Behold, This Dreamer

by Charlotte Miller

  Behold, This Dreamer

  Charlotte Miller

  NewSouth Books

  Montgomery

  Also by Charlotte Miller

  Through a Glass, Darkly

  There Is a River

  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.

  Genesis 37: 18-20 (KJV)

  NewSouth Books

  P.O. Box 1588

  Montgomery, AL 36104

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2000 by Charlotte Miller. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

  ISBN: 978-1-58838-002-9

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-60306-264-0

  LCCN: 00061310

  Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.

  To Justin

  Contents

  PART ONE - Eason County, Alabama, 1924

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  PART TWO - Endicott County, Georgia, 1927

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  Eason County, Alabama, 1924

  1

  There was as much pride within Janson Sanders as there was in any man in Eason County, though few people saw in him any reason for pride. Pride had no place in patched overalls and calloused hands, in a remade shirt and sunburned skin, or in the mixed blood that showed so clearly in his face and his coloring.

  He walked beside his father that gray Saturday morning in late November of 1924, the short, brick-paved downtown section of Main Street in Pine seeming to him choked with traffic and noise such as he was little accustomed to. Black and gawky Model T Fords rattled by, Chevrolets of varying colors, a Packard, an expensive-looking Stutz blatting its horn to get out into traffic—they were all dust covered, red from the Alabama clay, for this was the only paved stretch of road in all of Eason County, other than the short, brick-paved strip of Central Street just in front of the county courthouse in Wylie.

  People pushed past Janson and his father on the narrow sidewalk as they made their way from the wagon lot at the far edge of downtown, men in blue serge suits and starched collars, young dandies wearing plus fours and pullover sweaters, Janson meeting the eyes of each who passed with his father’s Irish pride and his mother’s Cherokee dignity, though his own overalls were faded and patched, and the shirt he wore had once belonged to another man. He knew that many people in the County looked down on him for the Cherokee heritage that showed so clearly in his face and his coloring, in the prominent, high cheekbones and the black, straight hair, but there was no shame in him for the man he was, or the past he was a part of. He was proud, as both his parents were proud, and he had been raised to know there was no man alive any better, or any less, than he—and he met the eyes of each who passed with pride and dignity, and with the independence born of his blood.

  His father was talking as they walked along, about the recent town ordinance that restricted horse and mule drawn wagons from Main Street any farther down than the wagon lot at the far edge of downtown, past Abernathy’s Feed and Seed and the dry goods store, and about the ugly Model T’s and the Chevrolets that crowded the roads enough already without restricting the short strip of downtown for their use alone. Janson listened, though he had heard the same comments many times before, not only from his father, but also from many of the neighboring farmers and churchfolk, and he started to say something in agreement, for he considered motor cars a luxury that he could see little need or use for—but a car horn sounded and drew his attention instead, and he looked toward the traffic to see a girl in a dark cloche hat crossing the narrow street toward them, the girl running slightly to avoid a Packard whose driver honked irritably for the second time as he had to slow for her.

  The short skirt of the navy-blue dress she wore covered her knees by only a bare few inches, and, as she stepped up onto the sidewalk out of the way of the motor car, Janson fancied he saw for a moment the top of a rolled stocking, and perhaps even a bit of exposed kneecap below the hem of the skirt—he looked away quickly, and then back again; after all, he was almost seventeen and a half now, and not unwise to the ways of the world, having become a man the year before at the hands of a girl from a neighboring farm, a girl who had known much more than any girl her age ought to have known.

  The girl in the cloche hat smiled appreciatively at the look in his eyes as she walked past—as bold as a flapper, he told himself, though he was not really certain how bold a flapper might be, for he had never been close to one in all his life. He found it difficult to even imagine a girl as bold and daring and promiscuous as he had heard city flappers to be, girls drinking liquor and smoking cigarettes, dancing and carrying on. The girl had face paint on, rouge and lipstick and face powder, and her hair was bobbed short beneath the cloche hat, curling in at her cheeks in the style some of the town girls had taken to wearing in the past several years, such girls actually visiting barber shops to have their hair cut just as men did.

  He glanced around at her as she walked by, admiring the slender calves encased in silk stockings, the dark seams so straight in back below the short skirt, though he knew she was the sort of girl his mother would say was no lady, for he well knew that ladies did not wear face paint and powder, or bob their hair, or roll their stockings down to their knees.

  “Janson, boy—” he heard his father say, a note of reprove in his voice, and he started to turn back to go on about the business that had brought them here into town today, so they could go back home to the land and to the barn roof waiting for repair, to the fall garden that needed hoeing, and the bow basket he had been working on earlier, as well as the scrap cotton still left in the fields waiting to be picked and sold for the money they would have Christmas on this year.

