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.”
The landscape that passed outside the open doorway of the rail car that Sunday afternoon in January of 1927 was a mixture of green southern pines and red Georgia clay. Janson Sanders sat just within the open doorway of the boxcar, his back against the wall, feeling the train rock and sway beneath him as it moved along the tracks. He had no idea where the train was taking him, and in that moment it did not much matter—anyplace was fine, anyplace that was not Eason County.
He shivered with the cold and tried to pull his coat closer about himself, but knew there was little use. The frigid January wind that numbed his face, his hands, and bare feet, also cut straight through the worn old coat, his faded workshirt and dungarees, and even the old newspapers he had stuffed down inside his shirt against the cold, to leave him shivering anyway. He had considered for a time moving back into the recesses of the car, away from the freezing wind that blew in the open doorway, but had already decided against it—the cold was far preferable over the stench that filled a space usually occupied by cattle, far preferable, and also probably far safer.
He eyed again the two men who rode the rail car with him, glad again of the distance between him and where they sat. They stayed at the far side of the car, seated against the wall, away from the air and the light. They had been here, sitting much as they were now, when he had swung himself and his few belongings on board those hours ago as the train had been picking up speed pulling out of the depot in Pine. They had looked at each other, and then had begun to stare at him as he settled down with his back against the wall—as they stared at him even now, returning his look with hard eyes that showed little concern for him, or for the remainder of the world.
Some instinct born within Janson warned him to be on guard as he met their eyes. They seemed hard men, neither too clean, and neither with less than several days growth of beard on his face. The youngest was at least twenty years older than Janson’s
