“I can’t let him do that. It was all my fault. I should have crossed to the other side of the street when I saw them, or—”
“No,” Dorrie said with a shake of her head. “It weren’t your fault; it was Buddy Eason’s. Him an’ them friends of his are a bad sort, an’ Buddy’s th’ worse of th’ lot. Th’ world’d be better off without any ’a them three, though I’d ’a never thought Carl Miles would’a turned out like he has, ’cause his folks’re good people, but I guess runnin’ around with Buddy Eason’d do that t’ anybody—”
“But, I can’t let Janson—he’ll end up in jail or killed or—”
“Shh—” Dorrie said, giving Elise’s hand another pat, her presence helping to steady the girl’s nerves. “Don’t you worry about that none. You got that baby t’ think about now, an’ you been through enough already. Me an’ Clarence’ll come back t’ th’ house with you, an’ maybe Clarence can talk some sense int’ that man ’a yours when you tell him,” she said, looking up at her husband, and Elise saw Clarence nod his head in apparent agreement with his wife.
Elise had already burned a skillet of cornbread in the old woodstove in her kitchen by the time Janson awoke. She had the rear door standing open to try to air the smoke out of the room. Clarence was sitting at the kitchen table and Dorrie trying to help her salvage what she could of the meal, when Janson entered the kitchen from the middle room of their three, his short, black hair messy from sleep, though he had dressed before he had left the front room. His eyes moved over Clarence and Dorrie, then went immediately to Elise, giving her the sudden and horrible thought that he would think something had happened with the baby, which made her blurt out the entirety of the truth before she could even consciously arrange her thoughts.
She watched his face drain of color as she told him what Buddy Eason had done and suggested to her today, realizing with a sudden clarity of thought that she was not censoring her words or the impressions of what had happened to her in the slightest way, though she knew she had earlier in speaking to Dorrie and Clarence.
Dorrie stood beside her now, though Elise could not tear her eyes from Janson’s face—she could do nothing but stare at him, seeing the awful loss of color leave his face, being replaced suddenly by a redness that she knew was anger.
“Did he hurt you?” he asked at last, his words perfectly clear, though she could see his jaw was clenched, his green eyes in that moment harder than she had ever seen them.
“No, he frightened me more than anything—”
He stared at her as her words fell silent. “He put his hands on you.” It came out as a statement, and the look in his eyes in that moment was worse than anything she had imagined. She could see murder in his expression. He was going to kill Buddy Eason for what he had done today. She was certain of it.
“He put his hand on my stomach, and, when I slapped him, he grabbed me by the arms and shook me, but he didn’t—”
But he was already halfway across the room headed for the open rear door, and she saw happening exactly what she had feared. She ran after him, knowing that he intended to go out that door and cut across the back yard and the yard of the house behind them on the way to the mill to find Buddy Eason. He intended—
She grabbed for his sleeve, only to have her hands pushed away. “Janson, you can’t—”
But he did not even look at her.
“Janson—”
Then Clarence was between him and the door.
“Get th’ hell out ’a my way, Clarence.”
But Clarence would not move. He met Janson’s gaze for a long moment, staring at him even as Dorrie reached Elise’s side and reached to draw her away.
“He’ll kill you,” Clarence said, conveying more feeling in his toneless words than Elise had ever seen in him before. “He’ll kill you, today, or some other day, if you go up against him. Elise ain’t hurt this time, but what’ll happen t’ her once you’re dead? Who’s gonna look after your wife an’ your baby if Buddy Eason kills you because you came after him? From what Dorrie tells me, you’re th’ only family she’s got now, you an’ that baby, ’cause she gave up her own people t’ marry you—are you gonna leave her behind now? You best think of your wife, boy, your wife, an’ not yourself an’ your own pride that you got t’ avenge now by goin’ after him.”
Janson stared at him, and Elise felt her heart rise to her throat to choke her, certain that he would still go after Buddy Eason.
Then Janson took a deep breath, and Elise knew that he was struggling to control the anger that was still written plainly in every line of his body.
“One of these days somebody’s gonna make Buddy Eason pay for all he’s done,” Clarence was saying as Janson turned at last to look at Elise again. “One of these days—but not today. You got your wife t’ think about, boy, an’ she’s been through enough already. She’s been through enough.”
It seemed as if Buddy Eason was determined to make his presence known in the village, and most especially to Elise, as the weather grew warmer. He drove down their street so often in the afternoons that she took to locking the doors at night while Janson was at work, even though she knew the locks were of little use, for they opened with a large skeleton key that was readily available in the mill office. Janson had told her she was never to go near the mill again unless he or someone else was with her, and that suited her just as well—she had no desire to run into Buddy Eason.
As the days passed and she became larger with the baby, she no longer felt like doing so much walking anyway—oh, how she missed the luxury of having an automobile to take her wherever she wanted to go, as she had had when she had lived in her father’s house. Back then she had never thought it a luxury that their family had owned three automobiles, her brother’s Packard, her father’s Studebaker Big Six President, and the ugly Model T Ford she had hated so much, as well as a number of trucks. She could not now think of any family she knew personally in the mill village, except for snooty Helene Price and her husband, Bert, who owned even a single automobile, and she was amazed sometimes when she realized how naive she had been never to realize how privileged her life had been as Elise Whitley. That life seemed so far away now, that life of easy transportation, of electricity in her home, of running water and decent bathroom facilities. Now there was walking if she had to go anywhere, kerosene lamps to light their three rooms, and that little room in the back yard that nauseated her stomach each time she had to use it.
She sat in the front room of their half of the mill house late on a Friday afternoon in June. Janson had left for his shift in the mill no more than twenty minutes before, but already darkness had begun to fall, an early darkness brought on by a storm she could hear approaching in distant and prolonged thunder from the west. The rain had not started yet, and she found herself dreading when it would, for that would mean she would then have to pull down the side windows in all three rooms, leaving as ventilation only the front and rear windows that were protected by the overhangs of the two porch roofs.
She sat reading again the letter she had received from her mother the day before, and tried to write a letter in response, but her mind would not stay with what it was she was trying write. She missed her mother terribly, and her brother, Stan, and now that the baby’s due date was drawing closer she found herself missing them only more, and missing her home in Georgia as well. She got up and moved about the three rooms they had in the mill house, thinking how odd it was that her child would be born here and would grow