Through a Glass, Darkly

by Charlotte Miller

  Within two weeks of Cassandra’s talk with her mother, the rumors had reached the ears of Irene Cauthen, Tim’s mother, and Tim was forbidden to walk Sissy home, or sit with her in church or during lunch at school—and, for the first time in his life, Tim Cauthen openly defied his parents. Sissy was sweet and good, he told his father, in an absolute rage after his father gave him “the talk” and asked what all had gone on between them. He would not change even one thing he was doing—if anyone told lies on him, they would be as untrue as the lies told on Sissy, he said, slamming the door as he left the house, leaving his father enraged and his mother wringing her hands in the kitchen behind him.

  Within a month the rumors had passed through the school. By the time they reached Cassandra’s ears again, they had grown and enlarged to such a point that she was not only surprised, but inordinately pleased with herself—Sissy Sanders was going to have a baby, the rumors now said, and she had no idea who the father was.

  No more than a week later the gossip reached the ears of the principal of the village school, Mrs. Cunningham, a tall, imposing woman with a mass of iron-gray hair and posture so perfect it appeared she could never bend—she could not have a girl who was in the family way in the village school. It was bad enough that there was no incentive for the children of the mill workers to learn, for nothing was expected of them other than what the Easons would need in the mill—an ability to read and write, to run a column of figures, to operate the cards or drawing frames or other machinery, the ability to follow orders and not to stir up trouble—nothing more and nothing less. She could not have a girl who was in a delicate condition attending the school, and even the thought of that influence on the other girls was almost more than Mrs. Cunningham could bear—something would have to be done, and done immediately, she told herself as she left her office in search of Sissy Sanders. Yes, something would have to be done immediately.

  Elise was sitting on her front porch that afternoon, tatting lace for the collar of the new dress she was making for herself while she watched Henry playing on the porch floor at her feet. She would have to go into the house soon to feed him and get him down for his nap, but her mind was occupied for the moment with the lace that was taking longer to make than she thought it should. She had hoped to have the dress finished before Janson got home that afternoon.

  The mill had changed from two twelve-hour to three eight-hour shifts late last year. The new schedule allowed additional time Janson could spend with Elise and Henry, and had given him doubles at times, even triples, which meant additional money toward buying his land back one day. He would have to eat and get some rest this afternoon, for he would have another shift starting only eight hours after the double ended, but there might be a little time they could spend together.

  She heard Henry laugh at her feet, and she looked down at him to find him bouncing excitedly as he stared toward the dirt street. Elise lifted her eyes in that direction as well, curious to see what had excited him so, and was surprised to see Sissy entering the yard. She glanced down at her wrist watch, not believing she had let so much of the day get away from her, then saw that it was still hours from the time school should be out—a stab of alarm went through her, and only increased as she met Sissy’s eyes over the distance between them.

  Sissy’s face was tear-streaked and filled with pain. Elise set her tatting aside quickly and rose to her feet, instinctively lifting Henry into her arms as she moved to meet Sissy at the top of the steps.

  “Mrs. Cunningham said I cain’t go to school no more,” Sissy said, breaking into tears again as Elise reached out to touch her damp cheek. “She said there ain’t no place in school for a girl like me—”

  Elise led her into the house and they sat on the bed in the front room—there had to be some sort of mistake. Mrs. Cunningham would not have sent her home. There were only a few more days of school left this year; perhaps Sissy had only misunderstood—but the words repeated to her left little doubt. The principal had told Sissy to go home and to not come back again this year or the next, that there was no place in the school for a girl like her.

  Absolute fury rose within Elise—how dare the woman! Sissy could have done nothing to hurt anyone. She might have difficulty learning, but she had actually begun to read and write a little this year with extra help from her teacher and from Elise as well—how dare the principal do this! Sissy had as much right to be in the village school as anyone; she was a member of Elise and Janson’s family, and she already talked of going to the mill herself in another year or so.

