Behold, this Dreamer. Charlotte Miller

only son, the only child they had given life to, and he had been so badly hurt.

      When Janson had arrived home those hours earlier, had gotten out of the car, his face paling beneath the sunburn, the blood soaking his shirt and hands, his steps staggering, Nell had thought her heart would stop within her. She could remember running toward him, catching him somehow as he fell, though she was small and slight and the top of her head did not even reach his shoulders—she knew she must have screamed for Henry, for he had been suddenly there, taking the boy up in his arms and carrying him toward the house, laying him on the old rope bed in the back bedroom, then running out again a moment later, through the pine woods and toward his parents’ home, for they had been unable to stop the bleeding, no matter what they had done.

      It had seemed an eternity later when Henry had returned to the house with his mother, an eternity in which Nell had thought she would see her son bleed to death there on that old bed, an eternity in which she watched blood soak into the clean petticoat she pressed to the wound, and into the sheet and linens on the bed, an eternity in which she prayed for sight of her husband and her mother-in-law. Deborah Sanders had not even spoken a word as she had come into the house and to the bed of her grandson, but her presence alone had helped to calm Nell’s fears, for Nell had seen her stop blood so many times before, had seen her draw fire, and cure thrush.

      Henry’s mother slept in the next room even now, near in case she should be needed through the night. She said Janson would be all right, that he would live, and that his shoulder would heal, but still there could be no sleep that night for Henry or for Nell. Janson was their only child, and he was all that mattered to either of them, other than each other.

      Nell sat now, staring at her son’s worn and calloused hands, a farmer’s hands, where they lay at rest on the pieced quilt, remembering the tiny fingers and toes she had counted and touched those eighteen years before when her body had still hurt even too much to move. She looked at his face, seeing Henry there as well as herself, even with the green eyes now closed in sleep—how they had wanted a child, children; but there had been over thirteen years of wanting and prayer before this one had come. So many nights they had held each other and prayed, wanting to give each other a large family, sons and daughters to share the years ahead, but for so long there had been only the two of them, and they had been happy in each other alone—and then this miracle had come, a child, a son, and their world had been complete. They had the land; they had each other, and they had a son—what more could any man or woman want.

      She looked at Henry now, watched him, though his eyes never once left the sleeping young man on the bed, noticing again the white that now liberally streaked the reddish-brown hair she had known for so many years. He would soon be fifty-seven, and she was now already forty-six, but his face seemed just as handsome now, just as loved, as it had on that first day she had ever met him, and she loved him even more—could that really have been almost thirty-two years before. Thirty-two years, over two-thirds of her life, and it seemed now as if it had been only a day.

      She had not even been fifteen then, newly come to Alabama with her father because of a job he had been promised in Eason County. Until then she had spent her entire life on the Qualla Boundary reservation of the Cherokee people in North Carolina, very sheltered, over-protected, and greatly loved by a father who had been widowed at her birth. It was only the second time she had ever been away from home, the first having been the few months she had spent at the boarding school on the reservation, the few months that were still marked in her mind by having had her mouth washed out with soap for speaking her native Cherokee and not English—and then her father had died as well, in an accident within days of coming to Eason County, leaving her alone in a place of strangers, where there was not one other person with a face or heritage as her own.

      She had been living with a farm family there in Eason County, tending their children, earning the money she would need to return home—and learning the meaning of cruelty for the first time in her less than fifteen years, hearing words she had never thought would be said to her, words spoken by the decent, good folk of the County, people who knew nothing of her, or of the people she had come from, words said simply because her skin was darker, and her heritage different from their own. Many of the people in the church the family attended had been kind to her, accepting her into their homes, looking after her until she could go home again to grandparents and an aunt who would take her in—and it had been at that church that she had met Henry.

      He had been staring at her, staring at her long and hard until she could feel it and turned to look at him—but he did not look away, as did so many of the people who stared at her only because they had never seen a person of Cherokee heritage before. He only continued to stare, making her both nervous and at the same time happy, for she had never been stared at by a man so handsome before, so tall, or so good looking.

      As soon as church was over, she had wondered who she might ask to find out who he was, and if it were even proper to make such an inquiry—but he had walked up to her before she could do anything, finding her waiting on the church steps for the Parker family, whose children she was tending. He had apologized for staring, had told her his name, and had asked her own. She had thought he might ask to call on her before he walked away that day, thinking that might have been why he had been staring, but had been disappointed as he had tipped his hat to her, and then had left her standing there.

      That disappointment had been short-lived. He had shown up at the Parker house the next day with a load of fire wood he said he owed them, and had come almost every day the following week on one pretext or another before he had at last asked to call on her. It was less than a month later that he asked her to marry him, pacing back and forth in the red dirt of the side yard of the Parker’s sharecropped home, telling her his dreams and his plans for red land that already seemed such a part of him, though it was not yet his own. “I ain’t gonna be a sharecropper all my life, Miss Nell. I’m gonna have my own land—th’ old Stilwell place; you know it. It’s good land, and it could make us a good livin’; that is, if you’d be my wife—”

      They were married a week later, on the day after her fifteenth birthday, in the little church where they had met, returning to his parents’ home that night where they would live until they could set up housekeeping on their own. There had been long years of hard work ahead of them, a decision they had made to have the land, no matter the cost it might bring to them. There had been a year of sharecropping for old Mr. Aiken, with half a crop lost for use of the land, the other half lost to the store bill; and then years in the mill village, in half a rented house, and long twelve-hour shifts in the mill for Henry—but at last they had the money, enough for them to get started on, and a mortgage for the rest. They had moved into the house Henry had dreamed of for so long, to the rolling red hills and the crop that no one could take from them, the land that was their own—and she had known Henry was at last home. Together they had worked the fields, planting or hoeing or picking the cotton, happy together in this place that had become part of them both.

      For so many years there were no babies, and, as the years had passed, they had almost given up hope, though they often still prayed at night as they held each other, each wanting a child, but both knowing that, even then, they could be no happier. Then the miracle had happened, and she had been almost too happy to believe it could be true, and then another month had passed, with no blood as she had always known—Nell had taken the little money she had saved and had gone to see a doctor before telling Henry, not wanting to give him false hope until she knew for certain, for they had been waiting for so long.

      After a horrid examination that had left her blushing and wanting to go home, the doctor had told her she was with child—at last, she was with child. She and Henry were to have a baby.

      Henry had been in the fields when she had gone to tell him, and somehow that had seemed fitting, for she knew that nothing meant life and birth and continuance more to him than did the land—she was going to have his baby, she told him, their child. He had held her for a long time, not speaking, and, when she had looked up at him, he had been crying. And she had understood.

      It had been a difficult pregnancy, a long labor, and a difficult birth. Henry had been banished from the house almost from the moment her pains had begun, told to wait on the porch with his father and his brother, Wayne, while his mother