Janson’s shoulder was fully healed by the time fall came and the cotton bolls burst open, paining him only on occasion now, when the weather was bad, or on days when he worked it too hard in the fields. He had not once seen Lecia Mae or Buddy Eason, or their father or grandfather, since the day of the stabbing, and he found that he was glad—not because he was afraid, for he held no real fear of any man, but simply because there were more important things on his mind, more important things that had to do with holding onto the land, and with selling their crop again where it could bring them the most money.
There was a surplus in the cotton market in that fall of 1925, more cotton coming in than buyers had a need for, and the going price per pound of lint had already dropped lower than it had been in either of the past two years—and the Easons were paying even less than that. There would be no more choice this year than there had been the last; they would have to sell out of the County if they were to hold onto the land, have to sell, and quickly, before there could be any further drop in price, a drop that could so very easily cost them the few cents per pound difference between being able to hold onto the land, and losing it.
Janson found that he was glad to be out in the fields again in that first week of picking the cotton, glad to be doing something, and not just sitting and waiting for his shoulder to heal, as he had been doing for so long—but it was tiring work, long days of dragging a pick sack behind him, picking until his hands bled from the dry hulls and his back ached from bending among the cotton plants, until his shoulder hurt and his feet were tired and he wanted only to go home and rest. There was trouble coming and he knew it, could sense it as he worked in the cotton fields, could see it in his father’s eyes—Walter Eason could not let them sell their cotton out of Eason County this year.
But there was no choice. There was so little choice left for any of them now.
There were long hours in the fields that first week of picking the cotton, days that went from before sunup in the mornings until long after sunset at night, each of them dragging a long pick sack behind them down the never ending rows, Janson, his father, and his mother as well, for there was no money to hire pickers, and, even if there had been the money, there would also have been better uses for it as well. It seemed to Janson that those first days went on forever, days of emptying pick sacks into the cotton baskets he and his father had woven years before, tamping the cotton down, only to return to the rows again—after a few hours backs would be aching from the constant bending and stooping, fingers would be bleeding from contact with the dry hulls, and any neck not protected by hat or bonnet would already be painfully burned from exposure to the sun.
By the end of that first week, Janson was sore and exhausted. He was glad now that he had turned down an offer to supper that night at the home of one of the girls from church; she was a nice girl, very pretty, with long blond hair down her back to her waist—but at the end of that first week of picking cotton, Janson was too tired to even really care. His shoulders ached from the weight of the cotton sack he had dragged behind him all day, its wide strap slung across his chest and oftentimes pressing the healed wound in his right shoulder. His fingers were sore, a deep scratch in his left thumb from one of the cotton hulls, and his back ached—all he wanted tonight was rest and sleep. Tomorrow there would be church and kin and dinner with the girl’s family after services—but tonight there was that old straw tick, and a rest he knew he so badly needed.
As darkness began to settle in that night over red fields now thickly starred over with white cotton, Janson and his father dumped the cotton baskets one last time into the overloaded wagon and started for home. The night was quiet around them, the sound of a motor car miles away in the distance the only thing that broke the stillness. There was a full moon, lighting the cotton fields and the bare-swept yard that led to the house; the smoke coming from the chimney of the separate kitchen, and the kerosene light showing through its windows, the only signs of life in the darkness.
Janson was exhausted as he sat beside his father on the seat of the old wagon. His mother had left the fields hours before to prepare supper for the family, but he wondered now if he would not be too tired to eat, stifling a yawn again as he stared toward the house and the old barn beyond. His pa was silent as he sat beside him, seeming to Janson somehow almost old for the first time in his life, his shoulders bent as he drove the team of mules—Janson knew he was thinking again of the work ahead, of the days of picking the cotton, and of the struggle that still might lie ahead to sell it as they knew they would have to. Things had been quiet around the place for the past several weeks; there had been no more broken windows, no slaughtered animals, but Janson knew it was not over yet. Walter Eason would know they had not been beaten so easily. Walter Eason would know, just as Janson knew. Walter Eason would know.
Janson’s appetite returned as they entered the separate kitchen of the old house a short time later, the scent of baking biscuits and frying ham coming to him. There was good, strong coffee, potatoes fried in bacon grease, and turnip greens swimming in pot liquor, as well as fried apple pies for dessert—and Janson realized suddenly how very hungry he was, a hunger he had rightly earned from hours of hard work in the fields that day.
When supper was finished, he sat tired and contented in the flickering light of the kerosene lamps in the front room they used as a parlor. He rocked slowly in an old split-bottomed rocker, his head leaned back, his eyes closed, his mind thinking, dreaming. His father sat nearby, reading silently from the old family Bible, its worn and cracked leather cover open in his calloused hands. His mother was across the room, bent over the foot-treadle sewing machine that had sat here in the parlor for as long as Janson could remember, her voice, sweet and clear above the sound of the machine, singing the words of a song he had heard both her and his grandmother sing time and again.
On the floor beside her chair sat a specially sized and painted bow basket Janson had made and given to her on her last birthday, a basket now filled with assorted bits of cloth of odd shapes and sizes, quilt scraps she would soon be turning into warm cover against the cold Alabama winter nights. Her hands were busy at the sewing machine now, unable to be still even after the day she had spent picking cotton in the fields, her mind occupied with the remaking of an old shirt someone had given her—Gran’ma or Aunt Rachel, or maybe even Aunt Olive—remaking it into a shirt he or his father could use, and that the former owner would hardly recognize again once she was finished with it.
