There Is a River

by Charlotte Miller

  He kept his eyes fixed on Elise and took a step, then another—it was not so bad. It hurt, but he was walking, standing on his own two feet again. He had been a fool not to have tried it before.

  Another step, and it was nowhere near as hard as he had thought. It felt as if one leg might be shorter than the other now, and he was certain it was caused from using the cane—I’ll get used to it, he told himself.

  Another step. She was looking in another drawer now. She had not seen him coming to her yet, but she would. She would smile and he would take her in his arms—the damn doctors; they did not know what they were saying. Telling him to take it easy, to be careful and not re-injure the hip; he wished they could see him now.

  Elise would be happy and surprised. He would be back in the mill in a week or two, and he would have her quit her job the minute he was back to work, war effort or no war effort. She was just giving that as a reason so he would not feel so bad. She would come home and be a wife again, sew if she wanted, and could feel like a woman. He would be a husband she could be proud of. He would again be able to take care of her and the kids, provide for them—and once the war was over, there would be the land. Elise would have the home he had promised her for so long. She and the girls could hang curtains in the windows and plant flowers in the yard and they could know the house would be theirs year after year. He and Henry, and Stan if he wanted, would work the land. They would have crops that were all their own, crops that would see them through each winter, crops that would get them from one year and to the next. Only a few steps—

  Janson had almost reached Elise when she lifted her eyes and saw his reflection in the mirror. Her eyes took in the pain on his face, and then moved beyond him to the cane where it leaned against the wall alongside the bed. She turned in the chair and started to rise to her feet and he reached out to take her into his arms—suddenly his leg gave way. A sharp pain shot through his hip and he fell against her, feeling her catch him, her hands going beneath his arms as she braced him with strength he had not known she possessed.

  He grabbed for the edge of the nearby dresser and pulled away from her, gritting his teeth against the pain in his hip—he would have fallen if she had not caught him. For a moment he could not meet her eyes. He had wanted to show her that he was still a man.

  Elise reached out to touch him but he moved away, bracing against the surface of the dresser for support as the leg threatened to give way again—he was not a man anymore, he told himself. He was not a man.

  He was not anything.

  A few days later, Henry Sanders stood in the open rear door that led into the kitchen in their half of the mill house, watching his father in the back yard. He knew that Janson did not know he was being watched that afternoon, and that was how Henry wanted it.

  Janson made his way slowly from the rear porch, walking carefully over the uneven ground as he leaned heavily on his walking stick. When he reached the woodpile, he hooked the cane over his arm, braced his right knee carefully against a stack of large logs, and bent to pick up several sticks of firewood, only enough to carry on one arm, then cautiously made his way back to the rear porch. He had made the trip several times already, and, on each return trip to the porch, Henry had ducked inside and closed the door almost shut so that he would not be seen.

  The stack of firewood at the edge of the porch was pitiably small, growing only by a few sticks on each trip as Henry watched. He knew that when his father was at last satisfied with the amount he had brought to the porch, he would repeat the entire process over again in taking the wood in to the woodbox in the kitchen. Henry could have reduced the entire process to one trip, could have had it over and done, but he knew better than to offer.

  Henry could see the pain in Janson’s movements, in the set expression on his face each time he turned back for the return trip to the porch, but Henry also knew that he was the last person from whom his father would accept help. A silent set of rules had come to exist between them in the few days his father had been home—Henry did not offer help. He did not fuss over his father or try to wait on him as his mother, Judith, and sometimes even Catherine did. Janson might tolerate it from the girls, greet it with silence from his wife, but he would not accept it in the slightest from his son.

  At first Henry had wondered if he had done something to anger his father, but it had not taken long before he understood—his father was angry with himself. Janson was angry with how he had been wounded, and most especially with the fact that he could not work now or get about as he used to. The womenfolk could get away with trying to take care of him, but not Henry. Henry was only months short of his seventeenth birthday; he was tall and strong, and had two good arms; he knew that he could be of more help than the girls, his mother, or his Uncle Stan—but his Uncle Stan had never once tried to help his father:

  “Let him do it on his own,” his uncle told him.

  It had been much the same as Henry had gotten from Janson—“I can get it,” “I can do it for myself,” or “I don’t need any help”—but still Henry watched.

  “I don’t see how he can expect me to just stand there and not offer to help him,” Henry had told his friend, Isaac Betts, earlier that afternoon. He had gone by Isaac’s house immediately after school, had been waiting for him on his front steps when Isaac had gotten in from the school he attended there in the colored part of town.

  Isaac’s stepmother, Esther, had tried to get them to come inside, but Henry had declined—Isaac’s little brother, Andrew, was four years old now, just old enough to be a bother, and he had a new baby sister, Clarice, who cried most of the time. After Olivia, Isaac was his best friend, the one person he knew he could always talk to, for Henry found that at times even Olivia could not understand the things going on inside his mind: Isaac was black, and Henry Sanders was part Cherokee. There was a common ground between them that Olivia could never touch. Neither Henry nor Isaac had ever fit in with the world around them.

