There Is a River Read online

  “He’s a fine, big boy,” Granny Alice said, wiping the crying baby off where he lay now on the bed beside Esther.

  Esther wanted to ask what he looked like, but found herself saying instead, “He’s all right then?”

  “He’s all right,” the old woman said. Her eyes rose to meet Esther’s when Esther looked at her at last, and she stared long and hard. “Your Nathan’s got hisself a fine new son,” she said, her hands automatically continuing the business of cleaning up the baby.

  “Nathan,” Esther said, the word not quite a question. The old woman’s eyes never left hers.

  “Yes, Nathan.”

  The two women stared at each other, and Esther was certain that Granny Alice knew.

  She looked away just as the old woman picked up the baby and moved to place him at her breast. He stopped crying the moment that he was near her heart, and Esther made herself look down at him—why, he’s just like any baby, she thought, staring at the little face, his eyes puffy and his head slightly misshapen from the birth. She had feared she would see Buddy Eason staring back at her from that little face. What she saw instead was her own son, someone who belonged to her, and she felt a surge of protectiveness come over her at the thought.

  “Hello, Andrew,” she said, opening one of the little hands to see that it owned five fingers, then moving the blanket aside to look at the other, and to make certain he had ten toes as well. The color of his skin was lighter than her own, but not far different from Nathan’s, and she found herself smiling and almost in tears as she touched the dimples indenting the wrists of his pudgy arms. “You’re fat, just like your momma,” she whispered, to herself as much as to the baby in her arms.

  She heard the bedroom door open and she looked up to see Nathan enter the room. She wondered what he would say, wondered what he would think, when he looked into the little face.

  He sat at the side of the bed, his eyes not leaving the child in Esther’s arms.

  At last he looked up at her. “You done real good,” he said, genuine kindness in his eyes. “We got us a fine son.”

  When Cassandra Price Eason went into labor, her husband, Buddy, was nowhere to be found. He had been gone for much of the previous two days, and had come home to his grandfather’s house the evening before only long enough to take a bath and to change into a fresh suit.

  “Where are you going?” Cassandra demanded, as he took up his hat from the bed and then started again for the door.

  “Out. I’ve got a date.”

  “You can’t go on a date! You’re married!”

  He snorted. “Married? You call this married?” His outright dismissal made her clench her hands in fury.

  She tried to strike out at him, but he caught her wrist and shoved her out of his way. She landed against the dresser, the curved edge of wood catching her hip, leaving what she knew would be an ugly bruise by morning—how she hated him now as she watched him go out into the hallway. She followed him to the door and slammed it shut behind him, then screamed into the empty room, pounding a fist against the outer side of her own thigh in impotent rage. She would have killed him then if she could have killed him and gone back to the mill village, or to prison, or to any other place than the hell she had bought for herself here.

  It was early the next morning when the pains began, and she knew somehow she had done it to herself—she had been pacing the floor for most of the night, so enraged with Buddy that she could not sleep. She was somewhat pleased at the commotion her early labor brought to the huge old house on Main Street—but all trace of pleasure left her as the contractions intensified and she really began to hurt.

  She was in the hospital by then, driven by his grandfather.

  Walter Eason left her alone so that he could go in search of Buddy.

  She was still alone when they told her they would have to cut her belly open to get the baby out.

  Walter Eason found his grandson’s La Salle coupe parked in the driveway of the house that belonged to the county whore.

  The woman who answered Walter’s knock at the peeling front door was unfamiliar to him, but she looked much as he had expected: worn, with smeared lipstick and tousled hair, and she smelled already of liquor there at midmorning. She smiled at him and leaned against the doorjamb, the brightly colored wrap tied about her waist gapping open and causing Walter to turn away.

  “Hi, ya, honey—don’t tell me you can still get it up at your age,” she said, an unpleasant, nasally tone in her voice that spoke of a life lived somewhere other than Alabama. She reached out to run a crimson-painted fingernail down the white cloth of his shirtfront, making him feel the shirt was now soiled. “I got somebody here right now, but—”

  “I am looking for my grandson.” Walter stepped away from her, not caring what she thought of him or anyone else.

  “Is Buddy Eason your grandson?” A smile came into her voice though Walter was no longer looking at her. “Why he’s—”

  But Walter was already past her and into the house. He moved toward where he thought the bedroom might be, hearing her trail behind. Her voice had risen with indignation.

  “Hey—you got no business coming in my house like that, Buddy’s granddaddy or not. Hey—”

  The bedroom was empty, but Walter could hear water running in what had to be the bathroom beyond. He opened the door to find Buddy sitting in the bathtub.

  His grandson stared at him for a moment, then took hold of the sides of the tub and laboriously pushed himself to his feet. He stood naked and dripping as he stared at Walter. A smile came to his face. He reached down to touch himself below his sagging belly, that smile never wavering, but all Walter saw was a glaringly white body already gone to fat.

