Through a Glass, Darkly

by Charlotte Miller

  On the last night of the two weeks, Janson sat on an overturned dye-can on the loading dock just outside the large doors that led into the opening room of the mill. He had chosen this place to take his brief, middle-of-the-night break to eat once he had his job caught up enough to take the time. The air was almost unbearably cold, chilling him through his worn coat and the legs of his overalls as he sat eating, but he would not go back inside until he had to. The open sky was far preferable over the noise and cotton dust within the confines of the card room, or even the stuffy atmosphere of the lunch room where he knew he could have gone to eat.

  The sausage sandwich he ate, on thick slices of home-baked bread, was long ago cold, but he was so hungry that it did not matter. It was good to be hungry, good to be working, sweating and earning a wage, even if it was over machinery and not behind a plow or dragging a pick sack. He missed the sky, the sun and earth as he worked. It seemed so odd to look up during his shift to see the dark ceiling overhead, beyond the glaring electric lights that lighted the card room, so odd to have the noise of the machinery in his ears, a noise that stayed in his head even when he was far away from this place.

  Janson bit into the cold, fried apple pie that was the last of his meal, listening to the sound of a train whistle as boxcars and a caboose moved down the nearby tracks and at last left his sight, then his eyes moved back to the darkness of the village. There was no light showing anywhere that he could see, except for the mill itself. A light burning at some unusual hour would bring a neighbor or even someone from the mill to investigate, to make certain there was no sickness or trouble, and, as Janson had already learned, most of the people who lived on these peaceful streets preferred not to bring attention to themselves.

  By the next night Elise would be sleeping in one of these dark houses. It would be good to have her so close, to know he would be able to return to her once the shift was over, without the long wagon ride to get through, to be able to touch and love her and glory in the daily changes in her body that the baby was causing, without the worry that Gran’ma or Gran’pa or someone else would hear them. There might be neighbors on the other side of the house, but it would be more privacy than they had known under his grandparents’ roof.

  Janson closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall, thinking of having Elise all to himself at last, thinking of her hair, and the feel of her skin, the newly gentle rounding of her belly against him, and the knowledge that his child was inside of her. He could see her so clearly in his mind, more lovely now than when he had first met her—less than a year ago, and both of their lives changed so completely since then. It still amazed him that she was his wife, as he guessed it would amaze him to the day he died.

  There was a sound from the doorway, and he opened his eyes and turned in time to see the dark form of a man starting back into the mill. For one brief moment Janson saw the man’s face, and what he saw there in that instant was more anguish than he had ever thought to see in any man.

  “Nathan, what’s wrong?” he asked, recognizing the man as the night janitor of the mill, Nathan Betts, whom he had seen in passing over the last two weeks.

  Nathan stopped, but did not turn back. It was a long time before he spoke, and, when he did, there was a choked sound in his voice. “We—” he stopped for a moment again, his eyes set on a place somewhere in the distance as he took a deep breath before he seemed able to continue, “we buried my wife this mornin’.”

  Buried—the word sat on Janson for a moment. He had no idea what to say. He rose from where he had been sitting on the dye-can and went to stand beside the older man, watching as Nathan pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his trousers to wipe at his wet eyes.

  “What happened?” Janson asked at last.

  “She had a boy, th’ boy we’d been hopin’ for after our two girls—but, after, th’ bleedin’ wouldn’t stop. It hadn’t been like that before, with th’ girls, an’ th’ granny woman, no matter what she did, she couldn’t make it stop. She sent me for th’ doctor, but it was too late—”

  Tears started down his cheeks again, tears he did not try to wipe away, as he looked at a memory that Janson knew he could not help but to unfold.

  “She bled to death before we could get back. Th’ granny woman had her covered over with th’ sheet.” His words trailed off as he stood in silence and cried, the tears rolling from his cheeks now and dripping onto hands that Janson could see were shaking.

  “You don’t need t’ be here t’night, Nathan—”

  But the older man shook his head, anger mixing in his voice with the grief. “I asked Mr. Walt for a few more days, t’ give me time t’ find somebody t’ keep my girls an’ th’ baby while I’m workin’, time t’ just take care ’a things, an’ t’ give th’ girls time t’ realize their mama’s with Jesus now and that she ain’t comin’ back—they’re both s’ little, they can’t understand—”

  “You need time, too. You lost your wife—”

  Nathan wiped at his eyes again with the handkerchief, and then a look of forced and bitter determination came over his face as he folded the square of material and shoved it back into his pocket. “Mr. Walt told me that he’d done give me two days, that she was buried now, an’ that there wasn’t nothin’ I could do t’ bring her back. He told me I had a job t’ do, children t’ support, an’ that I’d better start thinkin’ about them an’ not about me—as if even once since th’ day th’ first was born I ever thought of me over them, as if even once—” The bitterness seemed to fill him for a moment to the point there was no room for anything else. “I can’t afford t’ lose my job, even if it means leavin’ my children with th’ neighbor woman every night, an’ her s’ old she can’t hardly walk, hearin’ my youngest girl screamin’ as I leave because she’s afraid I ain’t gonna be able t’ come back since her mama can’t ever again—” Tears started from the edges of his eyes again, but he did not seem to notice. “Sometimes you got t’ find strength in you t’ do things you never thought you’d have t’ do.”