Janson listened to a dog barking a half-mile or so away in the darkness; listened to the sound of a train whistle off in the distance, a train going almost anywhere—such a lonely sound. He listened to the night outside, feeling the heat of the fireplace warm on his face, smelling the scent of the oak logs burning there. He heard his mother singing, and the sound of the sewing machine as long familiar as her voice—he kept his eyes closed, not having to look at this room to see it, for he had spent every day of his life here in this house. He knew every step of the way from where he sat through the house and out over the covered walkway to the kitchen, to the icebox that leaked water on the floor, or to the temperamental old wood stove that sometimes belched smoke back into the kitchen. He could find his way through these rooms in the dark or without sight, for this was his home, as much a part of him as his soul was. He knew the red land that rolled into pine-covered hills and woods, and the cotton fields he had worked for as long as he could remember. He knew the rise of land across the road, beyond the beginnings of the fields and the small apple orchard, the rise where the old oak tree stood, the place he liked to go to be alone, to think, to dream, or to just sit and look at the house and be. He knew every step of the way from the porch to the barn, to the smokehouse, or to the old shacks that had held sharecroppers long before his father had ever owned the land—if there ever had been such a time. He knew the rutted clay road and the woods, and every step of the way from here to his grandparents’ house, or to the sharecropped land of any of his kin or neighbors, as well as to the Holiness church they all attended. This was his home. This would forever be his home.
He sat with his head leaned back against the rocker, his eyes closed, his mind dreaming—he loved this land, this place, and he knew he would spend the remainder of his years here, working the red earth as God had intended man to do, even as his own father did now. Someday soon he would marry and have sons who would work this land as well. He would find a good woman, a nice girl from a Holiness family, for the Sanders were a Holiness people; a woman very much like his ma or his gran’ma, a woman a man could depend on, strong and level-headed and a good cook—and pretty, with a nice figure and long hair; not one of these modern girls with their bobbed hair and their smoking, their face-paint and short skirts and oh-so-modern ways that made them something less than ladies. He would marry a good, old-fashioned girl; they would have a family, and they would have this land—and someday he would buy more land, maybe the next farm over. And he would never sell at Eason prices again.
He must have dozed, for he woke with a start at his father’s cry. Henry Sanders was suddenly on his feet, sending the rocker he had been sitting in crashing over onto its side on the floor, the old Bible falling from his hands—he ran for the door, a horrified expression on his face, and for a moment Janson did not understand. Then he smelled it: Smoke, not the scent of wood smoke from the fireplace, but something more. And his eyes caught sight of the light reflecting orange and yellow onto the front windows of the house. Fire—
Within seconds he was out onto the porch beside his parents, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as he saw the unpicked fields ablaze, the cotton going up—all that work, all that sweat, all that hope, gone for nothing. His father had grabbed up a quilt from where it had lain sunning over a chair on the porch during the day, and he was already running across the yard toward the fields—Janson did not know how the other quilt got into his hands, but suddenly he was running as well, stumbling, falling, only to get back to his feet and run again, almost unmindful of the sudden, sharp pain that shot through his left knee at almost every step.
The fields were choked with smoke, with flying pieces of burning lint that singed his face and hands. He began to beat at the flames with the quilt, the thick smoke choking his lungs until he thought he would never breathe again, the sweat pouring into his eyes until he could see nothing but the heat and the fire and the hell around him. He gagged on the smell of the burning cotton, his lungs fighting for air until his chest hurt with the very effort to breathe. He was in hell and he knew it was lost, everything was lost, this field and perhaps the next—but still he fought on, beating at the flames with the quilt, only to see them rekindle again from the dry and burning plants nearby.
His mother was a few rows away, beating at the fire with the beloved rag rug that had lain in the parlor all these years, the rag rug that had once belonged to her own mother, a mother she had never known, it burning already in her hands as she swung it over her head and down into the flames again. Her long black hair had come loose from its bun, hanging now down her back and past her waist, swinging with her movements. Her face glistened with sweat, something near absolute panic in her eyes even over the distance, her long hair and dress both swinging too close to the flames each time she lifted and swung the rug—he started to yell for her to get back, to warn that she was too close to the fire, but suddenly something in her face changed. She threw down the rug and started to run, and for a moment Janson thought she had caught fire, that she was burning—then he saw. His father, a distance away through the hell, was clutching at his chest, seeming to fight for air, for breath, a look of pain suddenly constricting his features.
Janson threw down the quilt that was already beginning to catch fire in his hands and ran toward his father as well, a pain suddenly shooting through his left knee that was now too bad to be ignored. Fire shot up in front of him, moving down another row of cotton—but the cotton no longer mattered. Nothing mattered. Nothing but his father. And Janson already knew that he was dying.
