Through a Glass, Darkly

by Charlotte Miller

  His manners and behavior were for the most part acceptable, and were the best she could manage from him, as were those of her daughters. His speech was very much like Janson’s when he did not pay particular attention to it, which was most of the time, unless she was near; but most of the children in the town talked much as he did. They had little, but few families in Pine had much more, and he and the girls were dressed as well as they possibly could be on what Janson brought home from the WPA, and on what she could make from sewing. His clothes were old, but clean and neatly patched, as were hers, Janson’s, the girls’, and Stan’s, and most everyone else she knew in their part of town the past few years—the Depression had not affected the Sanders alone, after all.

  He was one-quarter Cherokee, but had been reared to be proud of that blood, told the stories that Nell Sanders had raised her son on from the time he had been in the cradle, and Henry could now recite those tales almost as well as his father—but such were the things that children teased about, skin that was darker and a look unlike their own. Henry was proud, and teasing would not sit well with him—but to not talk of it?

  Girls—but he was only ten; did boys start to think about girls so young? She could remember her own brothers tormenting each other into fights with teasing about one girl or another—but to not be willing to talk about it?

  “What’s wrong, Henry? You know you can tell me.”

  “Nothing’s wrong, Mama,” he answered, then changed the subject. “Can I go on? I promised to help Mrs. McClarey hang curtains.”

  Elise sighed. She knew she would get nothing out of him. He was just like his father, she thought. Well, let his father see what he can do with him tonight.

  “Go on—but come straight home right after. No playing. Your father will want to talk to you.”

  “I know.” Henry seemed to sigh without making a sound or a movement. “I’ll be home in a little while.”

  Elise watched him cut across the street, after waiting for a rattling truck to pass, and hurry down a way before cutting down a side street. Mrs. McClarey lived only a few houses down from them. She was an elderly widow woman with no grandchildren, and she often plied children from the neighborhood with treats of homemade cookies or cake in exchange for simple chores to be done at her house, mainly, Elise knew, just to have their company.

  Elise reached Main Street and turned her steps toward the downtown area. She wanted to check at the drygoods store for the new fabrics that would have come in on the truck from Birmingham that morning. Besides, she needed a spool of blue thread and a paper of pins to finish the dress she had been working on for the past several days for a woman who had already paid her to make two others. The small store near her house sold thread and pins, but the thread was so old that it often broke even when sewing by hand, and thread, like pins, needles, and everything else, was cheaper in town.

  She continued to worry about Henry as she walked, but all thought of Henry’s predicament left Elise as she crossed the street when she reached downtown and saw Buddy Eason standing just at the edge of the road, blocking the way of a young woman as she tried to get into a car.

  It was the first time Elise had seen him since the night he had tried to incite the mob to hang Janson for the crime he and his friends had committed. He had never spent one day in jail for what he had done, or for the burning of downtown, or even for Mr. Brown’s death—a cold chill moved down her spine. He was free, had been free since then, and was back in town now, roaming the streets—free to do anything he pleased to anyone he chose with the full protection of the Eason name, influence, and money. And Buddy Eason, she well knew, could be capable of anything.

  “Come on—you know you want it,” he was saying as Elise drew near enough to hear his words. He blocked the girl’s car door with one knee, keeping her from opening it enough to enter the vehicle and escape him.

  “Leave me alone. I’ve already told you—” The girl’s hair was short and black, reminding Elise more of the bobs that had been in style ten years before than the way most women were wearing their hair nowadays. She was small, not even as tall as Buddy’s shoulder, and looked to be about nineteen or twenty—Elise had seen her in town before, had done sewing for a relative of hers, and thought her name was Peggy.

  “You know I could make you feel real good—” Buddy reached out a hand as if to touch the girl’s breast through her dress, not seeming to care that they were on the busiest part of Main Street, and she drew a hand back to slap him. He caught her wrist before her hand could make contact with his face and grinned at her as she jerked it away.

