There Is a River Page 7

  Loneliness could change a lot in people.

  There was a sound next door as if a table had been knocked over, and laughter, loud and drunken, over the din of the radio. “Hussy,” Elise muttered as she stood now in the open doorway, staring through the screen door at the chimney sweeps darting about in the lowering sky. There was noise all about her, life all about her, but she felt no part of it. She stood alone, her arms folded over her chest, staring across the way. She felt isolated, homesick, though she stood in her own doorway, wanting so badly just to see and touch Janson—why had she not heard from him? Why—?

  After a moment she moved across the room to her sewing machine and went back to work on a dress she had begun early that morning. Her eyes were tired and she felt unbelievably older than her thirty-three years. She tried to concentrate on her work, tried not to think about Janson, about the long days since the last letter she had received from him. She reached with one hand to give the wheel on the sewing machine a turn and get it going, then operated the treadle with her foot to keep it in motion.

  The constant whir of the needle moving in and out of the fabric, the sound of the machine, dulled the other sounds into the background—the laughter of the two young women, Stan’s voice, the radio next door—then she stopped, listening, and the sound of the sewing machine died away.

  She could have sworn she had heard Janson’s voice, the sound of her own name—after a time she took a deep breath and then reached to set the machine back in motion, shutting her ears to the sounds around her.

  The mail was late the next afternoon. The damned mail, always late.

  Elise sat in the front room, picking the basting out of a skirt with a pair of scissors. She jabbed her finger, then almost started to cry from frustration—she got up and moved to the screen door, then stood staring out with her arms crossed before her chest, breathing deeply to regain her composure.

  Every day was like this now. Every day was nothing but hours to endure waiting for the postman to come, and then only minutes until it was time for bed, minutes until she would have to lie alone to make it through the endless night. It did no good to tell herself that she would have been notified if something had happened to Janson. It did no good to know she would have gotten a telegram.

  She caught sight of the postman, Mr. Ware, as he made his way up the street, and she stopped, gripping the door frame so hard that her knuckles turned white. She forced herself to stand there, not to run out onto the street, not to behave like a madwoman.

  Mr. Ware came abreast of the house and saw her in the doorway, then waved before passing on down the street. Elise stood with her hand raised in greeting, a dull emptiness settling over her again that she had known throughout the past days. She turned at last and made her way back to her chair, picked up the skirt, and began again to pick out the basting.

  Another day, and no word.

  She felt too empty even to cry.

  She finished the skirt that afternoon, then resumed work on a wedding dress for Dorrie’s niece, Rosie. She worked at the sewing machine until her neck and shoulders hurt, until her eyes felt strained, until the calf of her right leg ached from operating the foot treadle, and still she did not stop. Late afternoon came, and Elise busied herself fixing supper, preparing Janson’s favorite foods without thought, then she sat as Henry, Catherine, and Judith ate, unable to eat anything herself for the very fact that Janson was not there.

  Later, she left the girls washing the supper dishes, though Catherine was complaining through every moment of it, and went back to her sewing, resuming work on the wedding dress, a dress that would bring them needed money. She had saved for weeks to buy new shoes for Judith, so badly tempted to go into their savings for the purchase—it was getting harder and harder to make it without Janson’s wages from the mill and all the doubles he had worked in the months before he left for the war. She wondered how they had ever made it during the height of the Depression, when Janson and Stan had both been without a job, and especially in the years they sharecropped. Money was so important, so very important, and there never seemed to be enough of it. Never.

  She could not touch the savings. They had lost it twice before—once when her oldest brother had stolen it, once when the bank collapsed—they would not lose it again, and she would not eat it up slowly in the time Janson was gone. It would be there when he came back, and they would then buy his land, the home he had dreamed of for so long, the home he had promised her. She thought about it so often in the long nights, about that white house that seemed so big to her now with its six rooms, compared to their three in the mill village—what had her family ever done with all those rooms in her father’s big house in Georgia? That seemed a world away, a lifetime away.

  As the hour grew late, Elise stopped work at the sewing machine so the noise would not keep the children awake. She moved about the house quietly, straightening up, tidying the kitchen again, although that had been another of the tasks she had given Catherine and Judith to do after supper. Half of the room was only partially done, with crumbs under the table along with an unwashed fork and a small portion of a biscuit, telling Elise which side of the room had been Catherine’s responsibility. Her eldest daughter never did anything more than half way, apparently having concluded that to prove herself capable would only mean that she would be expected to do more often.

  Catherine was fourteen now, and sometimes reminded Elise so much of herself at that age that she was sorely tempted to slap her. Elise had been only two years older when she ran away with Janson, and she found herself watching her daughter at times now wondering how she could ever have been so young.

