For a few days it seemed possible that the bottom had been reached, that the wise men of Wall Street could breathe a sigh of relief, count their losses and watch the market rise again—then the panic began anew and no force short of God Almighty could stop it.
Stock prices plummeted, and in one desperate, last-ditch effort to sell and salvage what he could, William realized that everything was lost—the home where Whitleys had lived, loved, been born, and died for generations; the businesses that had made him a respected part of the community; the money that had wielded power over a county and much of a state; the mill he had wanted for so long—all gone now as completely as if he had never owned them. He could never repay the loans; he could never recoup the losses; he was wiped out.
That quiet October night, as he sat in the silence of the library in the home where he had lived all his life, it seemed that he had nothing left to live for. Martha had been gone more than a year now—no one would even miss him if he died. Everything that had defined who he had always been was gone. Soon he would not even have a roof over his head, he told himself, but would be out in the streets like a pauper—he was a pauper, he realized suddenly, the bitterness inside of him now something he could almost taste.
When he took the gun from the writing desk in the corner of the front parlor, it was with the thought that the world would be better off without him. Everything that had made him the man he had been was gone now—even the Whitley name would be ground into the dust, laughed at and spit on for what he had made of it. There was nothing left to live for, no one to care if he lived or died, no one to shed a tear—no one left now even to talk to.
He sat in the chair before the rolltop in the library and put the gun to his temple. His eyes came to rest on the picture of Martha amid the clutter on the desktop—he hoped she had forgiven him by now.
There was sound, and then there was silence. William Whitley was dead.
At first Elise could not bring herself even to consider returning to Georgia for the funeral. Her father had thrown her out and had denied his own grandson when she had returned upon her mother’s death. He had tried to kill Janson and had done everything he could do to keep them apart—why should she return now to pretend a grief that she could never feel, she asked herself. There was a blank space inside her where the love for her father had once existed, and she felt nothing for him now but hatred—he deserved to die, and he deserved to burn in hell, as she was certain he most assuredly was.
In the hours after the telephone call that Wednesday morning, she knew that Janson kept watching her, and she knew that he was waiting for her to cry, for her to show grief or sadness or a feeling of loss, but she did not. She went about the things she had to do at the house, telling him to go to bed to get some rest because he had another shift to work that night—but he continued to watch her as if he thought she was too much in a daze even to know what it was she felt.
“I’ll go talk to Eason an’ get a few days off t’ go with you for th’ funeral,” he said, watching her as she washed dishes in the dishpan there on the kitchen table, Henry playing on the floor between them. He had offered to do the dishes for her—for her, as if she were not fully capable of doing it herself—but she had refused, and he sat and watched her now as if he thought she would break every one.
“I’m not going,” she said, not even looking up from the dish she was scrubbing in the hot, soapy water, hearing it clatter against the side of the pan as well as against another waiting in the water to be washed.
“Not goin’—but you have t’ go. He was your pa—”
“My father died a long time ago—he died when he tried to sell me in marriage to J. C. Cooper to try to guarantee himself a part of that cotton mill; he died when he did everything he could to keep you and me apart; he died when he tried to kill you, and when he threw us off his land and told us we were both dead to him; he died when he didn’t send for me when Mama asked for me, and when he threw us out of the house when we went back for her funeral.” She realized she was shouting at him, but she could not stop herself. She yanked the dishrag out of the pan, sending soapy water out across the table as well as across her pregnant stomach. She squeezed it in her fist now as she stared at him, feeling warm water moving down her arm and soaking through the sleeve of her sweater, realizing she was shaking with fury. “I hate him, and I’m glad he’s dead—and I’ll thank you not to tell me what I have to do.”
He looked at her, his green eyes moving over her face, but she could do nothing but breathe heavily as she stared at him. Then he got up from the table, and, lifting Henry into his arms, left the room without saying a word. She watched him pass through the doorway and into the middle room of their half of the house, and then stood staring at the empty doorway—he had no right to tell her what to do, no right; he was her husband and not her fath—
Not her—
She stared for a moment longer, then set the dishrag down on the table and dried her hands on the apron tied around her, feeling the baby she was almost eight-months along with now move slightly inside of her, then become still again. She continued to look at the empty doorway for a moment, then followed Janson, surprised when she did not find him changing into his nightshirt so that he could get some rest after working all night. Instead he sat in the rocker beside the bed, Henry on his lap. His eyes came to her as she entered the room still drying her hands on the damp apron, and for a moment she could only look at him, then she crossed the room to his side, realizing that her hand was still damp when she reached out to rest it at his cheek.
“You’re right,” she told him after a time when he did not speak. “I have to go back—for Stan, if for no one else—” Her words trailed off and she realized she did not have to say anything more.
“I’ll go see Eason about a few days off,” he said. “You won’t have t’ face goin’ back by yourself—”
But she would have to face going back to Georgia alone.
