Watering My Little Apple Trees

By James Bynum

When two persistent interviewers asked Caldwell if he would define Fiddler, his answer was "Nope." It was his averment that meaning is a function of the story. That's one of the two responses an author can make to requests for meaning. The other is to say what he was trying to do; that, too, is about the story, not of it. It is only the story itself that can give the reader its measure of meaning. This story fails, finally, to be adequate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503564886

James Bynum

James Bynum, PHD, is a retired professor of English and communication from Drury University. He has a lifelong love of language and words. He has literally worn out a copy of the Columbia Encyclopedia from almost daily use. This book of short stories is a collection chosen from his many years of teaching and writing.

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Copyright © 2015 by James Bynum.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 05/29/2015

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CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. Jane, Jane

3. Pretty Boy! Pretty Boy!

4. Cry Me Remembrance

5. A Venus I Would Woo

6. The Monsignor

7. Anima Di Viola

8. The Fenger Fulcrum

9. I Dream Of Home

10. The Civilizations of Oceanus Hopkins

11. In the Parish of the Holy Lost Innocents

12. Dance Jubal

13. The Man Who Rolled on the Floor

14. Voiding All Regrets

15. The Angry Bawd on Hiram Street

16. The Angel of Death at Sunday Mass

17. Wergeld

18. You’ll Hardly Know She’s There

Martin Luther was asked, What will you do if your judging God comes today?

He said, I will water my little apple tree, if my little apple tree needs watering.

Introduction

Inclusion and Exclusion in Short Stories

I don’t mean this introduction to be a treatise on short story criticism. I am more interested in the creation of short stories than I am in their reduction to the chrome of traditional sense. Short stories share all characteristic of novels except length. There is in both a sense of newness: newness of thought, newness of syntax if you will, but especially newness of words if they work. (Novel is derived from L. novus, new.) One needs to read the best short stories critically to better understand the whole gamut.

In 1940 Eudora Welty published A Worn Path in Atlantic Monthly. It is, for me, the greatest short story in American literature. It is good because Welty’s creative intuition is rarely equaled in American literature. She had an impeccable choice for the right word. Critics frequently disagreed on the meanings of Welty’s story. I find this to be positive evidence of the versatility of the story, which enables Welty to widen her populations of good readers. She has achieved multiplicity by freighting the meanings of her morphemes, words, phrases, sometimes sentences. By and large, critics are not just good readers, they are also good thinkers: if they have educated themselves, individually, as to the story’s meanings, they feel obliged to share their findings with other readers.

Welty announces a bird five times in this story of about 4000 words. That’s an important clue for a story that’s not about birds. Two birds are named: the dead bob whites in the hunter’s pocket, and the sounds of the mourning doves. There could be an intended literary relationship between the quails and the doves: you decide. If your decision is yes, I think Welty has put in evidence that will support that conclusion.

Phoenix Jackson, an old black woman and the most important character in Welty’s story, is making a long walk to town to get medicine for her young grandson who had earlier ruined his throat by swallowing lye. She is caused to fall into a roadside ditch by a friendly dog. A white man hunting birds finds her and lifts her out. He thinks she is going to town to see Santa Claus. She steals a nickel from him; she will put it with other pennies she cadges to buy her grandson a Christmas present. She still feels bad. Precisely there, Welty puts in a surprising sentence: A bird flew by. Phoenix says, God watching me the whole time, but she keeps the coin. Then Welty puts in another odd event: the unprovoked white hunter grins, points his shotgun at Phoenix.

The reader’s problems are Why does Welty put in the unusual bird sentence and why does she put in the gun sentence?

The first problem can be solved easily by relating the unusual bird sentence and Phoenix’s immediate admission that God watching me the whole time. I come to stealing. Welty makes each of us a co-author and requires us to guess that she uses birds as the eyes of God. It’s a fine example of great creative writing.

If the fit of meaning is snug with the bird sentence, it is not so when the white hunter aims his gun at old Phoenix. Does Welty mean to enhance the courage of the old black woman? She had already proven that. In the 1920-30s the USA suffered through a nasty renaissance of KKK and the racial strife it generated. Welty would have been intelligent enough and brave enough to challenge the KKK. There was a related pseudo-social criticism that claimed Southern whites liked the individual black but did not tolerate the race, and Northern whites approved of the race but did not tolerate the individual black—a finally stupid racial divination based on expanded physiognomy.