  Elise sat down at the kitchen table after she finished straightening up, taking out paper and a fountain pen to began another letter to Janson, though she had mailed one to him only that morning—she just needed to talk to him, to be near him for a moment. Line after line was filled with senseless chatter, Elise writing so rapidly that it was barely readable, then she stopped, stared at the paper for a moment, and wrote: “Janson, where are you? Are you okay? I miss you so much. Oh, please—”

  Then she crumpled the paper and left it on the table as she rose to pull on the drawstring hanging in the middle of the room to shut the light out.

  She moved through the middle room, careful not to wake the children, then entered the front room and closed the door. She sat in her rocker and stared around the room for a moment, looking at the big, empty bed before she took up her knitting—but it was too easy to think as she stared at the stitches made, so she set the work aside and reached for a book, knowing it could occupy her mind.

  She had wanted to read Gone With The Wind for years now, but had not come across it in at the library until the day before. Everyone had talked about it back in ’36 when it was first published, and there had been even more talk when the movie came out in ’39—Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, she knew all about them already, as if they were real people she had heard gossiped about, and not just characters in a book or on a movie screen.

  Elise opened to the first page and began to read, then almost closed it when she saw the first mention of the word “war”—but by then she was already caught in the story. She read until late in the night, delaying going to that empty bed until she had to. She read until her eyes hurt and she could barely hold the book, then she marked her place and laid it aside. After changing into her nightgown, she sat on the side of the bed to look at the photograph of Janson on the night stand. The bundle of letters she had received from him lay alongside the photograph, and she took the top one out, pulling it from beneath the blue ribbon. She touched it, running her fingers over the familiar, uneven script, flattening it on her lap to read it for the thousandth time:

  “Dear Elise, first off I love you tell the kids pa sais high . . .”

  The last—most recent, she corrected herself—letter from him. He always began them the same, and she l
onged to receive a new one, to read that line again, written in a fresh hand and not worn from re-reading upon re-reading:

  “Dear Elise, first off I love you tell the kids pa sais high . . .”

  She gently put the letter away and looked at the photograph again, touched a finger to her lips then to the image of his face, then shut off the light and laid back to stare at the dark ceiling.

  She had been wrong, the woman who had written that book. She should have told how bad it hurt to be alone, how bad it hurt to worry if your husband would ever come home. She should have told—but who would want to read about loneliness, about an empty bed and long nights and—

  Sleep would not come and Elise lay staring at the darkness. She tried to remember what it felt like for Janson to hold her—then she tried to forget, tried not to think about it at all. There were footsteps on the back porch, the sound of the back door opening and closing, Stan coming in long hours after his shift in the mill ended, coming home to his bed in one corner of the kitchen. His shoes hit the floor and then there was silence.

  Elise lay and listened to the darkness, to her own breathing, to the sounds of loneliness and worry, until sometime in the early morning hours just before dawn, when sleep came at last.

  The next afternoon, Elise sat with Dorrie and a number of other women from Pearlman Street Baptist Church there in the village. They were having a housekeeping shower in Dorrie’s kitchen for Hettie King, a girl from the church who would be marrying her boyfriend before he shipped out for the merchant marines. The exclamations over presents had died down, and now the women sat talking about both their neighbors and the privations of the war, enjoying honey-sweetened lemonade and the last of the cake Dorrie had managed to concoct without benefit of white sugar, butter, eggs, or milk.

  Women bragged of husbands and sons overseas, photographs of handsome young men in uniform were shown, and a letter read that had come from a son in the military. One woman told of the victory quilt she was piecing for her eldest daughter. Another lady compared the taste of sweetening with honey, syrup, or molasses in the absence of sugar, and still another advocated the careful use of salt to bring out the natural sweetness in foods. There was talk of victory gardens, scrap drives, and first-aid classes; of rationing, the latest issue of Life magazine, and the lovely ruffled blouses in a store window uptown. More than once there were comments about the censors who read every word from their husbands, and quite a few ladies talked of jobs taken in the mill for the duration of the war—they all seemed to be doing so much, accomplishing so much more than Elise was accomplishing.

  Women who had never worked outside their homes had gone to work in the mill. They were taking up the slack left by the men and boys who had gone to fight, working now beside women like Dorrie who had been in the mill for years, as well as the old men and boys classified as 4-F and unfit for military service. The women worked as hard as their men ever had, pulling long hours, knowing that what they did only helped in the war effort—and Elise was ashamed to think of herself sitting at home with her sewing and her children, while these women went to work in the mill everyday to help in their own way to win the war, bringing home needed paychecks to support their families, and giving themselves something to help to pass the time. The mill was constantly hiring, hungry for workers in the shortages of war, paying good wages—and what she could do with the money! Janson had always said he would not have her working—but these were unusual circumstances, unusual times, and what did he think sewing and picking cotton were, anyway, if not work.

  She went to the mill the next day and was hired, and did not think again of how mad Janson would be until she was on her way home—but he could be as mad as he wanted, for she was at last doing something. She had not felt so good about anything in a long time—she would be helping in the war effort. She would be helping to pass the time. In her own small way, she might even do something that would help to bring Janson home—it just felt right.

