Through a Glass, Darkly

by Charlotte Miller

  The mill was working only two reduced shifts, sometimes for only a few hours a day, sometimes only a few days of the week, only running when there was work to be done—and there was never enough work. There was a wage coming in, but, after the weekly withholding for rent on the mill house, there was so little left to them. They had tried to make an occasion of Christmas, but with no presents except an orange for Henry, a new rag-doll Elise had made from cloth scraps for Catherine, one small, striped candy stick divided between the children, and carved wooden figures Janson had made for both of them—nothing for them to give to each other, nothing to give Stan or Sissy, and just enough food on the table to fill their stomachs.

  Every cent from that first pay envelope was counted, worried over, stretched to its utmost limit. Short shifts, only four days that week, even less the second, little better the third, but by then they had received word that made those pennies all the more precious.

  The mill was cutting back to only one shift.

  All but the old-timers were being thrown off.

  Janson Sanders was once again unemployed.

  Chapter Nine

  They were calling it a depression—The Depression, capitalizing the words with voices that had grown bitter and sharp from want, need, endless desperation, loss of hope. Over two-thirds of the mill workers were unemployed, over half the employees of the factory that made men’s overalls in Pine, at least half those of the cotton mill in Cedar Flatts. Innumerable jobs had been lost along Pine’s Main Street because of the fire, and because of business closings and cutbacks. Some people stayed on at reduced wages, reduced hours, desperate to hold on to whatever jobs they did have.

  Farms were going under, more and more land going up on the auction block. Bankruptcy loomed over many people, mortgage foreclosures, evictions. Families were finding themselves out on the street, taking whatever they could to live, whatever they had to do in order to survive. Hunger was becoming known to people who had never dreamed to see it, and many parents learned the pain of putting a child to bed with no food in his or her stomach, with little hope for providing more in the morning. People were freezing, in rail cars as they moved about the country in search of work, in back alleys in large cities, and in the Hoovervilles that were sprouting up near the tracks in many areas. Transients and the dispossessed slept in barns, in open areas, in make-shift shelters constructed of whatever could be found handy. Plenty existed in few homes, but usually even in the poorest there was at least something for a stranger, as more and more desperate people began to move from town to town in search of whatever work that could be found. Individuals tried to help in whatever way they could, charities, church and religious organizations, but there was never enough—and always more and more people coming, wanting, needy.

  There was hunger in the village, hunger under the roofs that the charity of Walter Eason allowed the villagers. Few of the unemployed could afford to pay the weekly rent, and little demand was made for it—times will get better, Eason told his people, jobs would return to the mill, and people would catch up on what they owe. They had roofs over their heads, but no food to feed empty bellies, no clothes to put on shivering backs. Villagers did what they could to survive, taking a few hours work where they could find it in exchange for food or money. Many left the village, left the free shelter for the roofs of family and friends. Some left in search of work elsewhere. Some left for the country. The security that the village had always represented was now broken, and even those still working looked on each wage as if it might be their last.

  Janson knew that he would have a roof over head for his family in the winter months ahead, knew there would be wood enough to cut in the surrounding countryside to keep their three rooms in the mill house warm—but he was worried. There was food to think of until spring could bring the first vegetables from a garden. There was also next year to think about, and the year after. Better times seemed nowhere within sight. It could be years before the mill put back on the workers it had thrown off. He could not keep on running up a debt in rent to the Easons, a debt that made him angry with himself each time he thought of living on in the mill house. He had been laid off, had seen his family put through hell, had seen his children hungry, his wife abused, his son hurt, himself locked up in jail. He had almost been lynched for what Buddy Eason did, a crime Buddy would never even pay for—he would not now live off Eason charity.

  He had to have work, had to have a way to provide for his family. He would not wait for a job that might never come. He and Stan had spent the past days looking for work, checking in town, in Cedar Flatts, even in Wiley and Wells on trips they made partly by foot, partly by catching rides on whatever truck or wagon they could find that was headed in their direction. There were so many unemployed in the village, so many waiting to be rehired, waiting for the prosperity that had been “just around the corner” for so long—he could wait no longer. He had to have more security for Elise and for the family they had made, a way to make sure that months from now he would be able to put food on the table and a roof over their heads that could not be taken from them at a moment’s notice—and the need for that security was driven home when Elise told him they were going to have another child.

  Janson lay awake long into the hours of that night. Elise was warm against him, having found sleep herself only after they had taken each other. He could feel her breath against his shoulder, but there were no sounds to be heard, not of the children and Sissy sleeping in the next room, or Stan where he slept in his narrow bed in one corner of the kitchen. The mill was silent, and that silence seemed loud to his ears as Janson lay staring into the darkness.

  He came to a decision that night, a decision that did not sit easily.

  As dawn came he got up to stare out the window that overlooked the village street. After a time he felt a light touch on his arm, and he turned to find Elise there, though he had not even known that she was awake.

