He heard her get up from the bed and cross the room toward him, then felt her gentle hand on his back. “Janson, tell me what’s wrong—”
He lowered his head and shook it slowly back and forth. She could never understand; no matter what it was he said to her, she would never be able to know what it was he felt. It was not a matter of thoughts or words—it was what he was, deep inside himself; and it was something she could never know because of the life she had led.
“Janson, please talk to me. Tell me what I’ve done wrong—”
The sound of her voice cut right through him, but he could not turn to look at her—God, how much he loved her, but they were so different, so very—
“You ain’t done nothin’ wrong.”
“Then, what is it?”
Why couldn’t they have been more alike? Why couldn’t she have been the daughter of some small farmer or sharecropper or mill hand; or he the son of some businessman or big cotton planter, someone who could give her the kind of life she deserved to have. He had never once been ashamed of the man he was, and he was not ashamed now—he only wanted to give her all that she deserved, all that she had always had, and he knew that he could never do that.
“I love you—please, tell me,” she said softly from behind him, her voice almost pleading.
He turned to look at her, a stab of pain going through him as he met her blue eyes. “Why do you love me—me, out of everybody else you ever met?” he asked her. “Why wasn’t it somebody more like you, somebody more like—”
She stared at him, and his words fell silent. “I don’t know why I love you—why do you love me?” she asked, her eyes never leaving his.
“It ain’t th’ same thing.”
“Why not? Did you have more choice in the matter than I did? Love’s not something you choose, Janson; it’s something that’s just there—”
“But, why me?”
“Why not you?”
“You don’t understan’!” He turned away, becoming angry with himself, and with her.
“Oh, yes, I do, and I can’t believe you’re asking me a question like that.” When he turned to look at her, he found her eyes almost angry. “I love you; isn’t that enough? I love you because of who you are—”
“Yeah, a hand that works your pa’s place, as different as night is from day from you.” His tone was sarcastic, and he turned his eyes away again, unable to meet the directness of her gaze.
“It didn’t matter who or what you were—or didn’t you mean what you yourself said, that you knew I was the one you were meant to be with almost from the day you met me?”
That was not fair. She was using his own words against him. He could not help how he felt about her—but she had been raised for a life so far different from the one he could give her. She had never been meant to be the wife of a small farmer, to have to worry about money for the remainder of her life, to have to do without all the fine, beautiful things she deserved—and somehow he was afraid she would grow to hate him one day for the choice she had made those months ago when she had agreed to become his wife, for that choice would one day take her away from all that she had ever known.
She seemed to be waiting for a response, and, when she did not get one, she sighed and shook her head. “I don’t know why I love you, any more than I know why you’re who you are, or why I’m who I am. I could have fallen in love with someone from town or from the next County—but, whoever it was, it would have been you.” She finally managed to turn him to face her, and she stood staring up at him for a moment, her hands on his arms. “It could never have been anyone else but you, because you’re somehow the other part of me—isn’t that what your parents taught you, what you taught me? I don’t care how different we are; you’re still as much me as I am, what completes me and makes me whole, and I couldn’t live if I didn’t have you—” She reached up to touch his face, her blue eyes filled with caring. “I couldn’t help but to love you. I wouldn’t want not to love you, even if I could; it’s as much a part of me as thinking or breathing is—”
“I’ll never be able to give you all this—” With one hand he indicated the room, and, with it, the house.
“I don’t want all this. All I want is you, you and the place we’ll have in Alabama.”
“But it won’t never be like this; we won’t ever have a lot of money—”
“We’ll be together; that’s all that’s important.”
“We’re s’ different,” he said, looking at her.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“But it could matter t’ you, someday.”
“No—” She placed her fingers over his lips, silencing his words. He searched her eyes. “When we’re together, when we’re touching and you’re inside of me, there are no differences. We love each other, and we’re one person.” Her eyes moved over his. “We’ll be together forever; that’s all that’s important.”
“Even if—”
“Sh-h—” She moved into his arms, pressing her body against his, feeling warm and soft and so close. “Just love me, Janson; that’s all that matters. Just love me—”
They sank down onto the feather tick again, her hands touching him in ways that awakened the need—but, even as their bodies joined, his mind still refused to release the worry. Would she ever be able to live the way he was asking her to live? And, if she could not—
There was the crackling of dry leaves beneath her feet that Saturday morning in the autumn of 1927, the sounds of migrating birds in the trees overhead. Elise moved quietly along an unmarked path in the woods, trying to keep Janson just within sight ahead of her. Briers and underbrush tore at her silk stockings, and a branch snagged her sweater, sending a chill gust of autumn air against her bare skin before she could again free the knitted material. She hurried to narrow the gap between them, careful of any sound she might make—if she should lose sight of him here in the woods, she knew that she might wander for hours, even for days, before anyone found her. They were not too far from the largest of her father’s cotton fields, and still somewhere on Whitley property, but she knew she would never be able to find her way back along the unmarked path Janson traveled, not even well enough to find her way out of the woods and back to the house again.
