Behold, This Dreamer

by Charlotte Miller

  Elise cried and she confessed, and Janson told her it was not her fault, that things that had been done could never be undone, and that Alfred would not have wanted her to blame herself for something she could never have foreseen, something she could never have prevented. And, slowly, she began to heal.

  Her days came to revolve around his visits, around whatever time he could find to spend with her. She had rarely left the house since the day of Alfred’s funeral, afraid she would run into Ethan Bennett—he was still free, awaiting trial for the attack on her, and she was terrified. He would never face judge or jury for killing her brother—self-defense they had called it, for there had been too many witnesses to say Alfred had intended to kill the man, too many witnesses to say Bennett had acted only to save his own life. But Elise knew differently. Alfred could have killed no one, not even the man who had attacked her. He had been nothing more than a hot-headed boy. A boy who would now never have the chance to become a man.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind sat a fear that Bennett would come after her again. She was afraid to leave the house, and did so reluctantly only when she had to, avoiding going shopping in town, or for the long walks she had always enjoyed taking. Only when Janson was near did she feel safe, and only gradually did her fears begin to lessen. She built her days around him, waiting for the time when she would hear his tap at the side door, as eager as a child for the simple gifts he would bring her: a penny’s worth of candy from the store, chewing gum, a ribbon, a small basket he had made, a figure he had carved from wood. She would receive him in the sewing parlor at the back of the house, for her mother would not allow him in either of the two front parlors—he might have cotton poisoning on his clothes, or red dirt on his feet, and, even if he did not, he was still a farmhand and only half white, her mother said, and he could never be allowed to forget that. They would sit for hours, talking, listening to the radio, just being together, and it would be Elise who would forget—he was her friend, the one person who had been there for her when she had needed someone the most, and that was all that mattered.

  They went for long walks together, or sat in the shade on the back veranda and drank lemonade, or took small picnic dinners into the woods and ate in the meadow clearing there. Often Elise would take along a book of poetry and read to him for hours on end as he sat and watched her, or he would gather wildflowers and bring them to her, telling her the names of each and showing her where it grew. What they did never seemed to matter; it only mattered that they could be together, that she could spend time with him, be near him.

  At first her parents did not object to the friendship, too involved in their own pain and loss to see or even to care. They were grateful to Janson for how he had fought Bennett to protect her, and grateful for all he had done to try to stop Alfred the night he had died. Her father knew she was safe when she was with him, for, though Ethan Bennett was free and walking the streets of the County, he would not dare to come near her so long as Janson Sanders was nearby.

  In those first days her father had often had Janson drive her about to the places she needed to go, into town to shop, or to choir practice at mid-week, even to church services when he and her mother could not attend. By the time the early days of summer came and her father did voice an objection to the friendship, it was already too late—Elise already cared too deeply for Janson Sanders to give a whit what her father said or thought about anything. There could be no harm in their friendship, no matter that her mother did say that it was unseemly and that people might begin to talk—to Elise it did not matter. Janson Sanders was her friend, and—and he was growing to be so much more.

  In the weeks and months she had known him, Janson had never once tried to touch or even to kiss her, seeming content with their relationship as it was. But, as the warm days of June passed, Elise began to realize she wanted more from him than friendship alone. She was falling in love with Janson Sanders. And she knew it.

  At first that knowledge had surprised her—how could she be in love with someone so different from she, someone who had no family, no money, no background, no home other than the lean-to room he slept in off the barn, none of the things that she had grown up thinking one could normally expect from life. They were so different, and yet—and yet there was something inside of him that was so very like her. He made her angrier at times than any other human being alive, and happier. He seemed to know how she thought and felt, often without her having to speak. And, as the days passed, she was beginning to know desire—the way he looked, how she felt when she was near him, how she thrilled if even he touched her hand. She wanted him, and she lay awake often at night wondering what it would feel like to kiss him, to touch him, to share with him the most intimate thing a man and woman could share.

  And, yet, the things she felt also somehow frightened her as well. She had never felt this way before, had never dreamed it possible to feel this way, to care so deeply for someone, to feel such desire—and yet be so unsure and afraid. He was so unlike her, so different from the man she had dreamed of all her life, and yet she could not imagine spending the remainder of that life with anyone else.

  But Janson was a farmhand, a farmhand with little prospect in the future of ever becoming anything more than what he was now. He would never be able to give her the kind of life she wanted, the kind of life she had always had. He could not give her a home, or surround her with beautiful, wonderful things; he could barely even provide the necessities of life for himself, and even that could be taken from him at a moment’s notice, for her father would surely drive him from the place the minute he were to ever learn how Elise truly felt about this farmhand. Janson Sanders had nothing, at least nothing to her eyes accustomed to wealth and luxury and beauty and more than she could ever want.

