Behold, This Dreamer

by Charlotte Miller

  No—this was not right. This was not the way that he was supposed to react. This was not—

  Elise forced a control over the moment’s panic rising within her. She brought her most flirtatious smile to her lips. “Don’t you like it? It’s my favorite; I’ve always adored Mrs. Browning.”

  “Mis Browning—”

  Something was very wrong. She could feel it. She moved closer to him, purposefully brushing against the sleeve of his workshirt—but he only moved away. A hurt feeling filled her—what had she done wrong? What had—

  She reached and opened the thin volume on his lap. “Poetry, like we read before—”

  He seemed so distant, so—“Poetry, oh, yeah.”

  This was not the way that it—the way that he—was supposed to be. If anything, he was only more distant, only more—“But, this is special poetry. It’s—” She searched her mind for the words, but could not find them. How could she tell him how she felt? How could she tell him what he had come to mean to her over the past months? It was all there on the pages before him, in words beyond anything she could say, if only he would look; if only he would—

  “Now, you can read to me sometimes. And, you’ll have your own book—” Her mind raced: what had she said wrong, done wrong? What had she said that could have offended that damnable pride and independent nature? Her heart was written plainly there on those pages before him, her love, her feelings, if only he would read. How could that offend him? Surely, he had to see, had to—

  She took a deep breath and marshaled her courage, determined not to have come this far only to fail now. “There’s one that I really like—” She moved closer to him and felt him move away again, but she refused to allow that to stop her, leaning only closer to him and flipping the pages in his lap, feeling the strength of his body so near to hers. He would know how she felt, even if she had to tell him outright. He would know. “Here, this is it—”

  But he only stared at the page blankly. A muscle twitched in his jaw.

  “It makes me think of you,” she said—the words were there on the page before him. Everything she felt—couldn’t he see. Didn’t he know? “Why don’t you read it to me?”

  “You—you read it t’ me—” He tried to push the book into her hands, but she refused to take it.

  “No—” She placed her hand on his arm and smiled up at him. “I love your voice; it’s so strong and masculine. I’ve read to you so many times. I’d like to hear you read to me for once—”

  His arm was warm beneath her hand—but he did not look at her, or even at where she touched him. He stared down at the book in his lap, clutching the sides of it in his hands until his knuckles turned white. For a moment there was only silence. The muscle twitched again in his jaw as he gritted his teeth. He kept his dark head bent and his eyes fixed on the page before him. For a moment something close to shame and embarrassment flickered across his features—shame and embarrassment, where she had never before seen anything but pride.

  When he finally spoke, his voice was so quiet that she had to strain to hear it, his words forced, filled with pain. “I—I cain’t read it—”

  For a moment she could only stare at him, not comprehending. “What do you mean, you can’t—” and then comprehension slowly came. She stared at him, realizing what she had done.

  “I cain’t read it,” he said again, louder, his voice carrying a choked sound. He closed the book slowly, got to his feet, and moved a few steps away, never once looking at her. She stared at his back, not knowing what to say, what to do.

  “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” she said quietly after a moment, but he only lowered his head and shook it slowly back and forth, standing with his back toward her. She stood and went to him, placing her hand on his arm, wanting nothing more than to undo the hurt she had caused him, the embarrassment, the pain. She wanted to put her arms around him, to hold him and tell him that it was all right, that it did not matter, but she knew she could not. She could only stand there with her hand on his arm, staring up at the profile she loved so well. “Janson?” But he did not lift his eyes. “Janson, please look at me—” She moved to stand before him, putting her hands on the crossed arms that held the book now to his chest. She looked up at him, but still he would not meet her eyes. “Janson, it doesn’t matter—”

  “Yes, it does.” His voice was tinged with anger as he finally looked at her. There was so much hurt in his eyes that she felt a stab of pain go through her. “It does matter, when some little kid can read an’ I cain’t—”

  “But that’s only because someone taught them. Didn’t you go to school?”