  “You want something, old man?” Buddy asked, still touching himself. Walter could hear the woman just behind him now, a shrewish voice demanding that he leave, and he reached back to shut the door in her face without ever turning. All he could think about was the girl from the mill village Buddy had gotten into trouble, the girl who was in labor even now to give birth to his child, and the Negro woman he had raped who had delivered a son Buddy did not even know he had fathered. Buddy’s member was rising, short and ludicrous beneath the rolls of fat on his belly. He was stepping out of the water now, that smile never leaving his face.

  “Come on in here, Adele,” Buddy called to the woman through the door. “I’ve got something just about ready for you,” though his eyes never once left his grandfather.

  His voice was quieter when he spoke again.

  “Old man, you can stay and watch if you want.”

  Walter did not know what he was going to do until it was already done. He struck his grandson across the face with his walking stick, leaving an angry red welt against the white skin—then he was shoving him backwards, turning him and forcing him down as Buddy’s feet went out from under him on the wet linoleum, to drive him headfirst into the tub of running water. Buddy’s arms flailed, his feet, then his knees, sliding on the slick floor.

  Walter knotted his hand in the thick hair at the back of Buddy’s neck, taking a better hold only to push him down further, until he could feel Buddy’s forehead slam against the enamel at the bottom of the tub. There was a wet sound, a drowning sound, a fight for life and air and desperation—he released Buddy suddenly and stood back, almost sliding himself. Buddy slung himself backwards and out of the tub, sending water everywhere, then drove himself back against the front of the facilities with his feet until they came out from under him again and he landed on the floor.

  He was drawing in deep drafts of air, his eyes on Walter, a knot swelling now beneath his left eye and a reddening mark on his forehead. In that moment Walter did not know if he would find more regret in letting him live or in making him die.

  “Your wife’s in the hospital having your baby this morning,” he said, staring at the fat mound of nakedne
ss lying against the commode. “I thought you might want to know you’re about to be a father.”

  It was a tiny, and very ugly, girl child who kept her much larger brother from being born. She had been in the wrong position, blocking the way—Walter did not understand what the doctor told them little more than an hour later when they reached the hospital, and he really did not care. Dr. Thrasher had delivered both children by Caesarean section, and he said even the smaller should survive, though Walter wondered how something so tiny and pinched-looking could be all right as he stared down at the baby girl in the nurse’s arms.

  A thin, fretful crying was coming from the female child, almost drowned out by the healthy wails of her twin brother in another nurse’s arms—Rachel Elizabeth, Walter thought as he stared at the tiny girl, remembering the name told him by Cassandra weeks before. Well, let her name the child, he told himself; the ugly little thing looked just like her anyway.

  The boy had reminded him at first look of Buddy shortly after his birth, and Walter already knew he would hold the same name—Walter Matthias, the same as his father, and his grandfather. And his great-grandfather before him.

  There was a disruption behind Walter, where the other nurse had been allowing Buddy to see the boy child.

  “No—Mr. Eason—really you shouldn’t,” she said now, and Walter could hear strain in her voice as well. He turned to see Buddy trying to take the child from her arms. “No, Mr. Eason, please—”

  At last he managed to wrest the child from her, and then stood staring down at it as its wails increased and the nurse clenched her hands helplessly at her sides.

  “I’m its father,” he said at last, almost to himself, the glaring overhead lights making a stark contrast of the dark knot showing now beneath his left eye, turning the heavy face ugly with the words. “This one belongs to me.”

  5

  If anything in this world, Janson Sanders was dependable. Every Friday afternoon, at the end of his shift in the cotton mill, he received his pay envelope for the week’s work. Every Friday afternoon he double-checked the figures on the envelope, counted the money inside, verified the correct amount had been taken out for rent on their half a mill house and for the charge at McCallum’s Grocery, then put it away into a pocket of his dungarees or overalls for the walk home.

  Janson reached his front porch by three on Friday afternoons; he ate his dinner, held his wife, and then counted his money again with Elise as they sat at the kitchen table. On Friday afternoons they decided what would be needed for them to live on for the next week, and then he added the remainder to the money he had hidden in a cigar box in the back of a kitchen cabinet, for Janson Sanders no longer trusted any bank after the bank failure that had taken their savings in 1930.

  Janson’s Fridays were always the same, and had been the same since they moved back to the village, and that is why, on an overcast evening late in June of 1940, Elise Sanders was worried when he did not come home.

  By the time darkness began to fall, Elise was unable to take the worry any longer. She left the three children to eat their suppers and started toward the cotton mill, determined to make certain Janson was okay.

  The clay streets in the mill village were quiet. She could smell suppers cooking, and hear the distant sound of a radio playing from a house or two as she passed, the electric lights showing through the windows of the mill houses still odd to her after the years they had spent here before electricity was brought to the village. A dog barked, jerking at a chain in a yard as she neared, and she found herself wishing that she had not come alone. She had asked Ruth Shelby, who lived in the other side of the mill house, to listen for the children while she was gone. Henry had just turned twelve, and hardly considered himself in need of watching, but Catherine was only ten, and Judith eight. Henry had wanted to come with her, and his stubbornness reminded her so much of Janson as he stopped her in the doorway, with the same black hair and green eyes, and the coloring that had come from Janson’s Cherokee mother.

