Through a Glass, Darkly

by Charlotte Miller

  Janson had warned her that the winter would not be easy, but she often found it worse than she had imagined. Janson took day work for the neighboring farms, working an hour here or there, a day where he could find it, clearing land for planting, repairing barns and buildings, helping to slaughter hogs, doing whatever he could to help feed the family through the winter, often working for trade in eggs or butter, potatoes, apples, or sometimes meat. Many of the farms in the area were in the same situation they were in, just trying to survive the winter, laying all their hopes on the coming year’s crop and the price of cotton at ginning time.

  No matter how many hours Janson put in on other farms, there was still land to clear for his own crop, soil to be broken up and readied for the cotton seed that all their hopes rested upon. He and Stan were often in the fields until after dark, ridding the land of the small pines that had taken root there, the tough grass he cursed, the stumps he swore at as Stubblefield’s mules strained against their trace chains to pull them from the ground.

  He seemed to work non-stop, even working their fields on an occasional Sunday and garnering a stern sermon from Gran’ma in return. He was out before light every morning, home often long after dark, working in his own fields and the fields of others until his back ached and his muscles were sore—but he seemed to come alive in the open fields, under the sun and in the chill air. There was often not enough food on the table to fill his hungry stomach at the end of the day, but he seemed happier just to be working the land, even if it was land that belonged to another man, more content that he had ever been in town.

  Stubblefield was more often than not impossible to deal with, and his wife was not much better. But Mrs. Stubblefield liked pretty dresses, though she hadn’t the figure to wear them, and she gave Elise work sewing in exchange for milk for Henry, Catherine, and the family, on occasion eggs, or whatever else she hadn’t a use for.

  Other families that sharecropped Stubblefield’s land were standoffish and involved in their own concerns, and Elise could find no friend among them to help pass the lonely winter months. Dorrie was in town, Gran’ma and Aunt Rachel too far away to visit often—there was only Janson, Stan, Sissy, and the children. And never enough food.

  There was the baby on the way, making her unbearably nauseated on most mornings, forcing her to eat for the sake of the child, even as she worried whether Henry and Catherine had enough. Somehow Janson always managed to provide, and they had not gone hungry as yet, though often there was nothing on the table for days except for sweet potatoes taken in trade for farm work, and milk taken in trade for sewing.

  She could only keep thinking—if we can only make it until spring, then we’ll be fine. Once Janson has the cotton planted, we can have a charge at the store to be paid in the fall from the money we make off the cotton. There will be early vegetables from the garden, even our own cow that Janson had promised to buy on credit from Stubblefield. If we can only make it until spring—

  The last days of February showed an early warming. Already daffodils bloomed from the flower bed in front of Mrs. Stubblefield’s parlor windows. Turnip and mustard greens lay planted in the garden, potatoes, carrots—a few month’s time and there would be food aplenty for the family. Janson said that if the weather held and the signs were right, the cotton crop would be planted and then there could be charges at the store. They would buy the cow—things would be so much better. They had survived the worst the winter could give them—hunger, cold, fear—and it seemed to Elise that at last they might make it.

  And then she realized she was losing the baby.

  There had been no difficulties with the pregnancy, beyond the same nausea she had experienced with both Henry and Catherine, but one afternoon there was blood. She sent Sissy running for Janson where he was plowing, frightening him as the panicky girl spilled out an almost incoherent story.

  “Blood—Elise’s bleedin’. She thinks somethin’s wrong with th’ baby—she said you should come—”

  Janson flung the plowlines from his shoulders and took off running for home, leaving the mule in the field where he had stopped the plow, yelling back to Sissy to run to Stubblefield’s house and get someone to go for Gran’ma in a car.

  Elise was lying in their bed when he reached home, a frightened expression in her eyes.

  “Does it hurt? Is it bad?” he asked, collapsing to his knees at the side of the bed and taking her hand. He tried to keep the fear from his voice.

  “No—it’s only blood. It may be nothing—I—I don’t know. It’s never happened before.”