Anyway, Faulkner had already negatively defined both in Light in August in 1932 But Welty’s gun-sentence does mean. It’s finely crafted sentences that allow a story to mean, a poem to mean. We have been taught that since the Muses. But, despite the patience of paper and the stability of print, the meaning of literature is not always obvious, is seldom static. Only change the reader, for example, and you change both the meaning and the channels of its availability. Some readers feel that the meaning of any story is a sitting duck: you have only to strip away the obscurants and suddenly the meaning is available in all its immutability.

Consider John Steinbeck’s The Flight in its compact effectiveness. It seems to me that once the reader accepts the necessity of Pepe’s fleeing at all, the reader must decide when Pepe becomes a man. When I was a young teacher, I set this as an exercise for my class. The students rightly guessed that the title announced that the meaning, the very essence of the story, was developed during Pepe’s desperate ride out of Monterey to the mountains.

True to their prerogatives, my students ignored Steinbeck’s definitions of becoming a man. Their prerogative may be described as the author is not the definitive judge of inclusions and exclusions. It can also be described as the creative reader’s exclusion of an author’s inclusion. The reader is always free to choose a personal judgment formulated from his complete context. My students were proudly unanimous in their decision: Pepe becomes a man when fleeing before a posse after having killed a man in a fight in Monterey. He is wounded in the arm and develops tetanus. The pain is great and he can’t tolerate it. He stands in plain sight and the posse kills him.

My class looked to me for confirmation. I defended their thinking and applauded their choice, but I disagreed. Pepe’s flight had taken him by his mother’s cabin on the coast. Despite what Steinbeck says or even what he might have intended to say—Mama acknowledges Pepe’s manliness: a blanket from her bed holds the food she sends with him. Papa’s hat, rifle, and the second horse become his—he was a man then and Mama could not chide him. She packs his supplies and watches him ride into the mist and the mountains and his fate. He became a man when both he and his mother accepted his responsibility for his actions. And his mother treats him as she would have treated his father in a similar situation.

They were dumbfounded and denied my theory. Could they appeal to a higher authority: to Steinbeck, himself? Of course. I would furnish the postage. They wrote a very pretty letter, I gave them stamps, they mailed it to Steinbeck’s publisher. In six-weeks the answer came.

Steinbeck thanked them for their interest, saying it was his favorite story. He,the author!—the obliging author!—said he could not answer their question. They should study the story, and decide for themselves when Pepe became a man. That was a long time ago and, for me, my theory is still intact. I would bet that, boy and girl, every student still believes in their decision. I am proud of them. Steinbeck could have told them they had done the right thing; and their conclusion was correct, but he was conscientious and wanted to make the more complex point that the story is its own statement.

Interpretations will vary from reader to reader, but the average reader feels constrained by the text; creative readers go on to the extrapolations frugally cached in symbols, figures and manners of speech, body language, parables—the whole lexicon of meaning infusions.

In the title, what do I mean by inclusion? The law of inclusion says: Anything that is included in a short story means, and if it is unusual it has special meaning. It becomes the responsibility of creative readers to determine meaning. They do it from two bases: the bare story and their complete selves. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer is a prime example There are three major significations in the story: the new captain, his still strange ship, and the captain’s double, the mate from the Sephora. It is immediately apparent that Conrad has chosen to name the emigre from the Sephora, and to not name the captain himself or his new ship. Why? Why Leggatt, and why Sephora? And, having named Leggatt, why does Conrad refuse to use the name again, using instead the more difficult identifications of my twin, my double, the secret sharer, and others? Leggatt, as a morpheme, falls into both classes: it is initially an inclusion and it is importantly an exclusion when Conrad consciously and deliberately chooses substitutes for it. The reader must ask Why? of both actions.

Keep in mind that Conrad was a great scholar and a stylist in literature, and is probably the best writer in English fiction. (He was born in Poland; English was an acquired language.) If he derived Leggatt linguistically—I believe he did—then it’s closest related word is legate. Other kin are delegate, colleague, and (more distant) legal and logic. Not bad: the naked night visitor with the desperate story who climbs aboard the captain’s new ship has immediate identification and legitimacy: He is, first, A kind of Adam. The captain, then, and we (the captain is our surrogate) can find Leggatt innocent of murder and can help him to escape. And that, too, is doubly good since Leggatt is also our surrogate.

