Chinaberry (15 page)

A short piece before they reached the cemetery, Anson asked Bronson to stop. The road had lost all semblance of being a road and was more like a trail. He said he would go on alone. Of the members of the family, Bronson had more confidence than the others that Anson only needed time. He would adjust, Bronson said. Bronson was old enough that he treated Jack and Anson as his sons, and you will remember they unaccountably resembled him. Bronson leaned against the car and watched as Anson disappeared behind the towering live oaks that hid the cemetery.

Bronson, from long practice as a cowboy, retrieved his field glasses from the truck when Anson did not return within a half hour. Walking to the right, to get a view of the graves, he saw Anson kneeling, one hand on Melba's marble slab, the other upon Little Johnnes's mound. The bluebonnets rested on the child's grave. Bronson returned to the truck and put the field glasses back into the glove compartment. No reason to hurry Anson, he thought. Let him have it out with a grief nobody could truly share.

Anson's mother, from the moment Anson and Bronson had driven off, had become restive. As time passed, she grew more disturbed and paced the floor, wringing her hands. Within less than twenty minutes, she and Jack had called Ellafronia to join them, and all had piled into a car, driving to the cemetery. There was nothing else to do.

On reaching Bronson, who was parked near the cemetery, they all jumped out, and Bronson waved them back. “He's all right,” he yelled, softly. “I've checked.”

They waited another thirty minutes before they all approached the cemetery, quietly and on foot.

Anson lay stretched upon Little Johnnes's mound, his arms half-buried in the mud, reaching down. He was asleep. Blossoms of the bluebonnets were stuck to his face like stars.

The winters family was an open-hearted group of people, even if they did not seem so to the casual onlooker. They owned gifts of the earth—land, cattle—and had money in the bank. They were not grasping, not asking for more. They had come by it hard, yet it had not hardened them.

Many thought the Winterses were strange, not easy to know. The womenfolk did not “hang on the telephone,” which meant they had no confidantes. Any news of them was difficult to come by. On the paternal side, they were a transplanted Appalachian family. Big Jack's speech bore the imprint of his early years in Western North Carolina, with a dash of West Tennessee. As for the maternal side—who knew? Anson's mother had said that Big Jack had “carried her off” when she was not much more than a child of sixteen and he almost twice her age. “I didn't even love him,” she'd say, “then.” But she came to love him, and she came to love the Bent Y Ranch, where they eventually set up housekeeping after leaving Chinaberry.

The Bent Y had begun from scratch, ranch land without so much as a cow. A few mavericks were branded, and among the calves there came a bull of stamina and quality. This bull set the standard for the short-legged, stocky longhorns that became the trademark of the Bent Y. But fashions in cattle change, bulls
have their day, and ranch owners have eyes out for a male to upgrade their stock. They want less fat, more lean, all endurance.

In the first year Big Jack added the ranch to his undertakings, and for a dozen succeeding years, the profits from Chinaberry's cotton crop were invested in livestock. As the cattle began to turn a profit, the earnings for both were used to buy more land and extend the borders of the ranch.

From the beginning, Big Jack, Bronson (who was in his twenties at the time the ranch was started), and Blunt tended the growing herd. They were soon to be joined by Pop Cod. Within a half-dozen years, the ranch reached its limits in the north and south. No more land was for sale or apt to be.

To the west was free range, where many herds grazed and to where the Bent Y drifted its herd at the end of summer when the grass there was most abundant, and as Big Jack put it, the cattle could be “brought into case” for fall shipment. On free range, any stray animal happened upon was promptly branded. It was a common practice, justified by the knowledge that other herdsmen were branding strays from other herds. In this way there was fair trade.

One day Anson told me he had word that three antelopes had joined the herd, and when the cattle were close enough to reach and return in a day, he would take me there on horseback. By then there were two herds on the ranch, the smaller of which had the antelopes and was grazing just inside Bent Y property. The other was far afield, on free range that the Bent Y punchers referred to as “Japan.”

The second time I was taken to the Towerhouse, I asked Pop Cod if the antelopes were branded as were the regular stock. It had always been said of me back home that I asked too many questions, and irritating ones, as they were usually ones to which nobody knew the answer. But Pop Cod knew.

“No,” he said, sitting propped in his chair on the bunkhouse porch. “I always liked to see them grazing. If you have to look at a bunch of brutes all day, it's good to rest your eyes on something different. Like looking at women instead of men.”

What Pop Cod didn't tell me, but Anson did later, was that a request came in once from Austin, asking for two antelopes, one of each sex. That had been back during Pop Cod's active days. With some difficulty, they were lassoed and delivered, to be placed in a zoo or possibly a traveling circus. Pop Cod was to regret this to the end of his life, which was less than a month away from the day I asked him my question.

One of the topics of conversation often heard among cattlemen is the location of a prize bull, one with the qualities to be bred into a herd. “No bull, no ranch” was a saying.

When stockmen attend cattle shows, which either Jack or Anson or both did regularly, they have an eye out for such an animal, either to appreciate what God and man have wrought in the way of breeding or to bargain for them. Such was the trip the two brothers took to Waco in October.

Jack was to bring the cattle truck from the ranch to Chinaberry, which was roughly on the way, pick up Anson, and drive to Waco and back, all in a single day. This would require their leaving before daylight and returning in the early hours of Sunday morning.