  A man walking past on the sidewalk had seen what happened, and he hurried on now—Elise saw the man look away just before he had quickened his pace, and she knew the girl had seen as well. They all knew Buddy was safe to harass her or anyone at will, here on Main Street or anywhere else in town. People were just as afraid of him now as they had been years before—Elise had seen it in the man’s eyes as he had hurried past her. Anyone who opposed Buddy would suffer, but not Buddy. Never Buddy—and Buddy Eason knew that most of all.

  The girl jerked at the car door, making Buddy laugh.

  “You sure look good when you’re mad,” he said to her, his eyes moving over her now openly there on the street. “Now, why don’t we—” But he glanced up as Elise came even with them on the sidewalk, and his eyes met hers in a cold, hate-filled stare. The girl took the opportunity to pull the car door open as he was distracted, and slip inside.

  Buddy did not seem to notice as the car cranked up and backed away into the street, almost striking another car. He turned his eyes toward the departing car and the girl he had been harassing, then brought them back to Elise, and Elise found her steps quickening, her hurry to be away from him no less than that of the escaped girl.

  She glanced back at Buddy, to find his eyes still on her—there had been a horrid promise in that stare.

  “Hey, In’jun Henry, I hear the reason your daddy’s in Eason County is because they ran him off the reservation,” Reuben yelled at Henry on a Sunday afternoon in mid-March, standing at the edge of the ballfield where Henry had spent much of the afternoon after church. “I hear tell he was the worst of all the In’juns they had there—”

  Henry had been playing ball with Isaac and other boys and was only just now headed home. Isaac had left earlier, his sister Gloria having come to the ballfield to fetch him to supper, just as Henry knew he would have supper waiting when he reached home—Teddy was there, along with three other boys who often hung around him and Reuben when they were at school. They had been waiting for him to pass, waiting for him safely away from the school grounds in a time and place where no one else would be present.

  “Is that the reason he can’t do much but rake leaves now, reliefer?” Teddy asked. “Cause he’s just a damn drunk Indian?”

  “I seen the red son-of-a-bitch picking up trash in the cemetery,” one of the other boys said. “He had this big patch on the seat of his overalls, looked like some damn tramp out there—”

  “You know why all you Indians and the other coloreds are so dark, don’t you, Henry—God made you that way to mark you so everybody’d know you ain’t no good—”

  “You better shut your damn trap,” Henry said, stopped now before them. He clenched his fists at his side, staring at Reuben. He knew he was outnumbered five to one, but if they said one more word he would not be able to stop himself.

  “Make me, you red-In’jun nigger—” The words had barely left Reuben’s lips when he shoved Henry backwards, and suddenly Henry was on him, hitting him hard in the stomach before the other boys could descend on him.

  Several held him down, several pounded at his body, even as he fought to free himself. There were boys all over him, everywhere he turned, hitting him in the face, the side, the nose, his eye, in his stomach. It lasted only moments, and then two men from a nearby house dragged the boys off h
im and Henry tried to struggle to his feet as the other boys ran away.

  “You all right, son?” one man asked, taking him by an arm to help him stand.

  “I ain’t your son.” Henry jerked out of the man’s grasp and got to his feet on his own, then left the ballfield and made his way into the street, wiping his bleeding nose against his shirt sleeve.

  Elise almost dropped a plate when Henry entered the kitchen that evening. His nose had been bleeding, and dried blood now crusted over his upper lip and stained the front of his shirt. One eye was almost swollen shut, his lower lip puffy, his clothes ripped, covered with grass stains, dried blood, and red dirt. She crossed the room quickly to him, but he jerked away from her the moment she touched his arm.

  “Henry—oh, my God—”

  Pure anger was in his eyes as he met her gaze, and he pulled away and went out onto the back porch, leaving the door open. Elise tried to follow, but Janson took hold of her arm, rising to his feet from where he had been sitting at the table, and held her back. “Leave him be,” he said quietly, his eyes on her for a moment before they moved back to look at the boy through the open rear door, seeing him now leaning against the support for the porch roof.

