Behold, this Dreamer. Charlotte Miller

yet. You set down an’ I’ll see what I can fin’ t’—”

      “I done told you I don’t take no charity!”

      She turned an angry gaze back on him. “You better jus’ decide real quick which is more important t’ you, boy, your pride or your empty belly—”

      For a moment he almost walked out of the kitchen, for he knew now that she would let him go. Then he heard her words, spoken back over her shoulder as if they were nothing: “Seems t’ me like a man’d be a fool t’ choose against a full belly, though.”

      Janson thought for a moment, and then moved to sit down at the kitchen table. When he looked back up at the woman again she smiled and nodded, then turned back toward the electric icebox without another word.

      Her name was Mattie Ruth Coates, and she had been on the Whitley place for almost longer than she could remember, she told him a short while later as she sat watching him greedily sop up gravy with half an eaten biscuit. Within an hour Janson found himself accompanying her through the woods to the small house that she and her husband, Titus, lived in on Whitley land. He was offered their barn as shelter for the night, even given one of her hand-pieced quilts to use against the cold, and introduced to a thin, badly balding man—but by then he was too tired to even remember the name. He crawled onto a pile of hay in the barn and pulled the quilt over himself, and was asleep almost before he knew it.

      He woke the next morning even before daylight, the air cold and chill around him, the warm quilt a welcome cover against the dampness inside the old barn. He got up and went out into the yard before the structure, wanting to see this place he had found himself, for he had been too tired to remember much of anything he had seen the night before.

      The house sitting not far distant was small and unpainted, its rough boards weathered to silver-gray. The yard was bare and simple, swept free of grass and leaves, with rock borders marking where flower beds would bloom again in the spring. There was a well-tended winter garden behind the house, its rows of turnip and mustard greens stretching almost to the woods beyond, and fields of dry cotton plants going off into the distance. Janson looked until he found the well near the back porch of the house, and he drew a bucketful of water, then returned to the barn to bathe there in the chill air as best he could, using the frigid water, and a torn pair of underdrawers from his portmanteau as a wash cloth. He dressed and then rinsed out the clothes he had worn and slept in for the past two days, and slung them over a stall in the barn, to dry, possibly even to freeze, in the frigid air; then he went outside.

      By the time the family was about, he had swept out the yard and begun to clean out the barn as repayment for the food he had been given and the shelter he had enjoyed for the night—as he had told the woman, he accepted no charity. He was served breakfast at the table just as if he were kin, and later, as Mattie Ruth and Titus Coates were off doing whatever work that rich folks like the Whitleys could find for them to do, he busied his hands again—chopping wood and stacking it near the back wall of the kitchen to dry; repairing a broken hinge on the barn door, and several shutters on the house; and was just completing the work on several chairs he had found on the back porch in various stages of being re-bottomed when Mattie Ruth Coates came home from the big house that afternoon to fix her husband’s supper before returning to prepare her employer’s meal.

      When she saw all the work that had been done, she shook her head with amazement and looked up at him. “Lord, boy, your hands ain’ been still a minute, have they?” she said, settling herself in one of the newly re-bottomed chairs to test it. “There ain’ no reason somebody like you ought t’ have t’ steal t’ eat, not hard as you work.”

      Janson looked at her, but did not respond, knowing there was reason in life for many things.

      After a moment he said: “I was wonderin’ if I could stay th’ night in your barn again. I’ll be gone by first light t’morrow—”

      “You’re welcome t’ stay long as you want. I kind ’a hate t’ see you go. It’s nice havin’ a young man aroun’ th’ place again, after both our own boys bein’ killed in th’ War—you goin’ back home t’ Alabama?”

      “There ain’t no reason for me t’ go back. My folks’re dead, an’ my land’s gone. I guess I’ll just be movin’ on; I got t’ find work—”

      “Well, if it’s work you’re lookin’ for, you ought t’ go talk t’ Mist’ Whitley. He wouldn’t take you on t’ crop, since you ain’ got no family t’ work as well, but he’s always takin’ on men for wages, farmhands an’ th’ like. If you want, my Titus’ll walk up there with you after supper t’night—”

      Janson looked at her for a moment, thinking—one place was as good as any other, he supposed, and a rich man like Whitley might even pay better than most. Besides, he still did not have any money, and he knew he would have to eat. He had already failed miserably at being a thief once; he did not want to be reduced to trying it again.

      “I’ll talk t’ Whitley,” he told her after a time, telling himself that it would not be for long. Once he had some money, he could move on to some other place. All he needed now was the money.

      As Janson started toward the big house that evening, he found himself wondering at the older man who walked at his side. Titus Coates had spoken hardly a word to him since they had met the night before, just the barest “Mornin’—” or “Evenin’—” as they had passed, but there was something about the man Janson found he instinctively respected, something he liked and trusted, and he found himself wanting Titus Coates’ respect as well. Titus would have to know that he had been found stealing, for his wife would have told him that—but there was nothing in the older man’s manner to show he even thought of it as they left the bare-swept yard that evening and started up the road toward the big house.

      “Th’ folks’ll be finished with supper by now,” Titus said, staring at the point where the red clay road twisted darkly between winter-dead cotton fields ahead. “Mist’ William’ll say he’s busy when we ask, but he’ll talk t’ us. He let a man go jus’ th’ other day an’ he’ll be needin’ somebody.”

      “What’s he like t’ work for?” Janson asked.

      “Well—” Titus fell silent for a moment. “He kin be a hard man t’ work for, but he’ll be right fair with you if you’re doin’ your job like you’re suppose t’ be doin’ it. He’ll pay you jus’ like he says he’ll pay you, an’ he’ll ’spect t’ get his money’s worth out ’a you in turn. Keeps my missus up there ’til all hours, cookin’ an’ cleanin’ an’ seein’ after th’ family; an’ he keeps me runnin’ here an’ yonder, goin’ int’ town or all th’ way up t’ Buntain, an’ even t’ Columbus some, totin’ packages for Miz’ Whitley when she goes shoppin’, or keepin’ an eye on them two little gals when they’re ’roun’; doin’ chores an’ keepin’ th’ cars runnin’ an’ fixin’ things ’roun’ here—he’ll keep you busy, but you know how rich folks are—”

      Yeah, I know—Janson thought, but said nothing.

      “Now, Miz’ Whitley, she’s a gentle-like lady, givin’ t’ jus’ ’bout everybody. She’d give th’ last bite ’a food off th’ table an’ th’ clothes right off her back t’ somebody needin’ ’em, if Mist’ William ’d let her. Folks’ll take ’vantage ’a that sometime, as folks’ll do—’specially them four young’ns ’a hers. There ain’ a one of ’em got a mind t’ listen t’ nobody, ’cept maybe Mist’ Stan, ’a course, th’ youngest. Th’ two oldes’ boys, Mist’ Bill Whitley an’ Mist’ Alfred, now they do pretty much whatever it is they take int’ their minds ’a doin’, an’ there ain’ nobody that kin stop ’em—it comes from bein’ spoil’t all their lives, I’d say, always gettin’ what they want. A good switchin’ like th’ ones I use t’ give my boys’d done ’em both a heap ’a good a few years back. They both jus’ like their daddy anyway, stubborn an’ set in their ways, with tempers like shouldn’t no man have; ain’ scared ’a God Almighty or