  Isaac had taken the time to read a letter waiting for him from his cousin, Wilson Jakes, who was overseas. Wilson had gotten his father’s permission and tried to enlist in the Navy, but the Navy did not want black recruits, so he enlisted in the Army instead, going into a segregated division of black soldiers under the command of white officers. Isaac said even the Red Cross blood banks for the military were being kept segregated, which made no sense to Henry—blood was red. It wasn’t black or white.

  After Isaac finished Wilson’s letter, Henry told Isaac about his father.

  “I don’t see how there’s anything wrong with offering to help him,” Isaac said, but Isaac’s father spoke up from the open doorway behind them.

  “Your daddy’s a proud man, Henry,” Nathan Betts said. He stood drying his hands on a mended dishtowel, his hair now more white than black, thinning at both sides just above his temples. “He ain’t gonna take no help from nobody.”

  Henry thought about that now as he stood in the rear door, watching his father take up another armload of wood. After a moment Janson started back and Henry ducked inside, then, hearing him start up the steps at last, he closed the door quietly and moved to the half-closed doorway between the middle room and the kitchen, waiting for his father to bring the wood inside. He stood quietly, listening for the sound of a fall—he would go to help if his father fell, whether Janson wanted him to or not.

  Janson was pushing himself for things to be as they had been before the war; Henry knew that. As the days passed, Janson seemed driven to walk about the house and the yard, until pain showed clearly on his face at the end of each day, and Henry began to worry, as he knew his mother did, that his father was doing too much.

  On the second Sunday after Janson had gotten home, Henry paused in the rear doorway coming into the kitchen with a bucket of water from the tap outside, hearing his parents’ voices.

  “Janson, it’s not that important,” his mother said. “It doesn’t
matter which one of us is working, as long as we’re getting by. With the war and—”

  “It matters t’ me.” His father’s voice was almost angry, and for a moment Henry was certain they were arguing. He had rarely heard them argue in all his life.

  “If you keep pushing yourself so hard, you’ll only end up hurting your hip all over again and it’ll be even longer before—”

  “I ain’t gonna have you supportin’ me any longer’n I have t’!” His father shouted the words.

  “You’ll only make it worse! You can’t keep pushing yourself like this!”

  “Maybe I ain’t pushin’ myself hard enough! I’m still usin’ this cane, ain’t I?” Henry had opened the door enough to look inside. His father was holding the cane out toward his mother, staring at her. She stared back, then touched his hand, at last taking the cane to prop it against his thigh. “I ain’t gonna hurt myself,” he said, more quietly.

  His mother moved closer to his father and touched his face a moment before Henry closed the door. “You better not,” Henry heard her say, then for a time he heard nothing more from either of them. He waited, then made a deliberate noise this time before he opened the door. His pa was still sitting sideways at the kitchen table, with his old, water-marked Bible open on his knee, his mother a few steps away at the stove.

  “Here’s the water you wanted, Mama,” Henry said and set the bucket down on the old wooden eating table. His father looked at the bucket, then closed his Bible.

  “You’ll need more water than that t’ do th’ breakfast dishes,” he said, pushing himself to his feet with one hand against the table, then reaching for his cane.

  “No, Janson, this is enough,” his mother said.

  “I’ll get some more.” Henry took up an empty bucket from the floor by the stove, but his father took it from his hands.

  “I’ll do it,” Janson said. When the door closed behind him, Henry turned to look at his mother, but she did not meet his eyes. She was staring at the closed rear door with worry on her face.

  Nothing any of them did deterred his father. Each day Janson pushed himself harder, drove himself further, until at last he was able to walk the house without his cane, then to make his way down the steps and into the yard. Three or four times daily he made the venture, walking until pain showed clearly on his face and he had to stop. Each day he went farther, coming home limping badly but never seeming satisfied with what he had done. Henry’s mother could not stop him. Henry could not stop him. Henry’s sisters could not have stopped him, even if they tried. All that any of them could do was walk along with him in the times he would allow it. All Henry or his mother either one could do was prepare to try to catch him if he stumbled—and he often stumbled.

  The first time Henry saw him fall in the yard, he immediately started to go to him, but his mother took hold of his arm.

  “Leave him alone, Henry. He’s got to do it on his own,” she said, staring out through the screen door to where Janson lay in the yard. Her grip on his arm did not diminish, but she never once looked at her son.

  “But, he’ll need help getting up—”

  “No, leave him be.”

  Henry turned away, unable to watch his father struggle to regain his feet. But his mother never turned away. Henry wondered how she could watch—then he saw the tears in her eyes. She watched until Janson was again on his feet, then she called to him, smiling, just as if she had seen nothing. “Dinner’s almost ready, Janson.”

