Through a Glass, Darkly

by Charlotte Miller

  And her faith.

  Belle would move in with Olive, and Maggie would live with Wayne and Rachel. There was only Deborah with no place to go. She could turn to one of the grandchildren—but she did not want to be a burden. She had always hated old people who had to live off the charity of others, unable to fend for themselves—but, now, with a start, she realized that she was one of these. Just another old woman with no home of her own, nothing but a burden to her family.

  She turned there in the kitchen and found Elise behind her. Deborah had thought she was alone in the house, but Elise was there, looking at her from just within the doorway.

  “I remember the first morning after Janson brought me here from Georgia,” Elise said quietly, moving into the room, looking at the eating table. “You made me sit down here and eat breakfast even though I didn’t want to.”

  Deborah looked at her, then her eyes strayed to the other memories around her, to the years she had spent here in this house, between these walls and under this roof that had never been her own. Her eyes touched on the marks, smudged and faint now, on the frame of the door that led out onto the rear porch of the house, marks Tom had made measuring Sissy as she had grown, and, beside them, fainter still, traces of Janson as he had gone from boy to man. Memories marked into wood that belonged to someone else.

  She closed her eyes and turned away.

  “What will you do now?” Elise asked, standing still across the room.

  Deborah glanced at her briefly, but could think of nothing to say. She did not know what she would do. She could turn to Tom, Jr. in Atlanta, but he had not worked in more than a year now, not since the mills had closed down, and already had too many mouths to feed. Wayne and Rachel had offered, as had Olive and Cyrus—but Wayne and Rachel did not need another person on their hands; they had already four sons, two daughters-in-law, and three grandchildren in the house; and Deborah could not bear the thought of living out her remaining days to the sounds of Olive’s carping and Cyrus’s daily reminders that she was living on his charity.

  “You can come stay with us,” Elise said, surprising Deborah with the words. Deborah had thought that Janson might offer, just as she had also known that he hadn’t the room or the ability to feed another person. Already Elise’s brother slept in the loft of the barn because there was not enough room in the small house, and there was Sissy, Henry, and little Catherine, and Elise was in the family way again. Deborah could not put herself on his hands as well. He had enough—too much—already.

  She had never expected to hear the words from Elise, however.

  “Janson tell you t’ ask me?” she asked, then immediately regretted the words. She knew the girl was trying to be kind, doing what she thought she ought to do, what she thought was expected of her, though Deborah also knew that Elise did not want an old woman on her and Janson’s hands any more than did anyone else. She could see it in the girl’s eyes—there was no place for old women in the world anymore, Deborah told herself. The world had gotten too wide somewhere along the way, so wide there wasn’t room left for old women or anyone else—wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, she quoted to herself silently.

  “He didn’t have to tell me,” Elise said. “I know it’s how he feels, and it’s how I feel as well. You’ve been there for us so many times.”

  But Deborah shook her head. “You got enough on you already.” She could not make herself another burden for Janson, one more mouth for him to feed, another person to crowd into the already-crowded two rooms. “I won’t add even more.”

  “Where else would you go?” Elise asked, and Deborah stopped short as she started to turn away—where else would she go? There was no place she wanted to go, no place she belonged, no place that belonged to her—that had ever belonged to her, she thought as she stared around the room. “You belong with us. That’s what family’s for,” Elise finished. And Deborah realized, in all her life, that was the one thing she had always had.

  Janson stood in the dark recesses of Stubblefield’s store late on a Thursday afternoon after the ginning was done, looking over the old man’s shoulder as Stubblefield sat working over a long column of figures at the desk before him—Janson’s charges for the year at the store, the money owed for the cow, the calculations of what was left of the half of the crop Janson was due. It seemed to take forever for the old man to add the figures, to take from Janson’s share what was owed, and Janson watched every scratch of the stubby pencil. A radio came on near the front of the store as Stubblefield’s daughter, Nonnie, tuned it. There was a run on gold, the radio announcer said, people hoarding it, afraid President Hoover would abandon the gold standard as England had done. Things were getting worse instead of better. Banks were collapsing in record numbers, bankruptcy was sought more and more, businesses were cutting back hours, wages were reduced to keep as many on the payroll as possible—and winter still lay ahead, Janson thought, watching Stubblefield at his long column of figures.

  He ticked over in his mind all the preparations they had made for the months ahead. Sweet potatoes, cabbages, and white potatoes buried in hills or trenches to last for months. Dry peas, corn, pumpkin, and okra. The share of hog meat Janson would take as payment for helping in the slaughter for Stubblefield, for his Uncle Wayne, and for another farmer who had asked. Chickens and eggs, milk from the cow. Home canned foods Elise, Gran’ma, and Sissy had put up. Sauerkraut, pickled beans, and chow-chow waiting for use. Turnip and mustard greens that would be growing throughout the months ahead in the garden. There would be food for the winter—please, God, if the winter weren’t too bad. Hunger would not be at their backs this year as it had been the last.