  Elise rose from the edge of the bed and stood staring at Sissy for a moment. “You stay here and watch Henry for me after I get him down for his nap,” she said. “I’ll go have a talk with Mrs. Cunningham and we’ll get this straightened out—”

  Visiting the village school that afternoon, Elise did not know what she had expected when she determined to confront Mrs. Cunningham. She only knew she had never expected what she found in the principal’s office.

  “I am sorry, Mrs. Sanders, but you have to know we can’t have a girl like Sissy in this school,” Mrs. Cunningham said as she sat behind her desk. She had an unnervinging habit of closing her eyes each time she spoke, and keeping them closed for the entire duration of what she was saying. Mrs. Cunningham was nothing like Miss Perry, the principal of the boarding school Elise had attended in Atlanta with Phyllis Ann Bennett, but in that moment she reminded Elise greatly of Eva Perry. The commanding attitude of the woman was reminiscent of Miss Perry, and made Elise feel again like the sixteen-year-old girl she had been those two years before when she herself had been expelled from school.

  “What do you mean ‘a girl like Sissy’?” Elise demanded, trying to force the angry tone back into her voice. She did not like feeling like that sixteen-year-old again, and especially not before this woman. “I would bet there is not another girl in this school who works as hard as Sissy does. She may be a little slower to—”

  “Come now, Mrs. Sanders, we both know that Sissy was not sent home because she’s slow.”

  For a moment Elise could only stare at her.

  “Really—you have to know what kind of girl she is.” The woman looked slightly taken aback as she met Elise’s eyes across the desktop.

  Elise returned her stare. “You can’t mean—” The words failed her.

  “Well, really, Mrs. Sanders, she lives with you. Surely you must have at least—”

  Comprehension came slowly to Elise of the full import of the woman’s words. “Sissy is not that kind of girl!”

  Mrs. Cunningham looked uncomfortable. She got up from her chair and moved toward the window to stand staring out with her hands clasped behind her. “I would not have thought that I would have to be the one to tell you something about someone living in your own home, but, yes, she is that kind of girl. Surely you must understand now why I—”

  Elise rose slowly from her chair, anger building within her to take the place of the initial shock and surprise. “What makes you think that Sissy—that she—”

  “I have been told—by more than one source, I assure you—that she has been seen in—well—in improper situations with a number of young men. And she—” The woman stopped for a moment, then seemed to plunge ahead. “She is with child, Mrs. Sanders; I cannot have—”

  “‘With child’!” Elise almost shouted the words, and Mrs. Cunningham turned to look at her. “Sissy is not pregnant!”

  The older woman looked taken aback, and Elise wondered for a moment if it were not more at Elise’s use of the word pregnant than her anger.

  “Mrs. Sanders, there’s no need to—”

  “How dare you! Who is spreading lies like that about Sissy? Who?”

  “I cannot say, but I assure you that—”

  “Who?” Elise demanded, slamming a fist down on the principal’s desk and drawing a startled look from the older woman.

  �
��Really, you must control yourself, young lady!”

  “Don’t tell me to control myself. I am not one of your students to—” But she stopped, took a deep breath, and tried to calm her racing heart.

  “I have made my decision, Mrs. Sanders. Just because Sissy is simple does not excuse her getting herself in this situation or her being the sort of girl she is—and you have to know that I cannot have a girl who is in a delicate condition around the young girls in this school. She will not return here, and that decision is final.”

  Elise held the bare control over her temper, forcing herself to speak more calmly. “Whoever told you such things about Sissy is a liar. Sissy is not the kind of girl who would—” But she could see that her words were making no impact on the woman. “Sissy is not pregnant!”

  “Time will tell.” Mrs. Cunningham stood for a long moment staring at Elise. “Good day, Mrs. Sanders,” she said at last. And Elise knew that she, too, was being dismissed.