  “Yeah, I went, when I wasn’t needed t’ work in th’ fields or t’ pick cotton. I tried t’ learn, but I was always s’ far behind—I don’t know, maybe I’m just slow—”

  “You’re not slow. You just didn’t have time to learn then, but you can learn now.” A rush of maternal instinct filled her. She wanted to take away the cause of his embarrassment, the cause of his hurt pride, so that he would never have to feel shame again. “I could teach you—”

  But anger flared behind the green eyes. A muscle clenched in his jaw. “I get along just fine like I am! I ain’t gonna be taught like I was some back’ards schoolboy!”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know what you meant,” he said, his feelings coming out now in a rush of hurt pride as he stared at her. “You comin’ here, battin’ your eyelashes, at me, flirtin’ like you thought I was somebody—I don’t need your help, Miss Elise Whitley, an’ I don’t need you tryin’ t’ wrap me aroun’ your little finger jus’ ’cause you think that’s th’ way every man aroun’ here’s got t’ be. If anybody needs some learnin’, I’d say it was you an’ not me, ’cause you sure don’t know how t’ act like a lady ought t’ act—”

  She could only stare at him with absolute surprise, forgetting his embarrassment, forgetting his shame, forgetting all the things she had meant for this day. “How dare you!”

  “If you’re s’ ’shamed t’ be aroun’ a ignorant farmer like me, then why don’t you just go on back t’ your uppity family an’ your uppity friends, ’cause I sure don’t need nobody like you meddlin’ in my life—”

  Fury filled her. “Well, I don’t need you either!”

  “That suits me jus’ fine.” He turned and started away.

  “You’re a damned, stubborn fool, Janson Sanders!” she yelled after him, filled with anger.

  “An’ I was right th’ first time I ever met you,” he said, turning back for a moment. “You ain’t nothin’ but a spoil’t brat of a rich girl—an’ you cain’t even talk like you was a lady!”

  “How dare you!”

  But he only ignored her indignation. “You jus’ go on back t’ your fancy life, Miss Whitley. You won’t have t’ worry about spendin’ no more ’a your time with no ignorant farmhand,” and he angrily turned and started away again.

  “Oh!” she yelled furiously, then stamped her foot in impotent rage at his retreating back. She knelt and began to shove the remnants of her lovely picnic dinner back into the bow basket—how could she have ever believed herself to be in love with someone like that! Stubborn, stupid, ill-mannered—

  She was too furious to even notice that he had taken the book of sonnets with him.

  “God-Almighty—feed that fire easy, boy!” Tate warned in his sharp old voice, poking Janson in the ribs with one long, bony finger as he stood hovering just over his right shoulder that next morning. “You got t’ feed th’ fire easy, not git it t’ hot t’ fast when you’re b’ilin’ th’ beer—”

  Janson sidled away from the poking, and continued to feed the fire just as he had been doing all along, avoiding a long stream of tobacco juice that Tate spat onto the ground nearby. He had been making liquor deliveries for Whitley for a little over two months now, and for the past several weeks had been brought in
to the stilling operations as well, working with the ill-natured old moonshiner to whom it seemed he could do nothing right.

  Tate made a disgusted sound as he stared at him, then moved aside to sit atop an overturned barrel placed to one side of the large copper stills there in the midst of the woods—but Janson paid him little attention this morning. He straightened from where he had been feeding the fire in the furnace beneath the nearest still, his eyes moving to the smoke drifting upwards, through the log framework and branch covering of the shelter beneath which the stills were located, his mind ticking off the minutes until the fire would be burning hot enough so that it would no longer produce so much smoke. He knew the heavy drift of smoke from the midst of the woods would only increase the likelihood of the detection of the stills and the men operating them—and Janson did not want to be caught operating a moonshine still, anymore than he wanted to be caught hauling corn liquor. He and the old man usually began the operation well before sunup, to allow the darkness itself to hide the smoke—but not this morning. This morning there had been delay after delay, and now it was broad daylight, and the smoke was drifting up above the trees—goddamn it. He could already see himself spending the night in the County jail.

