“You need time, too. You lost your wife—”
Nathan wiped at his eyes again with the handkerchief, and then a look of forced and bitter determination came over his face as he folded the square of material and shoved it back into his pocket. “Mr. Walt told me that he’d done give me two days, that she was buried now, an’ that there wasn’t nothin’ I could do t’ bring her back. He told me I had a job t’ do, children t’ support, an’ that I’d better start thinkin’ about them an’ not about me—as if even once since th’ day th’ first was born I ever thought of me over them, as if even once—” The bitterness seemed to fill him for a moment to the point there was no room for anything else. “I can’t afford t’ lose my job, even if it means leavin’ my children with th’ neighbor woman every night, an’ her s’ old she can’t hardly walk, hearin’ my youngest girl screamin’ as I leave because she’s afraid I ain’t gonna be able t’ come back since her mama can’t ever again—” Tears started from the edges of his eyes again, but he did not seem to notice. “Sometimes you got t’ find strength in you t’ do things you never thought you’d have t’ do.”
Janson stared at him. “If there’s anythin’ me or my wife can do t’ help, you let me know.”
Nathan brought his eyes to him and looked at him for a moment. “You really mean that, don’t you?” he asked. “Most white men wouldn’t make a offer like that t’ a colored man, no matter what’s happened in his family.”
“My pa was white an’ my ma Cherokee,” Janson said. “We’re all one color or another—besides, it’s what’s inside a man that makes him what he is.”
Nathan nodded. After a time he turned and started back into the mill. Janson watched him go, realizing in that moment that he had felt a degree of kinship with this man that he had felt toward few other people—Nathan Betts was here in the mill tonight not for himself, but for the sake of the family he had made with the wife he had buried today. He was here, not for himself, but for those he was responsible for. That was something Janson could respect far beyond the power or money of someone like Walt or Walter Eason.
He looked out over the darkened mill village one last time, then turned and went back into the mill, knowing that work waited for him.
Within days of moving into the mill village, Elise hated the sight of the huge, red-brick mill with its white-painted office out front and its tall chimneys billowing smoke throughout the village. She hated the flying lint that floated in the air for streets away, that stuck to her hair and clothing. But most of all she hated the sound of the machinery. No matter where she went, it was always there, keeping her awake at night as she lay alone in her bed, grating at her nerves in the daytime as Janson slept alone in the front room of their house, following her from morning to night and to morning again.
She longed for quiet and peace during those first weeks in the village, longed for someone to talk to, for books to read, for something to occupy her time as the minutes of each day dragged by. She found herself wishing for her mother, even for the constant harping of Janson’s grandmother—someone, anyone, to help her fill the hours of her days.
Most of all, she wanted Janson, but he seemed more distant from her than at any time since she had known him. He seemed driven to work, driven to earn, to prove something to her that did not need proving, accepting the shortened Saturday shift any time it was offered to him, sleeping through the days, waking only to hold her for a while, eat, dress, and return to that god-awful place that dominated life in the village—he hated the mill and the village even more than she did, and she knew it, though he never said a word. She knew he was working in a place he had never thought he would find himself because of her, and because of the baby.
He returned from his shift in the card room each morning, tired and hungry, covered with lint and cotton dust, and weary to his soul. He would eat whatever she had prepared for him, then fall into an exhausted sleep, no matter the hour. For the first week she tried to rearrange her sleeping so that she could lie beside him, but found that she could not sleep, no matter how tired she could make herself, so long as it was light outside. The only time she lay with him was for loving, and to watch him sleep afterward, before rising to try to find something she could do.
She tended their three rooms, doing housework for the first time in her life, housework she quickly decided she hated, in a house filled with mismatched furniture that had once belonged to his parents or that was borrowed from his relatives or given to them outright. She was determined to prove to herself, and to Janson, and to his grandmother as well, that she could be a good wife—the old woman had told her she was too spoiled to ever keep a decent house, which had made her all the more determined, and, it seemed, all the more doomed to failure. Each pan of burned biscuits now reduced her to tears; each meal that Janson did not compliment seemed inedible; each cobweb in a corner or hole in a sock seemed a slap in the face, until she sometimes thought she swung from crying jags to bouts of homesickness with nothing in between.
She could hear the neighbors’ voices in the other half of the house during the days, the many Breedloves as they came and went, hearing the children’s voices, even the parents arguing. She could smell their meals cooking, and hear their lives going on right here under the same roof as hers, and that made her feel all the worse. She could feel her body changing, the baby growing inside of her, and it had her mind in a turmoil. She was no longer the girl she had been, yet she was not sure who she was supposed to be. Life in the village was so different—and it was boring, so unendingly boring.
She wrote long letters to her mother and to her brother, Stan, and received long letters in return. Her mother’s writings were falsely cheerful, prattling on about people she knew, gossiping about neighbors, and showing a genuine excitement over the grandchild that Martha Whitley had to know she would likely never see. Stan’s letters were much more honest, and his honesty tore right through Elise’s heart—her name could no longer be spoken in her father’s house. Her room had been dismantled, her things either burned or given away to the colored families who lived at the edge of town. The people she had grown up with had been told that her father had thrown her out, that she was an ungrateful daughter who was at last getting what she rightly deserved. No mention was to be made of her, or of the “damned half-breed” she had married, and, when her mother at last told her father that she was pregnant, he said that he hoped that neither she nor her baby survived the birth.
She was dead to him, and he wanted every part of her dead as well, and, as Elise went through the days, she began to feel that a part of her really was dying, the part of her that had been Elise Whitley, the part that had been young and carefree and so excited just to be a young woman of the twenties. She could remember being that girl; she could remember being excited over new dresses and shades of lipstick, of wanting to be bold and daring and a bit shocking—but she wasn’t that girl anymore, and she knew she never would be again. She was Janson’s wife, and, though her entire world had changed because of him, she still wanted nothing else so much as to be his wife—she just wanted time with him, and something to do with the hours when they were apart. She just wanted to know who she was now, and to figure out her place in this new world. She had always had friends in Endicott County, people very much like herself, and she realized that she had defined who she was through those friends—but she had no friends here except for Janson himself.
She began to attend the Baptist church in the village, going alone, for Janson usually slept on Sunday mornings. She quickly became part of the choir, and was delighted when people made a fuss over her and told her how well she sang, until she realized she was valued primarily for her ability to drown out one of the other choir members, Helene Price, who sang loudly and usually quite off key, and who seemed to think that she could run the choir and the church and many of the other church members. Elise decided that she detested Helene, and it did not take long to realize that at least one other of the choir
