Through a Glass, Darkly

by Charlotte Miller

  “Are you going somewhere?” she asked.

  He did not answer. He yanked the chair that usually rested behind his desk back to its normal position and set the briefcase in its seat, then began to rake things from the desktop into it. The gun was dumped in with everything else, and fear surged through Cassandra as it landed aimed at her belly. She moved around the chair to stand at its other side, then watched Buddy cross the room to the credenza.

  “Are you—” she began again.

  “Yeah, I’m going, if it’s anything to you.”

  “But, where are you going?”

  He did not answer.

  “But—but, you can’t leave—I mean—” Her mind was suddenly panicked. He couldn’t leave. Not now. Not with her pregnant. He had to marry her. That was what was supposed to happen. He had to.

  She stared at his back.

  “Whatever you and your grandfather were fighting about, it can’t be so bad—you need to—”

  “The old man is the first thing I’m going to settle.”

  That made no sense. Buddy was squatting, looking in the credenza for something.

  “But, why—”

  “What does it matter to you?”

  “But, you can’t leave—I—I’m pregnant,” she blurted out. “You’ve got to stay and—”

  “I don’t have to do anything.” He turned to look at her.

  “But, it’s yours; the baby’s yours,” she said, and could hear the desperation in her voice. No, it was not supposed to happen like this.

  “So? What if it is?”

  She could only stare at him as he turned away again. “But, you can’t—you—you have to marry me! You have to! Your grandfather won’t let—”

  “Do you think I’d marry a mill village whore like you?” he asked, and Cassandra was surprised to hear a snort of laughter come out of him. “Do you think the old man would let me marry you, even if I wanted to?” Cassandra stared at him, feeling as if she had been slapped—and suddenly she understood; he never would have married her.

  Those tracks that cut the town in half had decided it after all.

  Cassandra was from the village. Buddy Eason was from town.

  And he would never marry her.

  The memory of something her mother said about a pregnant, unmarried cousin came to her—rather dead and buried than to disgrace the family.

  If Buddy did not marry Cassandra, she knew Helene would put her out the minute she learned Cassandra was pregnant. There was no doubt—better dead and buried, Cassandra told herself. Better dead.

  Cassandra’s eyes moved to the gun lying in the open briefcase before her, and she reached for it almost without thought—better dead. Better not to have people laugh at her and call her trash. She was not trash—she was Cassandra Price—her mother had always said she was better than anyone else living in the village.

  She had been good enough for Buddy Eason to bed.

  She just wasn’t good enough to marry.

  She was crossing the room before she consciously made the decision—better dead. But she would take care of something first.

  When Buddy turned and stood, Cassandra placed the business end of the gun to his crotch—take care of something. Oh, yes.

  Panic came to Buddy’s eyes. He was shoving her away with one hand, grabbing for the gun with the other, when Cassandra Price—who would never be Mrs. Buddy Eason—pulled the trigger.

  Walter Eason was sitting in his car outside the mill, his eyes closed. The window beside him was down, and he leaned against the door, his arm hurting too much to move, too much even to drive himself to the doctor. His left shoulder was dislocated, and he was too old for this, he told himself, too old to go through having it wrenched back into place, too old to scream like a helpless old man—he was a helpless old man, he told himself, and would be a dead old man if it had not been for the small pistol that still rested in his pocket.

  He could hear voices approaching the car and he opened his eyes, for a moment not recognizing the house boss he saw almost every day, much less Janson and Henry Sanders walking at the little man’s side.

  He had told Bickham to take care of them personally.

  “Yes, sir, I will,” Bickham had said, looking surprised. The nervous man was as good as his word.

  He was telling them about the house they had been assigned in the village as they approached Walter’s car.

  “It’s quite sound. We put a new roof—”

  “Bickham—” Walter said, sounding old to his own hearing for the first time. He cleared his throat, and tried again. “Bickham—” and the little man stopped and looked at him just short of the car.

  “Yes, Mr. Eason, are you all right, sir?” He poked at his glasses with one finger, rising up on the balls of his feet, nervous habits that always telegraphed his unease, but right now they did not bother Walter.

