her father — she often had to argue before they would let her pay for a meal. She threatened to stop coming if they didn’t stop doing that, and they laughed and complied.

She never ate or drank much, in case she wanted to linger in town a little longer, later.

It was inevitable that men would start to notice her. She wasn’t the greatest beauty, not as pretty as she’d been as a girl, but she wasn’t plain and certainly not ugly, so she noticed a fair number of men taking notice of her. And they would make eye contact, smile, nod, tip a hat, say, “Morning,” or “Afternoon.” She learned to give the faintest smile and nod in return, so as not to encourage anyone if she could help it.

But one man started to stand out, and she thought he might be running into her — or passing by, she supposed — on purpose. Then he seemed to show up wherever she had her lunch. Whether the Triangle, or Schoenhof’s, Pointer’s Grill, the diner in Woolworth’s, he seemed to show up soon after she’d taken a seat — generally she sat at the counter, being alone — and sat a few stools from her, and if she glanced over he would catch her eye, smile, and nod. He was a slim gentleman, somewhat older than her but hard to say how much, as he had a young face even though his short-clipped hair was beginning to show some gray. He wore eyeglasses, the small and round wire-rimmed kind. Clean-shaven. Nice suit. His hands, she noticed once, were slim and looked strong without bulk. Hands used to handling things but not workingman’s hands.

Finally one day as she left the grill he came out behind her and said, “Excuse me, Miss Chisolm?”

She startled. How did he know her name? Which she asked him.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I asked Mrs. Phipps.” He held out his hand. “My name is Gordon Ray, I work at Citizens Bank. I knew your father, and was sorry to hear of his passing.”

“Thank you,” Jane said. “Did you do business with my father?”

“Not much. I was just a teller back then. Before everything got so hard. We’re lucky to still be in business, I guess.”

“Yes. Well, my father wasn’t so keen on banks there toward the end, I guess.”

“No one was, Miss Chisolm.”

They stood there awkwardly for a moment. She emboldened herself and took a good, frank look at him then. He was handsome in a clean, precise, and conservative way. His eyes seemed intelligent and even kind. But she was wary of what seemed his persistent interest in her. She sensed he was a man who would be kind to a woman. But the question was always there: What did he, or would he, expect in the long run?

“Well, it was good to meet you, Mr. Ray.”

“Gordon, please.”

“Well, you can call me Jane, then. I have noticed you around.”

“Yes.” He laughed, a bit awkward. “Not a whole lot of options in the lunch department downtown, I guess. And I’m not married so I usually eat out at noon.”

“Yes.”

“And you? Do you live in town?”

“No, I live on my family’s farm, but the sharecroppers are doing all the farming these days, so I’m free to come in every now and then.”

“Would you ever like to stay for dinner? I would be honored to treat.”

She hesitated. But then her family’s tendency to be direct won out.

“Mr. Ray, I must tell you that I have never been on a date with a man in my life, dinner date or whatever kind of date.”

He kind of laughed.

“Better late than never.” Then added, “Truth is, I haven’t had a whole lot of dates myself.”

Jane looked at him. Yes, he was the friendly, awkward type.

“Living up in the country as I do, I have to be home early,” she said. “Or in any case I don’t like to arrive near or after dark.”

“I eat early,” Gordon Ray said.

All right. She pushed the family bluntness further.

“Mr. Ray, have you not heard anything about me? There must be lots of single young women in this town you could ask out to dinner.”

“Not as many as you might think, Miss Chisolm,” he said, with a kind of wan smile. “Especially if, like me, you don’t put on the he-man act. I come from Tennessee, and believe me I’m all man, but I’m not the kind to go strutting around like some circus wrestler, if you know what I mean. I’m a quiet type. Sometimes Southern women, if you’ll forgive me, don’t quite know what to make of men like me. Sometimes they get the wrong idea. But I assure you I like women very much.”

She stared at him for a second, then laughed, and he joined in.

“Well, I got your dander up, didn’t I?” she said. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I said have you not heard anything about me, and since you are sensitive to people making assumptions about you, surely you won’t mind the direct question.”

