There Is a River

by Charlotte Miller

  18

  Never once in her life had Joanna Sanders Lee given up on anything. Not even when she was a child. Not even when she was wrong. Not even when she was wrong and had known it. She was that stubborn and determined. That “mule headed,” her father called it. That much like him, her grandmother said. She had never given up on anything, but she had never faced something like this.

  She sat, swinging slowly in the front porch swing on a Thursday afternoon, one foot tucked beneath her, the other pushing lightly at the worn boards of the porch floor to keep the swing in motion. She stared out across the yard, across patchy grass that looked as if it would feel dry and brittle to the touch, grass she had not had to cut in weeks, for it no longer seemed to grow.

  The grass was dying. The farm was dying. The whole damn Southeast seemed to be dying.

  The weather had been hot and dry for months, and people were starting to talk drought—drought could mean disaster, not just to the Sanders, but to every other farm family in the region, but Joanna would not allow herself even the thought that the weather was also turning against her. She had been home for several months, and she had not once let herself give in to the idea that they might lose the land.

  So far they were making it. There were late payments almost every month, and the ledger was showing red as she now knew it had been doing for years—but there were few farmers in the area who were not losing money year after year.

  Another county farm had gone on the auction block a few weeks before, another family dispossessed. A group of farmers had tried to block the sale, but it had done little good. Deputies from the sheriff’s office had arrived and the sale had gone ahead. When the gavel fell, land that had been in a family for generations had passed into the hands of an out-of-state corporation that cared little for Eason County, or for Alabama. Land that had been cultivated by generations in a family; a home that had sheltered great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and children, all of the same blood; a farm that had grown cotton and corn and hay, and that had raised cattle and fed people in the county for most of a century, had, by the fall of that gavel, become merely a business asset. It was now no longer love and sweat and work, family tradition and a way of life that even Joanna had to acknowledge was slowly dying, that would decide what would happen to that earth. Now the future of that rich, red land, land so much like this she had loved all her life, would be decided by economic projections and business plans, as to whether it would ever be cultivated again, or be broken into tacky little lots where cheap housing could be built.

  Joanna had stood with those trying to block the sale, but they could not stop the inevitable. She knew she might not be too many months from that same place—but no matter what she had to do, she could not allow that to happen.

  Isaac Betts had telephoned to offer her the job on his place. She knew that her father was behind the call, and the offer, though Mr. Betts had not said a word to confirm her suspicions—she had watched her father turn away, shaking his head with obvious disgust as she politely declined the job. He could not understand why she would turn down what he saw as an assured and successful future, for the uncertainty of staying on this place—but it was in her blood; she knew that, though her father seemed to have forgotten it.

  She knew as well as her father or anyone else in the family the old stories, the tales of the past and of the people whose blood flowed in her veins. She had been reared on those stories, had had them told to her on so many Sunday afternoons as her brothers hogged the television and she had to look for her entertainment elsewhere, only to find it in her grandma or her grandpa, and their stories. She had walked in words alongside them down long, curving rows of sharecropped cotton, and over the hard-packed clay streets of a mill village; she had lived with the noise, and coughed in the dust and lint of a cotton mill; she had experienced the rationing and worry and shortages of a world war, and the horror that could come with a telegram, and that one moment between touching a page and not knowing if your world would end—those things she had lived in her grandparents’ words, in a time and a place that existed now only in memories, until she felt very much a part of that past, and even of what had come before it, in a time long before she had ever existed.

  She knew the stories of the Whitleys, her grandma’s people, and of the place where Elise Whitley Sanders had been born in Georgia. She knew of the great, white house on its hill beyond the curving drive, and the people of Whitley blood who had lived there long before the Civil War. They were people who had lost their money and done without, only to rebuild their fortunes on cotton and good business sense when the war ended, even in a time when other men had tried to profit from what they perceived to be the bones of the South.

