takes me—” They both knew he would not have money to pay for the fare, but that he would have to hop the train instead, waiting until it was picking up speed pulling out of the depot, then running to swing himself and his few belongings on board the first empty boxcar he might find—they both knew, but they also knew there was no way around it, just as there was no way for anyone to offer him money to pay for the fare instead. They both knew he would not take it.
“You’ll let us know where it is you wind up?” she asked.
“Soon as I can—”
Gran’pa rose from the table, stepping around the end of the bench and coming toward him. “For once I was hopin’ your gran’ma’d be wrong—why don’t you stay on here, boy, an’ help me crop this place?” But Janson knew his grandfather did not need him to help sharecrop the small farm. His Uncle Wayne had the next place over, and together he and Gran’pa, and Wayne and Rachel’s three boys, worked the two sharecropped farms as one, splitting the work, and splitting the little annual return there was from the portion of the crops that did not go for use of the land. Janson knew his grandparents did not need another mouth to feed, more kin than there already was crowded into the small house, just as he also knew they would take him in anyway if he wanted to stay—but he could not stay. There was the land—his own land—and he could never forget that.
“Won’t you stay on, boy?”
Janson shook his head. “I cain’t—” he said, but explained no further. His grandfather looked at him for a long moment, then reached out to take Janson’s hand in a firm handshake.
“If it’s what you got t’ do, boy.”
Janson nodded. There was nothing else he could say.
He went to his grandmother, stopping for a moment to drop his shoes and the portmanteau on the bare wood floor at her feet before putting his arms around her. He hugged her briefly, and kissed the softness of her cheek, then looked down into the kind brown eyes, finding them now filled with tears.
“I’ll be back in a couple ’a years,” he said. “Soon as I—” He did not have to finish.
She nodded, placing a work-rough hand on his cheek as she stared up at him. “You may look like your ma, but you’re just like Henry—”
And Janson understood.
She turned back to the wood stove, putting her mind to the worry that his stomach be filled, rather than that her favorite grandchild was leaving her. She fussed with the lid covering a black pot, lifting it with a folded pad of quilted material, then lowering it back into place without ever having looked inside. “You better eat somethin’ before you go—”
“I ain’t hungry. I made myself a big breakfast before I left th’ house,” he lied, knowing all the while that she knew he lied. His stomach was in knots, and he knew he would not be able to eat anything, not even if he had to.
She nodded again, then reached up to lower the door of the warming oven above the stove, reaching inside to take out something she had wrapped into a clean white cloth. She turned to put it into his hands. “Biscuits an’ fried chicken,” she said. “I knowed you’d get hongry later.”
For a moment, Janson could only stare at the warm white bundle in his hands, then he bent and kissed her cheek again, smiling and nodding to her—there was no need for words. He knew she understood.
He gathered up his shoes and the portmanteau from where he had dropped them earlier, holding them in one hand as he turned to his uncle.
“Uncle Wayne, there are some things left at my—” then he stopped for a moment, realizing, “at th’ house. Would you mind—”
“I’d be glad to, boy,” his uncle said, knowing the words before they had to be spoken, and looking for a moment so very much like Janson’s father.
Janson nodded, then looked around the room one last time, memorizing the sights and smells and feelings familiar from a lifetime—the wooden table worn smooth with use, the warmth of the wood stove, the smell of black coffee and good country food, the faces of his kin—there was nothing left to say. It was time that he leave.
They all walked him to the door: his gran’ma and gran’pa, his aunts, uncles, and cousins, even the preacher and his wife; and he told them goodbye one last time as they stood on the narrow front porch of the sharecropper house, the cold January wind whipping at their clothes.
“You take good care ’a yourself, boy,” Gran’ma said, staring up at him with love and worry clouding her brown eyes. Her gentle hand squeezed his arm. “You try t’ keep warm an’ dry, an’ let us know where you are soon as you can—you got any money?” she asked at last.
“I’m all right,” he said, and she nodded.
“You jus’ remember who you are, boy,” she said. “You jus’ remember who you are—”
Janson took one last look around at the faces of his kin, seeing the strength in them, and the weakness, knowing that what they were, he was also. Then he turned and left the porch, walking down off the narrow board steps and into the yard, crossing it toward the rutted clay road that would take him into town and to the train depot, and away from the only home he had known during the nineteen years of his life. As he topped the rise in the road that would cut off sight of the house behind him, he turned back for a moment to wave one last time, and to say goodbye. Then he turned and walked on, slinging his shoes over his right shoulder, the red clay ground cold beneath his bare feet—he was Henry and Nell Sanders’ son, he told himself. And someday he would make them proud.
Deborah Sanders stood on the front porch of the sharecropped house she had lived in for more years than she could count, staring at the red clay road long after the others had gone back inside to the kitchen and to the meal she had prepared for them. She smoothed her hands down over the front of the apron tied about her waist, her tears dried now, but the ache inside of her none the lessened—her grandson was gone now, gone from home and his kin and the only way of life he had ever known; and she was worried.
Janson was so like Henry—determined, stubborn, headstrong, with perhaps more pride than it was right for any man to have, and that same dream in his green eyes she had so often seen in Henry’s, that same dream of a home and crop all his own. Deborah had seen her son work and struggle through his life for that dream—and she had seen him dead because of it, had helped Nell to prepare his body for burial, and had seen Nell die so soon afterward, ready only to be with him.
And Janson was of both his parents.
Deborah closed her eyes and talked silently with her God for a moment—there was no need for conscious words in her mind, for she and her Lord were of long-standing acquaintance. He would understand. He would know. And He would look after her grandson.
She opened her eyes and stared at the road again, her mind no less troubled even after the prayer. Often neither God nor man made an easy life for a dreamer; she well knew that, as so many of their people through the ages had known it, from Tom’s grandfather who had been killed in Ireland in the hard years before the Potato Famine had forced the family to flee to America, killed by the Protestant landlord of a tenanted farm for refusing to pay his rent moneys and still see his children starve; to her own ancestors, who had only barely survived the massacres of non-Catholics in France; to Nell’s people, so many of whom had died in the forced march of the Cherokee west from the north Georgia mountains in the time of the Trail of Tears. They had always been a people with their own dreams, their own thoughts and ideals, different somehow by choice and birth from others, and willing to die for that difference if need be.
Janson held that same difference, that same stubbornness, and many of those same dreams, of the Irish, French, and Cherokee within him; and Deborah worried all the more as she stared at the road he had gone away on—so much blood had been shed in the past for dreams. So much blood.
Passages from the Old Bible came to her, verses about Joseph and his brothers, and the dreams that had plagued his life, making her suddenly