  But that seemed to matter less and less to her as the days went by. She loved him. She loved him for all his difference, and not in spite of it. She loved him, and she wanted him, even though his pride and his intensity sometimes frightened her, and his quiet introversion oftentimes left her feeling as if she did not know him at all. She did not understand him, and the distance he kept between them served to confuse her all the more. He rarely spoke of himself or of the place he had come from in Alabama, or of anything that had gone on in his life before the day he had first come here to Endicott County those months ago. She rarely knew how he thought or felt about anything, except nature and the land and growing things. What she had learned about him she had learned from Stan, for Janson seemed to talk more freely with her brother than he ever could with anyone else—he had come from the hilly regions of Alabama, had had a farm there but had lost it. His parents were dead, and he was alone, though he had kin in Alabama, and relatives spread throughout the South. His mother had been Cherokee, and his father’s people mostly Irish; and his pride went back for generations.

  Stan said Janson spoke often of his grandparents who were sharecroppers back in Alabama, of his gran’pa who planted by the signs and knew everyone in the County by name, and his gran’ma who could draw fire and stop blood and cure sick people with nothing more than belief and prayer—they sounded so far distant, so unreal, so divorced from the modern world of automobiles and electric lights and telephones and running water. And yet Janson was a part of their world, of a world he seldom spoke of, of a world she knew nothing about.

  By late June, it no longer seemed to matter to her who or what Janson Sanders was, that his skin was darker than hers, or that his life had been so far different from her own. The only thing that mattered was that she loved him, wanted to be with him, and that somewhere in her dreams she held a belief that he had to love her as well, a belief that they could be together—how that could be, in the manner of fantasies and children who have had all they have wanted all their lives, she did not know. The only thing she knew was that she wanted him, and that she would have him. The remainder she trusted would take care of itself.

  On a warm summer mor
ning late in that June of 1927, Elise sat before her dresser, critically staring into the mirror at her own reflection. She considered herself for a moment, assessing—her hair was a warm red-gold, bobbed into the most recent fashion; her eyes blue, darker than the sky, but unlike any other shade she knew; her skin soft, fair, flawlessly perfect. She knew she was pretty; enough young men in her life had told her that until it was something she did not doubt—but Janson had never told her she was pretty, and it was only from him that she wanted to hear the words. Many times in the past weeks she had turned to find him staring at her, and in those moments she had been certain he had been about to speak; in those moments his eyes had been readable, his feelings clear. In those moments she had known—Janson Sanders did think of her as a woman. He looked at her the way she wanted a man—the way she wanted him—to look at her.

  And yet he would never speak of what she often told herself he felt. He would never let her closer, never let her get to know the man inside of him, never really let her see his thought or his feelings or his dreams, seeming determined to remain as silent and as unknown to her as a closed and unread book. He seemed to enjoy the times they spent together—she knew she could not be wrong about that—but still there remained that barrier between them, a barrier he had placed there himself, a barrier she could somehow not cross.

  She picked up the ivory-handled brush from the dresser top and began to run it through her hair, considering again something she had been thinking of in the past several days—if Janson knew how she felt, he would have to respond. He would have to tell her how he felt, have to tell her that he loved her—and he had to love her; she knew he had to. There was no doubt within her of that. It made no sense to have to wait weeks and months in order for him to declare his feelings first. This was 1927, after all, and a woman no longer had to act demure and senseless and completely devoid of feelings until a man spoke, just to protect a reputation of the sort older people revered so highly. That was a good way to end up an old maid—and she was young and pretty and thoroughly modern, she had no intention of becoming an old maid as well. Janson would respect her openness. He might even be grateful for it—after all, even if it did not matter to her that he was a farmhand, it might matter to him. He could be afraid to show what it was he felt for William Whitley’s daughter, afraid she would turn him away, afraid she might even have her father put him off the place, when he could be no more wrong.

  She smiled at her reflection in the mirror, satisfied with the decision she had come to—today, she would know.

  It took her over an hour to choose the dress she would wear, and she finally settled on the first one she had laid aside, a cool white cotton that had almost no sleeves, a waist that fell somewhere about her hips, and a hem that barely even touched her knees. She slid on her favorite pair of silk stockings, daring flesh pink in the lightest chiffon, and then rolled them down to her knees, securing them with garters and then checking to make sure the seams were straight in back. She took an hour to do her face: Winx to darken her lashes, Kissproof Lipstick and Rouge, face powder advertised as that being used by all the smart Parisiennes, perfume; then she smiled at her reflection, noting how blue and sparkling her eyes were, how happy she looked, how pretty she was. Today Janson would see her as a woman; today he would speak at last. She was certain of it—even if she had to be bold and flirtatious and even tell him outright how she felt. He would speak at last.

  She made her way down the staircase to the first floor, then stopped for a moment in the wide entry hallway, trying to calm her heart and strengthen her courage. When she finally left the house a half-hour later, she carried a bow basket over her arm, a bow basket containing a picnic dinner she had watched Mattie Ruth prepare for them both—cold milk in a quart fruit jar, fried chicken and biscuits, potato salad, and gingerbread still warm from the oven of the Kitchenkook gasoline-fueled range her father had recently bought for the kitchen over her mother’s protests for an electric range. She would surprise Janson, go to where he was working in the fields, and share the picnic dinner with him beneath the shade of some tree during his dinner break. She already knew how she would tell him what it was she felt—also within the basket was a book of poetry, a book wrapped in brightly colored paper and tied with a string. She would give it to him once they finished eating, ask him to read to her from it—so many times in the past she had read to him from other books; but this time it would be his turn. She had chosen the book, the verse, carefully: “How do I love thee? Let me count . . .” Today he would know how she felt.