  She knew all about the Sanders, of ancestors of her great-great-grandfather Tom who had fled Ireland in the days of the Potato Famine, and ancestors of her great-great-grandmother Deborah who had survived the massacres of French non-Catholics centuries before. She knew that her great-grandfather Henry had been the first Sanders ever to walk his own earth, to own the land where he worked and sweated and lived and died—this land. He had been born the son of a sharecropper, the grandson of a sharecropper—and he had worked and fought and struggled to have this place and to pass it on to his son, her grandfather Janson.

  There had been Henry’s wife, Nell, a small, delicately beautiful woman who had mourned herself into death not long after he died, and who had been laid to rest at his side in that Holiness cemetery where generations of Sanders had gone once their struggles were over. Nell’s people had been Cherokee, so many of whom had been driven from their land generations before her birth in a forced march to the west, a march during which a great-great-great-grandmother of Joanna’s had died and been buried in an unmarked grave alongside what had become known as the Trail of Tears.

  There was her grandpa Janson, the first Sanders born to his own land in that line of Irish tenant farmers, Southern sharecroppers, and dispossessed Cherokee. He had lost this place when he had been younger than Joanna was now, and he had struggled for years to regain it, leaving the county to earn the money he would need to buy back his land, but returning with Grandma instead. He and Grandma had almost nothing when they began their lives together. They worked and saved, and then lost everything again when the local bank failed in the early days of the Great Depression; they sharecropped and worked in the cotton mill and were separated only once when Grandpa served overseas during the Second World War—but they never gave up.

  They had regained this land at last, and had to struggle against Buddy Eason to keep it—there was a hatred that existed between Joanna’s grandpa and that massive old man in a wheelchair whom Joanna had seen about town on a handful of occasions, a hatred that had existed for more than sixty years. She had been reared on that hatred, had lived with it, had absorbed it into her skin and flesh and the blood that flowed in her veins—it was not something she had been taught; it simply was. An Eason had been been responsible for the fire that killed her great-grandfather Henry Sanders more than sixty years ago. Buddy Eason himself had tried to kill her grandfather Janson on more than one occasion. And that same Buddy Eason had her father beaten bloody when he was no more than eighteen years old, beaten bloody and then left as a message for her grandpa to find: You’re nothing in Eason County, the message had been meant to convey. Struggle and fight all you want, you’re still nothing in Eason County.

  Well, this might be Eason County, Joanna thought, but this part of it was hers. This part was where her great-grandfather had first dreamed of owning his own earth. This part was where her grandfather and her father had struggled. She would fight to the last inch of her strength to hold onto it—she was a Sanders, after all, a Sanders in Eason County.

  She had no fear of struggle.

  It was what she had been doing all her life.

  The chains of the porch swing made a rhythmic screaking where they were attached to the ey
e-bolts above as she kept the swing in motion. Through the open living room window, she could hear her Katie’s voice talking her grandma into baking cookies, and her great-grandma into helping. Joanna’s grandfather came out onto the front porch, his walking stick in his hand, and Joanna watched as he turned back to pull at the handle of the storm door after it had latched shut behind him, as she had seen him do each time he had come through that door since it was installed, as if he did not trust the spring-loaded device at the bottom to close it properly.

  “Are you ready to go, Grandpa?” Joanna asked. She had been waiting on the porch to drive him into town to the Feed and Seed. He no longer drove himself, though he had never told her the reason—his eyesight was failing, Joanna’s grandmother said, though he was too proud to tell even Grandma that it was going.

  She braced her foot against the porch floor to stop the swing, then rose, hearing the chains rattle and then become still as she started for the steps that descended to the yard. Her grandfather came down slowly behind her, holding to the railing with one hand, his walking stick with the other, his eyes on each step of the descent as he made his way.

  Joanna had reached her father’s rusting old Ford truck in the drive at the side of the house before her grandfather made more than a few steps into the yard. She looked back to see him stop and study the sky, and she knew without his having to speak that he was checking for signs of rain, as they had all done innumerable times in recent weeks.

