Excerpt from Miss Jane by Brad Watson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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.

Purgatories
B

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.

Excerpted from MISS JANE: A Novel by Brad Watson. Copyright © 2016 by Brad Watson. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.