  He could do nothing but hold her hand and look at her, but even that was taken from him when Gran’ma arrived and ran him out of the house and onto the porch. He stood staring at the closed door, his heart in his throat at the thought of what could be happening on the other side of it. He heard Catherine crying behind him as Gran’pa loaded her into the wagon to take her, Henry, and Sissy back to their place for the remainder of the day.

  “I wanna stay with Pa—” Henry said, tears very close in his voice as well, but Janson did not even turn around. Elise—Elise needed him, but there was nothing he could do for her.

  He tried to pray as he heard the wagon creak away from the house, Gran’pa calling to the mules, and both children setting into loud wails, but the prayers would not come. He knew his God, and he knew his God knew him—but words seemed insufficient to give voice to all that was going on inside of him.

  Stan strode up onto the porch, looked at him for a moment, then simply said, “I took the mule back to the barn.”

  Janson nodded. There was no need for words between the two of them. They both had the same concern, one for a wife, the other for a sister.

  Stan stayed with him, leaning in silence against the support for the porch roof. After a time that seemed to stretch into forever, the door opened a narrow space and Gran’ma looked out at them.

  “You boys draw me some water,” she said, then lifted her kind eyes to Janson. “There ain’ gonna be no baby this time.” Her voice was soft, consoling, but Janson could feel no comfort, just a burning stab of pain through him.

  “Is Elise all right?” He tried to push past the old woman, to enter the house, but she held him back.

  “It ain’ over yet.” Her restraining hand on his chest felt like an iron wall between him and Elise.

  “But, I want t’ see her—”

  “No—” Gran’ma shook her head, blocking the doorway with her own squat, rounded body. “This is woman’s concern.”

  She accepted the bucket of water Stan brought.

  “But—” The door closed before Janson could get out more than the one word, and he leaned his head against the splintery wood and closed his eyes, his heart on the other side of that barrier.

  When it was over and Gran’ma let him in the house, Elise lay in their bed, tears brightening her blue eyes and wetting her cheeks. Janson knelt at the side of the bed and brought her hand to his cheek, wetting it with his own tears.

  “Don’t cry—” she begged softly. “I can’t stand it if you cry.”

  “Are you all right?” He pressed her palm to his lips and kissed it, closing his eyes for a moment then opening them to search her face.

  “I’ll be all right—I—I’m sorry about the baby. I know you—”

  “All I want is you and Henry and Catherine—”

  “I tried so hard. It—”

  “No—” He closed his eyes again, burying his face against her palm, crying all the harder out of the worry for her, but not wanting her to see his tears. “You’re all that matters—”

  “There’ll be more babies—”

  “She can have a whole houseful,” Gran’ma said, moving closer to the bed. “It jus’ happens sometime. Most women’ll lose a baby one time or another. There ain’t nothin’ causes it, it jus’ happens. It’s for th’ best. It’s God’s will.”r />
  Elise cried in his arms that night until Henry woke in the next room and came to their bed, pulling on the quilt and saying, “Don’t cry, Mama, it’ll be all right—” softly before Janson picked him up and tucked him into bed between them, then Janson lay there and watched his wife and son drift off to sleep in the darkness, finding himself wondering at the reasons for God’s will.

  With spring came work, hard work with seemingly no end, plowing, planting, later chopping the cotton to remove the weeds and thin out the cotton plants, running around the rows with the plow then going back to bust the middles and uproot any weeds still there, poisoning the fields to keep the insects from destroying the plants. The days went from long before light to sometimes long after dark. Life and survival depended on the cotton growing in the red fields. Money enough would have to be made from the sale of the crop to pay off their charge at the store, pay Mr. Stubblefield for the cow they had bought on credit, and still see them through the winter until another crop could be planted and the entire process begin all over again.

