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
