with a load of fire wood he said he owed them, and had come almost every day the following week on one pretext or another before he had at last asked to call on her. It was less than a month later that he asked her to marry him, pacing back and forth in the red dirt of the side yard of the Parker’s sharecropped home, telling her his dreams and his plans for red land that already seemed such a part of him, though it was not yet his own. “I ain’t gonna be a sharecropper all my life, Miss Nell. I’m gonna have my own land—th’ old Stilwell place; you know it. It’s good land, and it could make us a good livin’; that is, if you’d be my wife—”
They were married a week later, on the day after her fifteenth birthday, in the little church where they had met, returning to his parents’ home that night where they would live until they could set up housekeeping on their own. There had been long years of hard work ahead of them, a decision they had made to have the land, no matter the cost it might bring to them. There had been a year of sharecropping for old Mr. Aiken, with half a crop lost for use of the land, the other half lost to the store bill; and then years in the mill village, in half a rented house, and long twelve-hour shifts in the mill for Henry—but at last they had the money, enough for them to get started on, and a mortgage for the rest. They had moved into the house Henry had dreamed of for so long, to the rolling red hills and the crop that no one could take from them, the land that was their own—and she had known Henry was at last home. Together they had worked the fields, planting or hoeing or picking the cotton, happy together in this place that had become part of them both.
For so many years there were no babies, and, as the years had passed, they had almost given up hope, though they often still prayed at night as they held each other, each wanting a child, but both knowing that, even then, they could be no happier. Then the miracle had happened, and she had been almost too happy to believe it could be true, and then another month had passed, with no blood as she had always known—Nell had taken the little money she had saved and had gone to see a doctor before telling Henry, not wanting to give him false hope until she knew for certain, for they had been waiting for so long.
After a horrid examination that had left her blushing and wanting to go home, the doctor had told her she was with child—at last, she was with child. She and Henry were to have a baby.
Henry had been in the fields when she had gone to tell him, and somehow that had seemed fitting, for she knew that nothing meant life and birth and continuance more to him than did the land—she was going to have his baby, she told him, their child. He had held her for a long time, not speaking, and, when she had looked up at him, he had been crying. And she had understood.
It had been a difficult pregnancy, a long labor, and a difficult birth. Henry had been banished from the house almost from the moment her pains had begun, told to wait on the porch with his father and his brother, Wayne, while his mother and a granny woman from the church tended Nell. It was his child, he had told them, his wife, and he had a right to be there; but they would have none of it, not even allowing him past the front door, telling him that a birthing was no place for a man to be, that he should find something to do in the fields to make himself useful until the time came when he could see his wife again, and his child.
It had seemed to Nell that the labor would go on forever, the pains continuing into the evening and late into the night, until it seemed to her the child would never come. But the pain had only worsened, coming and going until it seemed a constant, twisting her body with its intensity, making her bite her lips and dig her hands into the straw tick of the bed to keep from crying out—she saw the granny woman shake her head, heard her tell Henry’s mother that Nell should never have conceived, that she was too narrow to give birth, and too frail. But Deborah Sanders had only pushed the granny woman aside, saying she had brought many babies herself over the years, and that she was not about to lose her own daughter-in-law, or her grandchild.
“You push, honey—” she had told Nell, her face already drenched with sweat in the hot room. “You push with everythin’ you got—you an’ that baby’s both Sanders; cain’t nothin’ get th’ best ’a either one ’a you unlest you let it. Now, push! Push like the devil hisself has got a’hold ’a you! Push!”
She had pushed, had thought she would die, had prayed to see Henry one last time, to see the baby born and put into his arms before God took her, just as her mother had seen her put into her father’s arms before she had died—she screamed aloud when the baby finally came, and Henry rushed into the room to see his son born into his mother’s gentle and knowing hands, and to hear that first cry of life as Deborah Sanders lifted him by his ankles to slap him across the bottom. Henry collapsed to his knees by the side of the bed, taking Nell’s hand in his, watching as their son was put into her arms for the first time, the baby screaming, red-faced, and angry at his entry into the world. Henry would not be moved again, staying with her even as they tried to make him go, touching her and their son, keeping her from heaven itself with the very love in his eyes.
As long as she lived, Nell knew she would never forget the feeling of holding that miracle in her arms for the first time, of counting the tiny fingers and toes, and examining the small, perfect body of the son she and Henry had made—and she would never forget the tears in Henry’s eyes, the wetness on his cheeks, as he brushed the sweat-drenched hair back from her face. “We got us a son,” he kept saying to her, over and over again. “We got us a son.”
They named the baby Janson after her father, and Thomas after his, and their world had been complete within the three of them. Henry’s mother said there would be no more babies, but, after the years alone, they had never expected even this one, and they accepted that one miracle was enough for any lifetime. They had each other, they had a son, and they had the land that would be his one day. They could want nothing more.
Janson had grown fast, a handsome young boy with his mother’s dark coloring and his father’s green eyes. He was a loving and happy child, with a bad temper when pushed, and, as his grandmother often said, more stubbornness and pride than was right in any man or boy. He loved the land from the moment he could walk, loved growing things, and the feel of the red earth beneath his feet; loved his parents, his grandparents, and his kin, but the remainder of the world he was often uncomfortable with. He was dark, and he was half Cherokee, and he was proud with a pride the world would deny him—Nell knew he often heard the same things she had heard in the years since she had left the reservation, but, whereas she had fought her battles with silence, and with the dignity her heritage had taught her, she knew her son often fought his with fists, and with a temper that was nothing less than Irish and inherited from his father’s side of the family.
As Janson had grown into a young man, he had kept few friends, often alone it seemed, but never lonely; a young man often silent, but at peace with the earth and the sky and himself. He often reminded Nell of her father, and often of Henry, and often of herself—but Janson was Janson, and often even she could not understand him, though she had almost died to give him life.
There was a sadness within her now as she sat in the rocker by the side of the old bed, looking at the young man who had been stabbed and so badly hurt, remembering the baby she had nursed and held and touched—he was a grown man now, eighteen years old, older than she had been when she had become Henry’s wife. There was a feeling within her that he had already been close with a woman, had already learned things that she and his father had not known until their marriage night—young people grew up so fast now days, she thought, too fast. She knew the stabbing had probably been over a woman—the wrong kind of woman—though Janson had not spoken a word of it, though she knew he would not. He would remain silent if asked, silent, and with that look in his eyes that said there were things in his soul that belonged to him alone—and she knew she would not ask.
He was proud, proud and stubborn and determined, traits that would make his life all the more difficult, even beyond what his coloring and heritage had already deemed that life would be—but she had known that from the start, from the time he had been that baby first learning