  He nodded and waved from where he stood in the yard, and Elise turned away, the unshed tears still visible in her eyes as she returned to the food cooking on the stove. Janson waited until he thought that neither of them was watching, but Henry saw—he made his way slowly back to the house, limping badly. When he entered the kitchen a few minutes later, the limp was barely noticeable, but pain still showed in his eyes.

  Each day Janson worked harder, and each day he did more, until one day little more than a month after he had come home, he met Henry in the front room as soon as Henry got in from school.

  “I’m gonna walk up t’ th’ mill. I thought you might want t’ go.” It was the closest his pa would come to asking Henry to do something for him, and Henry set his books down without a second thought, ready to go.

  Janson did not use his cane. He walked beside his son, limping but unassisted. Once he almost stumbled and Henry started to reach out for him, but Janson caught himself against the trunk of a tree alongside the sidewalk, and, after a moment’s rest, they walked on.

  He was limping badly, each step bringing pain to his face by the time they reached the mill, but there was also satisfaction in his expression. “Why don’t you wait out here,” he said to his son. “I’m goin’ in for a minute.”

  Henry watched him go up the steps and into the mill office, noticing with surprise that there was very little of the limp evident in his pa’s walk as he entered the building.

  A half hour later Janson came out of the office, causing Henry to rise from the step where he had spent the wait. There was again satisfaction on Janson Sanders’s face as his eyes came to rest on his son. “Why don’t you an’ me re-bottom your ma’s rocking chair tomorrow?” Janson said. “It’ll be Saturday an’ there won’t be no school. It won’t take too much time.”

  “Okay,” Henry said, staring at him with surprise.

  Janson looked down the street deeper into the village. “Won’t be much time for doin’ it next week or after,” he said. “I’ll be goin’ back t’ work Monday.” He brought his eyes back to his son. “Lets go home, Henry,” he said, placing a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “I got a surprise for your ma.”

  They looked at each other, then they descended the steps before the mill office and started down the village street toward home.

  Elise was the most damn-stubbornest woman Janson had ever known in his life. She would not quit the mill, not even with him back at work now, not even when she knew that was what he wanted: “When the war’s over,” she told him instead.

  When the war’s over . . .

  There was so much talk about what would happen when the war was won. Some people worried that the Depression would return. A few hoped the fighting would continue because it had brought them good jobs. Everyone seemed to have victory lists of the things they would buy and do once the war was won. Janson himself planned for the day he would buy back his land, and the day he would at last see Elise quit the mill—all once the war was over. Until then it was not as bad as he had thought it would be. They walked to their shifts together in the mornings, and walked home together in the afternoons. He saw her at times in the mill during the day, and it was nice to know she was that close—not so bad as he had thought at all.

  It was a spring morning in 1945 that Janson and Elise walked together to the mill. Elise was fretting over the boy Catherine was convinced for the moment she was in love with, and Janson had just about decided he would need to have a private talk with this young man, as he had the last, when Janson’s cousin, Sissy, met them at the bottom of their hill. She had been crying, her eyes red and her face streaked with tears.

  “Have you heard?” she asked and Elise took her arm. “FDR’s dead—”

  Sissy’s words had been quiet, but they left Janson feeling as if he had been struck. FDR dead. The President—

  “What happened?” was all he could ask, reaching out to take Elise’s arm at the look of shock on her face.

  “I don’t know. They said it happened in Warm Springs, Georgia, late yesterday. I don’t know—”

  There was a numbness inside of Janson, and a sadness that he was surprised to feel over someone he had never met—FDR was dead. Words and phrases came back to him, all in that peculiar Northern accent that he had first heard so many years before—

  “. . . the only thing we have to fear is fear itself . . .”

  “. . . I see one-t
hird of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished . . .”

  “ . . . a new deal for the forgotten man . . .”

  “Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy . . .”

  “. . . keep that faith constant, keep that faith high. . .”

  “. . . to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require . . .”

  “In this dedication of a Nation we humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one of us. May He guide me in the days to come.”

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been a voice on the radio to Janson, a face in the few newsreels he had seen, a picture on the front of magazines Elise had brought home, but more than that. FDR had been President through the darkest years of the Depression. He had been with them through the attack at Pearl Harbor and the war—always there, since that day back in ’33 when Janson had stood with others in that little country store outside Cedar Flatts and heard that voice over the radio for the first time. That had been twelve years ago. FDR had been elected to office four times; he had brought hope, drawn curses, had been damned and praised and reviled, and he had always had that ability to make people believe when it seemed they couldn’t believe in anything anymore.

  Janson himself had cursed Roosevelt with every breath when he had had to plow under part of his cotton in the early days of the New Deal, but he had come to think differently. If FDR had not been President, there would have been no relief for his family when they had needed it the most. If FDR had not been President, there would have been no WPA job to bring them out of sharecropping—and Janson could not imagine anyone else having led them in war.

  And now the President was dead.

  “His poor family—” Elise said quietly, tears moving down her face. But, somehow, Janson felt sorry for the whole family of Americans.