  “You can’t go out walking by yourself after dark,” he told her, as if he were the parent and she the child. He was as tall now as she, and it seemed so odd to Elise to meet her son on her own eye level, seeing pigheadedness within him that reminded her of herself at times.

  He only said the same thing his father would say anyway—oh, she would give Janson Sanders a piece of her mind if he was working a double without having sent her word. He knew better than to make her worry for no reason. She could think of enough things to worry about on her own, without any help from Janson—Buddy Eason had threatened to kill him on more than one occasion, for one thing, and had tried to carry through with that threat just the year before. He had threatened to harm her and the girls as well, and that thought hurried her pace. Janson had kept a loaded shotgun in the house for her since they had moved back to the mill village, but it was locked into a chifforobe to which only Elise had a key.

  She found Walter Eason getting into his car in the lot before the mill. He appeared surprised to see her. There was concern in his expression as he stared at her, his snow-white hair a stark contrast to the darkness around him, his gray eyes set on her face from below bristling white eyebrows that met over the bridge of his nose.

  “Mrs. Sanders, you shouldn’t be out by yourself after dark, and especially not here at the mill,” he said, and she knew that he was also thinking of his grandson. It had been Walter Eason who had kept Buddy from killing Janson that year before, and who had afterward stood by and allowed Janson to administer a beating that Buddy had earned long before.

  “I’m looking for Janson. Is he working a double?—he didn’t send me word. If he did, no one told me.”

  Her worry was so obvious that even deeper concern came immediately to Walter Eason’s face—but Janson was working no double, she learned, after Mr. Eason accompanied her into the mill, and Stan, who had been given a job sweeping on the second shift after the loss of his arm, had no idea where Janson was either. Elise left the mill filled with worry, refusing the ride home that Walter Eason offered her, and that he had insisted she take.

  When she reached the bottom of her own street she found a strange truck parked on the street before her house, and she started to run. A man was getting out of the vehicle, and it took her a moment to realize it was Janson. He held a box in his hands, which she almost knocked away in her rush to touch him.

  “Where have you been?—I was so worried—” she said, looking up at him, clenching both his shirt sleeves in her hands. She was almost crying now from relief.

  “I didn’t think it would take s’ long. Mr. Fluellen offered to give me a ride, an’ there was groceries to deliver on th’ way. We got th’ truck stuck in th’ mud over on th’ other side of town, an’ I thought we’d never get it unstuck—be careful, Elise, you’re gonna make me drop it—” he said, interrupting himself.

  The man behind the wheel reached across the seat to close the door after Janson, waving politely to her as the truck started away. Elise recognized the truck at last, and the man to be Bob Fluellen, who ran Fluellen’s Grocery downtown.

  She looked up at Janson, still not understanding.

  “I bought you a radio, Elise. I always swore I would.”

  She was crying in earnest now, seeing at last what was in the box he held in his hands. He had worried her to death to bring her a radio, and that extravagance when all he usually did was save money made her cry all the harder—he had sworn he would when times were better, had sworn it to her so many times during the years they had done without.

  “Elise, you shouldn’t be out walkin’ by yourself after dark,” he said at last, his face filled with concern.

  In the midst of the crying she could not help but to laugh.

  He had said just exactly what she had known he would.

  War was going on in Europe, but it seemed very far away.

  There had been proble
ms in Europe and Asia for years—first Germany and Austria, Italy and Ethiopia, Hitler and the Sudetenland, Mussolini and Albania, Japan and China. The past fall, Germany had invaded Poland, and Britain had declared war on Germany; since then, the talk of war seemed to be everywhere. By the time school let out that summer, most everyone was saying that the United States would be in the fight before the next term began, but Henry Sanders did not believe it. Europe was an ocean away on the maps at school, and America was so nice and safe on the other side of that expanse of blue.

  The summer of 1940 was proving to be a good one for Henry. People at last had a little extra money in their pockets, money they could use to hire a boy to do odd jobs about the village and town, money he could save to go to the picture show, or to buy the occasional candy or sweets when his mother did not catch him, or even to bribe his sisters to do his chores at home.

  On Thursday, July 4th of that year, Henry got up early, even though he had developed the habit of sleeping late while summer was on. A family had moved into the three-room shotgun house across the street a few days before, a house that had been empty since Henry and his family had moved back into the mill village the previous October. Henry had been eager to go over and introduce himself, hoping they might have work he could do to earn enough money to go to the picture show on Saturday. People just moving in were always good for some bit of work or another, if they had money, but, as usual, his mother would not let him “bother” the new family until they at least had the chance to settle in.

  Henry figured that two days was enough settling in time for anyone. Besides, he told himself, the man he had seen across the street would be of little help in getting his house in order. His hair was mostly white, which meant that he had to be old, maybe too old to move furniture or to help hang curtains.

  The man’s wife was sweeping her front porch when Henry crossed the street. She was short and plump, with curly brown hair and an apron with ruffles around the sides and bottom.