“Would you do it again?” he asked, his face sobering.
“Do what?”
“Marry me, if you had t’ do it over, even knowin’ all that’s come after.”
“Yes, I would.” She smiled, knowing she meant it. “I never wanted anyone but you. I could never even imagine myself going to bed with anyone but you. Even before you kissed me the first time, I used to wonder what it would be like to be that close to you, to have you touch me—”
“You shouldn’t ’a been thinkin’ things like that back then.” There was a teasing note in his voice as he looked at her. His smile was genuine now, his eyes leaving her face to move down her body. Elise felt herself blush, then saw his smile broaden as his eyes returned to her face to see the color that stained her cheeks.
Then his expression changed. Suddenly there was a longing and a sadness that did not belong between them. He noticed Elise shiver.
“Are you cold?” he asked, moving the nearly empty plate from between them.
“I guess a little.”
“Come here.” He lifted the blanket, then laid back and drew her into his arms, pulling the blanket up over them both. She lay for a time with her head on his shoulder, one hand resting on the familiar warmth of his chest. He was silent, and Elise felt unease slip over her.
“Remember I’ll always love you,” he said, and she caught her breath.
She felt as if he had said good-bye.
15
Later in the night, Elise drowsed. She dreamed of the land, of the years Janson had worked to buy it back, of the days spent picking cotton in the fields, and the nights alone with him here in this bed. The bins in the barn were full, as were the two vacant sharecropper shacks, and Janson planned to board in the front and back porches of the house to store even more cotton. Then they would take the crop out of the county to be sold, as Janson and his father had done all those years before, and it would be over, at least until next year.
There was a sound that roused her from the edge of sleep. Elise lay for a moment and listened, almost certain it had been nothing—then again, and she sat up, holding the blanket to cover her breasts. She waited, hearing nothing but Janson’s quiet breathing. Then she smelled smoke. Something was on fire.
She shoved the blanket back with one hand as she shook Janson with the other. “Something’s burning—Janson, wake up!”
He stumbled from the bed, almost falling over the blanket, not fully awake. “What—are you okay?”
“Smoke. Something’s burning—” She was struggling into the dress he had tossed aside earlier, and the panic in her manner found its way through the last remnants of his sleep, for he seemed suddenly to understand. He snatched up his overalls and began to pull them on as she ran out into the hall. She shouted for Henry and Stan, throwing open Henry’s door to roust him from sleep, pounding on her brother’s door to make certain he was awake—Janson was already at the end of the hall and going out onto the porch, and she could see the glow of fire beyond.
From the back porch Elise saw one of the sharecropper shacks engulfed in flames, and she thanked God in one breathless instant that the ground around the shack had been cleared so that the fire would not move into the unpicked fields nearby. Janson was running toward the barn, a pronounced limp in his gait, and Elise followed, feeling her heart leap into her throat as she saw the double doors of the barn flung open and fire eating upward into one of the rough wooden doors, and spreading inward toward the bins of cotton.
Elise ran down the rear steps, almost falling as she reached the ground, quickly outdistanced by Stan and Henry as they jumped from the edge of the porch and ran toward the barn.
The reek of gasoline was in the yard. Janson was snatching burning burlap sacks from a pile just within the barn, throwing them out into the swept yard. The fire was deliberately set, empty sacks thrown on a pile of hay, then doused with gasoline before setting the stack alight—but why here? Why set hay in the doorway ablaze and not the cotton inside?
Then Elise drew herself up short, realizing that what had wakened her from sleep was the sound of breaking glass. She turned back toward the house and heard herself cry out. Fire was lighting the windows of the separate kitchen that was attached by a covered walkway to the side of the house. Not the house. Not her house!
She ran back up onto the porch, through the rear door and down the hall to the bedroom. She flung books and odds-and-ends from the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, snatched the lid open, and dragged out a quilt, knowing they could lose everything tonight—the cotton, the land, the roof over their heads. She ran back down the hall, out onto the porch, and over the walkway to the kitchen, smelling the mixture of smoke and gasoline. She snatched the door open, letting in a gust of air to feed the flames, then slammed the door, closing herself in with the fire.
The curtains over the nearby window were burning, and she yanked them from the wall, gagging as she slung them down into the fire spreading across the floor. Air was coming through a broken window, and there was glass on the floor beneath, the smell of gasoline even stronger within the room, and Elise felt anger as hot and enraged as the fire eating its way into her home at the thought that Buddy Eason had done this—he was going to burn the cotton and take Janson’s land, destroy their home, take what they had worked so long to have.
She beat at the flames with the quilt. Sweat poured into her eyes, the fire hot on her face, and she gagged again, choking, unable to breathe—she would die here. No—her fury rose as she slung the quilt to the floor, smothering the flames, then beating at the edges with her hands where the fire still burned. A piece of jagged glass stabbed into her palm, but she did not care—she was winning against the fire. She was winning.
At last she stood on shaking legs, coughing, her hands and wrists smarting from burns—but the fire was out.
