There Is a River

by Charlotte Miller

  Henry knew they were losing the land. No matter how many times he told himself those words, they were never any easier to accept—they were losing the land, the house he had lived in since before he married, the farm they had worked so hard to sustain, the dream his father had struggled for, and his grandfather before him, a grandfather who had died trying to protect that dream. He remembered so well the fire they fought the first year they had been on the place, the fire that had taken so much of their cotton, and his fear that night—he felt the same now, angry and afraid, and, more than anything, helpless.

  The difference now was that he did not know who to blame. At least then he had known that what happened had been done to them by Buddy Eason.

  Now farmers throughout the country were losing their land, more, they said on television, than at any time since the Great Depression. One farmer’s place in the county had been auctioned off just the month before. The Sanders had not reached that point yet, but Henry knew it was a matter of time. It did not matter what anyone said, Reagan’s “trickle down” economic theory did not work where farmers were concerned. Or if it did, Henry Sanders was tired of being the one getting trickled on.

  Matt had abandoned the rear of the truck, to stand smoking a cigarette at the edge of the street. Henry heard a commotion in the back of the U-Haul, and a few less-than-quiet words, before J. T. joined his brother outside the vehicle. They stared into the back of the truck at what had to be, from the sounds coming from within, Joanna struggling alone with a piece of furniture.

  There was a bump, the sound of something scraping long and hard against metal, then his daughter’s clearly audible voice, “Oh, crap—” Then all grew silent again.

  After a moment, Joanna stood atop the rear bumper of the U-Haul, her fingers shoved again into the rear pockets of her jeans as she stared down at her brothers. For a moment, Henry thought she would ask for help, then thought the better of it as she continued to stare, before telling Matt, “You know, you ought not smoke around Katie.”

  Matt did not say anything, but he glanced at his niece where she stood watching the exchange from the edge of the yard, the teddy bear now piggy-back at her shoulders, each little hand holding firmly to a bear foot. He dropped the cigarette onto the street where he ground it out with one heel. As Joanna continuing to stare, he picked up the flattened butt to drop it into the City of Auburn trash can waiting at the street.

  “You see I was right,” he said, dropping the lid back into place and turning to look at Joanna. “It won’t fit any other way than the way we had it.”

  “I’m not admitting anything,” she said, but she did move to let Matt and J. T. back up onto the rear of the truck. She never gives in, Henry thought, listening to the argument flare back up then finally die away. Henry had not known of a thing in her life that Joanna had not tried to control. Even when she had had to kick Dwight Lee out of the trailer, that had been her choice as well. But what she would be facing soon she would have to accept. For once in her life, Joanna would have to listen to reason.

  There was a job waiting for her in Tift County in Georgia. Joanna did not know the job offer had been made, but it was one that would bring her a future she would never have on Sanders land—not that it would be Sanders land much longer anyway, Henry told himself, hearing the sound of his father’s voice behind him as Janson Sanders came out the front door of Joanna’s mobile home.

  Henry turned back to see his father step out into the afternoon sunshine, one hand braced on the doorknob of the flimsy trailer door, the other closed over the crook of his walking stick. Losing the land could very well kill his father, Henry told himself.

  He would not have it be the end of his daughter.

  Elise realized that Katie was asleep in the backseat of Joanna’s car long before they crossed into Eason County. She sat in the front seat of Joanna’s old Ford Galaxie, staring through the windshield at the faded sections of the car’s hood as she listened to the silence that had fallen within the car. Joanna had been talking about her plans now that she was finished with college, the things she hoped to do on the farm, until Janson had grown silent beside Katie, and soon Joanna had fallen silent as well. Elise knew Janson was staring out the window at the newly turned fields they passed, the acres upon acres of red earth open to the sun, then finally at the Chevron station, the Winn-Dixie and Harco Drugs, and at last McDonald’s as they drew closer to Pine.

  “Why don’t we drive down through town?” Joanna asked as they stopped at the red light where the highway met up with Main Street.

  Janson said nothing. Elise said, “Sure, go ahead,” though she had little desire to see Pine.

  Main Street was quiet, with few cars parked along either side of the road as they reached downtown. The highway that had come in a few years back had skirted the town, dealing a death blow to the stores located along Main Street. A number of businesses had moved out to the new shopping centers along the bypass, and those seemed to be doing well, but the businesses that had remained with the safety and tradition of downtown were slowly dying, choked out by the chain stores with easier parking and a wider selection of merchandise.

  The shops still open along Main Street looked little as they had when Elise had come as a young wife to this town, and she could see no evidence of the fire that had taken so much of the downtown section in 1930. The old brick, burned black then, was in many instances now covered with aluminum or taken out completely and replaced with plate glass. The movie theater had been boarded up, its marquee bearing the single word “closed,” and the front door of the drugstore had a sign stating the date it opened and the date it had gone out of business more than sixty-seven years later.