Henry Sanders collapsed into his wife’s arms as she reached his side, and for a moment it seemed Nell Sanders would fall as well with the added weight—but suddenly she was dragging him from the field, her face showing the strain, the muscles cording out in her neck with the effort. Janson reached her side and began to help, taking his father’s other arm, hearing her voice, the same words, pleading over and over again:
“God, don’t take him from me. God, please, don’t take him from me . . .”
There was so much pain in his mother’s eyes, so much fear, a fear that matched Janson’s own as they reached the edge of the field and collapsed there, his mother’s strength giving out, his own giving way with the pain that now filled his left leg. Nell Sanders was crying as she drew her husband’s head onto her lap, her voice saying his name over and over again, her hands touching his face, tears streaming down her own—but Henry Sanders was already dead.
The burning field nearby cast the world around Janson into a hell of heat and smoke and writhing black shadows. Tears ran from his eyes and down his cheeks as he stared into the face of this man who had given him life more than eighteen years before, this man who had given him the dream of the land. His mother rocked back and forth on her knees, his father’s head cradled in her lap, her face stunned, disbelieving, streaked with smut and tears and more grief than Janson had ever known before. He lifted his eyes from the nightmare before him, begging God to understand, to know why—
Then he saw. And he knew.
Sweat poured down his face and into his eyes to mingle with the tears already there. Burning pieces of flying lint singed his face and hands, the thick smoke choking his lungs, the strong odor of gasoline coming to him from the burning field—but still he saw clearly as the black car turned around in the road and started away. He saw clearly. And he knew.
It was the black, 1915 Cadillac touring car.
It belonged to Walter Eason.
The glow of fire in the night sky soon brought neighbors and kin from nearby farms to help fight the blaze. As soon as Janson knew the fire was out and his mother safe, the church women and Gran’ma with her, he knew he would go after Walter Eason, would go after him to make him pay for what he had done, what he had caused—but his grandfather would not allow it, pulling him up short as he started to leave the blackened fields, as if the older man knew what it was he intended to do: Nell Sanders had already lost one man this night, his grandfather told him; she would not lose two.
Janson stood to himself in one corner of a chill room in his parents’ home hours later that night, tears rolling from his eyes and down his cheeks as he watched his mother, his grandmother, and his aunts bathe and dress his father for the last time, preparing him for the burial that would come. His mother had not spoken for hours now, not since the moment Gran’ma had knelt beside her, one arm around her slender shoulders, tears streaming from her own eyes as she stared down into the face of her son.
“He’s gone, child. He’s with th’ Lord now. Henry’s done gone—”
Janson did not sleep at all that night. He lay awake in the darkness, remembering the big man with the gentle and calloused hands, thinking of all the things he would have liked to have said, all the things he would have liked to have told him—as dawn came he dressed and went out onto the front porch of the house, wanting to be alone, wanting to avoid the grieving and sympathetic looks of the kin and neighbors who had spent the night on chairs and pallets throughout the house, or who had sat up in respectful silence by the body of his father. He sat on the wooden steps that descended to the bare yard, staring out across red land burned black by fire, ruined fields, the destroyed crop, and it seemed to him as if the land was mourning as well.
The screen door creaked open behind him, and he turned to find his mother staring out across the fields as well, a distant and hurting look in her dark eyes. He rose out of respect as she moved toward him a moment later, stepping up onto the porch to take her hands in his, hands that suddenly seemed so small, and so very frail.
Her eyes were red and weak from crying, her face washed white with tears, her lips pale, their lines indistinct. He had never before looked into the face of loss, of grief such as she felt, and he knew somehow that her grief went much deeper than did his own, much deeper than even he could understand.
He held her hands tightly in his, searching in his mind for the words to tell her what it was he felt, somehow knowing all the while there was nothing he could do, nothing he could say, that might help to lessen her loss—but her voice came before he could speak, her words strong, determined, a fierceness in them as he stared down at her that he had never before seen in anyone in all his life.
“Your pa loved this land, and he loved me, and he loved you—and you make him proud—” she said, her hands squeezing his until his fingers ached. “Don’t you let them take this land away from you, and don’t you let them get the best of you—you’re my and Henry’s son; you’re half him, and half me, and don’t you ever forget that. Don’t you ever forget it.” She stared up at him, the strength in her matched only by her loss as she swayed slightly on her feet, her dark eyes never once leaving his face. “As long as they never beat you, they’ll never beat him, and they’ll never kill his dream. It’s inside of you, part of you—and don’t you ever let them touch it. You hold onto this place, and you be the man he taught you to be—and don’t you ever let them beat you. As long as you live, don’t you ever once in your life let them beat you—”
Henry Sanders was laid to rest in the quiet of the small country cemetery just beyond the Holiness church he had attended since Janson had been a small boy, laid to rest beside two brothers who had gone before him, and a great-grandfather Janson had never known. Within months of his death, Nell Sanders went to join him, laid to rest at his side, taken by the influenza in the cold winter months, even after having survived the epidemic that had taken so many in the years of the World War—but Janson knew the truth; he knew she died simply because she no longer wanted to live, no longer wanted to exist in a world where Henry Sanders was no more. Her spirit had given in, and the influenza had taken her—and, even as Janson sat beside the two bare, unmarked graves in the small cemetery, the tears running down his cheeks and dripping onto the red earth, he knew his mother was where she wanted to be, beside his father again.