  “But, he’s hurt—”

  “He’s mad as hell worse’n he’s hurt—let me see about him.”

  “But—”

  “No,” Janson said. “Let me see about him.”

  Henry did not raise his eyes as Janson walked out on the porch. Janson took up the bucket that rested on the shelf by the door, a dipper and ragged towel beside it, and went out into the yard to draw water from the well, looking back toward the porch and the boy who was now standing staring across the distance with his eyes on Janson.

  He returned to the porch to set the bucket on the old straight chair there, then dipped the clean handkerchief from his pocket into the cold water and reached up to wash the blood from Henry’s face, but the boy jerked back, refusing his touch. For a moment Janson met a gaze as green as his own, and an anger that was familiar, and, when he tried to wipe the blood from the boy’s face again a moment later, Henry allowed it, though his eyes, even the one almost swollen shut, never once left his father’s face.

  Janson dunked the now blood-stained handkerchief back into the water, squeezed it out, then held it to Henry’s nose, tilting the boy’s head back to try to stop the nosebleed, the boy’s eyes continuing to meet his over the cloth and the hand that pinched his nostrils.

  “How many was there?” Janson asked at last.

  Henry did not answer, then a mumbled response came from behind the cloth held against his nose. “Five.”

  Janson nodded, taking the handkerchief away to see if the nosebleed had stopped, then, seeing the seep of blood continuing, he wet the handkerchief again and pinched the boy’s nose and tilted his head back again. “Looks t’ me like it ain’t too smart t’ get int’ a fight when you’re s’ bad outnumbered,” he said, meeting the anger in the boy’s gaze. “They start it?”

  “Yeah—” Not “yes, sir” as the boy would have said only the space of a few months before.

  “An’, you had t’ finish it.”

  “Yeah.”

  Janson knew that there was more to this than the fights of children. He could see it in the boy’s eyes. Could see it, and something more. “What started it?” he asked at last, as he had intended from the moment he had stopped Elise from following the boy out onto the porch.

  Henry’s eyes, the one swollen until Janson knew he could little see through it, and the other open and angry, met him steadily. The boy did not answer, but he also did not turn his eyes away.

  “What started it?” Janson asked again, lowering the handkerchief to stare at the boy—his face was so beaten, the lower lip swollen until it no longer held its shape, one eye almost battered shut, swelling now to the browline, and a trickle of blood beginning to seep again from his nose. “This cain’t keep goin’ on, Henry. It’s got t’ stop—now, I want t’ know what started it.”

  “It wasn’t nothing—”

  “I want t’ know.” His voice rose in anger, in an impotent rage at something he could not identify. His hand tightened on the wet handkerchief until he felt the water seep between his fingers and run down across the back of his fist.

  “It wasn’t nothing,” Henry said, his voice rising as well.

  “Henry—”

  “I said it wasn’t nothing!” The boy pulled away and ran off the porch, down into the back yard, and across it toward the darkness of the woods until he was swallowed up by the shadows at the edge of the pines.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cassandra Price sat behind a typewriter at the mill office early on the second Monday afternoon in July of 1939. There was a blank sheet of paper rolled into the machine before her, and a hand-written letter in old Mr. Eason’s cramped-up handwriting that she was supposed to be transcribing, but she could not keep her mind on the work. She had taken her lunch break early today, taking Grace Taylor’s usual time as her own with little warning to the older woman, as soon as she had seen Buddy Eason leaving the mill that morning. Buddy had a habit of taking off in the middle of the day not to return until well into evening, if at all, and Cassandra had made a point of leaving this morning at the same moment, catching up with him on the front steps of the mill office to loop her arm through his, pressing her breast against him.

  “Hey, Buddy, how about taking a girl out to eat today?” she asked, staying close against him. In the two months she had been at the mill, he had been all over her whenever she’d given him the slightest opportunity, and she had done her best to keep him at arms-length. It had been an interesting game, but she was tired of the game now.