Sephora is not linguistic; it is Biblical. Moses, having killed the cruel Egyptian, fled to Madian where he befriended the daughters of Raguel (Jethro), a priest. Raguel gives his daughter Sepphora to Moses in marriage. She bears two sons by him and he names the first Gersam which means I am a stranger in a strange land. Conrad’s story is already similar to the Old Testament story, but the allusion is deeper than that, and—forgive me—better literature than the Moses stories in the Bible.

Again, there are two related problems to start our study: What does Conrad imply by Leggatt’s initial inclusion? For what reason does he immediately exclude it?

Leggatt, the fugitive, issues from the ship Sephora precisely as Gersam issued from Sepphora, but Conrad is too good a writer to name him Gersam or to name the captain’s new ship the Madian. Conrad implies; the creative readers have to infer from the indirect evidence Conrad furnishes: Leggatt is an emissary from God.

What about the ensuing exclusion of the fugitive’s name? I hinted at this earlier when I said Conrad subsequently calls Leggatt twin, double, secret sharer, etc. Conrad is multiplying his reading populations, the ones for whom his applications are intended; he like Welty, contracts his readers. He doesn’t know our names, but we do. This is not a retelling of the Moses adventure—that was prototype. To us, Conrad says, Unlike Moses, you must go beyond just seeing the promised land. It is precisely here that the greatness of Conrad’s creativity waxes incandescent. A kind of Gersam, he had gone beyond Alexandria, beyond Shakespeare, and urges us to exceed Moses.

Conrad establishes Leggatt, an innocent in trouble, as our alter ego; he also makes the captain, caring and understanding, our surrogate. He has used my double 17 times, and secret sharer almost as often to emphasize the closeness of Leggatt and the captain. Six times the captain remarks on the kinds of strangeness he feels aboard his new ship. They are attributes by repetition—making something true by repeating it.

I don’t believe there are really inviolate laws of inclusion and exclusion, but there are in fact, many helpful strategies for writing short stories. During my degree years and in my teaching career I must have read The Secret Sharer a score of times—twice in 2008, and I am undisturbed by any of Conrad’s word usage. Indeed, I claim that his wordiness works for him. The 17 instances of my double—a new kind and number of inclusions—may contribute to the reader’s feeling nervous and threatened: it is not easy to help a person in trouble, and it may become dangerous. Repetition makes the internalizing of necessary truths easier and it also maximizes the closeness between the Leggatts (the innocents in trouble) and those who help them.

Katherine Mansfield, born in New Zealand, also develops a religious theme in The Fly, her brief, compelling story of less than 2000 words. It is negative, the opposite of Conrad’s optimism. Its inclusions and exclusions center on the owner of the business and on his son, and importantly on a fly that he has managed to catch. His drowning the fly in an inkpot, and his setting himself to cry for his slain son are practically the only action. The nature of his specific involvements is cruelly varied: his concern for the drowning of the fly vastly exceeds his mourning for the slain son..

Almost everything seems to have been excluded. The nature of the business is not explained; the owner is not named, but Mansfield does call him the boss. Notice that the author is careful to not capitalize even that. That is an important exclusion. Find the story (easy enough on the Internet) and decide the import of the omitted names.

There are three story lines in The Fly and the meanings of the two most important ones are also excluded. As reader, you have to determine the main implications and define them. They are the weight of her story, and surely the oddest exclusions for a short story I have ever witnessed. Minor characters names are furnished freely: Woodifield, Macey and Reggie. But the reasons for giving those are available—they can be derived although they, too, are excluded!

I furnish you this one hint: Katherine Mansfield, who died of tuberculosis at the age of 35, may be making the most profound religious statement of her brief life. She was a talented pianocellist. I put that in to remind you to bring your complete context to the interpretation of The Fly.

As literature, the short story falls between 2000 words and 10,000 words: below 2000 words it becomes, arbitrarily, a short, short story; above 10,000 words, prose fiction is a novelette in its short ranges and a novel in its larger sizes.

Petronius, who died in 66 AD, was Nero’s master of ceremonies and arbiter of elegance. He wrote and related The Widow of Ephesus for Nero’s entertainment. It is a classical short, short story, one of the first and still one of the best.

Leo Tolstoy has written a brief short story—probably just longer than the short shorts. Like Mansfield’s The Fly, it has a negative religious theme that is not so broad as the theme of The Fly. (I first read The Three Hermits as a young veteran of WWII

Enrolled in old San Francisco State College then located at Haight and Asbury—later the hippie capitol of the world.)