  Elise turned her steps toward Dorrie’s house. She knew Dorrie was home today with a badly twisted ankle and bruised hip and side she had gotten from a fall inside the mill two days before. Elise had already gone by to check on her once that morning, and had planned on going by again later that afternoon. She needed time to think, time to decide what it was she would say to Sissy. She wished now she hadn’t been so positive in talking to the girl—what would she ever say to her now?

  She called out a greeting as she entered the Keiths’ three rooms in the house they shared with the Cofield family. The door was unlocked, as were most doors in the village.

  “Come on in,” Dorrie called back, and Elise made her way into the middle of the three rooms, where she found Dorrie propped up in bed with pillows beneath her swollen ankle. A mass of single socks lay spread across her lap and the bed beside her. “Amazes me how I can put matched-up socks in th’ wash and not be able t’ come out with a single pair out ’a th’ lot of ’em,” she commented absently as Elise sat down in a rocker she pulled closer to the bed. “Where’s th’ baby?”

  “Sissy’s watching him.”

  Dorrie glanced toward the clock that sat on a table across the room. “It ain’t time for school t’ be out yet, is it?” she asked, and Elise told Dorrie everything that had happened that day.

  For a long moment Dorrie was silent. Elise kept waiting for her to say something, waiting for the shock or surprise she had thought to see come to her friend’s face, but instead heard: “So, it’s got t’ th’ school now,” giving Elise a shock of reality.

  “‘Got to the school’!—you heard about all this and you didn’t tell me?” She almost shouted the words, then forced herself to calm down as she saw the look of pain that came to her friend’s face.

  “It’s all over th’ village, Elise. I’ve been hearin’ it for weeks now, people comin’ t’ tell me, ’specially because Wheeler James is s’ crazy about her—folks have been namin’ him and Tim both as havin’ been with her, sayin’ it was one ’a them that got her int’ trouble—”

  “You know Sissy’s not—”

  But Dorrie cut her off. “I know she ain’t gonna have no baby, just like I know that ain’t nothin’ out-’a-th’ way happened between her an’ Wheeler James, or her an’ Tim, or her an’ anybody else—she ain’t that kind ’a girl, an’ anybody that knows her’d know that—”

  “But, why didn’t you—”

  “I thought it’d die down on it’s own. I couldn’t see how—”

  “Who told you?” Elise demanded, too furious to care, too furious at whoever had started this in the first place, and at all those who had spread the lies and kept them going.

  “I’ve been hearing it from a lot ’a different people. There was a group ’a women talkin’ about it in McCallum’s grocery just th’ day before I took th’ fall down th’ stairs, every one of ’em from Pearlman Street Baptist, so they knowed her and they all knowed better. I told ’em that wasn’t a Christian among ’em. Helene even said—”

  “Helene—” Elise said, staring at Dorrie, an awful suspicion coming to her mind—but surely—

  “Yeah, she was in th’ middle of it. She was even th’ first that come an’ told me about it weeks ago. Come tellin’ me Cassandra had told her, an’ that since we was family she thought I ought t’ know. I told her t’ hush her mouth—”

  But Elise was no longer listening to Dorrie’s words—Cassandra Price and her mother, Helene. Cassandra—and suddenly she understood. She dragged her attention back to what Dorrie was saying.

  “She said I ought t’ get Clarence t’ talk t’ Wheeler James, t’ see if he’d done somethin’ he shouldn’t ’a done, sayin’ that if she was me she’d be worried t’ death knowin’ a ‘halfwit’ might be gonna have her grandbaby—I got her told good, her sayin’ those things about Sissy, suggestin’ Wheeler James had been foolin’ with her,” Dorrie’s voice was filled with a barely controlled rage now, several of the mis-matched socks clenched tightly in her fist, and Elise could well imagine the confrontation that must have taken place between Dorrie and Helene Price. “She’d be sayin’ one minute that any man that’d fool with a girl that ain’t just right ought t’ have his ‘thing’ cut off a little bit at a time, an’ th’ next that a girl like Sissy ought t’ be stopped from goin’ t’ th’ church, that it wasn’t right for her t’ be aroun’ good, ‘decent’ girls like her Cassandra. She said she thought me an’ Clarence ought t’ go t’ th’ preacher an’ have him tell Sissy t’ not come back t’ church, an’ even that you an’ th’ baby—”

  But suddenly her words stopped, the tirade cut off mid-utterance, and Elise found Dorrie staring at her, her mouth still open, and a look on Dorrie’s face that said she had clearly said too much.