  “I don’t remember it ever bein’ this dry this time ’a year,” he said as he pulled shut the passenger-side door of the old truck. The door made a hollow sound as it closed, the loose window rattling in its frame. The windows on both sides had been down and the doors unlocked when they got in. There had been little chance recently of a rainfall wetting the interior of the truck, and there was little risk that someone would steal this truck with its one bald tire and leaking oil pan gasket.

  Janson Sanders sat back and rested the walking stick against his thigh, his right hand remaining atop its crook.

  “We sure could use some rain,” Joanna said, starting the engine and putting the truck in gear. She rested her right arm on the seat back as she turned to look over her shoulder and through the truck’s rear window as she backed the Ford down the drive. Red dust rose at the sides of the pickup, small pebbles bouncing in the truckbed, as she slowed alongside the mailbox before backing out into the road. She turned to start forward, the taste of red dust and Alabama clay now in her mouth, breathed in from the drought and the hot day and the lowered windows.

  She knew there were a great many things they could use.

  The traffic was heavy on the highway as they drew closer to Pine. Cars and trucks were pulling out of the Kmart parking lot, as well as the Winn-Dixie, and there was a line of vehicles stretching from one side of McDonald’s all the way to the dark blue Suburban parked at the drive-through window on the opposite side. The traffic thinned noticeably as they turned onto Main Street. There was a knot of activity before the video rental store a block off the highway, and a number of cars were in the parking lots of the utility company and the library, but the closer they drew toward the strip of stores downtown, the less movement Joanna noted along the street. She passed through downtown without having to stop or even slow down to allow anyone to back out of a parking space. There were few spaces filled, she noticed, and that seemed odd even to her eyes. Joanna was only twenty-two, but even she could remember when this short strip of downtown bustled with people and vehicles.

  There were two cars and a number of trucks parked along the street before Abernathy’s Feed and Seed when they neared the edge of downtown. Joanna slowed and tried to find a place to park at the front of the store, concerned at the distance her grandpa might have to walk even before he had to climb the steps to the elevated sidewalk. There were no empty spaces, however, and she drove past, and then past the next vacant storefront, taking at last the first empty parking space she found.

  Joanna waited at one side of the rusting tailgate for her grandpa to get out of the vehicle and join her. She would walk with him up the street, and then wait for him to go up the steps just ahead of her. She would not offer to take his arm for the walk, or for the climb up the steps. Her grandpa would never allow that. No one but her grandma could take his arm to steady his step, and Joanna knew that.

  As they walked up the street, she noticed a small, expensive-looking red convertible parked in the space directly before the Feed and Seed, sitting against the retaining wall in a way that completely blocked the steps from street level to the sidewalk. As they drew near, her eyes took in the glossy finish that did not show even one speck of red dust or bird poop. As they drew alongside, she found herself hoping there would be bird poop on one of the nice leather seats, for the top was down—but what she saw instead surprised her. Spread out and almost falling from the passenger-side seat, a magazine lay open to the centerfold of a naked woman. Alongside it lay a crumpled sack, with what seemed an extravagant supply of Trojans spilling out—Joanna glanced quickly at her grandpa to make certain he had not seen.

  She waited a few minutes as Janson Sanders ascended the next clear set of steps up from the street. She glanced back to the red car, her eyes settling on the license plate bolted to its rear—she had expected to see a vanity plate there, but was surprised to see a regular tag instead. It was a tag from another county, at least, as she could see from its leading two numbers, and that pleased her somewhat. She had doubted that someone from around here would leave something like that laying open for the world to see.

  Janson Sanders had pulled his list from a loose trousers pocket before they reached the front of the Feed and Seed. She had heard him telephone just after breakfast that morning to check the prices of several items he intended to buy, both with the Feed and Seed and with Jenkins Hardware situated at the mid-point of downtown.