  She almost lost her nerve a short while later as she reached the edge of the field and saw him plowing there behind a mule down the long rows of cotton—he looked so distant there, sweating at work such as she would never know, and perhaps she looked at him in that moment with her eyes and not her soul for the first time in those months: his skin was sunburned, his overalls old and faded, and his frayed workshirt stained with perspiration beneath the crossed galluses. He worked with the red earth as if he understood it, as if it understood him—how could she feel as she did, and yet he be so different from her, so different from anyone she had ever known before. Had she really never looked at the farmhands and sharecroppers on the place, and, if she had, would she have found people as simple in needs and yet as complex in nature as he was? Suddenly she felt uncomfortable in her cool white summer dress and her rolled silk stockings—what did he see when he looked at her? Did he really see her as a woman, or was she only deceiving herself? Would he laugh at her gift and her feelings, turn her away; would he—

  Her courage failing, she turned to leave, but he had already seen her. He pulled back on the plow lines looped about his shoulders and called: “Whoa, Nicodemus—” to halt the mule, then raised his arm to wave to her. She could almost feel his smile over the distance, his delight at seeing her, and her courage returned.

  “What’re you doin’ out here?” he called to her as she crossed the field toward him, stepping carefully over the rough, uneven ground between the rows where the plow had already turned the red earth aside.

  She lifted the light brown basket slightly and motioned with it. “I brought our dinner. I thought we might have a picnic—”

  “That sounds nice, but I cain’t quit right yet t’ eat.”

  “That’s all right. I can wait.” She made her way back across the field to spread out the blanket and sit beneath the shade of a tree at the edge of the woods, watching him as he guided the mule down the long rows, watching him as the hot sun beat down around him, baking the red earth, baking his shoulders beneath the faded and worn material of his workshirt. She looked at the cotton plants growing lush and green in the rows—it would be laying by before long, and he would have more time free to spend with her, at least for a while, time free of the constant work in the cotton fields and the constant demands of her father. The church bazaar to raise money for the children’s home would be coming up in a few days, and the Independence Day celebrations were not too far distant—perhaps by then she and Janson would be more than friends alone. Perhaps by then he would be her beau—what a wonderfully old-fashioned word that was, a word from her grandmother’s time, but it was a word that stuck in her mind. She smiled to herself, imagining long walks with him, holding hands; the feel of his arms around her, his kiss; the knowledge that she alone would hold his heart—she lifted her chin and bolstered her courage. Nothing would ruin this day.

  He mopped his face and neck with a torn handkerchief as he made his way across the field to her, looking happy but tired. The crushed hat in his hand was soaked through with perspiration, as was his shirt; red dirt stained his feet and the frayed hems of his overalls—but Elise hardly noticed. She saw only his smile, the delight in his eyes as he looked at her, the handsome curve of his jaw. She already had the picnic basket emptied of food, the meal spread out on the blanket before her, and he joined her beneath the shade of the tree, sitting down nearby, smiling at her. She had
carefully patted her hair and wet her lips—she could see the effect in his eyes, in the way he was watching her. Today he saw a woman before him.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked, smiling.

  “I sure am—”

  She had planned to wait until they had finished eating before giving him the book, but she could not contain her eagerness. They had only just begun to eat when she knew she could wait no longer. “I have a present for you—”

  “A present—for me?” She had played the moment out in her mind a thousand times—she would give him the gift, would see the delight in his eyes that she had thought of him. He would unwrap the present, and she would ask him to read aloud to her, to read the sonnet she had chosen. He would open the book, read—and then he would look at her, and in that look they would both know. After this day, her life would never be the same again.

  She took the wrapped package from the bow basket and handed it to him. He turned it over and over in his hands, almost wondrously, looking at the colored paper, seeming for all the world like a small boy on Christmas morning—just as she had known he would.

  “You shouldn’t ’a got me nothin’—” he said, smiling up at her.

  “You’re always bringing me presents. I wanted to give you something for once—aren’t you going to open it?”

  “I kinda hate t’ bother it; you’ve got it wrapped s’ pretty an’ all.” He began to fumble with the paper, finally untying the string and carefully beginning to fold the wrappings back. “This’s th’ first present anybody’s give me in years—” He grinned delightedly up at her, and then looked back down as the paper fell away to reveal the book that lay beneath.

  A peculiar look passed across his face, and was so quickly gone that she was unsure as to whether she had actually seen it or not. He turned the book over in his hands again, seeming unsure as to what to do with it, what to say, then he smiled up at her with a smile that seemed to be almost forced. “It’s real nice. Thank you—”