He and his gran’pa had gone to the sheriff with what he had seen the night of the fire, but, even these months later, nothing had been done about it, as he had known nothing would be done—there had been too many witnesses to say Walter Eason had not left his home the night of the fire, and that the Cadillac had never once left the carriage house. It had been a heart attack that had taken Henry Sanders’ life, a heart attack brought on by the stress of trying to fight the fire, and it had been both the influenza and grief that had taken Nell Sanders—but still Janson knew the Easons were responsible. The Easons had set the fire that had taken more than half the cotton crop as it still stood in the fields, or had caused it to be set—Janson knew that; there was no doubt: the car, there where it should not have been; the fire, when there had been no cloud in the sky, no lightning that might have started the blaze; and the strong odor of gasoline in the burned fields—there was no doubt.
But, still, nothing would be done. Nothing in Eason County.
Time and again he started toward Pine in the weeks and months after his father’s, and then his mother’s, deaths, determined to make Walter Eason pay for what he had done, what he had caused. He knew the man could never have known the high price the fire would exact that night—but still he should pay, still he should—
But time and again he turned back. His mother’s words would not leave him—“. . . don’t you let them get the best of you—you’re my and Henry’s son; you’re half him, and half me . . . As long as they never beat you, they’ll never beat him, and they’ll never kill his dream . . . don’t you ever let them beat you. As long as you live, don’t you ever once in your life let them beat you—”
He could not allow himself to kill Walter Eason, though he wanted to badly. He was Henry and Nell Sanders’ son, and they had raised no murderer. He would hold onto the land, and he would make his parents proud, and he would see to it that the dream they had held for so many years would never die—the Easons had never defeated Henry or Nell Sanders once in their lives, and they would not defeat their son even now. Henry Sanders had dreamed too long, had worked too hard, for land of his own, a crop all his own, a better way of life for his son and for grandsons he would never know—Janson would not lose that now.
But he was alone, eighteen, and with a farm to tend, a farm with fields devastated by the fire that had devastated his own life those months ago. He had picked what had been left of the cotton after the fire—prices were the lowest they had been all season, and over half the crop had been lost, but still he would not give up. He had taken the cotton out of the County for sale, and no attempt had been made to stop him—no words had been spoken, no threats made, but still Janson had carried a rifle beside him on the seat of one of the borrowed trucks that had been used to take the crop out of the County. He would have shot the first man who had attempted to interfere. He had already made that decision.
When spring came, he began to break up the red land again, working alone behind mule and plow from just after sunup each morning to the last minutes of light. He planted the fields, tended them, chopped out the weeds with a hoe when they appeared; worked and worried and sweated from well before daybreak until long after dark each day. He fended for himself, alone for the first time in his life, as often as not eating cornbread and turnip greens, or whatever else he could find left over from what his gran’ma or his Aunt Rachel, or one of the ladies from the church, had brought over days before, sometimes too tired at the end of the day to even bother to heat it up on the old wood stove, and often too hungry to really care what it was that he ate. The preacher had suggested to him that he marry, that he take one of the girls from the church as his wife, someone to take care of the house and look after him, to cook his meals and mend his clothes, and maybe even give him a son or daughter in the year ahead—but Janson could not consider that. There were nice girls in the church, pretty girls, and he knew there were one or two who might even have taken a fancy to him—but he could not think about marrying now. He lay awake often in the night, tired and sore from the hours of work in the fields, lonely in the old house, missing his parents, and remembering how they had been. It would have been nice to have a woman beside him, someone he could touch and pleasure with and talk to—but all he could think about now was the land. All he could think about was the home he felt each day that he was losing.
Somehow late each Saturday he found the time to wash his overalls, dungarees, and workshirts in the wash tub in the back yard, using hot water from the black pot on the wood stove, and strong lye soap his mother had boiled down the year before from hog renderings and potash dripped from the ash hopper in the back yard. He beat the clothes on the battling block out by the kitchen door, boiling the sheets and his two good white shirts in the huge black pot there, scrubbing his work clothes on the rub board until his fingers hurt and his knuckles were raw—and often doing it all by the light of the fire beneath the wash pot, the one kerosene lamp he had brought out from the house, and the light falling from the windows of the separate kitchen where he would go for supper when the work was finished. The clean clothes would hang on the wash line overnight, and would often still be damp the next morning when he would take down one of the two good shirts and his Sunday trousers, press them as best he could using the old black flat iron he heated on the back of the wood stove, and would often still be damp even hours later as he walked toward church in them, the old Bible with its cracked leather cover in one hand, and the only pair of shoes he owned in the other.
There was always more work than he could do in the days, and never enough hours to do it in, no matter how hard he tried. So he spent even more hours, worked even later into the darkness each day, refusing to give up, refusing to even acknowledge that defeat could exist—and he lay awake at night and worried, and listened for someone to come again this year to try to destroy the crop, to take the last hope there was left. To take his land.