  After a time that seemed to Janson to stretch into forever, the fire began to burn well, and the smoke began to dissipate. The cap of the copper still had been sealed on with thick rye paste, and the beer within was boiling well. Janson allowed himself to relax for a moment, keeping an eye both on the fire, and on the old moonshiner who was watching him as well.

  “Back in my day, we made pure corn, not none ’a this sugar whiskey like now days—” Tate said, sneering toward the barrels of sugared mash that waited nearby to be processed in the stills, just as he had done on numerous other occasions over the past days as they had tended the mixing and working of the mixture of corn meal, ground malt, sugar, and raw rye that had fermented to become the beer now boiling in the stills and filling the barrels. Janson paid little attention to what the old man was saying, having heard it all several times before in the past days, until he could almost have repeated it back word for word if he had chosen to do so.

  Steam from the boiling beer in the still finally passed through the long arm attached to it to hit the contents of the thump barrel nearby, starting it to bubbling. Janson sat back to wait. He listened to the dull sound coming from the barrel and looked out through the woods, leaning his head back against the tree, smelling the distinctive odor that always hung over the stilling operation. He knew this was the most likely time of the run that they might be caught, for the sound could be heard for a good distance into the woods—but his mind could not stay with the danger of detection, or the chances of ending up in jail in violation of the Prohibition laws. His mind wandered back to Elise Whitley, and to the confrontation he’d had with her the day before, just as it had been doing all morning long.

  Damn her—

  He should have known better than to have let himself have anything to do with her. He should have known—but, still, when she had turned to him after her brother’s death, he had been unable to help himself. She was just a girl, and she had been through so much—the attack, then the death of her brother; she had needed someone, and he had let himself be needed. He had let himself—

  In the weeks and months since her brother had died, he had tried to help in whatever way he could. He had felt sorry for her, felt somehow responsible and guilty in a way he could not explain—and he had felt something more. It had been in those moments the morning after he had fought Ethan Bennett to protect her, those moments spent in the front parlor of her great house, as he had worn his threadbare clothes and cracked shoes, with his wildflowers for a girl who could very well have laughed at him—but she had not laughed. She had just been a girl that morning, treating him with kindness, even with respect. He had allowed himself to care about her, to think about her as someone other than William Whitley’s daughter, as someone—

  She bobbed her hair and wore makeup; she was rich and petted and so unlike anything he had ever known in his life. He had been surprised at his feelings, but he could not fight them—he cared about William Whitley’s daughter. He cared about her in a way he had never cared about anyone in his life, and as the days passed, he had realized those feelings would not go away. She was nothing like him, nothing like the people he had come from. When he looked at her he saw the rolled stockings and the short skirts, and he knew what his mother would have said—

  But he loved her.

  That had surprised him more than anything in his life. He loved Elise Whitley. He loved her, and he knew he could never let her know—how could he tell her, with her fancy book learning and her family’s motor cars and her big fine house, that he dreamed of taking her back to Eason County, that he dreamed of taking her to that small white house on those red acres, that house with no electric lights and no running water and even no indoor water closet that she might use. How could he tell her that he dreamed of taking her home to meet his gran’ma and his gran’pa, of walking down Main Street in Pine with her on his arm, of making her Elise Sanders—she would only laugh at him, call him a fool.

  And perhaps he was.

  When she had begun to flirt with him the day before, he had been almost unable to believe the evidence of his eyes and ears—Elise Whitley, smiling at him, surprising him with a picnic dinner, looking so pretty in her white dress; Elise, treating him as a man and not just as a friend. And she had brought him a present—but that had been the end of it all.

  He felt a hot flush of embarrassment even now, knowing she knew that he could not read. She had even offered to teach him—as if he were some ignorant, backwards schoolboy that needed to be taken on in charity. But he was a man. And now that man knew. He knew, and in that knowing was the end of those dreams. Elise Whitley would never be his. She would never see beyond his patched clothes and his calloused hands and his country ways, to see the man beneath, a man with all the pride and feelings of any man. She had flirted with him, and she had done so simply because she thought he was the one man in the County not in love with her already—what a fool she was. At least he had that part of his pride left; at least she would never know how much he had loved her.