  And then he saw the car.

  It drove by slowly, the old man staring out through the open side at Janson’s father. Janson watched as it slowed even further still, and, after a moment, made a wide U-shaped turn at the far end of Main Street, the other cars there seeming to stop or move out of its way, one driver of a Buick honking his horn loudly before seeming to recognize the car, the driver, and the passenger, then falling silent and inching over to make way for the black, 1915 Cadillac touring car, as did everyone else. They knew that car; everyone in the County knew that car, for, though it was nine years old now, there was not another like it in all of Eason County—and it belonged to Walter Eason.

  The car went by, and then pulled over just ahead, in the only empty space among the Model T’s and the Buicks and the Chevrolets, blocking the way to a fire
plug as it came to a stop and waited there. After a moment, the old man got out and walked up onto the sidewalk to stand waiting for them, his manner as unyielding as the black suit he wore, and the white shirt with its starched and detachable collar.

  Walter Eason remained silent as they approached him, his eyes never once seeming to leave the face of the tall man with the graying reddish-brown hair who walked at Janson’s side, his own face never changing—just the cold, gray eyes moving at last as they flicked for one moment to Janson, and then back again.

  “Mornin’, Mr. Eason,” Henry Sanders said as they neared him, nodding his head in greeting, but not tipping or removing the battered old hat he wore, as many men would have done in the presence of the powerful old man. Henry Sanders tipped his hat to no man, as his son well knew.

  “Good morning, Henry—young man—” The gray eyes moved to Janson again, and Janson nodded. Walter Eason stared at him for a moment longer, and then turned back to his father. “Doing some shopping, Henry? We don’t see you and the boy in town too often.”

  “My wife’s birthday’s comin’ up,” Henry Sanders answered, explaining no further, and the old man nodded.

  “It’s good to see you doing your business in Pine; it’s good for all our County people when they do their business here in Eason County,” he said, and Janson knew what was coming, as he had known from the moment the car had first begun to slow, and then had come back to stop before them, hearing the words only a moment later; “I hear you sold your cotton out of the County this year, Henry, over in Mason, to Taylors—”

  There was a moment’s silence, so quickly gone Janson was unsure as to whether it had been or not. “Yes, sir, I reckon’ I did.” There was no tone of apology in Henry Sanders’ voice, and none of subservience—he owed Walter Eason nothing, and they both knew that. It had been his crop, grown on his land, with his own seed, and he had sold it where it had brought him the most dollars, though no other of the County farmers sold out of Eason County, though few ever had.

  “County farmers usually sell in Eason County,” Walter Eason said. “Most men find it pays to do their business at home.” There was no threat to the old man’s words, just the clear message—Eason County farmers sell in Eason County. There was no room left for compromise.

  “Cotton’s bringin’ a better price over in Mason, an’ they’re payin’ a premium for long staple—I got a mortgage t’ pay on my place; I got t’ sell where I can get th’ most money.”

  “Money isn’t everything, Henry,” Walter Eason said quietly, staring at Janson’s father.

  For a moment Henry Sanders did not speak. “No sir, it sure ain’t,” he said at last, his words quiet.

  Janson stood watching the two men, but neither spoke for what seemed to him to be a very long time as they stood staring at each other. Then he found Walter Eason’s gaze on him again.

  “The boy takes after his mother, doesn’t he?” Eason remarked after a moment, as if no conversation had gone on between the two men as just had. There was appraisal in the look directed on Janson, a summing up he did not altogether like, and he returned the cold stare without looking away, lifting his chin slightly as he met the old man’s eyes.

  “Yeah, he looks a lot like his ma—” Henry Sanders’s hand came to rest on his son’s shoulder, just as it had done so many times in the past, though Janson was fully grown now and as tall almost as any man in the Sanders family. Janson could hear the pride in his father’s voice, the affection inherent in the words, and he looked up at this man who had given him life more than seventeen years before, seeing in him the pride and dignity and determination of a man who wore faded overalls and a patched and remade shirt—then he looked back to Walter Eason, and he found the old man’s gaze now directed at his father as well, something in the gray eyes Janson could not understand.

  But his attention was suddenly drawn away, toward the black Cadillac, and the husky young man who had gotten out from behind the wheel of the vehicle. Buddy Eason, the old man’s only grandson, stood now beside the car. He was perhaps a year younger than Janson’s seventeen and a half years, but broader of build, with a square jaw set into an angry and defiant line below slicked-back, wavy brown hair. Buddy Eason was a bad sort, with a quick temper that could be both violent and unpredictable by what Janson had heard in the years of growing up in the County, though he himself had been lucky enough to have had few dealings with Buddy Eason in that time.

