There Is a River

by Charlotte Miller

  “You come on my land again, an’ I’ll personally put a bullet in your brain,” he said, then watched Buddy’s eyes widen further. “You come near anybody in my family, an’ I’ll blow your goddamn head right off—you better not mess with me again. I killed men when I was in th’ Army for no other reason than that they was shootin’ at me—what’d you think I’d do t’ somebody that comes on my land an’ threatens my family? What d’ you think I’d do t’ somebody that sets fire t’ my house an’ my crop?—you don’t want t’ mess with us again after this.”

  Buddy closed his mouth and swallowed hard, his nose making a whistling sound.

  “Th’ rifle you left behind’s bein’ took to th’ state police right now, an’ it’s got your initials carved right in th’ stock. They’ll be askin’ why you was on my land t’night when somebody set fire t’ my kitchen an’ burnt part ’a my cotton, an’ they’ll be lookin’ t’ you if anything happens t’ any ’a us after this—an’ you better pray that you kill me next time if you come after us again. If you don’t, you better hope th’ law gets you before I do, ’cause what I can do t’ you’ll be a whole lot worse than anythin’ they could do, believe me, a whole lot worse.”

  Buddy was shaking now, sweat beading across his forehead and the exposed cheek, until the open end of the gun barrel slipped slightly against the wet skin.

  Janson lifted the gun barrel from Buddy’s forehead and stepped back, knowing that if he stood there any longer he would kill the man. And he wanted to, certain that the world would be better off without Eason, that the county would be better off, and even Buddy’s own children.

  Shaking now enveloped Buddy’s body completely. Great, gasping sobs made the round belly hitch and jerk. He was scrambling away across the bed, moving up onto his hands and knees, dragging the blanket with him, until he stood, clothed in nothing but his drawers, backed against the wall. His paunch continued to hitch with the almost-silent sobs, the blanket held against his mouth, the great, sagging mounds of flesh at either side of the material looking like malformed breasts in the sparse light.

  Janson had finished what he came for. Buddy had always been a coward. Only fear and anger, and the power of the Eason name, had ever made him appear to be a man.

  Janson left the room, going softly down the stairs to the first floor and out Buddy Eason’s front door, leaving it standing open behind him.

  He knew that Buddy Eason was nothing at all, and that he was done with him.

  When Cassandra Price Eason’s bedroom door opened, she did not open her eyes. She did, however, slide one hand underneath her pillow to the pistol she had kept hidden there since the last time Buddy had beaten her—and that was the last time, she told herself. She would kill him if he tried it again. Besides, soon he would not even have the opportunity—she would be leaving the county within days, leaving with a salesman she had been bedding for months.

  Douglas Kirby would leave a wife and children behind when they left together, just as Cassandra would leave the twins—she was not cut out for being a mother, she told herself, even though she was pregnant again anyway. Douglas hoped they would have a son, and that was what Cassandra was almost certain she would have—at least she hoped it would be a boy, and she was almost certain it was his. She had slept a few times with the pimply teenager who delivered their groceries, and one afternoon she had spent with a man who changed a flat tire on her car, though she had not taken the time to ask his name. At least there was no chance the baby growing in her was Buddy’s. Buddy had not touched her in years, and only twice since the twins were born, though he hadn’t kept it up either time long enough to do her any good.

  She opened her eyes when she felt the bed sag, his great weight sinking down beside her. He had not said anything since entering the room, and the sight of him made her stomach churn, with the mounds of flesh on his chest and the fat dimpling his sides. She knew she would throw up if he put his hands on her.

  His face was wet. There was a bandage on his cheek, and she noticed that he breathed through his open mouth as if his nose was full of snot—he was shaking, making the bed quake beneath her as he got under the blanket and pulled it over himself, his naked calf brushing her leg and making her move away. He curled up onto his side, and she realized suddenly that he had only come to her bed because he was afraid to be alone—

  As if she were his wife in more than name and joint bank account only and might comfort him.

  “You are a piece of shit,” she said, surprised at the sound of her own voice in the room, and the fact that her words made him start beside her. “What are you—afraid of your own nightmares?”

  She watched him for a long time.

  He never said a word.

  PART THREE

  1986

  16

  In the first moments of awareness each morning, it was difficult for Janson to know what year it was.

  He smelled coffee and frying bacon. There was the sound of a woman’s voice, and the slight creak of the old house as it settled about him. He lay in that in-between time and he listened, letting the day come slowly. There were other sounds now, the sound of running water and of a radio—or was it television—sounds that did not belong in a world that in sleep, and in the early moments of day, was very much the world he had always known.

  He opened his eyes on that spring morning to sunlight that filtered between almost-closed curtains, and to awareness that the day was in the present and not in his memories. He rubbed one hand over the stubble on his chin, hearing the slight scratching sound his fingers made against the bristles, then he raised that hand to look at it, finding dark veins along the back, and knuckles swollen with the arthritis that lived there. He tried flexing his stiff fingers, bringing the other hand up in an attempt to do the same, watching both hands as they moved painfully in the first minutes of his morning. He remembered how old man’s hands had looked to him when he was a boy, and these hands of his had truly been old man’s hands for many years now. Older than his own father’s had ever been.