This was Saturday, a day of no school and no mail, and I was glad of the first and sorrowful of the second. Jack arrived at Chinaberry when it was still dark, and I was wakened by the noise of the truck rack as it entered the yard. Jack carried in his arms his sleeping eldest son, Little Jack, and placed him fully clothed on the side of my bed.

As he pulled off Little Jack's shoes and loosened his clothing, he told us that Little Jack had determined to go to Waco with
them and couldn't be talked out of it. Such a trip, and the purpose of it, was out of the question for a ten-year-old.

“He'll cry a little when he wakes up,” Jack said, “but he'll get over it. He'll be all right. When he starts playing with Little Anson, he'll forget all about it.”

I was sitting up in bed, wide-eyed. Anson had told me before I went to sleep that he would be gone when I waked and I would be slumbering again before he returned. It had never occurred to me that I might go along.

Anson lifted me up and asked, “You're not going to cry, are you?”

I shook my head no. I was only partially awake and was almost back to sleep when he put me down.

Little Jack waked me with his crying later that morning. Lurie appeared with a pan of warm water and a washcloth, and throwing open the blinds, she washed both our faces and hands as we sat up in bed.

When Little Jack kept crying, Lurie asked him what he wanted.

“My Dad-o,” he replied.

Fifteen minutes later we were at the table, our chins hovering over bowls of cornflakes and milk, Little Jack grinning. To my eyes he was a young version of Bronson, his foster uncle, even more so than he was of Jack and Anson. The resemblance was too notable to overlook.

Two years younger, Little Jack was a third larger in size than I was. When Blunt lifted us up by the seat of our pants and hung us on the steelyards, Little Jack weighed eighty-one. I weighed seventy-three, a four-pound gain from when I had arrived at Chinaberry. The candy Anson was sneaking to me, the morsel he poked into my mouth with a fork after I had stopped eating, was showing up. The day Lurie found a stick of licorice in my pocket
she claimed to know it all along. “The smell of licorice hangs on like garlic,” she had said. The condition Anson had set for consuming the candy he slipped to me, even after the discovery, was waiting until after supper, not before. To begin with, it was a play-secret, known to the three of us.

This was Little Jack's first extended visit to Chinaberry. We explored the house, entering every room across the hall except the locked one with the key hanging in the door. We climbed to the rafters in the cotton house and jumped into the great mound as soft as snow. We climbed the ladder into the barn lof to see what was there. We sat in the wooden swing under the chinaberry trees, facing each other to give it balance and make it rise higher than was wise, until Blunt—who all the while was keeping an eye on us—came to scotch the swing with a hand. And every hour or so, when it came to mind again, Little Jack cried for his father. In his view, his father had tricked him, abandoned him in his sleep. I began to agree with him, to join him in his moody moment, to feel that Anson should have taken me as well. Little Jack wept; I only puffed up in injury.

With her own hands, despite Angelica and Rosetta's presence, Lurie fixed us a picnic dinner of cold chicken and homemade bread, sweet potato custard, and lemonade. We ate under a tent we raised under the shade cast by the crepe myrtles. After an hour's nap on pallets on the screened back porch, we played roly-hole marbles, and then Blunt had ready for us bows made of Osage orange limbs and cane arrows, so we played Indians Chasing Sheepherders. Sheepherders were considered the dirt of the earth in Robertson County. Occasionally, Little Jack paused long enough to cry, with me accompanying him in gloom if not in tears.

In late afternoon, Little Jack wanted to walk down the lane to the road, the way Jack and Anson would be coming. He was
aware that the return would be far into the night. We might have gone farther had not Blunt whistled at us and motioned us back.

We were asleep again, in my trundle bed, after midnight, when the travelers returned. Again I awakened and learned the trip had been a dry run. No bull had been purchased, for the prices were out of line.

“Did the boy cry?” Jack asked Lurie.

Lurie had to admit that he did. “But only a little,” she said. “They played all day, hardly had a dull moment.”

Jack wrapped his sleeping son in a carriage blanket, declining all invitations to spend the rest of the night, declaring he had to be home at daybreak.

I was sitting up in bed, awake enough to remember that Anson had been remiss in not taking me with him. He picked me up. I swelled up like a toad, like only a neglected boy could.

Hurriedly Lurie complimented me. “Little Jack cried but our boy didn't,” she said.

Anson studied me a moment. “Did you want to cry?” he asked.

I shook my head yes. It couldn't be denied. “You can cry now,” he said.

And I did.

Chinaberry was a place bursting with stories, and there was another that I was told, which deserves to be told now—the story of Irena Kendrick, the sister of Anson's first wife, Melba.

Irena was a year and a day younger than Melba. From infancy their mother had dressed them alike. Dresses, hats, slippers, ribbons. So twinlike many could not tell them apart. You never saw one without the other. Anson became acquainted with them the last two years he attended Bluewater High School. Melba was a classmate, Irena a grade behind. At age sixteen, when all was innocence and fun, Anson “went with” both of them. There was no chance of seeing either alone, their father being as much a stickler in the matter as the mother.

Following graduation, Anson attended Texas A & M for two years, his courses vaguely connected to agricultural science. The Kendrick sisters, the year after Irena's completing high school, attended for a term a finishing school in Armory, Mississippi, from whence their parents had migrated. There they were expected to brush up on Southern manners and decorum, learn a smattering of French, perfect their piano studies—which never did go much further than “Kitten on the Keys”—and be able to cross a room balancing a book on their heads. Lurie, who told me all I ever knew of the Kendricks, said the book should have been put into their heads rather than on top of it.