Behold, This Dreamer

by Charlotte Miller

  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 day.

  He stood for a moment and stared at the house, then made his way across the bare swept yard, past the preacher’s car and the old Model T, and up onto the front porch. He knew he would be disturbing dinner with his late arrival, especially with company in the house, but he could not stop now. He could not go back to the land, to the house, for one more day, one more night, knowing it was no longer his. He turned the doorknob smoothly in his hand and pushed the door open, not bothering to knock, for he knew there was little need for anyone to knock at this door.

  His cousin Sissy sat in a rocker in the warmth before the fireplace in the front room of the sharecropper house as he entered, the girl rocking a homemade ragdoll in her arms, her gentle face calm and happy. She looked up as he closed the door behind himself, smiling as she saw him, then quickly motioning for his silence, warning with a look that the doll-child in her arms was asleep. Janson smiled and nodded his understanding, then stood watching her for a moment, remarking again to himself how lovely she already was at twelve, her long blond hair hanging in curls down her back, her blue eyes large and expressive; she was already becoming a young woman—but her mind would forever be that of a child, as everyone in the family but Sissy herself already knew. He nodded again to her, saying goodbye in his own way, while taking care not to disturb the sleep of the carefully mothered doll in her arms.

  He passed through the middle room of the house, glancing at the old iron bedstead that had sat there in the same position against the whitewashed far wall for as long as he could remember, a hand-pieced quilt neatly drawn over its corn shuck mattress, a chamber pot visible beneath the foot of the bed. Ahead, through the open door to the kitchen, he could hear the preacher’s voice and his grandfather’s, both raised in some religious discussion as they sat on wooden benches pulled up to either side of the eating table, the soft voices of the women in the kitchen almost drowned out by his gran’pa as he told the preacher for the second time that book learning did not necessarily mean that a man knew the ways of the Lord. Brother Harmon started to respond, a holding-forth tone in his voice that Janson recognized from long Sunday mornings seated in his sermons, but Gran’pa cut him off mid-sentence as Janson entered the room.

  “Hello, boy, we missed you in church this mornin’—”

  The kitchen smelled warmly of home: fresh-baked biscuits, country ham, and fried chicken, collard greens cooking in a black pot on the back of the stove, wood smoke, strong black coffee. There were deep dishes of good food on the table, black-eyed peas cooked with ham, potatoes yellow with fresh-churned butter, rich candied yams, and syrup cakes stacked with dried apples for dessert. The men sat on benches pulled up to either side of the table, enjoying his grandmother’s and his Aunt Rachel’s cooking, the preacher sitting across from his grandfather, Uncle Wayne and his three boys, Aunt Olive’s husband Cyrus and their son Daniel. The younger people and the children were out back of the house, and Janson could hear their voices clearly through the windows and doors closed against the winter chill—they would be the last to eat, after the men, and then the women, were finished, and tempers were running high, and voices growing louder, as their empty stomachs growled and the minutes crawled by.

  The women stood or sat at the edges of the room, seeing that the bowls and platters of food on the table remained full, or simply waiting. Sister Harmon, the preacher’s wife, sat in a straight, split-bottomed chair away from the overpowering heat of the wood stove, her spine not once touching the seat back, her legs encased in thick cotton stockings, crossed primly at the
ankles, and tucked away behind one of the chair legs as she talked in quiet tones to Janson’s Aunt Olive. His Aunt Belle and Aunt Maggie sat only a few feet away, Belle with her arms folded beneath her large bosom, and Maggie with hers folded beneath her rather flat one, both pointedly ignoring the preacher’s wife for some slight imagined in church long weeks before.

  Gran’ma and Aunt Rachel stood near the wood stove, seeing to it that the men’s plates never grew empty, and that no slight in hospitality should occur, as they discussed children or households, canning or kinfolks, or whatever else it might be that women discussed at such gatherings. Janson returned his grandfather’s greeting, but did not take the time to explain why he had not been in church that morning, then he looked toward his gran’ma—she was staring at him, staring at him with a sad, rather-resigned expression on her gentle face. Her brown eyes did not shift to take in the shoes slung over his shoulder, or the portmanteau held in his right hand, and he realized suddenly that they did not have to—she had known all along he would leave, that he would have no other choice.

  “When you wasn’t in church this mornin’, I knowed it’d be t’day—” she said quietly, staring at him. “I figured it’d be soon—you know yet where you’re goin’, boy?”

  “I don’t reckon’ it much matters. I guess t’ just wherever it is th’ first train takes me—” They both knew he would not have money to pay for the fare, but that he would have to hop the train instead, waiting until it was picking up speed pulling out of the depot, then running to swing himself and his few belongings on board the first empty boxcar he might find—they both knew, but they also knew there was no way around it, just as there was no way for anyone to offer him money to pay for the fare instead. They both knew he would not take it.

  “You’ll let us know where it is you wind up?” she asked.

  “Soon as I can—”

  Gran’pa rose from the table, stepping around the end of the bench and coming toward him. “For once I was hopin’ your gran’ma’d be wrong—why don’t you stay on here, boy, an’ help me crop this place?” But Janson knew his grandfather did not need him to help sharecrop the small farm. His Uncle Wayne had the next place over, and together he and Gran’pa, and Wayne and Rachel’s three boys, worked the two sharecropped farms as one, splitting the work, and splitting the little annual return there was from the portion of the crops that did not go for use of the land. Janson knew his grandparents did not need another mouth to feed, more kin than there already was crowded into the small house, just as he also knew they would take him in anyway if he wanted to stay—but he could not stay. There was the land—his own land—and he could never forget that.

  “Won’t you stay on, boy?”

  Janson shook his head. “I cain’t—” he said, but explained no further. His grandfather looked at him for a long moment, then reached out to take Janson’s hand in a firm handshake.

  “If it’s what you got t’ do, boy.”

  Janson nodded. There was nothing else he could say.

  He went to his grandmother, stopping for a moment to drop his shoes and the portmanteau on the bare wood floor at her feet before putting his arms around her. He hugged her briefly, and kissed the softness of her cheek, then looked down into the kind brown eyes, finding them now filled with tears.

  “I’ll be back in a couple ’a years,” he said. “Soon as I—” He did not have to finish.

  She nodded, placing a work-rough hand on his cheek as she stared up at him. “You may look like your ma, but you’re just like Henry—”

  And Janson understood.

  She turned back to the wood stove, putting her mind to the worry that his stomach be filled, rather than that her favorite grandchild was leaving her. She fussed with the lid covering a black pot, lifting it with a folded pad of quilted material, then lowering it back into place without ever having looked inside. “You better eat somethin’ before you go—”

  “I ain’t hungry. I made myself a big breakfast before I left th’ house,” he lied, knowing all the while that she knew he lied. His stomach was in knots, and he knew he would not be able to eat anything, not even if he had to.

  She nodded again, then reached up to lower the door of the warming oven above the stove, reaching inside to take out something she had wrapped into a clean white cloth. She turned to put it into his hands. “Biscuits an’ fried chicken,” 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 acq
uaintance. 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.