Through A Glass, Darkly
Charlotte Miller
NewSouth Books
Montgomery
Also by Charlotte Miller
NewSouth Books
P.O. Box 1588
Montgomery, AL 36104
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2001 by Charlotte Miller. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN: 978-1-58838-054-8
ebook ISBN: 978-1-60306-265-7
LCCN: 2001044109
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.
To Justin
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
1 Corinthians 13: 11-12 (KJV)
Contents
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
“Imagine him bringin’ her here.”
“Two more mouths t’ feed, ’stead ’a just one.”
“An’ look at her, with her bobbed-off hair an’ her skirt right up t’ her knees—ain’t nothin’ but trash, I tell you.”
Elise Sanders fled into the small bedroom that opened off the kitchen in the little sharecropped house, but the voices of the two old women followed her into the room, as she knew they had intended.
“Trash, I tell you—an’ for us t’ be throwed out ’a our room for them two, t’ give ’em ‘privacy,’ I bet she’s done with child, married only a few days or not; she’s just th’ type—”
Elise’s face burned with embarrassment as she leaned her cheek against the cool wood of the door. She did not know how she would ever face the two old women again, even though she knew she would have to, for they were Janson’s aunts, her new husband’s aunts, and they lived here in the same house where she was now forced to live. It made it only worse that they were right—she was with child, a child Janson did not yet know that she carried. She could only imagine the smug looks the two old women would wear when her condition became obvious.
She made herself turn away from the door, her eyes moving around this room she and Janson had been given here in his grandparents’ house, finding herself suddenly filled with a sense of homesickness she had not expected, but that had stayed with her from the moment she had left her home in Endicott County, Georgia. She moved further into the room, looking first at the hand-pieced quilts drawn up over the narrow bed, then at the whitewashed walls and the sagging cane-bottomed straight chairs, and at the washstand topped by its chipped pitcher and basin. This room was nothing like the one she had known through the sixteen years of her life, that room with its papered walls and the drapes and counterpane that had been a gift from her mother on her last birthday, its lovely mahogany furniture, its colors of pink and rose and white. She knew she would never see that room again, just as she would never see her family, or the home that had sheltered Whitleys for generations, even long before the war with the North that had ended six decades before. She had given up that room, just as she had given up her home and so much else in her life, so that she could be with Janson—he was all that she needed, she kept telling herself.
She hugged her arms for warmth as she moved about the room, the fire burning in the fireplace set into the far wall doing little to alleviate the chill in the air. There seemed to be dark shadows everywhere she looked, cast by the light of the fireplace and the single kerosene lamp sitting on the table beside the bed, moving against the far wall near the chifforobe, and even reflecting in the fading mirror over the dresser. She felt for a moment as if she had gone back in time as she stared around this room, back to a time and a place before electricity and running water, for the little sharecropped house had neither, to a time of superstitions and old-fashioned folk ways, a time and a lifestyle made worse by the knowledge that Janson’s family was Holiness and did not believe even in jewelry or makeup. She felt as if her very presence here in this house was offensive to these people, for her hair was bobbed short in the style most girls were wearing now in the 1920s; her dress, though the most conservative she owned, low-waisted and coming well to her knees, was far shorter than those worn by any of Janson’s female relatives she had met today. She even felt that more than one of those relatives had stared at her simple wedding ring—none of these people seemed to belong here in the last months of 1927, for they all seemed part of that other time, and, worse still, Janson seemed a part of it as well. He fit in here, as he never had during the months he had worked as a farmhand for her father.
She made herself move toward the bed to take up the white cotton nightgown she had left there earlier when she unpacked their things and put them away in the chifforobe, not wanting to change for bed, even though she knew Janson would be in