Behold, this Dreamer. Charlotte Miller

see you at the gin next year,” he said, and then started to turn away.

      “Next year’s a long way off, Mr. Eason,” Henry Sanders said, and the old man turned back for a moment to stare at him. There was something in Walter Eason’s eyes that seemed to understand what was being told him, something that for the first time seemed to know the sort of man it was who stood there on the sidewalk before him that day. After a moment, he nodded his head, and said quietly:

      “We’ll see, Henry. We’ll see . . .” He turned and started again toward the black touring car, stepping down off the sidewalk without ever once looking back.

      Henry Sanders was a man who owed his livelihood to no other man. It had been a decision he had made, a choice taken in long years past before memory could even serve him. He had come into life over fifty-six years before there in Eason County on sharecropped land his parents had worked for more years than they could count, only the third generation removed from an Ireland of tenanted farms, famine, and starvation. He could remember no time in his life when he had not wanted land that was his own, a home no one could ever take from him, and a crop he would not lose half of each year for use of mules and plow and sometimes pitiful earth. Together with his wife, Nell, he had seen that dream a reality, had made it so, with work and sweat and doing without. Their son had been the first Sanders ever born to his own earth, the first Sanders ever to come into life not owing the land he lived on to another man. They had seen to that.

      But as the early months of 1924 had come, it had seemed they might be close to losing the land they had worked so hard to have. Eason County existed in cotton, as did most of Alabama and much of the South. Cotton had brought them through slave times and civil war, through carpetbaggers and Reconstruction, and to a South that now stood in mills and villages and company towns. Cotton had helped Henry to buy the land—but now in 1924 Henry could no longer look at a field of cotton without feeling worry. The going price per pound of lint had not been good since the year after the armistice to end the World War had been signed in 1918, and even the sharp rise in price in ’23 had been little felt by the farmers in Eason County. The Easons, as always, seemed to be paying a few cents less per pound of cotton than were any of the cotton merchants buying in the surrounding counties—but Eason County farmers did not sell out of Eason County. They sold their cotton to Walter Eason, as their fathers had done, and their fathers before them, all the way back to the hard years following the war with the North that had ended almost sixty years before. They owed their allegiance to Walter Eason, as fathers and grandfathers long dead had owed allegiance to Walter’s father—few men in the small towns and countryside of Eason County could not credit their livelihoods to Walter Eason, either to the cotton mill, ginning operation, or overall factory; the many sharecropped and tenanted farms he owned; or the businesses he operated from the busy, brick-paved downtown sections of Main Street in Pine, or Central Street up in the County seat of Wylie. And even fewer still could come to doubt his power, or his word. Eason County was his county, and the people his people—few men had dared to go up against Walter Eason in Eason County. It was well known those few had quite often lived to regret their courage.

      But Henry Sanders had owed Walter Eason nothing. No man had given him the red land he and his son worked behind mule and plow, the crop they sweated and prayed over. And no one would take it from them now. There was a mortgage to pay on the farm, the credit run at the store, a wife and seventeen-year-old son to see through the winter months ahead. To sell at Eason prices this year would have meant losing the land, losing what he had worked so long to have, losing what he had worked so long to give his son—if Henry Sanders owed anything, he owed his son the pride of walking his own earth; the dream of owning land, and a crop that was all his own; of never being a man worked and owned and sweated into old age by a man such as Walter Eason. And that was a debt Henry Sanders was willing to pay, a debt that had come from generations long past, and dreams that would never die, dreams that were as much a part of his son Janson as life or breath or pride would ever be.

      Janson had been reared on those dreams, but, as that cold winter of 1924-25 passed, and the spring months of plowing the red earth and planting the cotton, he knew those dreams were no less in danger than they had been the year before. Cotton prices were falling, and production was up. Many farmers were no longer even getting enough per pound of lint to cover the costs of growing their crops. There would be no more choice this year than there had been the last; the cotton would have to be sold out of the County if they were to hold onto the land.

      The fields were lush and green by the time the hot summer weeks of laying by came in 1925, the long, curving rows thick with green cotton plants, leaving little to be done there now but wait. Soon enough the bolls would burst open and the back-breaking work of picking the cotton would begin—until then there were only chores to be done at the house, the garden to tend, the barn to sweep out, or work that could be done for a neighboring farmer at a day’s small wage. Janson soon became restless, bored in those days, unaccustomed to having time on his hands with little or no work that had to be done.

      He visited with his kin, walked the green fields just as his pa did, and courted several of the girls from church, but there never seemed enough to do in the days to help make the time pass. He cleared land with his Uncle Wayne and his gran’pa, and wove baskets for sale from white oak splits he prepared himself—bow baskets, egg baskets, cotton baskets; and bottomed chairs for hire—but still laying by that year seemed to pass more slowly than had any other he could ever remember. He knew that soon enough the green fields would turn white with cotton, and that the long hours of dragging a pick sack behind him down the never-ending rows would begin—and also would begin the trouble with Walter Eason, for, sometime between now and the time the cotton was sold in the fall, something would have to happen, something aimed toward preventing them from selling the crop out of the County. Something —one farmer’s rebellion might bring two, two might bring three, until the system that had been in operation in the County since the hard years following the War Between the States might finally come to an end. And Walter Eason could never allow that.

      So far there had been few incidents, things for which there was no explanation, but things behind which Janson could see clear meaning—windows broken out at the front of the house, sending shards of broken glass into the old sofa and braided rugs there; several of his pa’s hunting dogs shot through the head and left; a brush fire set near the front of the house. Warnings alone—but the real struggle lay ahead in the fall when the time came again for them to sell out of Eason County. And that was still months away.

      On a hot Saturday morning toward the end of laying by that year, Janson started the eight-mile walk toward town, unable to find anything more useful to put his mind or his hands to. It was a warm morning, the hot July sun already baking down on his shoulders through his faded workshirt and the crossed galluses of his overalls as he turned off North Ridge Road and onto the road toward Pine. There would be a long walk ahead of him, and a hot one, but it was a walk he had made many times in the past, and in weather even hotter than the weather of this day. Besides, it was likely someone would stop to offer him a ride before he had gone too far a distance, some passing farmer or one of the churchfolk, for someone almost always did.

      There was a little money in his pocket from hired work he had done the day before, and, after several hours debate with himself over the waste, he had decided to treat himself to a phosphate at the soda fountain in the drugstore, and then to some time spent watching girls pass along the street. He would have liked to have gone to the picture show as well, to see the moving picture people he heard so much talk about: Clara Bow, whose photograph he had seen once on the front of a moving picture magazine in the drugstore, Tom Mix, Charlie Chaplin, John Barrymore, Theda Bara; but he knew he would not go. He had been to a movie show only once in his life, on a day he had told his parents he was going elsewhere, only to go to the picture show in town instead. When his mother had found out, his pa had taken him out behind the smokehouse—but Janson had not gotten a whipping that day, or ever again since. His pa had told him he was a man now, and that it was time he learn to choose right from wrong on his own—Janson had never again gone to see a picture show after that, though he still could not see why it was supposed to be wrong, even if the preacher did say it was; any more than he could see why it was supposed to be wrong for a man to curse, if the occasion warranted it; or to drink corn liquor, even if Prohibition had made liquor