She dashed her hair out of her burning eyes, wiping the sweat away, then started out the door and onto the covered walkway, not certain if her legs were steady enough to get her down into the yard. She could see that the men were beating back the fire in the barn. The door was ablaze, but it looked as if the cotton was safe.
Then movement alongside the shed at the edge of the yard caught her attention. She stopped, wiping the sweat from her stinging eyes again, hatred and rage erasing all feeling of fatigue.
It was Buddy Eason, watching the blaze.
In the firelight, she could see the pleasure on his face.
Buddy Eason was happy.
He had waited for this night for so long. He had waited—and the time had come. Tonight he would take a man’s life, and he would do it deliberately.
He had killed before—once indirectly, as the result of a fire set in these same fields of cotton; again through accident in the process of setting a fire; most recently, his own father in a heat of rage—but he had never committed premeditated murder before. This time it was with twenty-one years worth of premeditated thought that he would take a man’s life. Premeditated since he had fought Janson Sanders all those years before.
He stood watching Sanders from the protection of the unpainted shed at the rear of the house, watching as Sanders, with his son and brother-in-law beside him, furiously fought the fire Buddy had set in the barn. He felt something very close to a sexual thrill in watching the flames and the man who would die in so short a time. Buddy had discovered tonight something he had never known before.
Murder was not that different from sex.
Both were best when they took a very long time.
The hired thug Mender shifted restlessly behind him in the darkness. Buddy knew the man was ready to have events finished for the night, ready to get away before they could be caught—but Buddy was not worried about being caught.
He was Buddy Eason, after all.
Mender shifted again, and Buddy realized he was not looking toward the fire, or even the men fightin
g it, though Buddy himself could hardly pull his eyes away—it was such a beautiful thing, so much power, something over which no one held any control.
“Mr. Eason, you ought t’ take him now. There won’t be no better time,” Mender said, and suddenly something moved into Buddy’s field of vision, Mender holding a rifle with the barrel pointing up to the sky. Buddy slowly brought his eyes to the gun, even though it threw the fire out of focus beyond, and then his hands were closing around the cold metal of the barrel, drawing the length of it back to his chest, until the wooden stock was pressed into his belly and the cold barrel nuzzled against his cheek—yes, it was time. After all these years—it was time.
The door of the barn was burning well, flames eating into the wood—Sanders would die as fire burned beyond him, just as Sanders’s father had died. The flames would take the cotton—Buddy and Mender would make certain of that, for they would torch the other shack as well—and Sanders’s wife and her family would lose the land. Sanders would be a rotting corpse by then, the climax of a hatred undimmed through so many years.
Buddy brought the stock of the rifle to his shoulder, then pressed his cheek to the cool wood, leaning his body against the side of the shack to steady himself as the excitement grew. He closed one eye, taking careful aim, feeling his body react as his finger closed against the trigger, that thrill that he was taking Janson Sanders’s life at last. That—
There was a sound from near the house, and instantly something impacted the corner of the shack nearest his cheek, exploding it outward, sending splinters of wood into the side of his face. Buddy shrieked, the rifle jerking sideways, his shot going wildly into the yard as one hand flew up to cover the side of his face. He looked toward the house, and could not believe what he was seeing. Sanders’s wife was in the yard, a shotgun to her shoulder, and the bitch was taking aim at him again.
Elise’s second shot grazed the meat at the bottom of his ear before it exploded into the wood, sending tiny slivers into the side of his neck. Buddy screamed, a sound as high-pitched and terrified as any woman’s, and then he was running before he could even think, throwing the rifle away, hearing Mender swearing just behind—the woman had tried to kill him.
He ran between two rows of cotton as he reached the unpicked field, headed toward the burning shack at the far end and the car they had left beyond it. Dry plants snatched at his trouser legs, gouging him as he tried to run, his belly jouncing up and down, his breath coming in hard, labored gasps through his open mouth.
He caught his foot on the uneven ground and fell, his arms pin-wheeling out in a desperate attempt to catch himself, and then he hit hard on his face and belly there between the rows, the breath going out of him in a rush. He was wheezing hard, desperately fighting for air. He forced himself to his knees, then to his feet, took a step, and almost fell again—she was yelling at him from the edge of the cotton field, but he would not let himself look back, setting his eyes instead on the remains of the burning shack, and on Mender ahead of him crashing through the last rows of cotton to the car.
Buddy forced himself forward, trying to run, realizing suddenly that he was silhouetted against the burning shack, giving her an easier target. He could feel sweat greasing the insides of his thighs against his trousers as he ran—then he saw the Chrysler moving, turning around, and he knew he was being left behind.
He fell against the car door as he reached its side, but Mender barely slowed. Buddy yanked the rear door open, and suddenly he was inside—he landed with a jolt on his stomach in the backseat, his belly mashed into the seat cushion, one large thigh splayed out and a bruised knee against the floorboard, the stench of his own fear filling his nostrils.
Elise stared after the car long after it left her sight, a dark shape going down the dirt track that cut across their land, toward the road that would take it into town. She told herself that she should go help fight the fire in the barn, but she could not make herself move, no matter how hard she tried—she had never thought that she might be capable of killing another human being.