  The brick paving of Main Street was now blacktopped, the once-busy bus station was a car lot, and not one grocer was left in all of downtown. Big supermarkets out along the highway, a Winn-Dixie and a Piggly Wiggly, had replaced the quiet little grocery stores, stores with pot-bellied stoves for warmth, cracker and pickle barrels out on the sidewalk alongside where gossipy old men sat playing checkers and spitting, and fat storekeepers inside who ran a charge and always got your purchases up for you—God, it did not seem that long ago.

  Joanna turned off Main Street and onto Dell, going toward the mill village. Elise stared toward the houses along the street as they left downtown, seeing ferns on porches, and rockers and porch swings. Crepe myrtles grew along the street, bushes put out by the WPA women so long ago, and azaleas and dogwoods bloomed in yards, reminding her of so many spring days she had seen in this town.

  Joanna topped the railroad tracks, entering the village, slowing to avoid dragging the undercarriage of the car. Elise stared down those lengths of rail that still divided the town in half, finding them rusty and broken, overgrown with weeds and kudzu vines. At one time they had been a lifeline for the County.

  The village streets were just as tree-shaded as they had always been, but there was asphalt beneath the wheels of Joanna’s car, where once there had only been red clay. The houses in the mill village seemed almost closer together, but they looked very different from the way Elise first remembered them. They had been sold in the years after World War II, and many had passed from hand to hand in the time since—they were green and pink, white and brown. Decorative shutters had been added to some, rooms built onto others; porches had been screened in or boxed into rooms. A satellite dish sat in one back yard, a chain link fence surrounded another. Children played noisily, and not once did Elise see a “day sleeper” sign.

  She saw these shaded streets in memory as they had been so long ago, lined with row-upon-row of identical, white, two-family houses, and life here as a young bride with no electricity, no running water, and no indoor bathroom. She remembered the ice wagon and the milk man, both making deliveries on these same streets where now a snow-cone truck was selling treats to children.

  When they made the narrow turn onto Pearlman Street, El
ise was surprised to see the short strip of village stores was still standing. The first was now a beauty parlor, and the second had a front window labeled “God’s Word Church” in gold-leaf backed by full-length white curtains. The third, behind cracked and grimy windows, looked to be vacant, and the fourth was open to the sky, its roof having fallen in.

  A little farther down the street, Pearlman Street Baptist looked much as it always had, behind a “For Sale” sign that had recently been added to its front yard—the congregation had moved on to a bigger sanctuary out on the highway, Elise knew. So many things had moved on to “bigger,” to leave the town, and the town’s people, behind.

  The village school was still being used, although it held only the first through the third grades, with new classrooms and a modern lunchroom taking up space where the playground had once been. Uptown, a few blocks from Main Street, there was a new high school, with higher SAT scores and a lower drop-out rate than many in the state, and a new public library for them all.

  The “colored” school that Henry’s friend, Isaac Betts, had attended as a child was closed, and all the children of the town, no matter the color of their skin, attended school together. Elise turned in her seat to look at Janson, finding his eyes on the mill village school as they passed. His hands, showing their age, with obvious veins along the back and dark spots on skin that looked almost translucent across his knuckles, were folded atop the crook of his walking cane where it rested against his thigh. So many times in the years they had been together, she had seen him judged for nothing but the color of his skin, color he had inherited from his Cherokee mother. She was glad that he had lived to see this day, especially since she knew he had lived to see so many things that he had never wished to see.

  Janson did not fit in this world nowadays when the land had grown to mean so little, when poor people were ignored again as in the days before the New Deal, and when one man had the power to destroy the Earth and all of mankind. He did not belong in a time when no one cared to learn from the past, or when children went hungry and families were homeless, when embittered farmers still lost their land, and when multitudes still followed madmen as in the days of Hitler. She knew he could not understand why there were few fields of cotton, and less and less cultivated land every year, even in a time when people went hungry, or why it was that the wealthiest nation on Earth could not even make certain that a high school graduate could read and write.

  Janson had not understood things such as Jonestown or American hostages, Watergate, or the Vietnam War. He could not understand why man had not grown to be somehow better in this last half of the century, or why men like John and Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had had to die for their dreams—but Elise knew he had also seen dreams come true. He had witnessed man walking on the moon, and pictures sent back by the Voyager spacecraft, the success of Live Aid and the African Relief Drive and Hands Across America. And of civil rights as well.

  It seemed, at least, that the world had learned something.

  The car slowed as they drew within sight of the red brick of the huge, long-vacant cotton mill. A fire not long before it closed had taken much of the once-white office building out front. That smaller building stood a gutted-out shell, with blackened evidence of where the fire had licked its way up the graying walls above holes that had once been windows. Many of the blue-painted windows along the front of the mill itself had been broken out, and the tall chimneys that had once belched smoke throughout the village were crumbling and in ruin, now nothing but a home for nesting birds.

  An air of decay and utter desertion hung about the place, and even its sign, having for so many years proudly announced “Eason Cotton Mill” to the world, was askew and faded. The fence around the perimeter of the property was rusty, and the gate hung loose from one hinge and open, the worth of the place now existing only in the value of the brick and timber in the mill itself, for which it had recently been sold, and for which it would soon be destroyed.