Our brand new professor taught Tolstoy’s story as a stinging rebuke of the bishop’s righteousness, a sin. When, sometime later, I taught it to my own graduate class, I denied the bishop’s sin of righteousness. I saw him as humble, contrite, sincerely devoted to his flock, accepting graciously the humiliation he had earned for having read the three old holy men incorrectly.

The Russian bishop going by ship from Archangel to a distant monastery is Tolstoy’s central character. .

Tolstoy agreed with the Church that the best prayer was the Lord’s Prayer. He did believe that sometimes a natural, specific prayer will work in a particular situation. His holy men prayed Three are ye; three are we. Have mercy upon us. So strong is their faith, that they, like Jesus, can walk on the surface of the sea. Tolstoy’s major aim in The Three Hermits was to convince the ecclesiastical hierarchy to humanize some of the practices of the Russian Orthodox Church

A general exclusion in Tolstoy’s story is the lack of characters names. That could be explained by saying the story was derived from a Russian myth, but that’s history of the story: to the story, but not of the story. No name for the bishop creates anonymity that can apply to any bishop or all bishops. Tolstoy’s greatest lesson pertains to the three holy men: their kind of natural piety can make any man, or all men, holy.

I said earlier that the sense of a story or, in fact, the sense of almost anything an individual experiences, depends on an amalgam of her/his personas, and all the contexts in which he/she has developed. The meaning of a story, or a poem—any creative effort—depends in part on the sense the reader brings to the reading. That’s inescapable. It insures only that reader’s meaning of the story or poem. The meanings I assigned to Tolstoy’s short story are in part generated by my being a Roman Catholic—Tolstoy’s church was Orthodox Eastern Church, derived from the religion which Constantine took to Byzantium. That’s one reason why my interpretations of Tolstoy and other literature are only, after all, my sense of them.

How does one in any level of education teach? It has always been teach students to think. Teach them to interpret; don’t teach the facts of some other interpretation. Teach them the process, not the product. When Tolstoy was old he began a small crusade to convince artists to create their art so that all readers could perceive the meaning. His crusade was a failure as it should have been. No one can legislate creative writing, painting, music—any art. No one can write well by recipe.

A contextualist, I bring no history to the reading of The Growing Season by Erskine Caldwell that will help me take more complete meaning from the story. It’s a strange story: The central character is Jesse English; he’s a Southern sharecropper with 12 acres of young cotton threatened by wire grass—as Jessie is threatened by life and heat stroke. His wire grass is Fiddler. We know what Fiddler isn’t: not a dog, not a mule, not a black. There are not enough ordinary inclusions and exclusions in the story for us to readily understand the Fiddler’s nature and significance. What Caldwell has included is, easily, the eeriest I’ve ever encountered, and he has included it with diabolic art. He makes us derive the inclusion: You think you know, and it is monstrous.

Jesse had chained Fiddler to the chinaberry tree in the yard. In a murderous miasma he frees Fiddler from the chain and, with his shotgun, herds Fiddler to the gully behind the barn. From above he shoots Fiddler twice and yells, Die, damn you! Die. Then he hacks the still thrashing Fiddler with an axe and Fiddler finally dies. Jesse sharpens his hoe and goes back to fight the wire grass.

What you think you know, Caldwell forces you to announce to yourself: Jesse English, in a fit of insanity induced by the sweltering heat and his overwhelming problems, has killed his real problem, his deformed, severely retarded child. That is the sense I take from—or give to the story. I make no guarantee. I would not be interested in hearing a better interpretation argued. I could not write the story. I can barely read it. I cry for Fiddler. I think Caldwell erred in his creative effort by requiring the reader to create without room or direction for creating. That is Caldwell’s mistake, not the reader’s.

When two persistent interviewers asked Caldwell if he would define Fiddler, his answer was Nope. It was his averment that meaning is a function of the story. That’s one of the two responses an author can make to requests for meaning. The other is to say what he was trying to do; that, too, is about the story, not of it. It is only the story itself that can give the reader it’s measure of meaning. This story fails, finally, to be adequate.

Jane, Jane

One spring, dad was spading his garden and I was playing Mother–real Mother–- with my dolls in the shade of the maple tree by the alley. He had stopped to wipe the sweat off his face and called me over where he stood with one foot on the spade. He was fishing in his pocket.