  “You don’t need to walk to the house. Get in the car and drive,” Walter said, pushing away from the window. “Janson, young Sanders, get in the backseat. Bickham, there’s something I want you to do after—”

  He had to bite his lip to keep from crying out as pain lanced through his shoulder when he moved, but finally he was on the opposite side of the seat, his back to the door. Bickham looked uncertain, but Walter knew he would do as he had been told. The man got into the car, and it seemed a full minute before the rear doors opened and Janson and Henry Sanders slid in as well.

  Bickham choked the car too much—and then they were moving down the street and Walter could make himself breathe again.

  His gaze settled on young Henry in the backseat—the boy was very much like his father, Walter thought, watching Henry’s eyes move over the interior of the vehicle. Walter could imagine how proud Janson’s father, Henry, would have been if he had lived to see this grandson, how pleased he would be to have him carry on his name—not every man was so lucky.

  Walter knew he had not been.

  He tried to understand what had happened to Buddy over the years. Walter’s grandson had never had to worry about food or shelter or any of the other necessities of life that the man and the boy in that backseat had scraped and fought with. Walter looked at Janson Sanders in his faded dungarees and his shirt that looked as if it had once been a guano sack, at his skin darkened by his ancestry and by exposure to the sun, and at the bleeding lip and bruises that were already beginning to show on his face—it had been struggle itself that Janson Sanders had hammered himself out against over and over again through his life. It had been struggle that had beaten into shape the core of the man he was, a man Walter realized he respected as he did few others.

  Walter looked at the boy sitting at his father’s side, and he could see already some of that same shaping in the boy’s dark face—Henry Sanders would grow up to be a man very much like his father, Walter told himself, into a man Walter knew he would be proud one day to know.

  “Henry, did you know I knew your grandfather?” he found himself asking, bringing the boy’s eyes to him. “He was a good man, your grandfather,” Walter said, nodding his head as he stared into the green eyes. “He was a good man.”

  Janson felt that he was going home, and the feeling surprised him.

  He stood with his son on the street before the house they had been assigned in the mill village as Walter Eason’s car drove away, his eyes on the front door to the three rooms where they would live, and he could remember years before memorizing the details of a house very much like this one, details that he had taken back to Elise to tell her where they would live. He found himself doing the same thing today—she would be glad to be back here, he told himself, just as he was.

  Times were getting better in the county. There would be a decent wage and steady hours, and Walter Eason had said there would be a place for Stan in the mill as well. Electricity would be brought to the village in the m
onths to come, and Janson had already told himself he would buy a radio for Elise—after all these years she would again have some of the things she had given up when she had married him. He had never once heard her complain through that time, even though he realized now that he had not given her one thing he had promised her when she had become his wife—except for their being together and having made a family.

  And they had been happy.

  He would give her the home he had promised, the land he still dreamed of on so many nights, when he could finally make that dream a reality. That was one thing he would not doubt.

  He was only thirty-two years old now and Elise twenty-eight.

  There was still plenty of time to have that dream.

  He looked at Henry where the boy stood beside him, finding him staring at the house still. He started to speak, but Henry spoke first.

  “Pa, what was granpa like?” the boy asked, bringing his eyes to Janson.

  For a moment Janson was silent, trying to think of a few words that could sum up a man’s life. “He knew what it was like to work for a dream, and to be willing to die to have it,” he said at last.

  He watched as his son nodded his head, and he knew that Henry understood.

  About the Author

  Charlotte Miller was born in Roanoke, Alabama, in 1959, and has never lived outside the South. She began writing her Sanders family trilogy while a student at Auburn University, where she received a degree in business administration. Today, she works as a certified public accountant to pay the bills, and writes late into the night because she must. Behold, This Dreamer (2000), Through a Glass, Darkly (2001), and There Is a River (2002) complete her multi-generational saga of the agricultural and cotton mill South. One of her short stories, “An Alabama Christmas,” was included in the bestselling 1999 regional collection, Ordinary & Sacred As Blood: Alabama Women Speak. She is a member of the Georgia Writers and the National League of American Pen Women. She lives in Opelika, Alabama, and has one son, Justin.

  To learn more about Charlotte Miller and Through a Glass, Darkly, visit www.newsouthbooks.com/through-a-glass-darkly.