But this year there was no interference, no broken windows, no killed animals. When fall came, his kin helped as best they could, spending hours in his fields in addition to their own, his grandparents, his Uncle Wayne, and several of his cousins, picking his cotton as well as their own, trying to help him hold onto the land—but cotton was bringing less per pound of lint this year than it had in any year since 1921, less than he could ever remember it bringing before. There was a good crop, more cotton than the land had ever grown before—surely, even with the current prices, it would be enough to let him hold onto the land once it was sold. Surely—
When the cotton was at last picked, filling the bins in the barn, filling the two old sharecropper shacks on the land, filling even the spaces boarded in on either side of the front and back porches of the house with only narrow walkways left in between, Janson looked at it, and he worried all the more. Many farmers were saying their crops were going for less this year than it had cost to grow them—and there was the mortgage payment to meet, as well as the credit he had found it necessary to run at the store. His pa had always warned him against using credit—but even Henry Sanders had been forced to use credit from time to time. That was how they had gotten the land in the first place, the same damned mortgage that threatened to take it even now.
The cotton was loaded onto borrowed wagons this year for the trip out of the County. Janson knew any trouble they might find would come before they could reach the County line, and he was already prepared to meet it—the old rifle rested against his thigh this year as it had the last. The Easons would not take his land. Not even if he had to use the rifle. Not even if he had to kill someone.
It was not long after they left the land that morning, the wagons loaded heavy with cotton, that the black car began to follow them, always staying at a distance, never coming any closer, never any farther away; making no attempt to pass them on the narrow dirt roads, or to not be seen—but, as they reached the County line, it turned back, never once having attempted to stop them, or to halt their progress. The crop was sold, and Janson returned to Eason County—but he already knew it was lost. The cotton had not brought the money he needed. He was losing the land.
In the next days he sold off everything he could—two iron bedsteads; the sofa, upholstered chairs and centertable from the parlor; the hog he had been fattening for slaughter; the milk cow—anything he could find that might bring him some little money, until all there was left were the things he could never sell: the rocking chair he and his father together had bottomed with smooth white oak splits for his mother, the foot-treadle sewing machine she had worked over on so many evenings, the old rope bed his parents had shared since their marriage, the chifforobe that had sat in one corner of their bedroom all his life, the old wood stove, the leaky icebox. He took every cent he could gather from the sale of the furniture and the crop, and he gave it to the bank, knowing it was not enough, but praying—He kept telling himself that it could not end this easily, not after all his parents’ dreams, his own. Not after all the years that Henry and Nell Sanders had worked and saved to have this land, and to hold onto it for him. Not after his entire life spent here on this red earth, working these fields, not after seeing his parents die—not after the past year, after all the hard work, the long hours in the fields, plowing and planting and chopping the cotton; not after the work and the worry and the days upon days of picking the fields until his back ached and his fingers bled. Not after—
But the foreclosure notice came, the notice of auction—he did not have to be able to read them to know what they said. They meant he land was no longer his. His father’s dream. His mother’s. His own—he had lost the land.
It was only a few days later that Walter Eason came to the land, a cold, gray day with a heavy, damp chill in the air that clung to the skin like a wet coat. Janson had been working in another man’s fields since before sunup that morning, clearing land for the next year’s planting, earning the little money the work might bring him, for there was still the store charge to pay, as well as a long winter ahead, a long winter when he knew he would not be on the land. He was tired and hungry as he walked toward home late that afternoon, the money from the work now earned and in his pocket, but those few coins were soon forgotten as he rounded the side of the house to find the black Cadillac touring car pulled up into the front yard.
He stopped where he was just short of the front porch and stared, watching as the car door opened and Walter Eason got out, the old man’s white hair a stark contrast to the gray and threatening sky behind him—for a moment Janson felt a muscle clench tightly in his jaw, his hands tightening into fists at his sides as he fought to control the rage that built inside of him at the sight of the man. Walter Eason stared at him for a long moment, as if he were assessing the situation, and the young man who stood before him, then he closed the door of the touring car, and made his way toward where Janson stood before the house.
It seemed a long time before either man spoke, as Walter Eason and Janson Sanders met each other’s eyes over the short distance between them. A wind blown up by the lowered clouds and the threatening sky stirred the old man’s white hair—but still he looked somehow unmoved as he met Janson’s gaze. At last he spoke, his face seeming still unchanged. “I hear you’ve lost this place.”
Janson did not answer, but only continued to stare, somehow remembering the words his mother had spoken to him on the old porch behind him those months ago—and also a day, over two years past now, when Walter Eason had stopped him and his father in town. He could almost taste the red dust the cars along Main Street had kicked up that morning, almost hear the horns of the Model T’s, the Chevrolets, and the Buicks—and this old man before him, this old man who dared to come to the land even now.
“You’ll have to be leaving here soon,” Walter Eason was saying, staring at him now. “I want you to know there’ll be a place for you in the mill, and in the village, if you want it.” He paused for a moment, seeming to be waiting. “There’s always work in the cotton mill for a good, hard-working boy like you—”
For a long moment, Janson said nothing. When he at last spoke, his voice was quiet, but filled with anger. “Get th’ hell off my land—” he said, and Walter Eason’s face changed almost imperceptibly. “This place may not be mine much longer, but, while it is, I want you th’ hell off it—” He stared at the old man a moment longer, then turned and walked up onto the porch and in through the front door of the house he had lived in all his life, leaving Walter Eason standing alone in the front yard. It was then that Janson Sanders knew he had to leave Eason County.