  Still loved her.

  Even as he thought the words, he damned himself for the feeling. How could he love someone like her. Someone so rich and spoiled and uppity. He knew he had said things to her that he should never have said to any woman—but she had deserved it. She had made him look as if, feel as if, he were something less than a man; she had made him tell her something that no one else had known, that no one else had any right to know. He had wanted to fling her book in the ditch at the edge of the field, had wanted to fling it in the water of the creek that cut across Whitley property, but somehow had been unable to. He had been unable to throw it away, destroy it, as he told himself he wanted to—it now sat on the small, splintery wooden table by the cot in his room, reminding him of what she was, of what he was, and of what happened to the dreams of fools. He was lucky to have found out about her now, lucky to have realized the truth. She could never have been his, and feeling the things he had been feeling for her would only have led to the destruction of his dreams, of all he had ever cared about, even to his very soul. They were far too different, and perhaps they should never have become friends in the first place—it did not do for a man to reach after things he could never have, dreams he could never touch. He was better off on his own, better off to find a girl more like himself, a girl familiar with country folk and their ways, a girl who was not afraid of hard work or doing without, a girl who would give a man sons and daughters, who would raise them as they ought to be raised, and not act spoiled and selfish and like a child herself. It was better to find a girl like that—instead of spending his days thinking about Elise Whitley. A man would be a fool to waste his life thinking about a girl he could not have, a girl he would be better off not t
o—

  He came out of his reverie to Tate’s cursing at him. The thumping in the barrel had quit, and the surge of liquid had begun, flowing from the end of the worm and onto the ground there beneath the condenser. Janson got to his feet and quickly placed a jug beneath the worm to catch the liquid, then looked up at Tate, seeing the old man turn away, cursing him still as he uncovered a barrel of beer to use for the second run.

  Damn her—she would ruin even this for him. There were few jobs that would pay him as well as moonshining for Whitley did. His dreams might mean nothing to her, but they mattered a great deal to him. He needed the money to buy his land back, to be able to go home as a man—and to be able to get as far away from her as he possibly could. She had destroyed his pride, had made him feel shame as no other person ever had in his life—but he still had his dreams. He still had his dreams, and he would make them—

  But in that moment he realized that he had allowed Elise Whitley to become part of those dreams. And, even as that realization came, Janson Sanders called himself a fool.

  Phyllis Ann Bennett stood at the front window of her bedroom that afternoon, staring down at the long, graveled drive that led up to the front of her home. Carson Edwards, the eldest son of the Baptist minister, had kept her waiting now for ten minutes—ten whole minutes, just as if she were nobody. He was late in picking her up, and he would be sorry; oh, he would be so very sorry—there would be no quick drive to some deserted spot on a back road, some kisses, a little petting, and then straight to what he wanted. No, he would beg before he would lay her back today. Oh, how he would beg, and for more than ten minutes alone.

  She glanced at her wrist watch, then began to drum her fingers along the edge of the window frame—it was just like Carson to keep her waiting, just like him and that entire family of his. They had stuck up their collective noses at her a dozen times in the past two months since she had returned from school, all because of what Elise had told on her father, all because of Alfred Whitley having managed to get himself shot—but she had shown them. Her father had practically ruined her life over those two months—no one invited her over any longer; no one introduced her to handsome young relatives; no one asked her to go shopping, or to the movie theatre, or to parties; and few of the good-looking men in the County had anything more to do with her now than just to share a bottle of gin and some fun in the back seat of a motor car. It was all Elise’s fault; Phyllis Ann knew that. Phyllis Ann’s father had never tried to rape Elise; that had been nothing more than Elise’s overactive imagination, and probably her hopes as well. He had almost been killed by some hired farmhand on the Whitley place, had been beaten black and blue by Bill Whitley and Franklin Bates, and Alfred Whitley had even tried to shoot him, all because of what Elise had told—but Alfred had only gotten himself shot instead, and now no one would hardly speak to Phyllis Ann, or invite her over, or ask her out, as if she really gave a damn what her father had done to anyone.