“I’ll answer you, if you’ll let me do it over dinner at Schoenhof’s.”

“Are you sure you’re not a lawyer instead of a banker?” Jane said. But then, for some reason she did not entirely explore in the moment — as close as she would come to a whim — she didn’t exactly decline, said she would try to make it but that she had to be home by seven and had a busy afternoon scheduled already. “I hope you won’t be offended if I’m not able to come,” she said.

“I do hope you can, though. I’ll hope to see you there,” he said, with a big smile. He shook her hand, touched the brim of his hat, and strode off the one block to his bank with a good bounce in his stride.

Well, she thought, he’s an optimistic fellow, if nothing else.

She felt like she’d just participated in something like an emotional boxing match, and it felt good, like good exertion. But it had also made her anxious. She was glad of her earlier fasting that day, more than ever.

She occupied herself that afternoon at the new Carnegie library, browsing books and magazines. At around four-thirty she looked up, went outside, and was surprised to realize that the anxiety she’d felt earlier had disappeared. She felt an odd calm in her blood. She felt hungry now and a bit faint, but not dangerously so. She walked slowly back into the center of town. Thinking, if in a cloudy way. She went down to Front Street and into the pharmacy on the corner across and one block down from Schoenhof’s. Where she could see out the window from the magazine rack and have little risk of being seen back. In a while, she saw him walk up and stand near the restaurant’s door, looking up and down the street. Hands in the pockets of his nice suit. He didn’t pull out a cigarette to smoke. Didn’t seem like a man of vices, anyway.

She mulled the question, Just what would come of this? Surely it could be simple friendship. That was possible between a man and a woman, wasn’t it? Yet he had said he was “all man,” and just what did that imply? Well, she knew perfectly well what it implied. Especially given the way he had shadowed her, the way he introduced himself to her, the way he had been so politely insistent upon this “date.” And, possibly, he was a man with something to prove.

So, what would he tell her he had heard about her? He wasn’t a native, with lots of friends. What did anyone outside her family and Dr. Thompson (and Emmalene and Hattie’s family, she supposed) really know about her? Her guess was they had some general idea, something in the general vicinity of her condition, her history.

She let her eyes linger on Gordon Ray, standing there waiting on her, now checking his watch. It wasn’t yet five-thirty but it was close. He pushed his hands back into his pockets, rocked a bit on his heels. He looked pleased, possibly a little nervous. She felt sorry for him, just then. But she also allowed herself to be pleased that a man would want to ask her to dinner, knowing or having heard God knows what about her. And then she left from the same door she’d come in through, around the corner and out of sight of Schoenhof’s and Mr. Gordon Ray, and took the long way around to where she’d parked the little yellow Ford, got in it, and drove up the hill and out of town. Feeling light, in a way, as if she’d escaped a difficult situation. And as far as she knew, she probably had.

She supposed she would have to refrain from taking lunch in town for a while, in order to avoid running into Gordon Ray. She would rather seem to be mysterious than cruel. She felt sorry for him, but of course she was not exactly sentimental about loneliness.

I’m deeply grateful to the following people and institutions for their kindness and generosity and smarts during the many years I spent trying to figure out how to write this novel (and writing whatever I could when I couldn’t actually write this one), and the three years I spent actually writing and rewriting it down: the University of West Florida Department of English; the University of Alabama, Birmingham; the National Endowment for the Arts; the University of Mississippi Department of English and MFA in Creative Writing, and John and Renee Grisham for their endowed chair at Ole Miss; the Lannan Foundation; the University of California, Irvine, Department of English and MFA in Creative Writing; the Taylor family, especially Dr. Marvin Taylor; the Guggenheim Foundation; the Fairhope Writers Colony; the Aspen Writers Foundation and the Aspen Institute; the University of Wyoming Department of English and MFA in Creative Writing. Thank you to all the wonderful colleagues and friends at these places.