  He could distinctly hear the television now from where someone was watching it in the living room, carrying the sound of President Reagan’s voice—another old man, Janson thought, remembering the actor Reagan from movies he had seen back in the thirties and forties. Even now, Janson thought, the man sounded as if he were acting in a picture show.

  Running water shut off in the bathroom next to the bedroom. Janson pushed himself up to sit on the side of the bed, then reached for the walking stick he had needed in recent years, especially in the mornings before his joints had limbered up. He rose from the bed and slowly crossed the room toward the partly open bathroom door, the thumping of the stick on the wooden floor loud to his ears. He stood in the doorway watching as Elise set aside a towel and reached for her bathrobe. Her hair, more white now than the red-gold he remembered, was wet, but Janson knew she would have it fixed, just as she would have her makeup done, before anyone saw her outside this bedroom. He watched her, thinking that age had only made her look delicate.

  A smile came to her lips when her eyes met his in the bathroom mirror as she knotted the belt of the robe. Janson smiled back, realizing she had seen him watching. After almost fifty-nine years of being together, he still could never get enough of looking at her.

  Then her eyes sobered, and his smile faded. He crossed the room toward the front windows, leaning more heavily on the walking stick, until he stood with the curtain held back in his hand, looking out over the land. This had always been his favorite time of year. It had been springtime when he first met Elise in 1927. Since then, it had seemed to him every spring as if almost anything could be possible. Over recent winters, he had looked toward springtime more and more, waiting for the warm months to come—he was seventy-eight years old now. Such simple pleasures could often be more than enough.

  He stared at Elise’s azaleas, blooming in the yard as they had bloome
d for so many years, at dogwoods flowering, at grass turning green, ready soon to be mowed. The edge of a field was just within sight, a field that for so many years was planted in cotton—though none had been planted on it recently. There was not much money to be made in cotton these days. There was no longer much money to be made in any farming.

  He felt Elise’s touch, her hand resting on the bend of his arm, standing close enough that he could feel the warmth of her. They had been together for so long that sometimes they did not need words. It was enough to know she was beside him, looking at the same thing he was looking at.

  “We’ll make it. We always have,” she said after a time, mirroring what he had been trying to tell himself in the past days.

  He turned to look at her, at the blue eyes he had known for so long, eyes that had always trusted him no matter what he had led her to—a mill village, sharecropping, more trouble than she should have known. What she was saying was right: they had always made it. But Janson knew that always did not necessarily mean every time. Things were not the same in the world nowadays. Cotton mills had fled overseas, and maybe cotton farmers as well. This fall there would not be an acre peppered with white in Eason County. There were few fields with anything but goddamn kudzu and pine trees.

  In all the years they had been on the place they had never been out of debt. There was always equipment to buy, seed and fertilizer every year, and another mortgage when they had the first almost paid down. Catherine and Judith had married and left the county long ago. Catherine was living in LaGrange now, and Judith in Roanoke. But Henry had stayed on the land, bringing Olivia to live here after they married. There had been doctor bills as the grandchildren came along, but Janson and Elise had been in the house to watch them grow, three boys born to Henry and Olivia one right after the other. Janson was proud of his grandsons, but there was also disappointment, for not one of them had shown any interest in the land. Then a surprise had come to them, a little girl born when her youngest brother was already twelve years old, and when her parents had planned for no more children.

  Joanna Elise Sanders had come into life almost two months early, and she had kicked and clawed her way through the world almost from that first breath. Janson was surprised when he realized his granddaughter felt exactly as he did about their land, and that she intended to work it—but then he would think of his own mother, and his grandmother, and even Elise. He had long ago realized a woman could do anything she set her mind to, even if he had not wanted to come to that realization.

  Joanna would be coming home tonight with a degree in agronomy from Auburn University, and Janson hoped their land would be here for her; they had been in trouble on the place for years now, with missed payments, and an extension on the mortgage. It had gotten worse. He had been able to fight Buddy Eason when Buddy had tried to take the land from them in the forties. What he was facing now he could not fight. He could not make the world again as it had been when he was younger. There was little place in the modern agribusiness world for someone like him, or like Henry. He wondered if it could be different for Joanna.

  He felt the gentle pressure of Elise’s fingers on his arm as he turned to look out the window again. A breeze was moving the limbs of a dogwood in the yard, and he thought of the touches of blood that were said to stain each of the white blooms—Jesus’s blood—forever marked because it was on the wood of its kind that Jesus died.

  “We’ll make it,” Elise said again.

  “We already have,” Janson said.

  Joanna Sanders Lee became a college graduate that afternoon, walking across the stage in the Beard-Eaves Memorial Coliseum, accepting the rolled sheet of paper that, for the duration of the ceremony, represented her diploma, shaking hands with Dr. Martin, receiving her degree from Auburn University—in that moment she knew she was holding a dream in her hands. She had worked so hard for that piece of paper, worked so hard to make it to this moment. She was the first college graduate in her family. It had taken four years of work, worry, scrimping, saving, and barely squeaking by, but she had made it. After today there would be no more sleepless nights trying to get through chemistry or economic entomology. After today she could go home to the land to do what she had planned to do for most of her life.

