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
