And when they saw him afar off, even before he came near unto them, they conspired against him to slay him.
And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh.
Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, Some evil beast hath devoured him: and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Deborah Sanders stared at the point where the red earth and the blue sky met, her thoughts troubled—
“. . . and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”
The landscape that passed outside the open doorway of the rail car that Sunday afternoon in January of 1927 was a mixture of green southern pines and red Georgia clay. Janson Sanders sat just within the open doorway of the boxcar, his back against the wall, feeling the train rock and sway beneath him as it moved along the tracks. He had no idea where the train was taking him, and in that moment it did not much matter—anyplace was fine, anyplace that was not Eason County.
He shivered with the cold and tried to pull his coat closer about himself, but knew there was little use. The frigid January wind that numbed his face, his hands, and bare feet, also cut straight through the worn old coat, his faded workshirt and dungarees, and even the old newspapers he had stuffed down inside his shirt against the cold, to leave him shivering anyway. He had considered for a time moving back into the recesses of the car, away from the freezing wind that blew in the open doorway, but had already decided against it—the cold was far preferable over the stench that filled a space usually occupied by cattle, far preferable, and also probably far safer.
He eyed again the two men who rode the rail car with him, glad again of the distance between him and where they sat. They stayed at the far side of the car, seated against the wall, away from the air and the light. They had been here, sitting much as they were now, when he had swung himself and his few belongings on board those hours ago as the train had been picking up speed pulling out of the depot in Pine. They had looked at each other, and then had begun to stare at him as he settled down with his back against the wall—as they stared at him even now, returning his look with hard eyes that showed little concern for him, or for the remainder of the world.
Some instinct born within Janson warned him to be on guard as he met their eyes. They seemed hard men, neither too clean, and neither with less than several days growth of beard on his face. The youngest was at least twenty years older than Janson’s nineteen and one-half years; he was a big man, with huge shoulders bulging beneath a dirty coat, and huge hands and thick wrists extending far beyond the ends of his sleeves—but it was the older of the two who put Janson even more on guard. He was somewhere in his mid-fifties, with a body already going to fat, and a broad nose that looked as if it had been broken and poorly mended several times. He sat apart from the other man, drawing his looks on occasion without saying a word. His head was bare, the greasy black hair thin and sparse over the top of his large skull, but growing in thick mats down along the backs of both his broad hands—and somehow he made Janson even more wary than did the other, staring at him, squinting even through the darkness inside the car, never taking his eyes away even as the hours passed and the miles rolled by the train.
Janson returned his stare, knowing somehow that the two men were together, just as he knew they were not friends, for men such as these had no friends—rather they simply traveled together, as any predatory animal might travel in a pack. And, as Janson watched them, he felt as if all his instincts were on guard.
He turned his eyes out the open doorway of the car, some part of him still watching and alert for any movement one of the two might make, just as it had been from the first moment he had swung himself on board the train those hours ago—he wondered again where the train might be taking him. The land they were passing through seemed at times almost as red as the Alabama hills he had been born to, but it was flatter land, rolling only on occasion into the hills and curves his eyes were more accustomed to. There were pine woods, broken for broad expanses by winter-barren cotton fields; small towns, and what once seemed to him to be the edges of a big city, though he could only guess at that, for he had never been in a big city in all his life. From the height of the sun in the west, and the direction the train had been traveling, he knew they must now be somewhere in Georgia—Georgia, that seemed as good a place as any to start earning the money he would need to buy his land back.
He continued to stare out the open doorway, feeling the old leather portmanteau against his thigh, his shoes not far away. His stomach was growling and empty, but the smell of manure, urine, and sweat within the car, and the constant swaying motion of the train, had already combined to replace his hunger with nausea. The white-wrapped bundle of food his gran’ma had given him those hours ago before he had left Eason County had long ago grown cold, and it sat, still unopened, atop the portmanteau at his side, his hand resting on top of it. He knew he would have to eat soon, but not here, not in this stinking, swaying car. Once the train stopped, he would get off, find someplace warm, someplace the air was fresh and the ground steady, and then he would eat—besides, he had to urinate badly, and he could not bring himself to stand and relieve his strained bladder against the wall as he had seen one of the other men do.
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes for a moment, exhausted, numbed from the cold, sick from the smell. He had never felt so alone, been so alone, in all his life—but perhaps alone was better. No one to worry about. Nobody else to think of. Alone.
He was tired. There had been little sleep the night before, the decision to leave Eason County sitting heavily on his mind, taking the badly-needed rest from him—for a moment, he thought of home, of the white house on the red acres; the fields so rich, green with plants in the summer, white with cotton in the fall; the tall green pines, the rolling red land. He thought of his pa’s booming laugh, his mother singing softly as she worked at the old foot-treadle sewing machine in the parlor, his gran’ma coming by to make sure he ate two messes of polk sallet each year to purify his blood, and the time she had drawn the fire from his arm when he had burned it so badly on the old wood stove several years back. For a moment, he could almost see it all, almost touch it all—home, his parents, the white house as it had been in years past, just as if nothing had happened. Just as if—
There was a sudden movement across from him, quick, furtive, and Janson realized with a start that he had been almost asleep. His eyes sprang open, and his muscles tensed, ready—
The younger of the two men was half raised onto one knee, the dark eyes above the tangled beard set on Janson’s face. For a moment, the man stayed as he was, staring at Janson, then he slowly lowered himself back to a seated position, his eyes never once leaving Janson’s face—they were hard eyes, eyes that put Janson even more on guard. He would not fall asleep again.
It was not long before the train began to slow, coming into a small settlement, then finally coming to a halt with a shudder and a high-pitched screech of metal just outside an old depot. Janson cautiously looked out, hearing the two men shift even farther back into the darkness within the car. He knew it was not safe to stay so close to the open doorway, there being too great a chance the railroad police might spot him with the train stopped here at the station, and even Janson had heard of what often happened to the transients found riding the rails, how they were often beaten, sometimes to within an inch of their lives, before they were thrown off the train—but something inside Janson told him even that could be far preferable to what could happen to a man even deeper within the darkness of that car. At least the railroad police were the law. There was no law alive within that rail car.
The old depot building was run down, the once-white paint on its walls now peeling and gray from the smoke of the many trains that had come through. There were several sets of tracks, going in several different directions, but few buildings, and even fewer people—probably a freight stop, Janson told himself, staying hidden as best he could at the edge of the doorway. This was not the sort of place he had thought to leave his free ride, but both the smell, and the companionship, forced the decision on him—there were other empty cars on