Thanks to Dr. Gary Ludwin, for valued information and corroboration and insights concerning important medical facts (any remaining errors would be mine, not Dr. Ludwin’s); Angela Beese, for dog talk and encouragement; my Clay family cousins, for memories; Jimmy White, for long friendship and tall tales; my stepmother, Vivian Watson, just for being herself, for saving my father, and for reading a draft of the book and offering insight and advice.

I’d also like to thank the following people: Neltje, for the gift of friendship and a most beautiful place to get away and wrangle with the book at crucial times; also her staff, David and Cindy; Ric Dice, who read the manuscript more times than anyone but the writer should have to and offered great advice and much encouragement; Jason Thompson, for dropping by my office several times in the past couple of years to ask about the book and offer encouragement; Kelly Kornegay, for a last-minute tip that made a big difference; Duncan and Anne Chalk, for long friendship and unmatchable hospitality; Rattawut Lapcharoensap, for letting me sit in his study and whine and moan anytime I wanted; Jon Hershey, who, though I didn’t bug him about this book, pulled me out of the basement back when I’d quit writing and so has my eternal gratitude; my amazing agent, Peter Steinberg, for good humor, patience, encouragement, and a keen eye at the perfect time; Dave Cole, for his superb work on the manuscript; the good and (infinitely) patient and supportive people at W. W. Norton & Company, especially Nomi Victor, Dan Christiaens, Marie Pantojan, Erin Sinesky Lovett, Bill Rusin, and of course my incredible editor for all these years, Alane Salierno Mason, whose apparently near-infinite patience I stretched so thin, whose belief in this book often easily surpassed my own, who pressed me with wise advice and encouragement, whose apparently endless support I had no reason to expect to last this long — my gratitude, love, and apologies. My love and gratitude to my wife, Nell Hanley, who not only read many drafts but somehow found a way to live with me while I worked on this book.

Thank you to my beautiful, talented, irrepressible granddaughter Maggie, named after my grandmother, who was such a marvelous source of good stories for me. Maggie, who upon being read a chapter from an early draft of this novel, for some reason said, “Pappy should put a peacock in there.” And I did. And it changed everything. Clear-minded, innocent genius. Thanks, Mags.

And thanks to all my old friends on the road who have given me love and support, guest beds, food and drink, good company, and their own unmatchable hospitality, especially Horn, Cawthon, Pettit; McLemore; Denny; Dice; Noble-Horne; Bobo-Brock; Howorth, Franklin-Fennelly, Kornegay, Donelson, Hudson-Formichella; Pritchard; Winthrop; Gessner-de Gramont; Salter; Wier; Peterson-Shacochis; Vaswani-Holter; Esslinger-Sanders; Borofka; Hershey-Blalock; Hathaway-Wickelhaus; Bausch; Carlin; Williams; Huggins; Parrish; Canty; Brown; Harwood; Brewer; Geuder; Chiarella; Butler; Singleton; and Mr. Land; and others I hate to think I may be forgetting at the moment. I’m a little tired.

I’d like to acknowledge the following sources in what was a difficult search for information as I tried to engage in (roughly) educated speculation about rare, complicated, and serious urological issues: Genital Abnormalities, Hermaphroditism and Related Adrenal Diseases, Hugh H. Young; Hugh Young: A Surgeon’s Autobiography; and the website emedicine.medscape.com. Also, for information on Southern daily rural life and country doctors: The Doctor Stories, by William Carlos Williams, particularly “Old Doc Rivers” and his cocaine habit; Up Before Daylight, ed. James Seay Brown, Jr., particularly the essay “A Plain Country Doctor,” Lawrence F. Evans (wife conks husband with shovel); The Country Doctor Handbook, by the editors of FC&A Medical Publishing; Never Done: A History of American Housework, Susan Strasser; Cotton Tenants, by James Agee; photographs by Walker Evans.

The lines from the song “Let Me Call You Sweet Heart” come from the popular song published in 1910, with music by Leo Friedman and lyrics by Beth Slater Whitson. The song was first recorded by the Peerless Quartet.

Inspired in part by circumstances in the life of my maternal great-aunt, Miss Jane is