  She looked up into the audience to where she knew her three-year-old daughter, Katie, was sitting with her parents, her grandparents, and two of her brothers. Joanna knew that no matter what she had done in the four years at Auburn, Katie was her best accomplishment. Joanna had given up a husband for the sake of that little girl, and the decision to divorce Dwight had been the best one she ever made—they had been married for three months when she discovered she was pregnant. She could remember so clearly the look on Dwight’s face when she told him, and how bad his words hurt moments later when he said a baby would ruin both their chances to get an education. He asked her to have an abortion, but Joanna had done away with him instead, piling his possessions on the patio of their trailer, where he had found them in a rain storm the next time he came home. She had seen him rarely since, but knew he was now in the business of selling cars in Anniston—Auburn University had had little use for him after he went on academic probation.

  When the ceremony was over, she looked for her family in the massive crowd of people just outside the Roosevelt Drive entrance to the Coliseum, wanting badly to get back to her trailer so she could change into a tee shirt and jeans, and out of the high heels and dress that were driving her crazy. She saw her daughter’s bright hair, the same red-gold as Joanna’s, amidst the throng before she saw anyone else in her family—Katie was holding her great-grandfather’s sleeve, trying to pull him, walking stick and all, along as she tried to reach the spot where Joanna stood. Joanna smiled as she watched Katie enthusiastically tugging at his coat sleeve—the smile on Janson Sanders’s face was as broad as the one on Katie’s. He was still a handsome man, Joanna thought, with his hair now completely white, and she could see within him still the young man in photographs her grandmother had shown her that had been taken when they were young. Her grandpa meant a great deal to her; he was the one person who always believed she could do anything she wanted to do, if only she wanted it enough.

  “JoJo—let me get your picture with mama and daddy, and with grandma and grandpa,” said her brother, J. T.—Janson Thomas, the same name as their grandfather—when she reached them, but Katie refused to be moved when either photograph was taken, obviously seeing no reason she should not be included. She took possession of her mother’s mortarboard cap and put it atop her own head, then waited for her uncle to press the button on his camera, positioning herself before her mother in both photographs, and stamping her foot impatiently when she felt her uncle J. T. was taking too long.

  Joanna still held her daughter’s hand as she waited for her grandparents to descend the two wide sets of three steps each that led down toward Roosevelt Drive, which they would cross in going to the parking lot where their cars and her father’s truck were parked. She watched as her grandma waited on each step, her hand on her grandpa’s arm, as he slowly descended while he held to his cane. Joanna smiled; she had been watching them all her life, and she had hoped she had found in Dwight something of what they had—how they were with each other. She had been wrong, and had not had time in the years since to even consider another man, to think she might find it with someone else. But she had Katie, and that was enough.

  She looked toward the large bulk of Jordan-Hare Stadium just across Roosevelt Drive toward the east, and she thought of all the years she had spent on the Auburn campus—studying, working, taking Katie to football games, trying to survive and to make it to this day, with only the rare trips home between quarters or on weekends when she had not been working. It was hard to imagine a life without all that stress, without all that worry, without all that work to reach a point that seemed always just out of reach.

  “Come on, Mama. We got to go home and load the truck
,” Katie said, pulling at her hand, wanting to get back to the trailer they had already sold, so they could finish packing the remainder of their things for the move back to Eason County.

  “Sure, Bug,” she said, nodding her head. “Let’s go home.”

  Henry Sanders watched as his daughter supervised the loading of the last of her furniture into the U-Haul truck, staying well out of the way, knowing that nothing her brothers did now as they loaded the furniture, even under her supervision, would suit her as well as if she had done it herself. She was wearing blue jeans and an Auburn tee shirt, with her shoulder-length hair pulled back into a ponytail that bobbed as she moved, and she stood with her hands behind her at the small of her back, the ends of her fingers stuffed down into the rear pockets of her jeans.

  Katie stood alongside. Her longer hair, though the same red-gold, was curly where her mother’s was straight, and it was also caught into a ponytail. She had changed into an oversized Auburn tee shirt that was haphazardly stuffed down into jeans, and she also stood with her hands in her rear pockets, a brown teddy bear caught beneath one arm, as she assisted in the supervising.

  “Matt, you’re going to break my mirror—Matt!” Joanna called out to the brother closest to her in age, stepping up onto the rear of the truck, as Henry had known she would.

  He could hear her bickering with her brother, out of sight in the rear of the truck, then Matt’s response, and J. T.’s voice as he tried to calm them. J. T. was one of the few people who could do anything with her, and they had grown closer while Joanna attended Auburn. J. T. lived in Opelika, no more than fifteen minutes away, and he and his wife, Laurie, took care of Katie for Joanna while she was in class, as she tended their three children whenever she was needed—but even J. T. could do little with her at times. Joanna always seemed to think she should be in control, but Henry knew there were things in the world his daughter could not control, even if she had never believed it. Matt was one of those things—for his temper and his sheer cussedness were a match to hers—and the situation the family was in now was another.