strings to make them easier to carry; at his feet was his father’s worn old leather portmanteau, the battered old suitcase containing everything he would take with him in the world—the faded and patched overalls, dungarees, and workshirts, his good trousers, and the two Sunday shirts, all equally showing signs of wear now, and his inexpert care and laundering. Stuffed in with his clothes were the few dollars he had, and the old family Bible, the only existing photograph of his parents carefully placed between its pages, a photograph from long years ago, before hard work and worry had served to age them both. Everything else had been sold in the past months in trying to hold onto the land, everything but the few objects that were too precious to sell, things that had belonged to his mother and father, things with too much meaning to ever allow them to go to strangers. Those few things he would ask his Uncle Wayne or his gran’pa to come for in a wagon before the auction, in hopes someone in the family could use them, or at least store them until they might be of need again—he would not be here then. Today he was leaving Eason County.
He took one last look around at the red land, the fields he had worked beside his father all his life, the woods he had played in as a boy, and at the old barn yearly filled with white cotton for as long as he could remember. He looked at the house with its wide, comfortable porch where his mother had sat in her rocker on so many Sunday evenings, and at the separate kitchen off to one side of the house, connected only by the covered walkway in between—home, but home no longer.
He stood staring at the house for a long time, remembering things he had not thought of in years, days long passed now, things his father had said, the way his mother had often smiled, the sound of the sewing machine now and forever stilled and silent in the parlor. After a time he left the rise, cut through the silent apple orchard and over the North Ridge Road just above where it ran past the house. He cut through the fields with their rows of dry and lifeless cotton plants waiting now only to be turned under for the next year’s planting, and toward the woods. He never once looked back.
He went along the path long ago worn smooth by a man’s steady step and a small boy’s running feet, the winter woods silent around him, the green of the pines the only sign of life in the dead of the January cold—he would say goodbye to his grandparents, and then he would leave Eason County for perhaps a very long time. But he would be back. He would leave for now this place where his pride and his soul would not let him stay. He would go somewhere else—where did not matter, for it would never be home to him; nothing would ever be home again but that red land and that white house he could no longer call his own. He would go wherever it was that he might have to go, do whatever it was he might have to do, to earn the money it would take to buy his land back—and then he would return to Eason County, and he would make that dream a reality again. Even if he had to face hell or the devil or fight Walter Eason himself—he would have that dream.
After a time he came to the old Blackskillet Road, crossed a ditch at the side of the red clay expanse, then followed its edge toward the sharecropped land his grandparents had worked for as long as most in the area could remember. When he came within sight of the unpainted house, its tin roof long ago rusting and brown now, he realized suddenly that it was Sunday, for the preacher’s four-year-old Chevrolet was pulled up before the narrow front porch of the tenant house, as well as his Aunt Olive’s and Cyrus’ Buick, and his Uncle Wayne’s Tin Lizzie. There was to be a family dinner after services this Sunday, as on most Sundays, and the preacher and his wife had been invited to share the meal today, as had Janson. His gran’ma would be worried where he was, wondering why he had not been in church that morning—and now he would have to tell her he was leaving as well, leaving for perhaps a very long time, and that he would not see her again for possibly years after this day.
He stood for a moment and stared at the house, then made his way across the bare swept yard, past the preacher’s car and the old Model T, and up onto the front porch. He knew he would be disturbing dinner with his late arrival, especially with company in the house, but he could not stop now. He could not go back to the land, to the house, for one more day, one more night, knowing it was no longer his. He turned the doorknob smoothly in his hand and pushed the door open, not bothering to knock, for he knew there was little need for anyone to knock at this door.
His cousin Sissy sat in a rocker in the warmth before the fireplace in the front room of the sharecropper house as he entered, the girl rocking a homemade ragdoll in her arms, her gentle face calm and happy. She looked up as he closed the door behind himself, smiling as she saw him, then quickly motioning for his silence, warning with a look that the doll-child in her arms was asleep. Janson smiled and nodded his understanding, then stood watching her for a moment, remarking again to himself how lovely she already was at twelve, her long blond hair hanging in curls down her back, her blue eyes large and expressive; she was already becoming a young woman—but her mind would forever be that of a child, as everyone in the family but Sissy herself already knew. He nodded again to her, saying goodbye in his own way, while taking care not to disturb the sleep of the carefully mothered doll in her arms.
He passed through the middle room of the house, glancing at the old iron bedstead that had sat there in the same position against the whitewashed far wall for as long as he could remember, a hand-pieced quilt neatly drawn over its corn shuck mattress, a chamber pot visible beneath the foot of the bed. Ahead, through the open door to the kitchen, he could hear the preacher’s voice and his grandfather’s, both raised in some religious discussion as they sat on wooden benches pulled up to either side of the eating table, the soft voices of the women in the kitchen almost drowned out by his gran’pa as he told the preacher for the second time that book learning did not necessarily mean that a man knew the ways of the Lord. Brother Harmon started to respond, a holding-forth tone in his voice that Janson recognized from long Sunday mornings seated in his sermons, but Gran’pa cut him off mid-sentence as Janson entered the room.
“Hello, boy, we missed you in church this mornin’—”
The kitchen smelled warmly of home: fresh-baked biscuits, country ham, and fried chicken, collard greens cooking in a black pot on the back of the stove, wood smoke, strong black coffee. There were deep dishes of good food on the table, black-eyed peas cooked with ham, potatoes yellow with fresh-churned butter, rich candied yams, and syrup cakes stacked with dried apples for dessert. The men sat on benches pulled up to either side of the table, enjoying his grandmother’s and his Aunt Rachel’s cooking, the preacher sitting across from his grandfather, Uncle Wayne and his three boys, Aunt Olive’s husband Cyrus and their son Daniel. The younger people and the children were out back of the house, and Janson could hear their voices clearly through the windows and doors closed against the winter chill—they would be the last to eat, after the men, and then the women, were finished, and tempers were running high, and voices growing louder, as their empty stomachs growled and the minutes crawled by.
The women stood or sat at the edges of the room, seeing that the bowls and platters of food on the table remained full, or simply waiting. Sister Harmon, the preacher’s wife, sat in a straight, split-bottomed chair away from the overpowering heat of the wood stove, her spine not once touching the seat back, her legs encased in thick cotton stockings, crossed primly at the ankles, and tucked away behind one of the chair legs as she talked in quiet tones to Janson’s Aunt Olive. His Aunt Belle and Aunt Maggie sat only a few feet away, Belle with her arms folded beneath her large bosom, and Maggie with hers folded beneath her rather flat one, both pointedly ignoring the preacher’s wife for some slight imagined in church long weeks before.
Gran’ma and Aunt Rachel stood near the wood stove, seeing to it that the men’s plates never grew empty, and that no slight in hospitality should occur, as they discussed children or households, canning or kinfolks, or whatever else it might be that women discussed at such gatherings. Janson returned his grandfather’s greeting, but did not take the time to explain why he had not been in church that morning, then he looked toward his gran’ma—she was staring at him, staring at him with a sad, rather-resigned expression on her gentle face. Her brown eyes did not shift to take in the shoes slung over his shoulder, or the portmanteau held in his right hand, and he realized suddenly that they did not have to—she had known all along he would leave, that he would have no other choice.
“When you wasn’t in church this mornin’, I knowed it’d be t’day—” she said quietly,