On a visit to
Inkwood Books in Tampa Florida, the proprietor recommended a novel she thought
I would like – based on my stack of purchases awaiting payment. She correctly introduced me to Miss Jane by Brad Watson. The novel has no conmen, no evildoers, but
only farmers and sharecroppers desperately working the land to scrape out an
existence for their families. True, they
do have some individuals who drink a little too much, but they care for their
families and their children. The story
will warm your heart and make you want to bundle up for cold weather right
alongside the Chisolms.
Brad Watson teaches
at the University of Wyoming, Laramie.
He has written two collections of stories and a novel, Heaven of Mercury, which was a finalist
for the 2002 National Book Award. His
short stories have been published widely.
Miss Jane tells the story of
the Chisolm Family – Ida, his wife, Grace the eldest daughter, and Jane. A male baby had died soon after
childbirth. Jane was born with a
complicated birth defect. Back in 1915,
nothing could be done for the unfortunate child. Today, her condition could be easily fixed by
surgery. Watson describes the little
girl, “She had been a spritely young girl, slim and a bit lank-haired but with
a sweet face and good humor, but by now had grown taller and begun to take on a
gaunt, dark-eyed beauty, and moved with a kind of natural grace, as a leak will
fall gracefully from a tree in barely a breeze” (173). Dr. Thompson admired the Chisolms for their work-ethic
and, after delivering Jane, he stayed in close touch in hopes of some sort of
surgical miracle to correct her condition.
The lovely prose in
this novel reminded me of Cold Mountain by
Charles Frazier. Watson writes, “Leaving
the child’s care to her older daughter had made it a little easier for Ida
Chisolm to avoid her dark thoughts, though not entirely. When she had a little break, she sat on the
front porch, dipped a bit of snuff – which she knew was smallish sinful but did
it anyway, a soul was corrupt at birth and adding a little vice wouldn’t change
the equation much – and spat into the bare dirt of the yard doing the best she
could to empty her clamorous mind. Crows
banked about the grove of the pine and hardwood by the cow pond and flew back
up on fluff-cranked winds into the pecans near the barn, settling in their
gnarly limbs like black fluttering shadows into the foliage of clouded thoughts
she could not and did not bother to plumb.
Late fall blackbirds swept in waves to the oaks at the yard’s edge, and
their deafening, squawking, creaking calls, the cacophonous tuning of a mad
avian symphony, drew the grief-born anger from her heart, into the air, and
swept it away in long, almost soothing moments of something like peace. The occasional fluid mumuration of migrating
starlings, a wondrous sight when she was a child, could evoke in her all over
again in a strange sense of foreboding” (51-52). The story continues all the way to the
disappearance of Grace, the death of Sylvester, Ida, and finally the last days
of Jane Chisolm.
Some might view this
last sentence as a “spoiler,” but this is one of those rare books, seeps into
the mind of the reader, spreads warmth and sorrow, and ends on a satisfying
note. Do not let that stop anyone from reading
this novel. There are few things I enjoy
more than a great independent bookstore and a proprietor who can read her
customers. A trip to Florida is in my
future, and after reading Miss Jane
by Brad Watson, I will surely seek out Inkwood Books. 5 Stars.
--Chiron, 5/15/17
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