  “You look worried,” she said quietly. “I know times are so bad now—”

  “Babies have their own time,” he said. Then he moved to sit on their bed—she looked so young, he thought, as she came to stand before him. She was just now twenty years old, and Elise Whitley had given up so much to marry him. He had promised her so many things, and had given her so little. And now—

  He turned his eyes away, unable to look at her as he searched for the words. She sat beside him and took his hand, waiting, as if she knew—but she could never know this. He had sworn that he would never, had sworn even to Elise herself—but, then again, he had sworn never to so many things, so many things he had found himself doing. Working for the Easons, living in the village—but this was one never he had not thought to break.

  He sighed, holding her hand. “Elise, I don’t see no way around it no more. I wish there was. I wish—” His words trailed off. She was watching him, waiting, and for a time he could do nothing as he looked into those blue eyes that he had promised so much.

  He looked away again.

  “Elise, we’re gonna have t’ sharecrop—it won’t be easy; it’ll be a lot ’a hard work without much payback, but I know cotton an’ I know I can make a good crop with even halfway decent land. I—” He saw sadness on her face, and something else. For a moment he was afraid that something was disappointment in him.

  Resignation came over her features, an expression that tore right through him, making him look away—Elise Whitley a sharecropper’s wife, he told himself.

  Her free hand came to his cheek and he brought his eyes back to her, unable to read the expression on her face as he met her eyes.

  “There’ll be fields t’ bust up goin’ int’ it this time ’a year, maybe other work I can do ’til plantin’, an’ it’s gonna be hard—but it’d be hard if we stayed here, an’ at least this way we’ll have a crop next year, even though we’ll lose half of it for use ’a th’ land. There’ll be space for a garden, enough t’ grow what
we’ll need t’ eat, an’ we’ll have a roof overhead that won’t leave us owin’. We can run a store charge once I got a crop in th’ ground, but it’s gonna be hard goin’ for th’ next couple ’a months, maybe a day’s work here or there for eggs, or a chicken or ham, maybe some vegetables. I’ll get us a garden planted first off so we’ll have some early stuff comin’ in, an’ there’s huntin’ until then. It’s gonna be hard t’ make it, but I won’t let you or th’ children go hungry, not even if I have t’ steal t’ feed this family, not even if I have t’ set up a whiskey still myself—”

  “Promise me you won’t do that!” she said. “Promise me! I won’t be worrying about you being arrested again, or shot by bootleggers, or—”

  “I won’t let you or the children go hungry,” was all he would say.

  “Promise me,” she demanded, squeezing his hand until it hurt. “You have children to think about now, Henry, Catherine, and this baby—promise me you won’t moonshine. Promise me.”

  “I promise,” he said at last, reluctantly, and watched the expression in her eyes change, though he was now unable to read it. “But I won’t let you an’ the children go hungry, no matter what I got t’ do t’ make sure ’a that. I won’t lie t’ you; sharecroppin’ won’t be a easy life, but it’s th’ only way I can see t’ have land enough t’ grow what we’ll need t’ eat, an’ t’ be able t’ have any way t’ make it in these times. We could be there for years. We could be—”

  She touched her fingers to his lips, silencing his words, and he was surprised to see a smile touch her face. “Let me know when to pack,” she said quietly, her eyes moving over his face. “I knew I’d be a farmer’s wife one day.”

  But not a sharecropper’s wife, he thought later that morning as he sat at the kitchen table, cutting cardboard to fit into the bottom of his shoe to cover the hole worn there. He knotted the strings and stood to pull on the too-large coat his gran’pa had given him after his own had burned. He knew he made an odd sight, in the baggy, shapeless coat, his worn overalls patched at one knee but neat and pressed, newspapers stuffed into the front of his shirt under the bib of the overalls to insulate him from the cutting January wind.

  He tried first one landowner, then another, finding that many other men had had the same thought as he. Many of the villagers, even the townspeople, had moved into the country to sharecrop or tenant farm any place they could find. He tried Cagle Owen, who owned the land his gran’pa and his Uncle Wayne ’cropped on halves, then old Mr. Bishop, Johnny Fred Wilner, and even M. B. Pate. At each place he received the same answer, and asked if they knew of any other land that might be open to be ’cropped on halves. Several times Lester Stubblefield’s name was mentioned, along with others, and Janson tried them all, leaving Stubblefield for the last, for he had heard the man’s reputation for padding the store charges of his sharecroppers, as well as the poor quality of the houses where many of his people lived. At last he turned his steps toward Stubblefield’s place, hoping that he was not making a mistake.

  Stubblefield was a tall, rail-thin man somewhere past sixty, with yellowing gray hair and hazy eyes. He smelled of sweat and cheap corn whiskey as he drove Janson in a rattling truck over a rutted red clay road to the farm he said he had open for a sharecropper.

  “It ain’t been worked in a while, and th’ house ain’t been lived in for a spell, but it can be fixed up if somebody ain’t scared ’a work—”

  Janson was not afraid of work, but this farm would take something close to a miracle. The yard was grown high with weeds and choked with brambles, the house a small, decrepit, two-room shack with a hole in the roof of one room caused by a tree branch fallen in a not-too-recent storm. Loose planks shifted and creaked as they crossed the porch and entered the small structure, and an awful scent assailed his nose the moment he opened the door. He coughed and pulled the handkerchief from his pocket to cover his nose, hearing something small and dark moving about the corners of the room. Sunlight shone in through the gap in the ceiling, and part of the tree branch still protruded into the room. There were spaces in the walls and flooring where boards did not meet up adequately, and loose rocks in the chimney at the fireplace.