  She had only taken the job typing so she could get close to him in the first place. Keeping him at arms length now was not part of the plan.

  They had not even made it out of the mill parking lot that morning. He pulled her toward his grandfather’s Cadillac, then got to the point there in the back seat of the old man’s car with little preliminaries. It took him little time, but that did not matter; he had accomplished what she wanted with the sound of the mill machinery to accompany them. Cassandra had found no pleasure in it, but pleasure had been no part of the reason she had taken him. He had finished inside of her and that was the only thing she had wanted in the first place.

  If she had her way, Buddy Eason would be a father from that grunting little performance.

  Cassandra smiled as she stared at the blank sheet of paper rolled into the typewriter before her. Buddy had money and power and the Eason name, and he could get her out of this mill village. He would marry her once she was pregnant; she had no doubt of that—and, if he did not agree to do the right thing by her, she would simply cry out her story to his grandfather. Walter Eason would never allow his first great-grandchild to be born out of wedlock. Buddy would be made to marry her, whether he wanted to or not—after all, that was the way the world worked, Cassandra told herself.

  That was how her own mother had gotten her father to marry her.

  Buddy had driven away and left her at the mill not long after they finished, and Cassandra had cleaned up as best she could in the women’s lavatory before she returned to her desk. Old Grace had looked at her as if she knew exactly what went on in the parking lot—the old woman’s stare was somehow unnerving. She looked as if she thought there was something that ought to be said, and, clearing her throat and rising to her feet, old Grace came around her desk to stand beside Cassandra where she sat at her typewriter.

  “Cassandra, you know you’re a pretty girl,” Grace Taylor said. “There is no reason you have to cheapen yourself just to get a man to pay attention to you.”

  Cassandra stared up at her. “One of these days I’m going to own this place,” she said at last, lifting her chin as she stared into the old woman’s eyes, “and, when I do, the firs
t thing I’m going to do is put your fat ass out in the street.”

  She stared at the surprise that came to the old woman’s face, then turned back at last to the work before her.

  Buddy Eason stood in the lawyer’s office on Main Street the following Friday evening. He had been sent here to take care of business, but the business was completed now. He had signed his name and pushed papers about, which was all that it seemed he ever did anymore—but he continued to stay, even though the lawyer’s office was now open long beyond their normal closing. He knew old man Porter would never dare ask him to leave, though Porter’s secretary and his partner had both left long before, and the heavy-set Negro woman who cleaned the offices at night was already at work.

  Buddy watched her, this very dark-skinned woman Porter had called Esther. She was mopping, moving her mop bucket back and away from them, as if she were certain they were about to leave. Buddy intentionally tracked the area she had just finished mopping, feeling a touch of satisfaction go through him as she had to go back to mop it again, and again a few minutes later as he tracked the area once more.

  He lifted his foot and placed in on the edge of the mop bucket as she started to move it away, realizing that she knew now what he was doing, and that she had no intention of removing his newly tracked footprints again. He continued to talk to Porter, discussing his grandfather’s plans for the land he had just bought, but he also watched the woman—she was angry; Buddy knew that, though he knew she would never dare to show it. He could see it in her dark brown eyes as they met his briefly, and even in her stiffened posture as she moved away and began to mop a fresh area of the floor with a mop she could not now rinse out for the presence of his foot resting at the top edge of her bucket. She had turned her back to him, and that made him angry, for he could no longer see her face, or her reaction to what he was about to do.

  He lifted his foot from the edge of the mop bucket and placed his toe against it, then pushed, intending to spill it over, but it slid slightly on the floor instead, sloshing the contents up against its sides as it went, then again as he tried once more. At last he placed his foot again at the top and tried to tip it. He had intended it to spill out sideways, flooding over the office floor so that she would have to clean it up, but it turned instead, rolling back on its round bottom edge to pour out warm water and soapsuds over his shoes and the lower part of his trouser legs, then it almost tripped him, making him catch hold of the nearby chair as his foot slipped downward and into the bucket itself.