  But Stan was not so sure, and even Henry tried to dissuade her.

  “You can’t take that job—”

  “Pa will be furious—”

  “You know how Janson feels about women working.”

  “What about Dorrie and all the other women who work in the mill?” Elise demanded of her brother.

  “Yeah, and none of them are married to Janson,” Stan said, looking at her over the tops of his eyeglasses.

  “I am going to do it,” she stared back.

  I am—she repeated those words over and over in the days to come. I am—as she tried to learn the job she was given in the mill. She was supposed to run drawing, and supposed to learn from an old man who seemed to resent her very presence in the mill. If she had thought through all these years that the area outside the mill was hell, with the sounds of its machinery and the sight of flying lint, then the interior of the building was the deepest pit, with its machines and noise, and the lint and cotton dust-choked air.

  “I know your husban’,” the old man who was supposed to be teaching her said in her first hours in the mill. “I’ll tell you what he’d say, that you ought t’ be home with your cookin’ an’ your young’ns, seein’ after th’ house ’til he gets home, not out tryin’ t’ do a man’s work.” He spit a stream of tobacco juice into a nearby spittoon, then wiped at his mouth with the back of one hand as he squinted at her.

  He made it as difficult on her as he possibly could, and Elise knew it, but there was little choice for him or for anyone else working in the mill. There were fewer and fewer young men available to take jobs, because of the war, leaving the grizzled old men, the women, and the underaged kids who were being worked against the child labor laws. Elise had been surprised to see the kids there, and even more surprised to see them hidden, sometimes lowered out of windows or sent to stay in bathrooms when the government people came through, but they were always put back to work as soon as it was clear.

  Elise hated the mill even before her first shift was over. She was terrified of the machinery, terrified because of what it had done to Stan and to so many others, and that fear was only compounded by the horror stories the older men told Elise and the other women who had come into the mill. She hated the noise, hated the lint and the cotton dust that stuck to her hair and clothing, and did not know if she could make herself set foot in the place even one more time—but she did. She stuck it out, determined to prove to herself, and to the old men, that she could do it, that they couldn’t drive her away, and each day it became easier. At the end of each shift she could only think—one day closer to the end of the war. One day closer to Janson coming home. One more day.

  Such a long time had passed since she last heard from Janson. She kept telling herself that she would have been notified by now if something had happened to him, that she would have been sent word—but it didn’t help. Nothing helped.

  At least she was doing something now, she told herself. At least she could return home at the end of a shift, ready for bed, ready for sleep, if sleep would come, her body too exhausted, her mind too numbed, to think of him more than a thousand times each day.

  One afternoon a few weeks after Elise had gone to work at the mill, Sissy and Dorrie were at her house for the evening. Sissy had been rocking her new baby in Elise’s favorite rocker, but Dorrie had laid claim to little Timmy the minute she entered, taking him from his mother and sitting in a near-by chair as she cooed to him. “My, how precious you are—yes you are,” as Sissy smiled and watched.

  Elise sat on the side of the bed there in the front room, watching her friends as Sissy showed Dorrie a photograph of Nora and her baby brother, which she said she would be sending to Tim. Judith was in the front yard with Nora now, for once enjoying not being the youngest. Catherine and Henry had found things to interest them elsewhere. Catherine, at fourteen, had little patience with either children or babies, and little interest in anything not male and in a uniform. Henry, Elise knew
, would be with Olivia, wherever they might be.

  It had grown quiet outside. Judith’s voice had stilled, as had Nora’s laughter. Elise got up from the bed and started for the door, hearing someone coming up the steps now and onto the porch. There was a knock, and then silence. She reached the doorway and looked through the screen door at the man who stood on the porch, and then at what was held in the man’s hand—she caught at the doorframe for support, feeling almost as if she had been struck. She could hear Dorrie’s voice behind her, and she knew that Judith and Nora were now on the porch behind the man, but all she could see was what he held. A telegram—no, she did not want to know. No—

  She swayed, fear gripping her, tightening her stomach muscles into knots. There was a humming in her ears, a humming she knew could not be there, for everyone had fallen silent, from her own daughter, staring now down at the telegram, to Sissy and Dorrie in the room behind her.

  Elise made herself breathe, made herself think, make her lips form the words: “Yes—wh—what do you want?”

  Her voice was a whisper. She felt Dorrie’s hand beneath her elbow, keeping her on her feet.

  “Mrs. Sanders?”

  She nodded, unable to speak, the room beginning to spin about her, the edges of her vision darkening—no, I won’t faint. I would know it if he was dead. I would know it. I won’t faint. I can’t. I’ve got to know. Dear God—not Janson. I can’t—

  The man looked at her, and Elise knew that he could see the fear in her eyes, knew that he had delivered news of death and heartbreak so many times before.