  Janson stared at him. “If there’s anythin’ me or my wife can do t’ help, you let me know.”

  Nathan brought his eyes to him and looked at him for a moment. “You really mean that, don’t you?” he asked. “Most white men wouldn’t make a offer like that t’ a colored man, no matter what’s happened in his family.”

  “My pa was white an’ my ma Cherokee,” Janson said. “We’re all one color or another—besides, it’s what’s inside a man that makes him what he is.”

  Nathan nodded. After a time he turned and started back into the mill. Janson watched him go, realizing in that moment that he had felt a degree of kinship with this man that he had felt toward few other people—Nathan Betts was here in the mill tonight not for himself, but for the sake of the family he had made with the wife he had buried today. He was here, not for himself, but for those he was responsible for. That was something Janson could respect far beyond the power or money of someone like Walt or Walter Eason.

  He looked out over the darkened mill village one last time, then turned and went back into the mill, knowing that work waited for him.

  Within days of moving into the mill village, Elise hated the sight of the huge, red-brick mill with its white-painted office out front and its tall chimneys billowing smoke throughout the village. She hated the flying lint that floated in the air for streets away, that stuck to her hair and clothing. But most of all she hated the sound of the machinery. No matter where she went, it was always there, keeping her awake at night as she lay alone in her bed, grating at her nerves in the daytime as Janson slept alone in the front room of their house, following her from morning to night and to morning again.

  She longed for quiet and peace during those first weeks in the village, longed for someone to talk to, for books to read, for something to occupy her time as the minutes of each day dragged by. She found herself wishing for her mother, e
ven for the constant harping of Janson’s grandmother—someone, anyone, to help her fill the hours of her days.

  Most of all, she wanted Janson, but he seemed more distant from her than at any time since she had known him. He seemed driven to work, driven to earn, to prove something to her that did not need proving, accepting the shortened Saturday shift any time it was offered to him, sleeping through the days, waking only to hold her for a while, eat, dress, and return to that god-awful place that dominated life in the village—he hated the mill and the village even more than she did, and she knew it, though he never said a word. She knew he was working in a place he had never thought he would find himself because of her, and because of the baby.

  He returned from his shift in the card room each morning, tired and hungry, covered with lint and cotton dust, and weary to his soul. He would eat whatever she had prepared for him, then fall into an exhausted sleep, no matter the hour. For the first week she tried to rearrange her sleeping so that she could lie beside him, but found that she could not sleep, no matter how tired she could make herself, so long as it was light outside. The only time she lay with him was for loving, and to watch him sleep afterward, before rising to try to find something she could do.

  She tended their three rooms, doing housework for the first time in her life, housework she quickly decided she hated, in a house filled with mismatched furniture that had once belonged to his parents or that was borrowed from his relatives or given to them outright. She was determined to prove to herself, and to Janson, and to his grandmother as well, that she could be a good wife—the old woman had told her she was too spoiled to ever keep a decent house, which had made her all the more determined, and, it seemed, all the more doomed to failure. Each pan of burned biscuits now reduced her to tears; each meal that Janson did not compliment seemed inedible; each cobweb in a corner or hole in a sock seemed a slap in the face, until she sometimes thought she swung from crying jags to bouts of homesickness with nothing in between.

  She could hear the neighbors’ voices in the other half of the house during the days, the many Breedloves as they came and went, hearing the children’s voices, even the parents arguing. She could smell their meals cooking, and hear their lives going on right here under the same roof as hers, and that made her feel all the worse. She could feel her body changing, the baby growing inside of her, and it had her mind in a turmoil. She was no longer the girl she had been, yet she was not sure who she was supposed to be. Life in the village was so different—and it was boring, so unendingly boring.

  She wrote long letters to her mother and to her brother, Stan, and received long letters in return. Her mother’s writings were falsely cheerful, prattling on about people she knew, gossiping about neighbors, and showing a genuine excitement over the grandchild that Martha Whitley had to know she would likely never see. Stan’s letters were much more honest, and his honesty tore right through Elise’s heart—her name could no longer be spoken in her father’s house. Her room had been dismantled, her things either burned or given away to the colored families who lived at the edge of town. The people she had grown up with had been told that her father had thrown her out, that she was an ungrateful daughter who was at last getting what she rightly deserved. No mention was to be made of her, or of the “damned half-breed” she had married, and, when her mother at last told her father that she was pregnant, he said that he hoped that neither she nor her baby survived the birth.

  She was dead to him, and he wanted every part of her dead as well, and, as Elise went through the days, she began to feel that a part of her really was dying, the part of her that had been Elise Whitley, the part that had been young and carefree and so excited just to be a young woman of the twenties. She could remember being that girl; she could remember being excited over new dresses and shades of lipstick, of wanting to be bold and daring and a bit shocking—but she wasn’t that girl anymore, and she knew she never would be again. She was Janson’s wife, and, though her entire world had changed because of him, she still wanted nothing else so much as to be his wife—she just wanted time with him, and something to do with the hours when they were apart. She just wanted to know who she was now, and to figure out her place in this new world. She had always had friends in Endicott County, people very much like herself, and she realized that she had defined who she was through those friends—but she had no friends here except for Janson himself.