  As the days passed, Elise watched the maturing cotton plants, knowing that there lay their hope for the future. There were vegetables from the garden, milk from their own cow, eggs from chickens Janson had taken in trade for work. Hunger no longer threatened daily, but worry did not end. Everything depended on the cotton crop, a crop that could be wiped out by storm, or by any act of God, man, or nature, hopes that could be dashed by a drop in the price of cotton when the crop was harvested.

  Elise had become pregnant again, and she and Janson welcomed it after the loss of the baby in February, but Elise worried all the more—she knew she could never bear to lose this child as she had the last.

  By the last week of June, the cotton crop was lush in the fields, the weather warm and clear. There was talk at Stubblefield’s small store, and among people leaving the small Baptist church there in the country on Sundays—times were getting better. President Hoover had proposed a moratorium on war debts to shore up the troubled European economy, with an immediate impact felt in the United States. Everyone had wanted the President to do something, to take some action that would help to pull the country out of the Depression, and it seemed that he was doing something at last.

  “Times are gettin’ better—” one farmer after another said, as did the storekeeper, the minister, the neighboring sharecropper’s wife.

  Everyone praised President Hoover. The stock market rose and confidence tried to raise its head—times were getting better.

  Laying-by came, and with it a lessening of work on the farms. Cotton crops stood tall in the red fields, waiting only for time so that the bolls would burst open and the picking could begin. There was nothing to do now but wait, hope, pray—and worry.

  Elise knew that Janson could not sit idle, any more than could any of the farmers in the county. He began to clear another field for planting the next year, hoping for a bigger crop, more money, a way to get them off of Stubblefield’s land and onto land of their own—and Elise knew the dream had to seem farther from him than ever, just as she knew he dreamed it often, just as he always had. He finished the repairs on the house and barn. He worked cutting trees and pulling up stumps. He walked, and he worried. Now time had the upper hand. There was nothing more he could do but wait and see what the hours, the weeks and months of work behind a plow or over a hoe would bring to them.

  Elise often found Janson on the porch in the late afternoons, staring across the acres of cotton plants. Their entire life lay in those fields, in the success of that crop, in the price of cotton, in the hours of work ahead for Janson and Stan and even Sissy.

  They bought sparingly on credit, doing everything they could to survive on the things they could produce themselves. Credit was a necessity for them, as it was for the other sharecropping families, until the cotton came in, but Elise knew Janson watched every penny charged as if it might be his last. He did not like debt, and Elise knew that he worried himself constantly over every cent—“Credit’s what kills most sharecroppers,” he told Elise, words his father had often told him. Credit ate up what little profit there might be from the sharecropper’s half of the year’s work, leaving little to nothing for the winter months ahead when no charge could be run because there was no crop in the ground. They charged so little: soda, sugar, salt, kerosene—only what was necessary—but the bill mounted up, a bill that would have to be settled before they would see any money from the sale of the cotton.

  Stubblefield’s prices at the store he ran for his sharecroppers and for other small farmers in the area were the highest they had ever paid, higher even than those in the stores in the mill village, but no one else would give them a charge. Even considering Stubblefield’s prices, Elise knew the bill could not grow at the rate it seemed to be growing. It was being padded by Stubblefield. She was certain of it, as was Janson, but there was nothing either could do to stop it.

  “We’re ’croppin’ his land,” Janson said bitterly when she brought up the subject. “He can do pretty much what he wants, an’ there ain’t nothin’ we can do about it.”

  The days of laying by crawled along. Gran’ma visited sometimes, bringing Aunt Rachel and at times even the annoying presence of Aunt Belle and Aunt Maggie. Gran’pa or Uncle Wayne sometimes came to help in clearing land that Janson was determined to plant the next year, and sometimes Janson or Stan went to help with work they had to do. It seemed as if laying by would never end. No one looked forward to the aching backs and bleeding fingers of picking cotton, but everyone needed the money the crop might bring. Sharecropping had always been a bad business, and the Depression had made it worse. Selling this crop at a good price and finding better times next year seemed all that anyone could look forward to—and everyone was praying for those better times.