She tried to move as quietly as possible, carefully picking out each step, cringing at the sound of each twig that cracked beneath her feet—why had she not worn more sensible shoes; why these high heels when she had known all along what it was she had intended to do this morning? But at least she would soon know what it was she had come to find out. At last Janson would hide nothing from her any longer—before this day was over she would know what it was he did for her father; today she would know where it was he went, what it was he did, when he left her to do things he would not speak to her of later. Today, at last, she would know everything.
She had the right to know, she reasoned to herself, carefully keeping him in sight. There was no reason for secrets between them, not as close as they had become. She was his lover, and she would be his wife—she was prepared for the truth, no matter what that truth might be, she told herself, just as she had been prepared for it for months now. She was coming to understand what kind of man her father was, and she knew that whatever he and Janson were doing was most probably illegal—but it was the one thing that Janson kept from her, and the one thing that still held them apart. She had a right to know, and she was ready for what she would find—and, after this day, Janson would never hide anything from her again.
He seemed almost to sense that someone was following him, for he stopped suddenly and turned back, causing Elise to step behind a tree quickly to keep from being seen. His eyes moved through the woods for a moment, searching for the source of some slight movement or sound he had detected. After a moment he moved on, and Elise breathed a sigh of relief, doubling her efforts to be quiet as she stepped from behind the tree
and made to follow him again. If he had caught her—
But she would not worry about that now. He would be furious once he discovered what she had done, but that could not be helped. He would forgive her, just as she would forgive him once she knew what it was he was hiding. There was no doubt in her mind of that.
He slowed his pace, and she felt a sense of relief—at least she would not lose him here in the woods before she could even make her discovery. He seemed to know exactly where he was going, making his way along some path he knew—toward what, she wondered again, thinking over the possibilities. She knew it was probably illegal, this thing that her father had Janson involved in, and, if not illegal, it was at least something her father would not want everyone in the County to know he was doing. She had been convinced for days now that it had something to do with gambling, for her father was extremely fond of his poker, even though he might loudly condemn card playing to the deacons in church on Sundays. If not gambling, then it had to be the sharecroppers and tenant farmers on the place, for her father had cursed often enough about the men who he always swore never got enough work out of their families or out of the land—maybe he was using Janson to keep them in line, forcing higher rents from them, or a larger percentage of their crops each year. Perhaps it was underhanded business dealings, money her father was earning from some source he would never openly admit—whatever it was, it had to be shady, if not downright against the law; and he was using Janson to do it. She had wondered about it for so long, worried about it—but today she would know. Today, at last, she would know.
There was a peculiar odor in the woods around her, stale, as if it had been hanging there in the leaves for days. She lost sight of Janson for a moment, and panic gripped her, then she caught a glimpse of the blue of his overalls through the leaves, and she moved to shorten the distance between them—surely it could not be much farther. She had been following him for such a time already. Surely—
He seemed to break into a narrow clearing ahead, and then to pause. There was no sound of movement ahead of her now, no rustling of leaves or cracking of twigs coming to her over the distance. There was one more brief glimpse of blue, and then it was gone. Elise moved ahead cautiously, her eyes searching the woods for any sight of him. An eerie feeling moved up her spine, as if someone were watching her—but she could see no one. Her own heartbeat was loud in her ears now, the break of a small tree limb at her side as resonant as a gunshot—what if she had lost him? What if there were someone else about—what sort of person, on what sort of shady dealings, might be moving about here in the depths of the woods on a Saturday morning? She pulled her sweater closer about herself, suddenly chilled, and moved quietly ahead, her eyes searching for any movement, her ears straining for even the slightest sound. She came to the edge of the narrow clearing and stopped, seeing hidden in the woods at the other side what it was she had come to find.
She stared in disbelief at what lay before her, knowing suddenly that this was where Janson had come, what he had been doing, all the times he had left her. She had never once seen a whiskey still in her life, but she knew what it was that lay in the edge of those woods as she slowly crossed the clearing; she had heard the descriptions, had grown up with the folklore—the reddish copper, the furnaces, the barrels, the tubes and pipes; it could be nothing else. Her eyes moved from the copper boilers, to the rough rock of the furnaces beneath, to the glass jars and sacks of sugar lying nearby under a crude shelter there alongside a stream—whiskey stills, moonshine stills, and Janson had to be the one operating them. Janson, and her father.
She stared for a moment, unwilling to comprehend—liquor, but all liquor was illegal, the making and selling and transporting of it, because of the Volstead Act and the Prohibition laws. She had known that what her father and Janson were doing was probably illegal, and she had somehow accepted that—but not liquor, not when she knew so many people whose lives had been affected by it; Ethan Bennett, Phyllis Ann, even Alfred—and this was even so much worse. Moonshine, the poisonous corn liquor that could kill or cripple or blind—and her father, and the man she loved, the man she was going to marry, were the ones who were making it, selling it, doing only God knew how much harm to who knew how many people.