Go in and put on your shoes. He looked down at my feet and smiled. Better wash your feet first. He had two quarters in his hand and was looking at his handkerchief. Get a clean hankie out of my drawer and bring it to me.

When I got back with the handkerchief he put the coins in the hankie, twirled it around them and tied a knot over them. Wait on the front porch for Miss Jane and ask her if you can go downtown with her. Go to Blackman Hardware and buy 10ȼ worth of bean, radish, and tomato seeds. Speck will put each lot of seeds in a little envelope and seal it. You put it in the hankie like I did the coins and tie a knot over them. Can you remember that?

Sure.

What kind of seeds are you going to buy?

Beans, radish, and tomato. Will you watch out for my dollies?

Sure. Come and tell me when you see Miss Jane coming. Dad and I called her Miss Jane because I’m named Jane, too. You’ll have 20ȼ left over and you and Miss Jane can get cones at Greers. He folded the ends of the hankie in and put it in my right front jean pocket.

When Miss Jane and I came out of Blackmans I had the seeds in my front pocket. I had let Speck untie the coins and he had known how to tie the seeds up and tuck them into my front pocket. The pocket bulged and I felt bigger and older.

Dr. Ollave was walking across Reunion Street in front of Blackmans and being very careful for it was also Route 54. He saw Miss Jane and said, Well, here’s crazy Jane from Cedar Lane. He had lines that curved down in a lyre’s frame about his mouth. He made a half smile, deepened those lines, laid a hand on her shoulder, said Miss Jane, and shook her shoulder a little. She smiled, too, and dropped her hand on his hand. She knew which side of the line he stood on. No one else could have gotten away with saying that, doing that, but Dad said once that old Dr. Ollave had saved her life when she lost only her leg. I was only four or five at the time we went for seed but I knew there was something special in their relationship.

We had lived on Cedar Lane long enough for him to cure my ear infection. We came from somewhere and for some reason I can almost remember, but I am reluctant and won’t make the effort. I know a lot of women I liked always stopped to hug her and talk to her and their men would pat her shoulder or shake hands with her. Some days—mostly in spring or summer or fall, a family car would come down the lane, slow down. They’d honk and wave at Dad and me and we’d wave back.

I’d ask Dad where they were going; I knew only Miss Jane lived down there. He’d smile and say, That’s the Melers. They picked strawberries yesterday. They’re taking Miss Jane a shortcake for dinner today.

I got to where I could do it: Brud Boyd driving the taxi and his sister Midge sitting in the passenger seat holding a medium pot. Brud got a deer Monday and Midge made venison stroganoff to share with Miss Jane. Or they might take new potatoes and beans. If they had the family it might be watermelon in ice, or homemade ice cream with cake.

But some others might walk up the sidewalk and not even see her standing there talking to the doctor. I knew others called her Crazy Jane to the backs of their hands or out of her sight and hearing. Mother—when she was home—would come to the screen door in the summer time and just above a whisper she would say, Crazy Jane coming down the street. Dad and I were on the front porch. We always were unless he was hoeing in his kitchen garden, rescreening a window mother had thrown something through, or mending a tread on the back stair. But he liked to sit on the porch to rest and rock and rub the hand he’d almost lost at Ypres in the great war.

He hated mother’s saying Crazy Jane, but he laughed doubly at her report: we had already seen Miss Jane plant that unfeeling foot at the corner and circle her body to walk down the lane. The lane was his other laugh: mother had grown up in Chicago and any passageway on which houses made irregular lines, was a street. But the city had not yet cared to pave it, or light it, or bury water pipes in it. Considerate, though, they had cut down the cedars that had given it the name Cedar Lane.

One could still see the stumps losing their shine where they had been cut even with the surface of the parkway, and you could tell the cedars had been tall because the stumps were big. Then they had to put up a street sign, a manufactured one in green and white: Cedar Lane. Opposite Cedar Lane was Graham Cutoff and it had to have that same sort of green and white sign to show that it wasn’t also Cedar Lane. (Mother would laugh about that and say, They had to put up a Graham Cutoff sign so Crazy Jane would know which way to turn to go home.)

When Dr. Ollave saw me he said, Well, Miss Jane from Cedar Lane, too. He tweaked my ear carefully and kissed the top of my head. Do you think, he said, they should name your street Jane Lane?

That’d be silly, I said, and Miss Jane nodded. I said, I bought some garden seed. I patted my pocket. We’re going to Greers and I’m going to buy cones for me and Miss Jane.

