Chinaberry (7 page)

It seems that I cried out in the night, which I might well have done, or made disturbing sounds, for he had come with the lamp to assure me with his presence.

A routine evolved. Lurie and I were both as fresh as soap and water and clean garments could make us as we awaited Anson's return. During August, he came before sunset. As the shipping season arrived, he came later, and by October, he didn't get home until after dark.

Instead of driving to the common parking ground, he would stop in the yard, leave the motor running, jump out, and rush up the steps and embrace Lurie. Next, he would pick me up, give me a smack on the chin, then close us both in his arms, and make a groan of relief. Unused to being picked up, I felt both awkward and embarrassed, even though no fellow Alabamians were there to watch. Every time I said “I'm heavy,” he would reply, “As chicken feathers.” Still carrying me, he took me back to the car, and once having parked, he asked, “How was the day?” Whatever the hour, we did not have supper until he was with us.

That same second night at Chinaberry, the tick hunt was initiated, an event that would happen every night after that. In Alabama it was the red bug that was likely to burrow into the skin and fester, particularly in spots unreachable to scratch. Turpentine and kerosene and vinegar were the recommended remedies to unseat the almost-invisible insect. Usually, you scratched it
free. But in Texas the tick was the problem. If allowed to hang on long enough, the tick would bloat itself with your blood and likely infect you with Rocky Mountain fever. Looking for ticks was a job for more eyes than your own. You had to be scanned top to bottom, front and back. Every day.

Here was a problem. By age twelve, boys have been imbued with the inviolability of their bodies and will not undress before anyone except their peers. Anson and Lurie worked together on this daily search, usually before bedtime. With all my clothes removed save my shorts, Lurie turned me about, looking me over carefully. She left the room, and Anson would pull my shorts down for a moment, look front and back, and jerk them up again. He'd call to Lurie, “The road's clear.”

His son, having lived to only be six, did not have to pass through the insecurities of adolescence.

No matter my embarrassments, I knew that I had been taken in. Chinaberry was to be my home.

A morning came when Anson stood by my chair at the table as I devoured cornflakes and remarked, “I had a little boy once, and he used to give me a big smack every time I was going to leave him, even for a minute.”

He meant a kiss. I had never kissed anybody in my life, at least not that I could remember. I looked at Lurie and her eyes said “Do it.”

Anson bent down, and my mouth pressed high on his jaw. No “smack” to it.

“Huh,” Anson said. “Pretty dry.” Then, “Have you got a smack for Lurie?”

I did, and willingly. Hard, on the cheek. “Good boy,” said Anson.

It was a revelation.

On the third night at Chinaberry, my bed was rolled into their bedroom, directly across from their brass bed, which in lamplight shone like gold.

Anson did not report to the ranch for the next two days. The telephone rang, some explanation was given, and on the third day, his brother Bronson arrived in a cattle truck, bringing Ernest with him, to check on us. Bronson and Anson looked so much alike that I fancied them father and son. The same sandy hair, eyes as much the true color of the sky as blue, which in different lights changed hues. Not particularly tall, but not short. The same action of knee and swing of foot. Identical clean khaki shirts, and khaki breeches tucked into polished boots. “Dirt won't stick to a Winters,” I was to hear, and it seemed true enough.

Bronson shook my hand and looked me over. He plucked my chin. He knew his brother like a book, and he understood. “Come to the ranch day after tomorrow for sure,” he told Anson. There was something that required his attention. Bronson let his eyes fall on me. “If they don't treat you right, come stay at my house. My children are gone, and I've a lot of empty rooms.” Thus he made me welcome.

Ernest pulled me aside. “I wouldn't leave you here except you couldn't be better looked after. Too good, my opinion. Your daddy let you come along for the experience, and you're getting it. We'll stay awhile, and then I'll take you home.” To that he added: “If you get too dissatisfied, you can come stay with me in the bunkhouse at the Bent Y. There's an old cowboy there will keep an eye on you. He's got more tales in him than a cat has fleas.” His report on the Knuckleheads included their being reprimanded by
one of the Bluewater policemen for racing their delivery wagon down the main street, resulting in breaking the axles.

Anson returned to the ranch on my fourth day at Chinaberry. That morning Lurie again appeared at my bedside with a wash pan and a washcloth. She washed the sleep from my eyes, face, and hands, and Anson brought a goblet of water with a lump of ice in it. I frowned as I swallowed the alkaline taste, and Anson said, “We'll have to do something about the water.”

When he left, the house seemed very quiet. Lurie busied herself at the sewing machine making clothes for me: shirts and undershorts and wash pants. She was involved in her work, and I was alone. I had nothing but my homesickness, which burgeoned inside me.

After the passing of the first wife, Melba, Anson had remained at the small lying-in hospital in the county seat for two weeks helping attend to Little Johnnes, who was fighting for his life and was hardly expected to survive. Anson did not attend Melba's funeral, so precarious was the situation of their child, much to his mother-in-law's dismay.

To his father-in-law's disapproval, Irena—Melba's sister and the onetime object of Anson's affection—insisted on spending the daylight hours assisting Anson. However, the father-in-law did not forbid it, given the circumstance that the vigil was around the clock. There was no oxygen equipment, and the child could not be moved. Other physicians were brought in, one even from Austin, but after a cursory examination, they only shook their heads.