  But they still needed money. The baby was due in January. That would mean eight people in the family, not only to feed, but to clothe and to see well through the winter. Henry was growing out of his shoes; Elise’s were ragged, and Janson’s in such bad shape that the soles had to be padded heavily just to be able to walk in them. A charge could not be run at the store in the winter, not again until a new crop was in the ground, and there were things they would have to have that only money or trade could buy them—sugar, thread, soda, kerosene, so much more. If only he were on his own land—

  If there was not half the crop to lose in exchange for the use of pitiful, hilly, rock-strewn land. If there was no store charge that would have to be run in order to survive—how well they could make it. His father had always told him how easily a sharecropper could come out owing at the end of the year, his entire half of the crop taken to cover his bill at the store, and still more owed, forever tied to the land of another, working himself deeper and deeper in debt each year. Credit was something a man was better not to use unless he had to—but he had had to, and each scratch of the pencil clutched in Stubblefield’s hand only reminded him of his father’s words.

  Lester Stubblefield turned in his chair and looked up at Janson. The old man tapped the paper before him with one grimy fingernail and glanced back down at the figures again. Janson did not like the look on his face. “Wish we could’a sold at a better price, boy—it’d ’a helped,” Stubblefield said.

  Janson looked at him, waiting.

  “After my half for use ’a th’ land, my mules, plows and all, an’ th’ cotton seed, and after th’ cow I sold you on credit and your bill here at th’ store—I do wish we could’a sold at a better price, boy—”

  “How much?” Janson asked, hearing the impatience in his own voice. “How much do I have left?”

  Stubblefield looked at him for a moment then turned slowly back to the desk, to the small stack of money they had received for Janson’s cotton crop. Janson had been so careful with the store charges, so cautious to buy on credit only what was necessary. There had to be money left, money for all the work and sweat that they had endured throughout the year—all that cotton, those fields beautiful and green, beautiful and white, the hours upon h
ours of picking, the bleeding fingers and shoulders aching from the weight of pick sacks. There had to be money left.

  Stubblefield turned back to him with a few coins which he dropped into Janson’s open palm. “Price ’a cotton’ll be better next year, boy,” Stubblefield was saying. “You cleared that new field t’ plant, and next year you won’t have th’ cow t’ pay for. You should do better next year, even better the year after that.”

  But Janson was not hearing. He could only stare at the coins in his hand, stare and think—this is all. After all that work, after all this year—this is all. Winter was coming on. Elise would be having the baby. There were things the family needed, shoes for Henry, so much more—and, this was all. All that work, all that hope—and this was all.

  “You’re even with me ’til next year, boy. You’ll get that crop in th’ ground and you can start your charge here again—it’ll be better; you watch and see.”

  Damn you, Janson thought, but clenched the few coins in his hand and left the store without a word.

  Chapter Ten

  The baby came in the last week of January, 1932, a small, angry, black-haired little girl born on a night so fierce that a quilt had to be hung over the door to block some of the chill wind that whistled through the cracks and crevices. Judith Louise came into life screaming at the top of her small lungs, seeming outraged at the world in which she found herself.

  It was a long labor and a difficult birth, and Janson knew that Elise was physically and emotionally drained in the weeks afterward, taking longer to recover this time than from either of the two previous births or the miscarriage. It was a cold, hard winter with eight people crowded into the two rooms as Stan finally had to make a pallet for himself by Henry’s bed as the worst of the weather descended. Janson worried for the children, and for Elise, over the cold winter nights as the frigid wind blew under the house and up through the loose, ill-fitting floorboards, coming through spaces in the walls that no amount of chinking could fill.

  He and Stan had beaten the cotton stalks down in the fields in the early part of January, and had plowed them under because of the boll weevils, as well as to allow the plants to rot in preparing the land for the new year’s cotton crop. Janson had broken up the new field he had cleared, and had already gone back to plow it again, though it soon looked to be packed as tight as if it had never been plowed in the first place.

  He made baskets and walked the countryside selling them, worked clearing fields when someone would hire him, did odd jobs, and took whatever was offered in trade—there never seemed enough he could do as the cold days passed. He knew they were on their own until spring came, until they could get another cotton crop into the ground. No charge could be run at the store in the cold months. Now they had only what they had stored for the winter to see them through. If they had misjudged, if they had not planned well enough, they could all be left hungry—that thought was never far from Janson’s mind. He had seen too many other people in the same desperate straits. There did not seem to be a sharecropping family in the county who had fared well from the previous year’s cotton crop.

  But, then again, sharecroppers never fared well.

  When spring finally came, Janson and Stan worked from early in the mornings until late in the evenings to get the cotton crop into the ground. Sissy helped distribute the guano and plant the fuzzy cotton seed, and Elise soon joined her, which Janson objected to loudly.

  “It’s my crop, too,” she told him, staring at him stubbornly when he demanded that she return to the house.

  “I won’t have you—”

  “Don’t you tell me what you won’t have, Janson Sanders,” she said, stamping her bare foot on the clay ground. “I’m your wife, not a child you can tell what to do!”