Tell you what: Dr. Ollave said, I’ll buy cones for all three of us and we’ll sit in a booth and eat them, and I happen to know that Adam Jackson is going out that way when he gets his order of groceries. When we finish our cones we’ll go down to Hancocks and see if he’ll give you Miss Janes a ride to Cedar Lane.

I’d like to ride in a car, I said, and Miss Jane nodded. When Mr. Jackson came out he put his groceries in the trunk and folded the front passenger seat so I could clamber into the back. He was tall, slim, smiled a lot under his straw-hat.

You ride in the back seat, little Miss Jane and Miss Jane will ride in front so she won’t have so much trouble with that leg. Miss Jane knew immediately which side of the line Adam Jackson stood on and she smiled at him. She put her hindie on the seat, picked up the mean leg under the knee, swiveled, swung it in and followed with the good leg. Mr. Jackson stood at the car door watching. She smirked at him. He smiled, nodded, closed the door. Doesn’t give you much trouble at all, he said and went around the car to sit at the steering-wheel.

From the back seat I said, I know about Adam in the Bible.

That’s fine, he said, but what do you know about Adam Jackson.

Five things, I said.

His eyes darted to the rearview mirror and he looked at me, finally smiled. OK, Little Jane, what are they?

You live alone in the white house above Little Saline, and have a dog named Karl.

Karl’s a German shepherd and a good watch dog. And what’s the fifth thing?

Dad says you’re a good man. Miss Jane nodded. Mr. Jackson reddened below his hat. He stopped where Bynum Road came out of Joiner Cemetery and waited for Brud Boyd’s taxi to turn to go downtown. He waved at Brud through the window and Brud waved back. I knew mother had come down to our house.

Thank you, Little Jane, and thank you, Miss Jane. They touched hands. The car climbed the hill toward Cedar Lane. I would not be neighborly, Mr. Jackson said, if I did not let you out at your doorstep—as Dr. Ollave prescribed. He turned left down Cedar Lane. You, Little Jane, live in the house my Grandfather built a long time ago before the city came this far. It was he who set out the cedar trees that gave the lane its name. Fifty, I think, on one side of the road. He tried to talk Elbert Appel into planting fifty on the other side, but Mr. Appel had an orchard from Bynum Road to the railroad cut. He claimed the cedars hosted a bacteria or moth that would damage the apple crop. I expect he was right. He built a small house back from the railroad and his foreman’s family lived there. He also built an apple shed where the apples were sorted and packed. Miss Jane’s father bought the house from the Appel heirs after the orchard was long gone. He passed our house and went on down Cedar Lane. We’ll deliver Miss Jane home, and I’ll drop you off when we come back up Cedar Lane. I want to say howdy to your dad.

I didn’t know any of that, Mr. Jackson, I said.

I didn’t know most of it, said Miss Jane and I thank you for telling us. It was very interesting.

We always called this place the Old Jackson place, and my father said the younger smart-alecks called Miss Jane’s house the Appel Apple house. Well, here we are, Miss Jane, at the Appel Apple house.

Miss Jane laughed—maybe the first time I had heard her laugh. I guess, she said, that means two apples a day.

Mr. Jackson laughed and went around the car to open her door.

It only took one for the Adam in the Bible, I said, and both of them laughed again. He walked her to her door and waited till she had unlocked it. She went in and he came back to the car.

You might just as well sit up here with the driver. And it was grand, though I did stand up part of the time to see better.

Mother was home.

Mr. Jackson and I went around back and dad was just finishing up. He had busted the clods, raked the soil, had stretched seagrass lines from end to end, marking rows, and had dug the trenches for the seeds. He looked up when we came around the corner. He laid the hoe down carefully and cut across to intercept us.

Adam Jackson! he said, extending his hand to Mr. Jackson.

Dr. Ollave instructed me to drop Little Jane off at your dooryard. We just took Miss Jane home, and I wanted to see if you were keeping the old Jackson homeplace in good repair. I see you haven’t forgotten how to make a garden.

That’s right: this was your homeplace.

And, said Mr. Jackson, you know: I was happier here than anywhere else I’ve been.

Dad nodded. Well, we both know that the younger you are the easier it is to make your life happier.