Janson found it almost impossible to get in to see Walter Eason that morning when he went to the mill. He waited in the outer office, leaning forward where he sat in a leather-covered chair, his elbows resting on his knees and his fingers laced before him as he stared at the dark, polished wood of Walter Eason’s closed office door. When he was finally allowed in to see the old man, he found Eason preoccupied, shifting papers on his wide desk, not lifting his gaze even once from the pages before him as Janson told him his reason he needed a few days off.
“In times like these, we all have to keep our minds on our jobs,” Walter Eason told him, his eyes still on the sheaf of papers in his hands. “You can’t go taking time off just whenever you please.”
“My wife’s expectin’ a baby in another month or so; I cain’t let her go all th’ way off t’ Georgia by herself t’—”
When Eason’s eyes met his at last across the wide expanse of the desk between them, Janson knew without having to be told that the talk he had heard in the past day was true: the Easons had lost a lot of money in the stock market crash.
He also knew he would not be allowed time off without those days also costing him his job and the security he had built for them in the mill village.
Janson was willing to give up that security if need be in order to go with Elise, but she would hear nothing of it. Now that she was determined to go, she would go without him if she had to, taking Henry and Sissy with her. Janson had to keep his job, she told him, for, if he quit, they would lose not only their source of income, but also the roof over their heads—and they had Henry to think of, and the new baby as well. She would be fine, she assured him, and so he reluctantly put Elise and Henry, and Sissy, on the train that afternoon. Stan would be meeting them at the station, and he had already made arrangements for them at the hotel in town, for Elise refused to stay in her father’s house even now that he was dead.
William Whitley had thrown her out one too many times, Janson knew
, and she was not willing to forgive him, not even in death.
He stood on the platform that afternoon at the station in Pine, returning Henry’s wave as the train pulled away, feeling as if his entire world was moving away from him as that train started on its way toward Georgia.
The casket was closed at the funeral because of the way in which William Whitley ended his life. There were few mourners to mark the end of a man who had until so recently wielded so much power in the county and throughout much of the state—J. C. was there, and his father, Mattie Ruth and Titus Coates, Sheriff Hill, Old Mr. Tate, who had worked for the Whitleys since Elise’s grandfather’s time; and Dr. Lester, her father’s cousin and the doctor who had delivered Elise and all three of her brothers.
Some of her father’s employees and business associates were also there, as were few distant relatives and members of the Baptist church William Whitley had attended all his life, but few of the men he had always considered his friends. Stan said their father had distanced himself from almost everyone in the time since their mother’s death, seeming, especially in the last months, to be concerned only with the market and with the mill and mill village he had acquired at last. Stan sat beside her in the church during the funeral, and stood with her as the final words were spoken over their father.
He was the only one who cried.
They returned to the cemetery later, Stan, Elise, and Henry, after the red earth had been freshly mounded over the new grave. Elise laid flowers at the headstone of her mother, but not on the newly turned earth that was her father’s grave, feeling strangely drained of emotion as she stood beside Stan. She wished she could cry as he did, but she could feel nothing, could think of nothing but the day her father had driven her from his house after her mother’s death, or the day she had seen him beat Janson here in this very graveyard until Janson lay bleeding and unconscious at her father’s feet, or the day he had driven her and Janson from his land. She had heard his words that day over and over again, even as she could hear them now: “I no longer have a daughter.”
She stood in silence and allowed Stan to grieve, her eyes on Henry where he stood clinging to the bottom of her skirt. The little boy seemed uneasy at the sight of his tall uncle crying—he looks so much like Janson, Elise thought, so much like Janson.
Stan’s eyes were red and puffy, and he sniffed as he cried so honestly for their father, that she envied him his grief. All she could think of was that she wanted to be away from here, wanted to be back home with Janson in that half a mill house, even with the noise and the lint and the gossipmongers, and Buddy Eason prowling the streets. Janson had been wrong; she did not need to be here except for her brother Stan.
For a moment she thought she could hear children’s voices over the sound of Stan’s sniffles, and her eyes followed the sound, coming to rest on a family getting out of a Studebaker parked in the nearby churchyard. There were several children, and a mother and father; the mother leading a little girl by the hand and the father scooping one of the boys up onto his shoulders as they made their way to the church, setting the little boy off into peals of laughter—Elise smiled with the picture, thinking of Janson and how good he was with Henry. He was such a good father, as he would be to all their children.
She watched, even after the family had disappeared through the church doors. She felt a wetness on her cheeks and reached up, surprised to find there were tears there. She watched the front of the church and she cried, feeling Stan’s arms go around her, and she knew he thought she was crying for their father, even though she told herself that she was not—she was crying because she was pregnant, and because she was tired and far from home and she missed Janson so terribly.
She put her head on Stan’s shoulder as she cried, stupidly surprised that he was as tall now as a man. Henry patted her knee through her skirt and she cried only harder, kneeling cumbersomely in her almost-eight-month pregnant state to hold him to her. She realized suddenly that she was remembering her family as it had been in years past when she had been nothing but a child, remembering her father when he had seemed so tall and strong and her mother when it had seemed Martha Whitley would never change, remembering Bill and Alfred when they had just been her big brothers, and Stan when he had been little Stanny to them all.