He had not once thought of what he would do once the land was gone, once the farm was sold on the auction block, for that had seemed such an impossibility, even as he had held the notice of foreclosure in his hand—but now he knew it was a reality as unstoppable as fire or death or falling cotton prices had ever been. He knew he could not stay here now to see his home sold to another man, to see another man work the fields that had once been his own—he had to go somewhere else, to find work that could earn the money he would need to get his land back someday. The Easons had not beaten him, as they had never once beaten Henry or Nell Sanders in all their lives—Janson would return here; he would buy back his land, and he would pass his dream, his parents’ dream, on to sons and grandsons of his own someday.
Two days later he stood on the low rise of land just beyond the small, winter-barren apple orchard and the beginnings of the red fields that in a few months’ time would be broken by another man’s plow, tended, picked—it was the same as if he were married, and knew his wife would lie with another man, for he had loved this land for so long, known it even more intimately than he had ever known any woman. He stood beneath the empty branches of the old oak, looking out over the fertile red land, an aching inside of him such as he had not known since the days that each of his parents had died.
Over his shoulder were slung his shoes, tied together at the strings to make them easier to carry; at his feet was his father’s worn old leather portmanteau, the battered old suitcase containing everything he would take with him in the world—the faded and patched overalls, dungarees, and workshirts, his good trousers, and the two Sunday shirts, all equally showing signs of wear now, and his inexpert care and laundering. Stuffed in with his clothes were the few dollars he had, and the old family Bible, the only existing photograph of his parents carefully placed between its pages, a photograph from long years ago, before hard work and worry had served to age them both. Everything else had been sold in the past months in trying to hold onto the land, everything but the few objects that were too precious to sell, things that had belonged to his mother and father, things with too much meaning to ever allow them to go to strangers. Those few things he would ask his Uncle Wayne or his gran’pa to come for in a wagon before the auction, in hopes someone in the family could use them, or at least store them until they might be of need again—he would not be here then. Today he was leaving Eason County.
He took one last look around at the red land, the fields he had worked beside his father all his life, the woods he had played in as a boy, and at the old barn yearly filled with white cotton for as long as he could remember. He looked at the house with its wide, comfortable porch where his mother had sat in her rocker on so many Sunday evenings, and at the separate kitchen off to one side of the house, connected only by the covered walkway in between—home, but home no longer.
He stood staring at the house for a long time, remembering things he had not thought of in years, days long passed now, things his father had said, the way his mother had often smiled, the sound of the sewing machine now and forever stilled and silent in the parlor. After a time he left the rise, cut through the silent apple orchard and over the North Ridge Road just above where it ran past the house. He cut through the fields with their rows of dry and lifeless cotton plants waiting now only to be turned under for the next year’s planting, and toward the woods. He never once looked back.
He went along the path long ago worn smooth by a man’s steady step and a small boy’s running feet, the winter woods silent around him, the green of the pines the only sign of life in the dead of the January cold—he would say goodbye to his grandparents, and then he would leave Eason County for perhaps a very long time. But he would be back. He would leave for now this place where his pride and his soul would not let him stay. He would go somewhere else—where did not matter, for it would never be home to him; nothing would ever be home again but that red land and that white house he could no longer call his own. He would go wherever it was that he might have to go, do whatever it was he might have to do, to earn the money it would take to buy his land back—and then he would return to Eason County, and he would make that dream a reality again. Even if he had to face hell or the devil or fight Walter Eason himself—he would have that dream.
After a time he came to the old Blackskillet Road, crossed a ditch at the side of the red clay expanse, then followed its edge toward the sharecropped land his grandparents had worked for as long as most in the area could remember. When he came within sight of the unpainted house, its tin roof long ago rusting and brown now, he realized suddenly that it was Sunday, for the preacher’s four-year-old Chevrolet was pulled up before the narrow front porch of the tenant house, as well as his Aunt Olive’s and Cyrus’ Buick, and his Uncle Wayne’s Tin Lizzie. There was to be a family dinner after services this Sunday, as on most Sundays, and the preacher and his wife had been invited to share the meal today, as had Janson. His gran’ma would be worried where he was, wondering why he had not been in church that morning—and now he would have to tell her he was leaving as well, leaving for perhaps a very long time, and that he would not see her again for possibly years after this day.
He stood for a moment and stared at the house, then made his way across the bare swept yard, past the preacher’s car and the old Model T, and up onto the front porch. He knew he would be disturbing dinner with his late arrival, especially with company in the house, but he could not stop now. He could not go back to the land, to the house, for one more day, one more night, knowing it was no longer his. He turned the doorknob smoothly in his hand and pushed the door open, not bothering to knock, for he knew there was little need for anyone to knock at this door.
His cousin Sissy sat in a rocker in the warmth before the fireplace in the front room of the sharecropper house as he entered, the girl rocking a homemade ragdoll in her arms, her gentle face calm and happy. She looked up as he closed the door behind himself, smiling as she saw him, then quickly motioning for his silence, warning with a look that the doll-child in her arms was asleep. Janson smiled and nodded his understanding, then stood watching her for a moment, remarking again to himself how lovely she already was at twelve, her long blond hair hanging in curls down her back, her blue eyes large and expressive; she was already becoming a young woman—but her mind would forever be that of a child, as everyone in the family but Sissy herself already knew. He nodded again to her, saying goodbye in his own way, while taking care not to disturb the sleep of the carefully mothered doll in her arms.