  Janson knelt and looked up the throat of the chimney. It looked to be choked with trash and birdnests, and he doubted little that to light a fire in the hearth would mean only one of two things, either it would cough black smoke back into the house, or it would promptly burn the entire place down—and burning it down did not seem too bad an idea.

  Stubblefield led him from the house onto the small, leaning back porch and out into the yard to show him the well there, covered over but rank from disuse. It would have to be cleaned before good water could be drawn from it, cleaned and still even that might not be enough. Another well might have to be dug.

  He found the barn in better shape than the house, but that still did not account for much. The roof at least seemed sound, although it probably leaked, or had in the past, causing the rotting planking in the loft that would have to be replaced before someone could safely walk above. There was a creek, running cold and pure along the back of the house, running away down into the fields below.

  The land had been lying fallow, growing up in Johnson grass and seedling pines as it curved away from the buildings and toward the dark woods that encroached upon its borders. The place seemed hopeless, the house near impossible to make liveable, the land fertile but wasted—it would take months of work just to repair the buildings and get the land cleared enough to plant. The land wasn’t the best he had ever seen, hilly and rolling, rock strewn, dropping off in places to nothing, as did much of the land in the area, but it was decent land that a man could make a cotton crop from—but this was impossible. There was so little promise here, only work, and more work, with little return. The house, the well, the barn—no man could offer that to his wife, to his family.

  “I’ll buy what you need for repairs, tin for th’ roof and all,” Stubblefield said, as if the matter had been settled. “I supply th’ seed, plow, mules, everything you need t’ make a crop, and I get half in return. You can keep th’ seed or sell it after th’ ginning, and I stake you at th’ store after you get a crop in th’ ground.” He followed closely as Janson walked out into the overgrown field nearest the house. “There’s another field that needs clearing that you can work, too. Just needs a couple ’a trees cleared off it and some stumps pulled up, but it’s good land, land a man can make a good cotton crop on.”

  Hopeless, Janson thought as he looked back toward the house. Sharecropping was one thing, but there was not even a chance they could make it on this farm, if it could even be called a farm. There had to be other places open, or maybe the chance of work in town, some place he had forgotten to check.

  He knelt and dug his fingers into ground moistened by the previous night’s rainfall—red, rich, fertile, not the best cotton land in the South, but it would do the job for some man after the years of lying fallow. A man could clear off the seedling pines, pull up the stumps here and there, turn under all the dead grass and weeds, and he’d have a good place to start a crop.

  He lifted his eyes and looked out across the fields, hearing Stubblefield’s voice, but not listening—one good crop and a man could be on his feet again, he thought, even with losing half of what he made to the landowner there could be enough, if the price of cotton was good, to take a family through the winter and still leave some left over come planting time the next year.

  The land felt good under his fingers, firm and unyielding under the soles of his worn shoes. This was where a man belonged, depending on nothing but the strength in his own back and the work of his own hands to make a crop to support his family. God had made the land to be worked, and man to work the land, Janson told himself—even if that land belonged to someone else.

  “Why, the man that used t’ crop this place for me used t’ make—”

  “I’ll take it,” Jans
on said, standing, dusting the red dirt from his hands and onto the worn legs of his overalls. “I’ll make you a crop on this land.”

  Janson had been right when he had said that the house was almost not fit to be lived in—Elise stared in open horror at the small, two-room shack the first time she saw it, amazed that something so obviously dead had not already fallen over and been given a decent burial. But, by the time she saw it again a week later, the little house was hardly recognizable.

  The roof had been repaired, a few rotten boards in the porch replaced, the rooms swept out and the walls, floor, and even the ceiling scrubbed down with a strong mixture of lye soap and hot water. Janson had whitewashed the fireplace, shored up the falling back porch roof, cleaned out the well, and even chinked some of the more-obvious cracks in the walls. But still it was a sad little house, sitting on its stacked rock pillars in the middle of its newly cleaned-out yard. The scrubbing and airing that Janson, Stan, and Sissy had given it had gotten rid of the odor she had noted the first time Janson had brought her to see the place, but she knew she would always remember that smell and associate the little house with it.

  They moved into the house a week after she had first seen it. The two rooms were close-cramped, smaller than those on Goode’s place, crowded with the six of them and their bare furnishings. Stan immediately made a pallet for himself to sleep in the barn loft. He said it was because the house depressed him, but Elise knew his reasons were more noble. He wanted to give Sissy more privacy than she had on the other side of a quilt strung down the middle of the room they shared with the two children, and he wanted to allow Elise and Janson more privacy as well. Elise could not help but worry about him, however. It was often bitterly cold in the little house early in the morning before fires could be stoked in the fireplaces and the woodstove, and Elise found herself grateful in the nights for the warmth of Janson beside her in their bed—she could imagine how the nights must be where Stan slept in the barn loft.