Behold, this Dreamer. Charlotte Miller

cover in one hand, and the only pair of shoes he owned in the other.

      There was always more work than he could do in the days, and never enough hours to do it in, no matter how hard he tried. So he spent even more hours, worked even later into the darkness each day, refusing to give up, refusing to even acknowledge that defeat could exist—and he lay awake at night and worried, and listened for someone to come again this year to try to destroy the crop, to take the last hope there was left. To take his land.

      But this year there was no interference, no broken windows, no killed animals. When fall came, his kin helped as best they could, spending hours in his fields in addition to their own, his grandparents, his Uncle Wayne, and several of his cousins, picking his cotton as well as their own, trying to help him hold onto the land—but cotton was bringing less per pound of lint this year than it had in any year since 1921, less than he could ever remember it bringing before. There was a good crop, more cotton than the land had ever grown before—surely, even with the current prices, it would be enough to let him hold onto the land once it was sold. Surely—

      When the cotton was at last picked, filling the bins in the barn, filling the two old sharecropper shacks on the land, filling even the spaces boarded in on either side of the front and back porches of the house with only narrow walkways left in between, Janson looked at it, and he worried all the more. Many farmers were saying their crops were going for less this year than it had cost to grow them—and there was the mortgage payment to meet, as well as the credit he had found it necessary to run at the store. His pa had always warned him against using credit—but even Henry Sanders had been forced to use credit from time to time. That was how they had gotten the land in the first place, the same damned mortgage that threatened to take it even now.

      The cotton was loaded onto borrowed wagons this year for the trip out of the County. Janson knew any trouble they might find would come before they could reach the County line, and he was already prepared to meet it—the old rifle rested against his thigh this year as it had the last. The Easons would not take his land. Not even if he had to use the rifle. Not even if he had to kill someone.

      It was not long after they left the land that morning, the wagons loaded heavy with cotton, that the black car began to follow them, always staying at a distance, never coming any closer, never any farther away; making no attempt to pass them on the narrow dirt roads, or to not be seen—but, as they reached the County line, it turned back, never once having attempted to stop them, or to halt their progress. The crop was sold, and Janson returned to Eason County—but he already knew it was lost. The cotton had not brought the money he needed. He was losing the land.

      In the next days he sold off everything he could—two iron bedsteads; the sofa, upholstered chairs and centertable from the parlor; the hog he had been fattening for slaughter; the milk cow—anything he could find that might bring him some little money, until all there was left were the things he could never sell: the rocking chair he and his father together had bottomed with smooth white oak splits for his mother, the foot-treadle sewing machine she had worked over on so many evenings, the old rope bed his parents had shared since their marriage, the chifforobe that had sat in one corner of their bedroom all his life, the old wood stove, the leaky icebox. He took every cent he could gather from the sale of the furniture and the crop, and he gave it to the bank, knowing it was not enough, but praying—He kept telling himself that it could not end this easily, not after all his parents’ dreams, his own. Not after all the years that Henry and Nell Sanders had worked and saved to have this land, and to hold onto it for him. Not after his entire life spent here on this red earth, working these fields, not after seeing his parents die—not after the past year, after all the hard work, the long hours in the fields, plowing and planting and chopping the cotton; not after the work and the worry and the days upon days of picking the fields until his back ached and his fingers bled. Not after—

      But the foreclosure notice came, the notice of auction—he did not have to be able to read them to know what they said. They meant he land was no longer his. His father’s dream. His mother’s. His own—he had lost the land.

      It was only a few days later that Walter Eason came to the land, a cold, gray day with a heavy, damp chill in the air that clung to the skin like a wet coat. Janson had been working in another man’s fields since before sunup that morning, clearing land for the next year’s planting, earning the little money the work might bring him, for there was still the store charge to pay, as well as a long winter ahead, a long winter when he knew he would not be on the land. He was tired and hungry as he walked toward home late that afternoon, the money from the work now earned and in his pocket, but those few coins were soon forgotten as he rounded the side of the house to find the black Cadillac touring car pulled up into the front yard.

      He stopped where he was just short of the front porch and stared, watching as the car door opened and Walter Eason got out, the old man’s white hair a stark contrast to the gray and threatening sky behind him—for a moment Janson felt a muscle clench tightly in his jaw, his hands tightening into fists at his sides as he fought to control the rage that built inside of him at the sight of the man. Walter Eason stared at him for a long moment, as if he were assessing the situation, and the young man who stood before him, then he closed the door of the touring car, and made his way toward where Janson stood before the house.

      It seemed a long time before either man spoke, as Walter Eason and Janson Sanders met each other’s eyes over the short distance between them. A wind blown up by the lowered clouds and the threatening sky stirred the old man’s white hair—but still he looked somehow unmoved as he met Janson’s gaze. At last he spoke, his face seeming still unchanged. “I hear you’ve lost this place.”

      Janson did not answer, but only continued to stare, somehow remembering the words his mother had spoken to him on the old porch behind him those months ago—and also a day, over two years past now, when Walter Eason had stopped him and his father in town. He could almost taste the red dust the cars along Main Street had kicked up that morning, almost hear the horns of the Model T’s, the Chevrolets, and the Buicks—and this old man before him, this old man who dared to come to the land even now.

      “You’ll have to be leaving here soon,” Walter Eason was saying, staring at him now. “I want you to know there’ll be a place for you in the mill, and in the village, if you want it.” He paused for a moment, seeming to be waiting. “There’s always work in the cotton mill for a good, hard-working boy like you—”

      For a long moment, Janson said nothing. When he at last spoke, his voice was quiet, but filled with anger. “Get th’ hell off my land—” he said, and Walter Eason’s face changed almost imperceptibly. “This place may not be mine much longer, but, while it is, I want you th’ hell off it—” He stared at the old man a moment longer, then turned and walked up onto the porch and in through the front door of the house he had lived in all his life, leaving Walter Eason standing alone in the front yard. It was then that Janson Sanders knew he had to leave Eason County.

      He had not once thought of what he would do once the land was gone, once the farm was sold on the auction block, for that had seemed such an impossibility, even as he had held the notice of foreclosure in his hand—but now he knew it was a reality as unstoppable as fire or death or falling cotton prices had ever been. He knew he could not stay here now to see his home sold to another man, to see another man work the fields that had once been his own—he had to go somewhere else, to find work that could earn the money he would need to get his land back someday. The Easons had not beaten him, as they had never once beaten Henry or Nell Sanders in all their lives—Janson would return here; he would buy back his land, and he would pass his dream, his parents’ dream, on to sons and grandsons of his own someday.

      Two days later he stood on the low rise of land just beyond the small, winter-barren apple orchard and the beginnings of the red fields that in a few months’ time would be broken by another man’s plow, tended, picked—it was the same as if he were married, and knew his wife would lie with another man, for he had loved this land for so long, known it even more intimately than he had ever known any woman. He stood beneath the empty branches of the old oak, looking out over the fertile red land, an aching inside of him such as he had not known since the days that each of his parents had died.

      Over