Chapter 3 Jane
Jane
Everyone loves a good girl. Especially a poor one, stuck in her station in life, who knows her lowly place yet manages to plaster on a smile.
Here’s an underdog they can all root for, but not be threatened by.
She will never have what they have; the cards are stacked against her, so: Bless her heart.
But look at how she smiles, curtsies, all gratitude and light, repeating her father’s down-home parables about honesty and self-worth.
I don’t mind being that girl. Been her my whole life. Teeth bared, yet lips curved into a grin. A warm sensation spreads across my chest when I first meet someone, win them over. It’s so easy.
Too easy, in this one-pony town.
Here, they are hungry for someone like me. Ready to feed off me in order to feel better about themselves.
Had a nice chat with that Jane girl today; she sure is sweet!
She doesn’t have a stitch of new clothing, but it doesn’t seem to bother her, poor thing!
Wonder if we should bring her family a meal? Add them to the church meal chain?
“I have a good feeling about this place, Sunshine,” Pa said to me the night we first arrived.
And I do, too. Honestly, despite my complaints.
As soon as I stepped from the truck, the tangy night air suckled my skin. In the deep pines, it’s way more humid than in Dallas, and the heat—coupled with the wild honeysuckle strangling our fence, stamping the air with its reckless scent—felt embryonic.
I circled the path around the pond, the grass high and dewy, licking my calves, and gazed up at the belt of stars pulsing in the sky.
I hadn’t glimpsed a single star in Dallas.
Then there was the impromptu swim in the pond with Pa that first night after we got the horses settled. The water felt as warm as the stack of pennies baking in the ashtray of our truck.
I hated Dallas. Hated the big city and the fact that we had to let go of most of our livestock. Hated the filthy air and the bland strip malls.
Hated it all except for Luke.
Just thinking of him now sends shivers over me. I miss him so much.
Even though Dallas wasn’t for me, that’s where he is, and I was torn up—still am—over our sudden departure.
But it couldn’t be helped.
“We gotta get back to the land. To what we know,” Pa told our neighbor, an elderly gentleman named Mr. Baxter, who was always in his front yard tinkering with a vehicle sitting on cinder blocks.
“Sure gonna miss y’all,” Mr. Baxter said, then packed a wedge of Skoal in his gums.
I won’t miss seeing that, I thought, but just grinned back.
What we know is homesteading. Our rowdy pigs. Chickens. Farm-fresh eggs so natural, the yolks are the color of tangerines. Not the store-bought, watery mass-produced stuff.
Mom’s little wooden shed filled with her drying herbs. Her oils.
The land. Our luscious gardens with tomatoes so heavy, the vines threaten to snap.
Pa’s woodworking shop.
The land is in my blood. It’s who I am.
I’ll never get sick of an open night sky, so pitch-black that it looks like I’m gazing into a bottomless well. I’ll never get sick of riding Cookie, my thoroughbred, legs clamped around her strong back as she ferries me through the pasture.
But now that I’m seventeen, I am getting tired of some aspects of country living. Of being poor. Wearing handsewn rags, for one, and Mom’s hippie-dippie projects. When I was little, dyeing my own clothes and canning fruit was fun. Now it’s just humiliating.
Pa tells me we won’t always have to live like this. That he’s saving.
But peering down at Mom just now from the loft (she can’t tell I’m looking at her) as she hums to herself, stirring a pot of figs to make jelly with, I think she likes living this way. Likes all this wholesome bullshit.
She circles the kitchen table, then folds her arms around Pa, who’s sitting in his chair, whittling a new pipe from a pine log, curls of blond bark spilling onto the packed-dirt floor.
This all is enough for her.
One of the cross-stitches she made when I was a baby hangs above the stove in the kitchen:
A truly good wife is the most precious treasure a man can find!
She is good to him every day of her life, and with her own hands she gladly makes clothes.
She is like a sailing ship that brings food from across the sea.
Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
—Proverbs 31: 10–31
She and Pa trade Bible verses all the time, sing hymnals back and forth. The family Bible stays parked on our kitchen table, Pa’s ancestors’ names jotted in the front pages with jarringly short life spans.
Every Sunday night, Julia, little Molly, and I are all expected around the campfire for Vespers, to listen to Pa strum on his guitar and belt out gospel songs for us to sing.
But I narrow my eyes while looking down at Mom’s plain face: hair tied back with a bandanna, sweat beading on her upper lip, skin free of makeup, clothes smelling of apple cider; it all makes me seethe.
I don’t want to be anything like her when I’m older.
Pacing in a kitchen to please some man. Pretending to love constant manual labor.
Not that Pa is just some man. He’s my everything.
But not in that gross way you’re thinking; I don’t have some messed-up Electra complex.
It’s just that Mom and I, we’ve never seen eye to eye.
She doesn’t like me. It’s Pa who has the easy grin for me, the spare quarter he slips me when she’s not looking.
Julia’s always been her favorite, and now baby Molly is her entire world. I’m the middle child, overlooked, even scorned by her.
I have my own mind, and she knows it, can’t stand it.
And I don’t care how many shirts she sews, how much bread she bakes and homemade butter she churns, she’s not enough to keep a man like Pa interested.