He passed through the middle room of the house, glancing at the old iron bedstead that had sat there in the same position against the whitewashed far wall for as long as he could remember, a hand-pieced quilt neatly drawn over its corn shuck mattress, a chamber pot visible beneath the foot of the bed. Ahead, through the open door to the kitchen, he could hear the preacher’s voice and his grandfather’s, both raised in some religious discussion as they sat on wooden benches pulled up to either side of the eating table, the soft voices of the women in the kitchen almost drowned out by his gran’pa as he told the preacher for the second time that book learning did not necessarily mean that a man knew the ways of the Lord. Brother Harmon started to respond, a holding-forth tone in his voice that Janson recognized from long Sunday mornings seated in his sermons, but Gran’pa cut him off mid-sentence as Janson entered the room.
“Hello, boy, we missed you in church this mornin’—”
The kitchen smelled warmly of home: fresh-baked biscuits, country ham, and fried chicken, collard greens cooking in a black pot on the back of the stove, wood smoke, strong black coffee. There were deep dishes of good food on the table, black-eyed peas cooked with ham, potatoes yellow with fresh-churned butter, rich candied yams, and syrup cakes stacked with dried apples for dessert. The men sat on benches pulled up to either side of the table, enjoying his grandmother’s and his Aunt Rachel’s cooking, the preacher sitting across from his grandfather, Uncle Wayne and his three boys, Aunt Olive’s husband Cyrus and their son Daniel. The younger people and the children were out back of the house, and Janson could hear their voices clearly through the windows and doors closed against the winter chill—they would be the last to eat, after the men, and then the women, were finished, and tempers were running high, and voices growing louder, as their empty stomachs growled and the minutes crawled by.
The women stood or sat at the edges of the room, seeing that the bowls and platters of food on the table remained full, or simply waiting. Sister Harmon, the preacher’s wife, sat in a straight, split-bottomed chair away from the overpowering heat of the wood stove, her spine not once touching the seat back, her legs encased in thick cotton stockings, crossed primly at the ankles, and tucked away behind one of the chair legs as she talked in quiet tones to Janson’s Aunt Olive. His Aunt Belle and Aunt Maggie sat only a few feet away, Belle with her arms folded beneath her large bosom, and Maggie with hers folded beneath her rather flat one, both pointedly ignoring the preacher’s wife for some slight imagined in church long weeks before.
Gran’ma and Aunt Rachel stood near the wood stove, seeing to it that the men’s plates never grew empty, and that no slight in hospitality should occur, as they discussed children or households, canning or kinfolks, or whatever else it might be that women discussed at such gatherings. Janson returned his grandfather’s greeting, but did not take the time to explain why he had not been in church that morning, then he looked toward his gran’ma—she was staring at him, staring at him with a sad, rather-resigned expression on her gentle face. Her brown eyes did not shift to take in the shoes slung over his shoulder, or the portmanteau held in his right hand, and he realized suddenly that they did not have to—she had known all along he would leave, that he would have no other choice.
“When you wasn’t in church this mornin’, I knowed it’d be t’day—” she said quietly, staring at him. “I figured it’d be soon—you know yet where you’re goin’, boy?”
“I don’t reckon’ it much matters. I guess t’ just wherever it is th’ first train takes me—” They both knew he would not have money to pay for the fare, but that he would have to hop the train instead, waiting until it was picking up speed pulling out of the depot, then running to swing himself and his few belongings on board the first empty boxcar he might find—they both knew, but they also knew there was no way around it, just as there was no way for anyone to offer him money to pay for the fare instead. They both knew he would not take it.
“You’ll let us know where it is you wind up?” she asked.
“Soon as I can—”
Gran’pa rose from the table, stepping around the end of the bench and coming toward him. “For once I was hopin’ your gran’ma’d be wrong—why don’t you stay on here, boy, an’ help me crop this place?” But Janson knew his grandfather did not need him to help sharecrop the small farm. His Uncle Wayne had the next place over, and together he and Gran’pa, and Wayne and Rachel’s three boys, worked the two sharecropped farms as one, splitting the work, and splitting the little annual return there was from the portion of the crops that did not go for use of the land. Janson knew his grandparents did not need another mouth to feed, more kin than there already was crowded into the small house, just as he also knew they would take him in anyway if he wanted to stay—but he could not stay. There was the land—his own land—and he could never forget that.
“Won’t you stay on, boy?”
Janson shook his head. “I cain’t—” he said, but explained no further. His grandfather looked at him for a long moment, then reached out to take Janson’s hand in a firm handshake.
“If it’s what you got t’ do, boy.”
Janson nodded. There was nothing else he could say.
He went to his grandmother, stopping for a moment to drop his shoes and the portmanteau on the bare wood floor at her feet before putting his arms around her. He hugged her briefly, and kissed the softness of her cheek, then looked down into the kind brown eyes, finding them now filled with tears.
“I’ll be back in a couple ’a years,” he said. “Soon as I—” He did not have to finish.