Her eyes came to rest on Janson where he stood near one of the stills, staring at her. His arms were folded across his chest, his jaw set, a terrible anger in his green eyes—for a moment she could only stare at him, letting her discovery, and the look in his eyes, slowly sink into her. She no longer knew what she had expected to find when she had begun to follow him from their meeting place earlier in the day, but this had not been it. This had never been—
“You had t’ see; you had t’ know what I was doin’—well, go on now an’ look!” His voice was filled with fury, his face with more anger than she had ever before seen in any human being in all her life. “You cain’t leave nothin’ alone, can you? No, you had t’ go followin’ me—did you really think I didn’t know there was somebody behind me in th’ woods back there? Did you think I didn’t know it was you? A man don’t make it too long runnin’ liquor if he’s stupid!”
For a moment, she could only stare at him. “You knew I was—”
“You’re damn right I knowed it!”
“And you let me—”
“Yeah, I let you!” he yelled, interrupting her words. “You wanted t’ see s’ bad—well, go on an’ look! You wouldn’t listen t’ me when I was tryin’ t’ tell you what was best for you—”
Suddenly anger exploded within her. “Best for me!” She shouted the words at him, enraged. “How dare you try to tell me or anyone else what’s best when you’re poisoning people at the same time with this stuff!”
“I ain’t poisonin’ nobody! We ain’t made nothin’ but good corn liquor—”
“‘Good corn liquor’—you call this poison good! You know what it does; it can kill or blind—and it’s against the law!”
“God damn Prohibition!—a man’s got th’ right t’ make a livin’!”
“Is money that important to you? More important than the lives of the people who drink this stuff?”
“I done told you that we don’t make no bad liquor—an’, yeah, money’s important t’ me. It’s how you an’ me are gonna be able t’ leave here an’ get married, ain’t it?”
“I won’t have our lives built on this kind of money!”
“What do you think’s payin’ for that big, fancy house ’a yours now, an’ all that schoolin’ you got, an’ all them pretty clothes?”
She stared at him for a moment, realization slowly coming to her—this had not just recently begun; this had been going on for years, perhaps even for her entire life. Her father’s money, or at least much of it, had come from this source, from the making and selling of bootleg liquor. From moonshine. Janson was right—the house, all her things, her entire way of life, had been built on the profits of these stills, or on other stills like them. Janson was right—but that did not make the realization any easier.
He seemed to sense what he had done to her, the confusion, the inner turmoil that his words had caused. His expression softened, and he moved toward her. “I’m sorry, Elise. I shouldn’t never ’a let you find out this way. I should ’a stopped you in th’ woods as soon as I knowed you was there, an’ made you go back—”
“Made me go back!” She pulled away just before he could touch her, and stood staring up at him, her anger, both at her father for having kept this from her all her life, and at Janson for defending what he had been doing, now turning on him alone. “Why—so you could hide it from me even longer? So you could go on poisoning people and I couldn’t say a—”
“Damn it, woman—do you really think I’d be poisonin’ people!” he shouted at her, angry again. “Well, do you! Do you really think I’d be makin’ liquor that could hurt folks! Th’ most this stuff’ll do is give somebody a headache if he drinks too much of
it, but it ain’t gonna do no more harm’n that!” He stared at her for a moment, breathing heavily, his eyes angry. “You know me better’n anybody else aroun’ here—do you think I’d be poisonin’ folks?” he demanded, staring at her. “Goddamn it, woman, answer me!—would I be poisonin’ folks!”
She stared at him, remembering the man who had held and touched her so gently, who always whispered her name as their bodies were joined—the same man who made moonshine whiskey in illegal stills. “No—” she said after a moment, “not on purpose, but—”
“There ain’t no ‘buts’ to it. Your pa turns out good liquor; there ain’t no busthead ever left this place—”
Your pa—his words echoed in her ears. She had lived off the profits of bootleg liquor, of moonshine, even as she had sat in the Baptist choir and heard her father condemn ‘the demon rum’ to the church deacons. Moonshine, the liquor made by backwoods people and white trash—and by her father and Janson. How self-righteously she had pitied those whose lives had been torn apart by alcohol, while all the time she herself had been living off of—
“Liquor is wrong; you know that. Why else would they have made it illegal.”
“Bein’ legal or not don’t matter. Folks are gonna drink anyway if they want t’—an’ makin’ a life for us ain’t wrong, is it? Runnin’ these stills is how I’m gonna do that.”
“We can’t build our future on the destruction of other people’s lives!”
“Damn it, Elise—I ain’t destroyin’ nobody’s life! All I’m doin’ is runnin’ good corn liquor an’ haulin’ it out t’ th’ speakeasies an’ t’ th’ sellers in Buntain—what’s s’ wrong with that? You knowed that I was doin’ somethin’ for your pa that I couldn’t tell you about—would you rather I’d ’a been hurtin’ folks or cheatin’ people than runnin’ liquor? A man’s got t’ make a livin’, an’ this is as good a way as any, an’ it’s better’n most. This way I’m makin’ more money, an’ savin’ more money, than I’d ever be able t’ do if I was doin’ somethin’ else.”
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