  But Buddy Eason was staring at him now, staring at him with a look that became only angrier as Janson returned the stare, Janson lifting his chin and returning the gaze without once looking away. Buddy shifted with almost restless motion, then again, his hands tightening into fists at his sides, his eyes not leaving Janson’s face until he heard his name spoken, and then Henry Sanders’s reply.

  “You know my grandson, Buddy, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, how’re you doin’, son?” Henry Sanders asked, and Buddy Eason’s eyes shifted quickly to him, eyes that were suddenly furious, filled with rage it seemed only because he had been spoken to as he had, had been addressed as “son,” and not as “Mr. Buddy” or “Mr. Eason” as Janson knew most of the County folk would have addressed him. Then Buddy’s dark gray eyes moved back to Janson, and Janson realized suddenly this younger man was waiting now for him to speak, waiting for him to ask after his health, to call him “Mr. Buddy” with the respect Buddy believed himself due as an Eason.

  Janson Sanders remained silent and returned his stare.

  “I’m sure you’ll come to realize before ginning time next year that it’s best for a man to do his business at home, Henry,” Walter Eason was saying, as if they had never once left the subject. Janson brought his eyes back to the old man, finding no doubt written there on the almost unlined face. “We’ll see you at the gin next year,” he said, and then started to turn away.

  “Next year’s a long way off, Mr. Eason,” Henry Sanders said, and the old man turned back for a moment to stare at him. There was something in Walter Eason’s eyes that seemed to understand what was being told him, something that for the first time seemed to know the sort of man it was who stood there on the sidewalk before him that day. After a moment, he nodded his head, and said quietly:

  “We’ll see, Henry. We’ll see . . .” He turned and started again toward the black touring car, stepping down off the sidewalk without ever once looking back.

  Henry Sanders was a man who owed his livelihood to no other man. It had been a decision he had made, a choice taken in long years past before memory could even serve him. He had come into life over fifty-six years before there in Eason County on sharecropped land his parents had worked for more years than they could count, only the third generation removed from an Ireland of tenanted farms, famine, and starvation. He could remember no time in his life when he had not wanted land that was his own, a home no one could ever take from him, and a crop he would not lose half of each year for use of mules and plow and sometimes pitiful earth. Together with his wife, Nell, he had seen that dream a reality, had made it so, with work and sweat and doing without. Their son had been the first Sanders ever born to his own earth, the first Sanders ever to come into life not owing the land he lived on to another man. They had seen to that.

  But as the early months of 1924 had come, it had seemed they might be close to losing the land they had worked so hard to have. Eason County existed in cotton, as did most of Alabama and much of the South. Cotton had brought them through slave times and civil war, through carpetbaggers and Reconstruction, and to a South that now stood in mills and villages and company towns. Cotton had helped Henry to buy the land—but now in 1924 Henry could no longer look at a field of cotton without feeling worry. The going price per pound of lint had not been good since the year after the armistice to end the World War had been signed in 1918, and even the sharp rise in price in ’23 had been little felt by the farmers in Eason County. The Easons,
as always, seemed to be paying a few cents less per pound of cotton than were any of the cotton merchants buying in the surrounding counties—but Eason County farmers did not sell out of Eason County. They sold their cotton to Walter Eason, as their fathers had done, and their fathers before them, all the way back to the hard years following the war with the North that had ended almost sixty years before. They owed their allegiance to Walter Eason, as fathers and grandfathers long dead had owed allegiance to Walter’s father—few men in the small towns and countryside of Eason County could not credit their livelihoods to Walter Eason, either to the cotton mill, ginning operation, or overall factory; the many sharecropped and tenanted farms he owned; or the businesses he operated from the busy, brick-paved downtown sections of Main Street in Pine, or Central Street up in the County seat of Wylie. And even fewer still could come to doubt his power, or his word. Eason County was his county, and the people his people—few men had dared to go up against Walter Eason in Eason County. It was well known those few had quite often lived to regret their courage.

  But Henry Sanders had owed Walter Eason nothing. No man had given him the red land he and his son worked behind mule and plow, the crop they sweated and prayed over. And no one would take it from them now. There was a mortgage to pay on the farm, the credit run at the store, a wife and seventeen-year-old son to see through the winter months ahead. To sell at Eason prices this year would have meant losing the land, losing what he had worked so long to have, losing what he had worked so long to give his son—if Henry Sanders owed anything, he owed his son the pride of walking his own earth; the dream of owning land, and a crop that was all his own; of never being a man worked and owned and sweated into old age by a man such as Walter Eason. And that was a debt Henry Sanders was willing to pay, a debt that had come from generations long past, and dreams that would never die, dreams that were as much a part of his son Janson as life or breath or pride would ever be.