Mr. Jackson had picked up a big clod of dark soil and was breaking it into friendly crumbs in the trench planned for the tomatoes. He looked at dad and scowled. No-h! he yelled, and threw the clod against the tool shed. He scared me. No, he said again. You’re forgetting some kids suffer bad. You’re forgetting- -you’re forgetting her. You’re forgetting him- -and me–I killed him! I killed him. He dropped his head, crying. I wanted to cry but I didn’t.

You saved her life, dad said. They were both crying. Oh, God, yes, dad said. They reached for each other and stood there crying together. I walked around to the front porch and sat in dad’s chair. I never knew what he was talking about.

We didn’t see Mr. Jackson again for a week. We saw Miss Jane nearly every day as April slipped into May. She’d come swinging that bad leg, it creaking, the good leg hurrying to spell it, coming up the little rise below our house, coming through the heat and the dust of the forenoon. And she would swing back down the lane in the early afternoon sun when even the dust was tired. She’d stop in the shade of our east porch, and dad would have me fetch her a glass of cool water from the milk bottle tied just off the bottom of our well. She’d back up to the porch floor and sit as far on it as she could, cock the good leg at the porch edge, lift the bad leg and push with the good leg. She’d let the bad leg drag, raise herself on her flat palms and swing her hindie back. Finally, she would reach the wall and lean body and head against the corduroy clapboard, her eyes closed, her mouth still clamped. That sounds vulgar and ugly, but she was pretty, sweet and young—about 27. Everything she did had a certain grace. Dad would watch her back across that porch floor, his jaws clamped. I think he held his breath because he always took a deep breath when she reached the wall and she would look up and smile. She knew on what side of the line he stood. She told dad that. I didn’t know that, too.

I had a silly-girl notion that their relationship went from her lost leg through his hand that was almost destroyed in France. I would lie on my belly up the porch from Miss Jane, my chin in my hands. If they had something to talk about, they talked. If they didn’t, he rocked, and she’d watch the rare clouds or dust devils or the heat waves or the hot, dry grasshoppers in the dusty grass.

I think mother was no fool. If Crazy Jane had been communing on the porch for thirty minutes, mother would come out and stand by dad’s rocker until he got up and let her sit, finding himself a seat at the edge of the porch. Invariably, within a few minutes, Crazy Jane would push along the floor to the edge, let that bad leg drop over, thrust herself into upright balance and creak on down the lane. Dad would sit there watching her splat the dust with her inflexible foot, and mother would make a slight sound like a soap bubble bursting, standing straight and tall and lovely and twist her way back into the house. (I used to imitate her and dad would just laugh and say, You have the notion but not the motion.)

She was never my real mother. I barely remember when she came down with a new purse from Chicago. She left it lying on my bed and I spilled it on my bed and marched with the strap on my shoulder. She grabbed it and me. She was going to whip me. Dad said No! You may have been Mom’s sister, but Jane was her angel. You don’t qualify. She sneered.

A week after Mr. Jackson had brought us home, Miss Jane came to our porch in the early morning. The day was not yet hot, the greedy hawthorns were blooming, the dust was just drying from the dew off the grass, and the sound of the cicadas was early and loud, wild and intoxicating on the winey morning air. Miss Jane stopped on her way to town, just swung up unexpectedly into the yard and propped herself against the porch, not bothering to sit, just leaning against a porch post, her pretty eyes half closed, not saying anything, silently asking for defense or solution in that overpowering May madness. Dad sat there, leaning forward, Miss Jane leaning back, none of us saying anything, just listening, senses innocently opened to the subtle persuasions of the morning boisterous with being and coming alive: I shivered but I was not cold.

Mother flung the screen door open and slammed it shut. The months of Spring distempered her. She hated the interminable sound of the cicadas. She despised people who did not look at her.

Well, she said, her voice strained, brittle, serrated, three crazy Janes. Our attending this miracle of May was ruptured, and yet none of us answered her. That angered her, too. (I believe mother was irritated by all life save hers.) You were all whelped by the same whoresome bitch. Dominating, disdainful, cruel, mother had never been vulgar before. She went back in, managing to slam the door she jerked shut. Dad and I watched the door spring through the screen; it still vibrated, complained, singing its tiny plaintive song well under the overtune of spring sounds.

Miss Jane seemed to have never been aware of mother’s coming out onto the porch. Hadn’t heard mother’s indictment and judgment, didn’t know she had left the porch. But she heard the song of the door spring, and it was to her the shot of the racer’s start. Her wide, pretty eyes found dad and she stood lithely erect, shrugged her whole body into that May morning, going soundless but going back home quick.