  Katie awoke before they left the mill village, but she remained silent as they drove out of town. Elise had looked back to see the little girl take her great-grandfather’s hand from the crook of his walking stick, and that she continued to hold it by the first two of his fingers where it rested on the seat between them.

  Elise turned back to stare out the windshield long before the Peace Memorial Gardens cemetery came within view at one side of the road toward Cedar Flatts.

  “Would you like to stop, Grandma?” Joanna asked as they drew nearer the cemetery, as she had done so many times before.

  The sun was going down and the late afternoon was cool when they stepped out of the car. Joanna stayed with Katie, lifting the little girl up onto the hood of the car as they waited, letting Janson and Elise walk into the cemetery alone. Cemeteries were a place for old folks and memories, Elise knew, and they held little interest for a small girl or a young woman.

  She held to Janson’s arm as they walked over the closely clipped grass, afraid that he would fall even here on this smooth ground. She could not help but to think, as they made their way through the rows of flat markers, that one day in the future the two of them would come here together for the last time. She hoped that it would be her to go into the ground on that day. She did not want to be the one left alive when the other was gone.

  They found the grave they were looking for, among the rows of identical stones that seemed so little mark to the passing of a life—Stanley Denham Whitley, her brother, 1913–1974. Somehow she could remember him best as a child, with the round lenses of his eyeglasses reflecting the sun, so full of questions and curiosity about the world, and forever with his nose in a book. It was harder to remember him in later years, working in the fields, picking cotton, losing his arm in the card room at the cotton mill—he had saved Janson’s life when they had all been young, and he had been beside them through so many years, seeming contented to share their lives.

  “No woman would want to marry a man who only has one arm,” he had told her so many times, seeming to have allowed that one moment in the mill to have set the direction of his life. “I have a family—you and Janson, and your kids—”

  And that, for him, he had decided, was enough.

  She knelt by the grave and ran her fingers over the letters that spelled her brother’s name, realizing that she was crying again as she had rarely cried in the twelve years since he passed away. This place in this clay earth seemed such a long distance from where she and Stan had grown up, and from where her brother had been a child.

  After a time she stood, feeling the pain of arthritis in her knees as she reached to take Janson’s arm and steady herself. She looked at him, finding peace in the green eyes, in the laugh lines and wrinkles of his skin, the way time had written life into his face.

  “Lets go home,” she said, and he nodded.

  They had reached the car before she realized that this time Janson had held her arm as they walked, making certain that she would not fall.

  17

  Buddy Eason sat alone in the huge Eason house on Pine’s Main Street. He was an old man now, caught in the liquid sound of his own breathing, the congestion in his chest, the sound that kept him company at night—he had slept little, propped up on pillows in the adjustable bed that elevated his head enough so that he could breathe. He had not laid down free of pain once in years. He could medicate himself enough to sleep if he wanted, bringing a brief escape from the pain, only to wake again in the early hours sitting up in bed with his head lolled down and drool escaping from the corner of his mouth, aware suddenly that he had been unconscious and that anyone could have done anything to him in those moments while he had been away.

  He could hear the voices of the male nurses who tended him in the hallway that ran the depth of the house, and Buddy wondered if they were the ones who had bathed him and helped him to dress that morning—Buddy had been sobbing by the time they finished
, whimpering from pain caused by the rough handling, and he could still feel the marks that one left on his upper arm from when they had maneuvered him into the device that lifted him into his wheelchair. He stared down at his body, toward the great, round curve of his belly, and the flaccid legs hidden by the blanket covering his lap—living was something that he found to be no longer pleasant, but it was something he had to do.

  Not living meant death, and death meant no longer existing. And, more than anything else in this world, Buddy Eason did not want to cease to exist.

  There was an extended blast from a car horn on the street in front of his house, but it was a noise quickly drowned out by the coughing fit that overtook him, bending him forward in the chair as he hawked into the room. Then he sat for a time, trying desperately to clear his throat and open an airway as he choked on the phlegm he had brought up from his own lungs.

  At last he could breathe and he sat staring toward the distant windows through the dark glasses he wore now almost all the time, realizing that not one of the men he paid so well had come to even make certain he still lived, though he knew they would have heard him clearly in the other rooms of the house. None of them cared if he lived or died, and he knew it. One day they would sit in another room, drinking his coffee and listening to him, while he choked to death alone and afraid.

  It was just a matter of time.

  He was on his own, though he had the men who took care of him. Both his children were gone. Rachel had left the county when she was fifteen, and Wally the year after. Buddy had not seen either of his children since, though he knew his daughter had died in a car accident years later, along with her husband, and that they left a son behind. The boy, Stephen, had gone into the care of his father’s family for a short while, until Buddy sent for him. He could still remember his first look at the child, when Stephen had been a sickly looking five-year-old—Buddy Eason had seen something in his grandson even then that reminded him very much of himself. Perhaps it was for that very reason Buddy sent the boy away to boarding school.