  It was a hot, still day when Janson and Stan went to help Gran’pa repair the roof on the old barn on his place. Elise, Sissy, and the children went along to sit on the front porch with Gran’ma, and later to help with the supper they would all share that night after the men were done with their work. Elise sat on the porch shelling peas into a dishpan in her lap, watching Henry and Catherine play in the yard with two of Wayne and Rachel’s young grandsons, and a big, clumsy puppy from one of Gran’pa’s hunting dogs. Elise had been nauseated earlier in the morning, but was feeling better now, past the time when morning sickness should have bothered her.

  Gran’ma was in a comfortable mood, talking of her youth, of long-ago memories of a South in the midst of war when she had been a girl, of a father killed in battle, of men in gray uniforms, and men in blue who had given her nightmares. She talked of children she had borne, the many who had died. Of Janson’s parents and Janson as a small boy. Of her people and stories that had come from a long past before her.

  The sun was warm, the air still, and only the sounds of insects, the children’s laughter, and the puppy’s yaps, competed with Gran’ma’s voice. Occasionally Elise could hear the sound of the men’s voices from the barn, hammers driving nails through tin, the barking of Gran’pa’s hunting dogs, the sound of a car, a truck or wagon passing along the road. Cotton grew dense and green in the fields nearby, stretching as far as the eye could see.

  Gran’ma seemed to start up from her rocker even before Elise heard the sound—something striking tin, a horrible cry, and the sound of something hitting the ground. Gran’ma was off the porch and running as fast as her age and size would allow toward the barn, toward the sound of the fall, and toward the cry they all knew had been Janson’s voice.

  Elise slung the dishpan from her lap, sending peas skittering across the wooden flooring and into the dust of the front yard. She jumped from the porch, ignoring the steps and her pregnancy, and ran after Gran’ma, quickly passing the old woman. Her heart in her throat, unmindful of the child she carried who had just begun to change her body, she ran, her mind blank of all things except—dear God, don’t let it be Janson. Som
eone had fallen from the barn’s high roof—don’t let it be Janson. It had been his cry—but, don’t let it be Janson.

  Gran’pa lay on the ground, his face turned up toward the sky he loved, one arm twisted beneath him at an impossible angle. His head was turned to one side, and his eyes closed. Janson was descending the wooden ladder, taking two rungs at a time, his hands and body shaking so badly that the wood quaked against the side of the barn. Stan was close behind.

  Elise stopped, staring in horror at Gran’pa, at the angle of his neck, at the arm twisted beneath him—at Janson, bending over him for a moment, then looking up at her with hurt and sickness in his eyes.

  Gran’ma reached her side, and a small cry escaped the older woman. Elise turned to see her eyes widen in shock and disbelief.

  Gran’ma took a step forward, one hand to her mouth, then she fainted at Elise’s feet.

  The little house lay quiet and still in the hours after the funeral. Deborah, alone, moved from room to room, touching first one thing then another, remembering her husband, remembering the children they had borne only to bury hours, days, weeks, years after life had been given them. Tom was gone. Of the twelve children he had given her, only five still lived—Tom and seven of her babies gone, all buried in the red Alabama clay.

  And she wanted to be gone as well.

  Deborah knew she could stay no longer in this house where she had loved her husband, where she had raised her children. The house was not hers; the land was not hers. It belonged to Mr. Owen, who would now let his youngest grandson farm it—it had been Deborah’s for as long as Tom lived.

  Mr. Owen had told them that often enough through the years, and Deborah had always found comfort in the words, for she had never imagined a day when Tom would no longer live. He had produced a crop on this land each year for more years than she could remember. He had worked it, sweated over it, getting only half of the return on what he had grown—but it had never been his, and it was not Deborah’s now. She would have Tom’s share, if any, of the crop already in the fields, after the store credit was paid and the pickers’ wages covered, if Janson and Wayne could not pick these fields in addition to their own—she would have so little left to face the world on alone, just the furniture, a couple of hogs, some chickens.