Tonight she had done all she could to kill Buddy Eason.
Her only regret was that she had failed.
A light touch on her shoulder made her cry out in alarm, almost dropping the shotgun before she realized the person behind her was Janson. He stared at her in the darkness, his eyes taking in what she knew must be an insane appearance, her hair disheveled and singed, her blue-print dress now gray with soot, and blisters beginning to raise on her hands and arms. She knew she reeked of sweat and smoke. She was coughing again as she watched him turn his eyes toward the disappearing car, and then back toward the house. At last he brought his eyes back to her and took the shotgun from her hands.
“The kitchen was on fire,” she said matter-of-factly, wiping at her face with the back of one hand. “It’s okay now. I put it out before I came out to help with the barn; that’s when I saw Buddy.”
“Th’ cotton’s safe. Th’ fire’s almost out. Henry’s drawin’ water t’ douse what’s still smolderin’.” He bent to lay the shotgun on the ground at their feet, then took both her hands in his, examining the burns in the now-fading firelight. His eyes came back to her face, though he still held her hands in his, and she felt stupidly self-conscious at how she knew she must look, with her hair wild about her head and smut darkening her face. He looked again in the direction Buddy Eason’s car had gone. “You was tryin’ t’ kill him, wasn’t you?” he asked.
Elise looked away. “He was going to shoot you, or Henry, or maybe all three of you—I couldn’t just stand there and—” Somehow she was afraid that he would not understand.
“Sh—” he said, and he drew her hands up to his lips to kiss them in the places where there were no burns.
Elise was surprised to see him smile.
“You never could shoot worth a crap—” he said.
And Elise surprised herself with the sound of her own laugh. He drew her close against him and picked up the shotgun again to hold it under one arm. “I need t’ get you back t’ th’ house s’ I can see about them hands,” he said.
After a few steps in that direction, Elise stopped and looked up at him. “Janson, he’ll come back again. I scared him tonight, but he’ll—”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m gonna make sure ’a that after I tend t’ them burns.”
Elise stared at him, both of her hands curled into one of his, his free hand in the small of her back guiding her toward the house.
She knew that this time he would go after Buddy.
And she knew that he had to. There were no choices left. Buddy Eason had come here tonight with the intent to do murder.The Eason County law would do nothing to him. Nothing had ever been done to him, no matter what he had done to them or to anyone else in Eason County. Buddy had intended to kill Janson tonight, and perhaps Henry, Elise, and Stan. This time it had to end.
“Be careful,” Elise said, afraid of what might happen to him tonight when he left the land. She could not see his features now because of the shack burning at a distance behind him, but she did not have to see the black hair only recently showing touches of gray, or the green eyes, to have him clearly in her mind.
Janson nodded and Elise understood.
She had just agreed he might have to kill a man.
When Buddy Eason woke in the pre-dawn the next morning, it was to the realization that a man stood beside his bed and that there was a gun pressed into his forehead.
Janson Sanders watched Buddy’s eyes widen with fear in the sparse light from the nearby window, and he remembered that expression from two decades before when he had held a knife to Buddy’s throat.
“Wh—what do you want?” Buddy croaked. The bandage on his left cheek made Janson think Elise might have grazed him with at least one shot. Buddy moved his hands slightly on top of the blanket at either side of his round belly, causing Janson to press t
he gun that had once belonged to Elise’s father more firmly into his forehead. Janson wanted to make certain Buddy was awake, wanted to know beyond doubt that Buddy Eason knew this was no dream.
The ticking clock on the mantel across the room marked the seconds, witness to the time passing between the men—they were alone in the room. Janson had not been surprised to find that Cassandra Eason did not sleep beside her husband; he could not imagine that any woman would willingly lay down with Buddy Eason.
He had come here as soon as he had nursed the burns on Elise’s hands, and after he made certain no danger remained of fire to the house or to the cotton stored in the barn or in the second shack. They had lost the one shack and the cotton stored in it, but most of the crop had been saved. There would be enough left to meet the mortgage on the land, if not be much beyond that. They would face a hard winter, but they would survive.
They had survived hell already.
There would be another crop in the spring. And there would be no problem with Buddy Eason to plague them in the new year—Janson was about to see to that.
He stared at the jowly face in the semi-darkness, pressing the gun muzzle into the broad expanse of pasty forehead, marking it. Sweat glistened over Buddy’s upper lip, and the smell of fear was strong in the room—Buddy was afraid, and Janson knew he had every reason to be.
He also knew that he had never wanted anything so much as he wanted to pull the trigger.
“Aren’t you going to answer me!” Buddy’s voice rose, then fell again as Janson’s hand on the gun to his forehead forced his head back into the pillow. Buddy’s open-mouthed breathing was harsh and quick now, panicky in the otherwise silent room. There was a sound from down the hallway, a child speaking in her sleep, but still Janson said nothing until he could feel the fear stoke within Buddy as the silence stretched out.
When Janson did speak, his voice was so quiet that he knew Buddy had to strain to hear it.
There Is a River Page 16