  It almost tore his heart out to watch her in the fields, bent over a hoe as she learned to thin out the cotton plants—Elise Whitley chopping cotton for the first time in her life.

  Kin came to visit as Decoration Day and Homecoming at the little Holiness church Janson had grown up in approached that year, and Janson could only hope the kin would leave once Sunday was over. The prior year his Aunt Grace and Grace’s widowed daughter, Jeanette, had stayed three weeks, and left only after Elise served them a dinner of nothing but scorched potatoes and butterbeans that had been cooked in too little water until they were dried out and brown at the edges, then prepared the same thing for supper that night, and threatened to do it again for the next day’s dinner.

  “You shouldn’t ’a done that,” Janson told her, though he too was glad to see them leave.

  This year Grace was back, and Jeanette with her, and Janson was wondering how long it would be before Elise started scorching potatoes and beans again—but at least his family was better off than they might have been. His Uncle Wayne had Gran’ma’s sister, Nancy, one of Nancy’s grandsons and his wife, and all five of their children sleeping on pallets at his house.

  Janson rose early on Saturday morning with the intention of getting to the church cemetery and cleaning off the Sanders graves before anyone else in the family could arrive. He was determined to avoid his cousin, Estelle, his great-aunt Nancy’s daughter. Janson could not remember a single time when he had been able to pull up weeds and spread fresh sand in the cemetery without being under Estelle’s direct supervision—she never did any of the work, but just stood with her hands on her hips and a disapproving look on her round face, telling him what he was doing wrong. Sometimes he thought she would never shut up.

  When she did, it always ended with, “Well, if that’s th’ best you can do.”

  Stan volunteered to go with him this morning, and Gran’ma as well, though Janson told her there was no need. He and Stan could do the work, and would have the graves ready for Sunday morning, but Gran’ma would have none of it.

  “There ain’t been a Decoration Day that I ain’t cleaned off graves, an’ this ain’t gonna be th’ first—you think I’m gonna have Nancy tellin’ everybody Estelle done all th’ work?”

  Several wagons and one Model-T Ford truck were parked at the edge of the cemetery by the time they arrived. Estelle was there, walking among the graves, hands on hips, disapproving look already in place, though the work had not even begun.

  She did not say hello, or exchange any of the typical greetings even a stranger would have thought polite.

  “It’s a shame how ya’ll let these graves go t’ ruin every year,” she said.

  Neither Gran’ma nor Janson responded, though they could have. Janson had cleaned the graves last fall, and again at the end of winter, and he and Stan had been back no more than a month before to pull up weeds that had come up with the spring showers.

  Janson went to work on his parents’ graves, pulling out a few stray weeds as Estelle stood over him, the woman leaving him at last with a final: “Well, if that’s th’ best you can do.” He used the wheelbarrow they had brought to haul sand down from the pile at the edge of the cemetery. He could remember doing this so many times as a child, when his parents were alive, and they had all worked together in cleaning their people’s graves. It was something you did, something you hoped someone would do for you, when your time came to be buried.

  As they did every year, children climbed over the large pile of sand, making the sides collapse, until some of the older folks made them quit. More people were arriving and the day was starting to get hot for May. Janson waved to two cousins he had not seen in years and stopped to visit with them beneath the shade of the old oak tree in the middle of the cemetery. His cousins remembered the syrup cakes stacked with dried apples his mother made every year for dinner on the ground, saying Aunt Nell had always made the best cakes. Other folks stopped to say they sure did miss Sister Nell and Brother Henry, and church singings weren’t the same anymore without Brother Tom’s voice to join in. Aunt Olive stopped to give him a hug and then moved on to talk to Gran’ma.

 
Grace had arrived now, as had Jeannette, although they would do more meddling than bend an elbow to any actual work. Aunt Nancy was there, disagreeing with Gran’ma as to who was buried where in the unmarked graves of long-dead kin at the bottom end of the cemetery. It was the same argument they had every year, caused by some woman who was no relation to them but who had gotten herself buried in the midst of their kinfolks. Aunt Nancy said she was buried in one grave; Gran’ma said it was another, between a distant cousin and a great-aunt who died before Janson was born—there was no agreement to the woman’s name, her cause of death, or why she was buried in the middle of someone else’s family. One year Janson’s Aunt Olive slapped Estelle when the two of them joined in—he had not seen that, but he knew he would pay cash money, if he’d had any, to see it happen again.

  Brother Sim Leverett interrupted the women as their voices began to rise. He had been the preacher at the church when Janson was a boy, but had moved on years before Janson’s parents died. Brother Leverett had come back to help preach both Henry and Nell Sanders’s funerals, and, more recently, Tom Sanders’s funeral. He would be preaching tomorrow, and Janson was glad to see him a moment later as he shook his hand.

  “Brother Sanders—are we going to be seeing you and your family at Homecoming tomorrow?” Brother Leverett asked.

  “We’ll—” Janson began, but immediately fell silent when women’s voices raised a few graves away, followed by the sound of a slap.