  After he hung up, Joanna had asked if he wanted the number for the big hardware store that had recently opened out along the highway, but her grandfather declined.

  “I reckon they got enough money,” he had said. “They ain’t got no need ’a mine.”

  The familiar smell of the Feed and Seed greeted Joanna as they entered the building that afternoon, that smell of chemicals combined with the various plants for sale just outside the open double doors, a scent unlike any other she had ever smelled but one she had found in every feed and seed she had ever entered. She could see both Mr. Abernathy and his widowed daughter-in-law busy with other customers, as was Thomas Jackson, the elderly black man who had worked in the store for more than sixty of his eighty-three years.

  Seeing her grandfather immediately drawn into a conversation with another man at the front of the store, a conversation of which she heard enough to know it was about the dry weather, Joanna began to look around on her own. The Feed and Seed was a familiar place, one she had come to often with her father and her grandfather in her years of growing up. It had changed little. At least here in Abernathy’s, just as at Jenkins Hardware, there remained a bit of stability in a town and a county that she was afraid were changing too rapidly.

  The tall, scarred wooden counter at the front of Abernathy’s, just inside the window painted with its green curve of letters that spelled out the company’s name, had been in the Feed and Seed since the day it opened what was now probably a century before. The counter’s surface was stained and marked with black lines and pencil marks, but she knew it was clean and scrubbed every morning as thoroughly as any counter in town.

  On it sat an old cash register with a new calculator alongside, as well as various and sundry items for sale, from plant food spikes to small gardening tools. An IBM computer, along with its monitor and a wide-carriage printer, had been added in the past year, and it sat now on a small desk to the rear of the counter, looking oddly out of place in the ancient Feed and Seed. There was a display of harnesses, choke chains, tie-out chains,
dog collars, and leashes near the front windows, beside tomato cages, watering cans, insecticide bottles, and a stack of coiled hoses. On one wall mid-way of the poorly lit store was a display of hoes, mattocks, sling blades, rakes, shovels, and long gardening forks. To one side of the main aisle that led back into the store, large jars and several bins held seeds: curly leaf mustard, seven-top or purple-top turnip greens, white field or yellow sweet corn, white velvet okra, Jackson Wonder or Henderson bunch beans, cucumber, tomato, eggplant, squash, and sweet pepper. Just beyond that she could see sacks and bins of fertilizer: ammonia, guano, and the more modern chemical mixes. There were racks of flower seeds, axe handles, and work gloves; counters with boxes and bottles of pesticides and herbicides; sacks of peat moss, potting soil, dog ration, chicken feed, and cat litter. There were clay, plastic, and ceramic flower pots; pink flamingos; white, wooden rose trellises; and metal feed bins in the dim back recesses of the store, as well as cement water fountains, weathervanes, lightning rods, and rolls of barbed wire and chicken wire.

  Mr. Abernathy at last came to wait on Joanna’s grandpa where he stood talking with the other man near the front windows, but Joanna paid little attention to what they were saying. She knew they would have to exchange pleasantries first. Those polite, unerringly nosy inquires always had to be gotten out of the way before any real business could take place in Eason County. That was how it was here in this place where everyone knew everyone else, or at least everyone knew of most everyone, and where if you talked to someone long enough you found you were either kin to them or at the least that your grandparents had been acquainted with theirs.

  Joanna spent some time looking at the seeds in their glass jars and bins, knowing that her grandfather would let her know if he needed her. She heard voices raise to one side of the store, and her eyes moved in that direction. Old Mr. Jackson was struggling with something, at last hefting what looked to be a fifty-pound sack of dog ration from a stack there and up onto his shoulder. Joanna heard a sound escape from her and she moved in that direction—he was at least several years older than Joanna’s grandpa, and he had looked just as hunched-over and old from the time she had been a child as he did right now. She thought that he staggered slightly under the weight, but then he struggled on, speaking back over his shoulder to a man who followed him.