  “Me and Henry?” Elise asked, staring at her. “Me and Henry—what?”

  For a long moment Dorrie only stared at her.

  “Me and Henry—what?” Elise prompted again, rising from the chair.

  “That uppity Helene thinks she’s all high an’ mighty. I—”

  “What did she say?” Elise asked, cutting her off.

  “I didn’t want t’ tell you,” Dorrie said at last. “That was why I didn’t tell you what they was sayin’ about Sissy—I told Helene t’ shut her mouth, that she ought t’ be prayin’ for forgiveness an’ not—”

  “What did she say?” Elise could hear her voice now tinged with impatience. She realized her hands were knotted together tightly before her and she forced herself to relax them.

  “She said you an’ th’ baby ought t’ be stopped from comin’ t’ th’ church, too, because of Janson—”

  “Janson?” For a moment there was only surprise. “Because he’s Holiness?”

  “That, too, but—”

  “But, what?”

  “She said—she said she didn’t think you ought t’ be comin’ t’ a white church because Janson has Indian blood in him, an’ th’ baby, too—”

  Elise felt as if she had been slapped. She sat down slowly, staring at Dorrie. “How—how dare she—how dare—” She could think of nothing to say. She had never thought that anyone would say any such thing about her, or about her baby—“How dare she—that little—that—” But she could think of nothing bad enough to call Helene Price—she knew now that it had all started with her, with her and with that bratty daughter of hers. Cassandra had been behind this; the lies had all somehow started with her, as well as what had been said about Henry and Janson and Elise as well. Cassandra had started all this, and somehow that made it worse, knowing that it had been done deliberately—the lies that were being told about Sissy had not been built up gradually from misunderstandings and enlarging gossip. They had been begun deliberately.

  Dorrie sat staring at Elise, and Elise realized that the older woman was afraid she would be angry because she had not come to her with what she had been told before it had reached this point—
but Elise knew now that it had been inevitable. It had been inevitable from the moment she and Tim Cauthen had confronted the three girls behind the church after what they had done to Sissy at Christmas time. It had all been inevitable.

  She rose and went to pat Dorrie on the shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said, quietly. “We’ll get all of this straightened out.”

  Rarely had Elise seen Janson as angry as when he arrived home only to be told that Sissy had been sent home from school and the reasons behind it. He stood for a long moment staring out the screen door, and Elise knew that he was looking out to where Sissy sat rocking Henry in the old rocker on the front porch.

  Elise sighed and clenched her hands together in her lap, staring down at them for a moment. “Cassandra Price has to be the one who started it,” she said. “She’s hated Sissy since Tim started paying so much attention to her, and there’s also what she did to Sissy at Christmas. Dorrie said Helene was the first one to come to her with the gossip, and that she was in the middle of it the other day at McCallum’s as well.”

  She fell silent, waiting for him to speak. She could not stop thinking of what Dorrie had said, of what Helene had told Dorrie, that she and Henry should not be allowed to go to the church because of Janson’s Cherokee blood. That she and Henry—

  “That little bitch—” she said, not realizing she said the words aloud until after she heard them. She looked up at Janson and found his eyes on her now, a look of surprise on his face. She knew he had never heard her say anything of the like in the two years they had known each other.

  She looked away again, after a moment feeling him come to stand before her. He did not say anything, but she knew he was waiting.

  “Helene told Dorrie that Sissy shouldn’t be allowed to go to the Baptist church here,” she felt her jaw clench tightly, having to force out the remainder of the words, “and that Henry and I shouldn’t, either—”