Henry reached up and patted her wet cheek, his green eyes reminding her so much of Janson—she could remember her father when he had been much the same kind of man that Janson was. She could remember—and she did not understand what had happened to William Whitley to make him the man she had known in the past years, a man capable of trying to kill Janson to keep them apart, a man capable of doing so much.
It had not just been the knowledge of Janson’s Indian blood, or the fact that she had decided to run away with him—something had changed her father over the years, something had made the man who now lay buried in the ground at her feet a stranger to her.
Stan knelt beside her now, allowing her to cry in peace until she was finished, then he gently helped her to her feet. She dried her eyes with the back of one hand since neither of them had a handkerchief, then she looked out toward the pines, out toward the west.
She sniffed and wiped her eyes again. “I want to go home,” she said, turning to look at Stan and seeing the concern for her on his face. He was almost a man now, recently turned seventeen, and grown tall and skinny. He looked at her through his round-lensed glasses, and suddenly she could not imagine leaving him here, alone, for Bill was gone from town now, and Stan had never been close to any of their relatives. He would not even have a place to live, according to what they had learned from the letter their father had left, the letter saying he had lost everything—Stan was still her baby brother, and she could not leave him here, alone with no home, no money, no prospects other than to live off the charity of relatives or to leave school and take a job to support himself.
“Can you be ready to leave tomorrow morning?” she asked him, as if the matter had been already settled between them.
“Leave—but you can’t mean—Elise, I can’t live off of you and Janson. I’ll—”
“Nonsense, you’re my little brother. I have no intention of leaving you here.”
“But, that wouldn’t be fair to you—to either of you.” He looked worried. “I’ll find a place to stay, and I can—”
“You’ll stay with us; I won’t hear any arguments. It’s what I want, and it’ll be what Janson wants as well, I’m sure of it—”
But she was not sure, and, after she finally convinced Stan to return to Eason County with her, she became worried at what Janson might say. The three rooms they had in the mill house were already crowded with her, Janson, Henry, and Sissy, and now there was the new baby on the way.
She was grateful for the privacy of the hotel that afternoon, for it allowed her to place a call to Eason County as soon as Henry had gone down for his nap and Sissy had left to walk to the drug store soda fountain a few blocks away, a call to the small village grocery after which she waited for the operator to ring back that Janson was on the other end of the line.
“I asked Stan to come live with us,” she said simply, after assuring him that she, Henry, the baby, and Sissy were all fine, realizing belatedly that she had frightened him with the unexpected and expensive telephone call. “Is that all right?”
“Yes, ’a course it is, if it’s what you want.” His voice came back to her over the crackling wire, and for a moment she could picture him there in the village grocery, standing at the black box on the wall near the front of the store, his black hair less than neatly combed as he stood in his overalls or dungarees and one of his workshirts.
“It won’t be too much? I mean, another mouth to feed, one more person to—”
“Don’t worry about that, Elise. Stan’s family—we’ll make it; we’ll always make it. We’ll be fine as long as we got th’ money in th’ bank.”
When she hung up
, she felt reassured—yes, they would be fine, just so long as they had that money in the bank.
By the time Elise had the baby, it seemed as if the country was already pulling itself out of the frightening days of the Crash. Catherine Martha Sanders was born in that December of 1929, with Dr. Washburn handling the delivery and Janson banished to the next room to pace the floor alongside his brother-in-law.
Catherine was a beautiful baby, with a light sprinkling of reddish hair and a quiet disposition that was much different than Henry had been as a baby. Henry, at almost eighteen months, did not know quite what to think of his new sister, staring at her often in the first days as if he did not understand why she was here, climbing into bed with Elise and the baby, or up onto Janson’s lap whenever he sat down, trying to come between his parents and this crying, smelly thing that demanded so much of their attention, setting into loud wails of his own any time that she cried, and staring at her often when she did not, as if he were certain she would start up again at any moment.
Much money had been lost in the Crash, and, with it, much of the country’s confidence. Hard-earned savings had been lost by many people, massive fortunes by others, and there was a lot of belt-tightening going on. People and businesses began to economize. Where once there had been a mad spending spree going on before the Crash, now no one was buying. There was reduced demand for goods, and reduced need to manufacture them, leaving machines and workers idle.
In the village, there was nervousness in the air. There was no hiring at the mill, and the existing employees worried with each pay envelope that it might be their last. Stan enrolled in the high school uptown, causing quite an uproar because he was living in the mill village—but there was no work for him at the mill, and seemingly little chance there would be any time soon. No mention was made to Janson about his brother-in-law, although the subject had been broached to Walter Eason by several persons—but Walter had more pressing matters on his mind than the schooling of a seventeen-year-old boy. He had much more pressing matters now at hand, matters that not only concerned him, but the entire county.
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