She nodded, placing a work-rough hand on his cheek as she stared up at him. “You may look like your ma, but you’re just like Henry—”
And Janson understood.
She turned back to the wood stove, putting her mind to the worry that his stomach be filled, rather than that her favorite grandchild was leaving her. She fussed with the lid covering a black pot, lifting it with a folded pad of quilted material, then lowering it back into place without ever having looked inside. “You better eat somethin’ before you go—”
“I ain’t hungry. I made myself a big breakfast before I left th’ house,” he lied, knowing all the while that she knew he lied. His stomach was in knots, and he knew he would not be able to eat anything, not even if he had to.
She nodded again, then reached up to lower the door of the warming oven above the stove, reaching inside to take out something she had wrapped into a clean white cloth. She turned to put it into his hands. “Biscuits an’ fried chicken,” she said. “I knowed you’d get hongry later.”
For a moment, Janson could only stare at the warm white bundle in his hands, then he bent and kissed her cheek again, smiling and nodding to her—there was no need for words. He knew she understood.
He gathered up his shoes and the portmanteau from where he had dropped them earlier, holding them in one hand as he turned to his uncle.
“Uncle Wayne, there are some things left at my—” then he stopped for a moment, realizing, “at th’ house. Would you mind—”
“I’d be glad to, boy,” his uncle said, knowing the words before they had to be spoken, and looking for a moment so very much like Janson’s father.
Janson nodded, then looked around the room one last time, memorizing the sights and smells and feelings familiar from a lifetime—the wooden table worn smooth with use, the warmth of the wood stove, the smell of black coffee and good country food, the faces of his kin—there was nothing left to say. It was time that he leave.
They all walked him to the door: his gran’ma and gran’pa, his aunts, uncles, and cousins, even the preacher and his wife; and he told them goodbye one last time as they stood on the narrow front porch of the sharecropper house, the cold January wind whipping at their clothes.
“You take good care ’a yourself, boy,” Gran’ma said, staring up at him with love and worry clouding her brown eyes. Her gentle hand squeezed his arm. “You try t’ keep warm an’ dry, an’ let us know where you are soon as you can—you got any money?” she asked at last.
“I’m all right,” he said, and she nodded.
“You jus’ remember who you are, boy,” she said. “You jus’ remember who you are—”
Janson took one last look around at the faces of his kin, seeing the strength in them, and the weakness, knowing that what they were, he was also. Then he turned and left the porch, walking down off the narrow board steps and into the yard, crossing it toward the rutted clay road that would take him into town and to the train depot, and away from the only home he had known during the nineteen years of his life. As he topped the rise in the road that would cut off sight of the house behind him, he turned back for a moment to wave one last time, and to say goodbye. Then he turned and walked on, slinging his shoes over his right shoulder, the red clay ground cold beneath his bare feet—he was Henry and Nell Sanders’ son, he told himself. And someday he would make them proud.
Deborah Sanders stood on the front porch of the sharecropped house she had lived in for more years than she could count, staring at the red clay road long after the others had gone back inside to the kitchen and to the meal she had prepared for them. She smoothed her hands down over the front of the apron tied about her waist, her tears dried now, but the ache inside of her none the lessened—her grandson was gone now, gone from home and his kin and the only way of life he had ever known; and she was worried.
Janson was so like Henry—determined, stubborn, headstrong, with perhaps more pride than it was right for any man to have, and that same dream in his green eyes she had so often seen in Henry’s, that same dream of a home and crop all his own. Deborah had seen her son work and struggle through his life for that dream—and she had seen him dead because of it, had helped Nell to prepare his body for burial, and had seen Nell die so soon afterward, ready only to be with him.
And Janson was of both his parents.
Deborah closed her eyes and talked silently with her God for a moment—there was no need for conscious words in her mind, for she and her Lord were of long-standing acquaintance. He would understand. He would know. And He would look after her grandson.
She opened her eyes and stared at the road again, her mind no less troubled even after the prayer. Often neither God nor man made an easy life for a dreamer; she well knew that, as so many of their people through the ages had known it, from Tom’s grandfather who had been killed in Ireland in the hard years before the Potato Famine had forced the family to flee to America, killed by the Protestant landlord of a tenanted farm for refusing to pay his rent moneys and still see his children starve; to her own ancestors, who had only barely survived the massacres of non-Catholics in France; to Nell’s people, so many of whom had died in the forced march of the Cherokee west from the north Georgia mountains in the time of the Trail of Tears. They had always been a people with their own dreams, their own thoughts and ideals, different somehow by choice and birth from others, and willing to die for that difference if need be.
Janson held that same difference, that same stubbornness, and many of those same dreams, of the Irish, French, and Cherokee within him; and Deborah worried all the more as she stared at the road he had gone away on—so much blood had been shed in the past for dreams. So much blood.
Passages from the Old Bible came to her, verses about Joseph and his brothers, and the dreams that had plagued his life, making her suddenly cold even beyond the chill of the wind:
And when they saw him afar off, even before he came near unto them, they conspired against him to slay him.
And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh.
Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, Some evil beast hath devoured him: and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Deborah Sanders stared at the point where the red earth and the blue sky met, her thoughts troubled—
“. . . and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”