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,