Dad and I turned and watched her hurry. The screen door spring had quieted its song. Her going seemed a cancellation of May. Or the first part of a recipe for using it.

Save for the shock and the hurt, dad’s eyes were those of a baby waking into another day of awareness and knowing. When the great winds of love and hate rise, he said, even the stars may be blown about the sky. He looked to the sky, ignored the steps, took the porch post in his good hand and swung down into the drying grass. I don’t know, he said to himself. I don’t know. Neither what nor how.

I didn’t say it, but I didn’t know either.

He didn’t look back to the screen door. Or even to where I stood on the porch. The cicadas still sang their eccentric symphony; there was still the taste of rosé in the air, and a feeling of genies out of bottles. He didn’t lower his head to try to wedge through whatever aura prevailed that May morning: he was more a part of it than in it. And he went in the same direction Miss Jane had gone but with more haste.

I sat in his rocker to think about it and to wait for him to come back and explain, but he had not come back by noon and mother had not come from her bedroom. I felt a need for food and went to the kitchen. There was a biscuit left from breakfast and in dad’s pantry drawer I found a white onion smaller than my fist. I peeled it, washed it, sliced it thinly, and fried it in margarine on dad’s coal oil stove. I sliced the biscuit three times and heaped the onions on each bite. It was richly delicious.

Mother came out of the bedroom when she smelled the onions cooking. Ugh, she said at my eating the heaps of onion. Later I will make some soup and you may have that for supper.

That will be nice, I said but I doubted it would be so delicious as my onions.

Your father has not come back? she asked.

I said no. Where did he go? I shrugged and shook my head: I don’t know where he went but he started down the lane.

I have a good idea, she said and went back into the bedroom. Later she came out of the bedroom, rummaged through the kitchen and made a kind of soup with carrots and potatoes, green onions, and mushrooms Dad had gathered. It wasn’t as good as my onions fried in margarine but it was company in my belly. Actually it was good and I was hungry. She washed the few dishes and glasses and went back into the bedroom.

After a while, with no one to light the lamps, I washed my feet, and put on pajamas. I took the bedspread off and turned back the covers and pulled the sheet up over me. I went to sleep and woke when someone came up on the porch. I could tell it was dad. He sat in the rocker on the porch in the moonlight, and even with the katydids joining the cicadas, I could hear the rockers scything on the porch floor. I knew mother had hooked the screen door hook.

I got up, unhooked the screen door, went out on the porch. Dad held out his hands and I went and curled up on his lap. Where have you been? I said.

I went to say goodbye to Miss Jane.

It took this long to say goodbye?

Adult goodbyes to someone as important as Miss Jane are always complex. And then I walked over to Adam Jackson’s.

What for?

Miss Jane wanted me to tell him that she said ‘Yes.’

’Yes?’

Yes. Earlier he had asked her to marry him and she had wanted to think it over. She’s a good woman. He’s a good man. They’ll be a good married couple.

Yes. They will be good to each other.

He hugged me. You’re a wise little beggar.

One time I thought about asking her to marry us, I said.

He hugged me again. That would have been nice for us, too, but we have to think of Miss Jane, and I thought that the answer to all of her questions was Adam Jackson, and she deserves right answers. Doc Ollave and I had talked about it earlier—he’s the one who saved her life and sanity after she lost that leg.

You’re a good daddy. I said. You’ll have to wait and marry me.

Daddies can’t marry related daughters. They have to love them, care for them, help them, and pray for them. Let’s put you back in bed. He carried me in, kissed my cheek, put me to bed, pulled the sheet up to my arms. Mother came from the bedroom.

I want you, she said to him, her voice husky in the loud, moon-lessened darkness, but strong and tinged with bitterness.

No, he said, his voice a match for hers but neutral and cold. You are not the right Katherine. That confused me; I thought her name was Genievive.

I’m not crazy Jane.

No, you’re not.

I was right on the porch.

Who’s to say?

Early the next morning, at first light, Brud Boyd drove into our front yard, waking dad asleep in the rocker. Mother dragged her suitcase onto the porch. Brud said Good morning, to dad. Mother got in the cab and caught the first train to Chicago.

I never saw her again.

Before Miss Jane and Mr. Jackson got married, she came again to our porch. Sliding her hand up the step rail, she climbed to the porch: good foot up,