The child, given to frequent smothering spells, had to be manipulated ever so gently to start him breathing again, and on many occasions Anson snatched him from death by forcing his own breath into the boy's lungs. His mother was to say that Anson believed that by sharing his own good health with his ailing child he could save him. And he did, but for six years only.

For those first two weeks, Anson sat beside the baby by day, tiny hand in his own, his eyes hardly straying from the child's face. Little Johnnes lay half-somnolent, his flesh a cast of blue
from lack of oxygen. By night, Anson lay right beside the baby. Irena brought food and drink from home, food she herself had prepared and which, it was said, she actually had to spoon into his mouth, so great was his reluctance to eat. Though there were a cook and a washerwoman who served her parents' household, Irena also saw that Anson had fresh clothes, washed and ironed by her own hand. Such was the news that leaked to the wide countryside, which thrived on such personal tidbits. The wisdom by telephone was that, despite religious injunctions against a brother-in-law marrying a sister-in-law and the expected objections of Irena's parents, these two would turn up on a Saturday afternoon in a clerk's office in some courthouse and be married. And it would be as if nothing had happened, except in the case that the child did survive, Irena would be there to share in his care.

This was assumed despite the known fact that Irena was now engaged to a lawyer in the town, a lawyer of good family and rising promise. She even wore a diamond engagement ring. To confuse the issue, the young lawyer himself often stopped by the hospital, stood silently in the door to signify his concern. Anson knew him, though he rarely looked up. And then it was that some keen and prying eye noted that the engagement ring had disappeared from Irena's finger.

The telephones rang off the hook.

Little Johnnes did mend, the blue cast of his flesh cleared, and his smothering spells lessened in frequency. Irena was to remember that, as the both of them bent over him one day, the infant opened his eyes, and so far as a ten-day-old can smile, he did.

“I see brown eyes!” Anson said, and then he burst into tears, pressing the tiny body to him. “My baby.”

Irena and Anson had embraced. They were to recall without even speaking of it in their sometimes meetings in years to
come. When this happened they wept again, the tears perhaps for what might have been.

The Victorians won out. The father-in-law did put his foot down, and Irena submitted again. He had sacrificed one daughter to Anson Winters and would not provide another. The diamond engagement ring presently returned to Irena's finger, although the marriage did not take place for several years. And Anson was not known to have looked at another woman. On this subject, the telephones operating in this wide community—such a relief and human satisfaction to isolated houses—had only questions, no confirmed answers. Where facts are missing, speculation takes over.

During the two weeks of Little Johnnes's crisis, the three-bed lying-in hospital had a number of visitors. Though the Winters generations kept largely to themselves, as did others of the large family conclaves of the region, they still carried on business relations, if few social ones. They held joint stock in enterprises, loaned workers or even cowboys in emergencies, bought from and sold to each other, and sometimes met in courthouses to iron out disputes not amenable to other solutions. In the matters of illness and death, in light of their own vulnerability, they were as one.

Visitors usually paused at the door and went no farther. Anson would raise his head for an instant, face deep in misery, and nod. The shade was drawn to keep light from the infant's eyes, the room dusky and always smelling of camphor. Irena would usually be there, and it was she who would rise, go to the door, and stepping beyond it, give what medical report there was to be offered.

As it happened, Irena was not present the time Lurie tried to visit. To make this call took some preparation, as well as courage and determination. Lurie lived with her sister and brother-in-law
in a town twenty miles distant, and she only got to attend Melba's funeral because her brother-in-law had agreed with reluctance to drive her there. In his view as well as that of her sister, Velvet, it was hardly comely, as the families had never had business or social dealings. The single encounter between them had been years before when her father, as circuit judge, had presided over a case in court that went against the Winters claim, resulting in an expensive fence miles in length being built between the Bent Y Ranch and the neighbor to the north. It produced a long coolness between the families. Big Jack Winters had never claimed he was wronged. The case was moot. It could have gone either way. The injury was losing it.

The day after Melba's funeral, Lurie had bought an automobile—the Overland—to the alarm of her brother-in-law. This was an unheard of thing for a female to do. Nobody knew any woman who owned a car. But Lurie was determined to visit the hospital to see Anson and to view his child. She had been thinking of Anson since she was twelve years old, and she wasn't about to stop now. Velvet alone knew her sister's well-kept secret and couldn't find it within herself to wholly disapprove. And Velvet could keep a secret. The telephone wires were not to hum with this information for years to come.

Lurie could well afford to buy an automobile or anything else she might want. Her father, upon the death of his wife, having reached retirement age and the end of his last term in the same year, had gone to live with her elder brother, a cotton broker, in Waco. He had settled on his three children a substantial part of his estate, rental properties in the town and income from one third of the shares in a ranch in the Panhandle. The income was pooled and divided equally on an annual basis.

Lurie could already drive, having been allowed by her father to take the wheel on country roads when a girl. She never
ditched the car, but, as her father complained, if there was a rock in the road, she managed to run over it. She became so adept she was allowed to drive the family on Sunday outings, even in passing through the town, which was as much a scandal as a female riding astride a horse in public instead of sidesaddle. Yet Lurie was far from being a tomboy. She was given to sewing her own clothes, when she might have had them done, and to decorating her summer hats with cloth flowers of the day. She practiced the art of crocheting, tatting, and knitting. Embroidered blouses were the work of her own fingers. But she was tough.