left the house, hearing Deborah Sanders’s admonition once again to stay away from where the men were working. Elise told herself silently, as she stood in the chill air on the small rear porch, the door now closed between them, that she had already had enough of the old woman’s interference, enough of her meddling, and that she would go wherever she pleased to go, and that she pleased to go see her own husband.
She made her way down the slanting board steps and across the bare-swept yard, along the edge of the now-cleared winter garden, and toward the barn where it stood at a distance from the house with the cotton fields stretching away from it, feeling the wind pick up and begin to whip her skirt about her legs as she walked. She could hear the voices of the men as she neared the side of the structure, and she realized with a flush of embarrassment that Janson was enduring some good-natured jesting from his uncle and his grandfather at his supposed lack of sleep due to their being newly married. She blushed with embarrassment and stopped where she was, glad she had heard them before she had walked into the conversation.
“That’s my business, an’ Elise’s—ain’t nobody else’s,” she heard Janson say, a stern tone in his voice, and she felt a stab of guilt go through her. There was no reason he should not have gotten plenty of sleep the night before, that is, unless her crying had kept him awake.
She looked back toward the little sharecropped house, the sky low and gray beyond it, not wanting to return there, but knowing she could not walk into the discussion that had been going on, even as she heard the men fall silent for a moment. She sighed and tugged her coat closer about her shoulders, deciding she would have to return to the house, whether she wanted to or not, but then curiosity got the better of her as she listened for a moment, hearing the sounds of the men’s breathing, and occasional words and phrases.
“He sure was a big ’un.”
“Hope that gamblin’ stick’s good ’n stout.”
“You got them pans ready?” she heard Janson ask.
Curiosity overcame embarrassment, and she moved around the side of the barn to see what they were doing, what she had been warned away from intruding on. At first she could not see, for Janson’s grandfather and his uncle blocked her view of Janson and of what it was he was doing. She moved closer at the same moment the two men moved aside, and she saw—
Janson knelt on the ground before a hog strung up for slaughtering. There was a quick swipe of a butcher knife, and then Janson was turning, standing up, the creature’s decapitated head in his hands—
Elise covered her mouth, vomit rising to her throat. The glassy eyes in the head seemed to look right at her, and she forced her eyes away—to the carcass that hung headless over a waiting pan. She did not want to look, but could not stop herself. She had known that animals had to be slaughtered for food, but she had never seen, she had never known—it was so barbaric, and the men could do it with seemingly no feeling, no emotion at all.
She finally forced her eyes away, and to Janson, who stood looking at her, a bloody apron tied around his waist. Her Janson—who had cut the creature’s head off.
She felt the vomit rise into her mouth, and she turned and ran a few steps away, then fell to her knees, the breakfast she had just eaten coming back up. She hated this place, this barbaric, bloody, superstitious place. She hated these people, and everything about them.
She continued to retch long after there was nothing left to come up. Janson was kneeling beside her, saying gentle words she could not understand—but he did not touch her; he kept his hands away. She looked at his hands again, and thought of what he had done, and she began to retch anew, wishing he would just shut up, wishing he would just go away, wishing he would just leave her alone and never come near her again. The man who had rushed to her, the man kneeling at her side, the man she had married, seemed a stranger now.
The late afternoon sunlight slanted across the yard beyond the window, throwing it into stages of light and shadow. It seemed a familiar sight to Janson, familiar from all the times of visiting his grandparents’ home over his years of growing up in this county. So little had changed in the months he had been away, so little—except for his own life. When he had left Eason County in those early January days of 1927, he had been responsible for no one but himself.
He had left, swearing never to return to the county until he could return as a man, until he could return to buy back the land that his parents had fought and died to give him, the land he had lost to the auction block so soon after they had died. Now, less than a year later, he was back, responsible for Elise, as well as himself—and he had not returned as a man should have returned. He had come back to live off his grandparents’ charity, bringing Elise to a life he had known she could never understand, for it was a life so far different from the one she had always known in the white-columned great house the Whitleys had lived in for generations. All her life she’d had anything she could ever have wanted—and there was nothing he could give her now to compare to the things she had given up in order to marry him. They had no home, nothing they could really call their own—only each other. He had tried so hard to make her understand—but he knew now that he had failed miserably at getting her to see the kind of life she was choosing in deciding to marry him. He had failed miserably, and at more than making her understand.
He could hear the old floorboards creak behind him as he stared out the window, the sound of the rocking chair moving slowly back and forth where Elise sat in it, but he did not turn to look at her. The room had been chill, and he had built a fire for her, pulling the rocking chair closer to its warmth so that she would not be so cold, but she had said nothing. She had said so very little of anything all day. He stared out the window, feeling more helpless than he ever had before. He knew now that he had made a mistake, perhaps the greatest mistake of his life, to have brought her here.
This was no way of life for Elise Whitley; she was a lady, accustomed to grand and fine things, and he knew he had been a fool to have offered her any less. She could not live in this little house crowded in with so many of his relatives, with his aunts making her feel unwelcome, with Gran’ma’s healings, and the country life and ways she could never understand—but he did not know what to do. There seemed nothing he could do now to set things right again. She was his wife, and because of that her father had disowned her. She could never return to her home in Georgia. Janson loved her, but knew already that he had failed miserably at being her husband. He only wanted for her to be happy, only wanted for her to love him.
He was surprised to find her eyes on him when he turned to look at her. There was such a look of sadness on her face, such a look of loneliness, that a stab of pain went through him. He wanted to go to her, but he could not. There seemed a distance between them now that he had never felt before, a distance much greater than that of the room between them, a distance of promises he had made to her that he was afraid now he would never be able to keep. He told her they would have a home of their own, that small, white house on those red acres he had been born to, a life that would have been something in exchange for all she had given up. Now he was afraid that would never be, afraid in a way he had never allowed himself to feel before.
There seemed a sadness in her eyes now as he stared at her, a sadness that broke his heart, and a longing that he was afraid he would never be able to fulfill.
“I’m sorry,” he said, simply, staring at her. For a long moment, he could think of nothing more to say. He crossed the room slowly and knelt on the floor at her feet, reaching to take both her hands in his and lifting them to hold them against either side of his face as he stared up at her. “Forgive me for what I’ve done t’ you, for bein’ s’ blind as t’ bring you here—”
“There’s nothing to forgive you for,” she said, very quietly.
He released
