He stared toward the fields, now barren, the dry cotton plants waiting to be turned under for the new year’s cotton crop—fields that had once been burned black in a gasoline-ignited fire that had ended a part of Janson’s life forever. He stared toward the edge of the field to the place where his father had died in his mother’s arms in the midst of that hellish night, and he could almost smell the smoke, could almost feel the heat, could almost still choke on the smell of the burning lint and the taste of his own hatred as he remembered.
He stared toward the front of the house to the place where Walter Eason had stood little more than a year later, after those months of Janson struggling to try to hold onto the land, after Janson having seen his mother die the winter after his father, after the notice of foreclosure had finally been received—Walter Eason had offered him a job in the cotton mill in town, had told him there would always be a place for him there, for a “good, hardworking boy” like him.
Janson could remember that day so well, could feel the lowered, darkened sky, so like this day, and the hatred as he had stared at the man he knew was responsible for both his parents’ deaths, and for his loss of the land. Henry Sanders had refused to sell his cotton crop in the county at the Easons’ prices, for he had known that to do so would have meant the loss of the land—but they had lost the land anyway, and Janson had lost both his parents as well. He had thrown Walter Eason off the land that day, and had left Eason County shortly thereafter, knowing he could never work for the Easons, for Henry Sanders had worked and slaved and sworn never to see his son within the walls of that cotton mill, never to see him owned and sweated into old age for someone like the Easons.
Henry Sanders had worked in that cotton mill; he and his wife had saved and dreamed and done without until they could guarantee their son a better life. Janson had grown up with the red land beneath his feet, the first in his family ever born to his own land in a line of Irish tenant farmers, Southern sharecroppers, and dispossessed Cherokee. Janson had never once worked indoors, had never thought to work where he could not see the sun or sky, for he was a farmer, and that was all he had ever wanted to be.
But now there was something he wanted more. Now there was something that meant more to him than the red earth, more even than the dream of owning something that was his own—Elise. Elise and their baby. Now he had a reason to want the land more than for himself alone. Now he had a reason to want it more than as a home he could give Elise—it would one day belong to his son, to grandsons he would someday know. Now there was a reason to accept a roof and walls to work within, as his own father had done. He could not take Elise to a sharecropped farm, for that would be a life far worse than any in town, losing half a crop each year for use of mules and plow and earth, watching their own half eaten up by a store charge they would be forced to run, taking her to live in a drafty shack, for most sharecropped farms were far worse than the one his grandparents cropped on halves—no, that was no life for Elise, or for their children. The choice was made, a choice he would have to live with, a choice he had no alternative to.
He knelt and picked up a winter-brown leaf that had fallen from the branches of the oak tree, then straightened to stare toward the house again—this would be theirs again, one day, no matter how long it took him; one day he would give this to Elise, and to their sons and daughters. Until then he would work, he would slave, he would be sweated into old age if he had to—but this would be theirs.
He crushed the leaf in his hand as he took one last look at the land he had dreamed of through the last year, the way of life he had always known—at the red earth, the tall pines, the all-seeing sky. It was a way of life he would not know again for a very long time, locked within the walls and ceiling of a cotton mill, owned and worked by men he would forever hate. He looked, and he remembered. Then he turned his back and walked away.
“It’ll kill him,” Deborah Sanders said as she pounded the wash that lay on the battling block, using the heavy stick she held in both hands. “He ain’t a man for workin’ indoors—it’ll kill him, sure as I’m standin’ here.” She pounded the wash even harder, staring across the narrow distance of ground beside her sharecropped home at the girl who was now wife to her grandson. Elise stood nearby, up to her elbows in steaming water, scrubbing clothes up-and-down over the rub board in front of her. The girl did not say a word as she stood in the cold air, a slight mist of steam rising from the washtub before her, and that made Deborah only angrier, even as she prayed again, for the innumerable time, for the patience to deal with the girl.
Janson had been back in Eason County for a little over a month now, having brought this one back with him after almost a year’s absence from his family and home—Lord, but Deborah had been surprised to see the sort of girl Janson had taken to wife, with her bobbed-off hair and her short skirts, and—heaven help them both—she had already been with child when Janson married her. Deborah still did not know what to make of this Elise Whitley, except that she was a spoiled child who had never done a day’s work in all her life. Deborah had no idea what sort of marriage this was going to be, since the girl had never cooked or cleaned or sewed or made a bed even once in her life for all anyone could tell of her. She had burned so many pans of biscuits and cornbread over the past month that Deborah had worried she would set the house ablaze over their heads if not kept away from the stove—Elise was never going to be able to keep house on her own, Deborah was certain of that, if Janson kept to this fool’s plan he had announced to them only this morning. She had known something was coming, had felt it, over the past weeks as Janson had gone about the work that Tom and Wayne had found for him to do about the place—he had only been waiting, finishing up chores he knew would be easier for a younger man to do, even though she realized now that he had known all along that it had many times been make-work that had been given him.
She stared now at this girl through the haze of woodsmoke that came from beneath the black pot of boiling clothes nearby, setting her lips for a moment, then snapping: “You’re gonna rub a hole in that shirt. If it ain’t clean enough already, put it back int’ th’ pot t’ boil some more.”
The girl stopped rubbing the shirt, dunked it back into the wash tub, and reached in for another piece of laundry, coming up with what looked to be the same shirt again, which she then set about scrubbing vigorously on the board. Deborah sighed, exasperated, and reached to sling the wash she had been beating into the girl’s tub as well, surprised when Elise only paused for a moment, then went back to rubbing the shirt without saying a word. Heaven help me, Deborah prayed silently, asking God to make her not dislike the girl so much, even as she knew that her own feelings stood in the way of any intercession from the Almighty, for she could find very little even likeable within the girl. Henry and Nell would have been surprised to have seen this little piece of baggage their son had wed, even more surprised to have seen what she had brought him to—Janson working in a cotton mill, Janson working in town, for the very people who had—
Lord, give me strength—first to find out the girl was already with child, then her absolute incompetence at anything wife-like, then, to seal forever what would probably be Deborah’s unending dislike of her, the girl had burst into tears when Deborah had told her she would be the one to midwife her child at its birth. Elise had thrown herself on her bed and cried until Janson had promised her a doctor to bring the baby—a doctor, when money was