  She began to attend the Baptist church in the village, going alone, for Janson usually slept on Sunday mornings. She quickly became part of the choir, and was delighted when people made a fuss over her and told her how well she sang, until she realized she was valued primarily for her ability to drown out one of the other choir members, Helene Price, who sang loudly and usually quite off key, and who seemed to think that she could run the choir and the church and many of the other church members. Elise decided that she detested Helene, and it did not take long to realize that at least one other of the choir members felt much the same.

  “Thinks she’s somethin’, don’t she?” she heard someone say as she was putting on her coat after choir practice on a Wednesday evening late that February. She turned to find Dorrie Keith just behind her, the heavy-set woman taking up her own coat from where it had lain across the back of a pew. Dorrie was the only person Elise had met who was outspoken enough to tell Helene Price when she was flat or in the wrong key.

  Elise followed her gaze, and found Helene standing near the front of the church talking to the preacher, Reverend Satterwhite.

  “Thinks she’s so high-and-mighty,” Dorrie was saying, bringing Elise’s eyes back to her. “I remember when she was just Helen, growin’ up at the edge of town. Her family was about th’ poorest I know of, ’cause my mama used t’ feed them young’ns more than their own folks ever fed them—then she married Bert Price, and him th’ boss of th’ supply room, and she was suddenly Helene, all high and mighty, but she ain’t nothin’ but Helen, no matter what she thinks of herself.”

  Elise found that she liked Dorrie Keith as heartily as she detested Helene, and was surprised when she learned the two were distant cousins.

  “She just about lived at our house growin’ up,” Dorrie told Elise one day, “though t’ hear her talk now you’d ’a thought we were her poor relations—tried t’ give me a old wore-out dress of hers not too long ago, as if I’d have some old rag she’d wore—”

  Dorrie lived with her husband, Clarence, and their four sons only a few streets away from Elise and Janson in the mill village, and Elise began walking to church on Sunday mornings and afternoons and Wednesday evenings by way of Dorrie’s house.

  It was nice to finally have a friend in the mill village, even if that friend was old enough to be Elise’s own mother, nice to have another woman to talk to about being pregnant, and about what having a baby would be like.

  Elise sat in Dorrie’s kitchen late on a Thursday afternoon in March. Janson had left for his shift in the card room at the mill and would not be home until early the next morning, and Elise had been looking for company when she had walked the few streets to Dorrie’s house. Dorrie had just gotten in from the shift she worked in the spinning room, and was beginning supper for her family, but she had been uncharacteristically silent almost from the moment she had met Elise at the door. Dorrie was peeling potatoes for supper, her eyes going to the door repeatedly, until Elise at last asked her what was wrong.

  “They sent for Clarence just as soon as we got in from our shift, told him t’ bring Wheeler James t’ th’ mill office,” Dorrie said, meeting Elise’s eyes from where she sat just opposite Elise at the old table then looking away again. “Men—” she said, the word coming out almost as if it were a curse. She peeled viciously at a potato, taking away chunks of white with the peelings, “they think we got nothin’ t’ say when they go t’ talk somethin’ important. Women’re there t’ birth ’em, an’ bury ’em, an’ in between we get t’ clean their bottoms an’ b
andage their heads an’ put ’em t’ bed if they’ve had a drunk—they sent for Wheeler James an’ for Clarence with no mention ’a me, as if I ain’t been in th’ mill every bit as long as Clarence, as if I ain’t Wheeler James’s mama, as if I ain’t got nothin’ t’ say, or even th’ right t’ know—”

  “Why would they want to see Wheeler James at the mill office?” Elise asked. Wheeler James was Dorrie’s oldest son, only a couple of months younger than Elise herself, very tall and thin, with a quiet manner that did little to show the brilliant mind that Elise had found behind his brown eyes and shy smile. He seemed to know something about almost any subject she could bring up, and could do mathematics in his head that she could never hope to do with pencil and paper and unlimited time.

  “Mr. Eason offered him a night shift in th’ twister room at th’ mill, soon as school’s out this year,” Dorrie said, an odd tone in her voice.

  “A night shift—for the summer?”

  “No, permanent.” Dorrie’s eyes moved back toward the door, and Elise realized she was waiting for her husband and son to return from the mill office.

  “But, there’s no way he can work all night and go to school the next day.”

  “I know that.”

  “But, he shouldn’t quit school; there’s so much he could do with his life. He—”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Dorrie asked, anger coming to her brown eyes and into her voice as she turned to look at Elise once again. “Don’t you think I know how smart he is? Don’t you think I know that he’s got in him t’ be anythin’ he wants t’ be—I’ve knowed it since he was talkin’ in complete sentences at two, and readin’ books when he was only four. I’ve watched him grow up, thinkin’ every day, dreamin’ every day, about him finishin’ school, not just the village school here, but goin’ on beyond it, maybe even college—”