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There Is a River

Page 29

by Charlotte Miller


  “My name is Stephen Dawes,” he said, meeting Henry Sanders’s eyes, “and I hope one day to marry your daughter.”

  When supper was ready to go on the table that night in the old mill village house, Elise left Olivia and Katie dishing food into bowls and went to look for Janson. It was unusual for him not to be in the kitchen by then, prying into plate-covered bowls on the kitchen table, taking just a taste of something with a spoon or fork that he would leave sitting in the middle of his plate until everyone else joined him at the table.

  Elise found him in the living room, peeping out the curtain covering the front window. She stopped and stared at him, and at Henry, who was peeking out the other side of that same curtain to where Elise knew Joanna was sitting with Stephen Dawes in the front porch swing.

  She could hear the slow screak of the old swing, and the voices of the two young people, and Elise smiled to herself just before she asked, “Why don’t you just go outside where you can stare at them openly?”

  Janson glanced her way, though Henry did not move. It was a long moment before he spoke, and, when he did, Elise wondered if he were speaking to himself, the words were so quiet.

  “I don’t like this,” Henry said, still staring out the gap in the curtain. “If he thinks I’m just going to stand aside and—” His words trailed off.

  Elise crossed the room to place a hand on Henry’s arm. She parted the curtains slightly with her other hand to look out, and she smiled—they were an attractive couple, in their own way, though there was the unfortunate resemblance between Stephen and Buddy Eason. Stephen was holding Joanna’s hand now, her fingers securely intertwined with his and resting on his thigh. Joanna had seemed uncertain of him at first, Elise noticed—but that uncertainty was now gone. She could see that the two young people had made their peace. Joanna smiled, and Stephen leaned closer and kissed her briefly.

  Elise felt Henry stir uncomfortably at her side.

  “Leave them alone, Henry,” she said, letting the curtain come together before her and reaching out to take hold of both men’s shirt sleeves and draw them away from the window. “It’s none of your business,” she said after she had drawn them several steps into the room.

  “Like hell it’s not. She’s my daughter.” He looked back toward the window.

  “She’s a grown woman, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Leave ’em be.”

  It was Janson who had spoken this time, and Elise turned to look at him. Of the two, she had thought he would be the most reluctant to have an Eason in the family—a part-Eason, anyway, not to mention the fact that he was a blood descendant of both Helene and Cassandra Price.

  “There ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. You cain’t keep ’em apart, not if they’re meant t’ be together. Th’ only thing you will do is drive your daughter away—”

  “I’ll be damned if I—”

  “No,” Janson said.

  So many times in the past, Elise had looked at her son and realized how much he looked like Janson. But in that instant, it was her own father that he reminded her of. She could see something of that same determination there, that same hatred that she had seen in William Whitley’s face when he had looked at Janson all those years before. When Janson spoke again, she knew he also saw it.

  “Your mama’s pa never held you in his arms when you was a baby,” Janson said quietly, staring at their son. “William Whitley never looked int’ your face t’ go beyond what he could see ’a me there, t’ see somethin’ ’a himself. He loved your grandma’ Whitley—I don’t have no doubt ’a that—but he kept her from seein’ you an’ your mama ’til th’ day she died. You can’t stop what’s meant t’ be; all you can do is give up your part in it. All you can do is give up th’ chance t’ look int’ a face, t’ go beyond what you see ’a Buddy Eason there, t’ see yourself as well. Nobody could’a kept me an’ Elise apart; nobody could’a kept you an’ Olivia apart—don’t make Joanna choose between you an’ Buddy Eason’s gran’son. You won’t like her choice.”

  Henry stared at his father, and then moved back to peep out again through a narrow gap at the side of the front curtain.

  “I’ll give him one chance,” he said at last.

  Elise looked at Janson and smiled.

  One chance was all they had ever needed.

  Epilogue

  Joanna Sanders Lee and Stephen Dawes were married beneath flowering dogwoods in the Sanders side yard, near the old kitchen Buddy Eason had tried to burn so long before. The household’s kitchen had been moved years ago into a back room in the house, and most recently that separate structure, attached to the house by a covered and elevated walkway, had served as living space for Stephen Dawes, for Henry Sanders would not allow his future son-in-law to spend even one night in the house until he and Joanna were properly married by a minister in the presence of her family.

  Andrew Betts performed the ceremony, and his brother, Isaac, came all the way from Georgia to attend the wedding. Joanna’s brothers were there, their wives, and their children, including a baby who began to cry part-way through the ceremony, though nobody seemed to mind.

  Joanna had both her father and her grandfather give the bride away, one walking at her either side, and, though Buddy Eason could not see Janson Sanders’s face from where he sat in his van parked so far away on the dirt road that cut through Sanders land, Buddy was sure it was the happiest day of Janson Sanders’s life.

  Buddy had intended to do something to stop the wedding, to ruin the day for the Sanders family, but he found that he could not. His head hurt horribly, and there was a searing pain in his eyes as he stared through dark glasses and watched his only grandson marry Janson Sanders’s granddaughter. There was tingling and numbness in one of his hands, and he kept rubbing at one eye, until he knocked the glasses from his face and had to get the driver to find them.

  His headache had worsened by evening. He could hardly see through one of his eyes, and he was almost certain he had done it himself as he kept rubbing it—but that did not matter. He was alone—so completely alone—for he had fired the nurses, and dismissed his driver as well, when he got home, showing them to the door with a revolver.

  Now he sat in the huge, old house that had sheltered Easons for generations, drinking, trying to make himself drunk, as he thought about all he would do to his grandson and to Janson Sanders’s granddaughter—what God has joined together, Buddy Eason will pull asunder, he kept thinking. What God has—

  But there was no God, only Buddy and the things he would do. He lit a cigarette with an engraved lighter, then sat for a moment studying its flame before he flicked the top shut and set it on the cherry wood desk. He took a deep drag on the cigarette, and then rested that hand back on the arm of the wheelchair, thinking of all he would do, and of how he would make his grandson suffer before he was through with him.

  What God has—

  The hand holding the cigarette was going numb. The cigarette fell from his fingers and rolled into the broad expanse of his lap, then onto the floor, coming to rest in folds of the blanket covering his wasted legs.

  Before long the blanket was smoldering. Buddy’s face was drawing down on one side by then, the muscles pulling, twisting the side of his mouth, and his head hurt so bad that he thought he would die even before the blanket was fully in flames.

  Buddy Eason was conscious, fully awake and knowing, when the fire reached him at last.

  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 Th
ere 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 There Is a River, visit www.newsouthbooks.com/there-is-a-river.

 

 

 


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