Chinaberry Read online

  Anson smelled of Lucky Tiger, the lotion barbershops used to dispense. I was embarrassed by being carried at my age, so I wriggled, thinking he might put me down. Cadillac and Rance would have a good laugh over this. But he didn't.

  “Heavy,” I said.

  “As a chicken feather,” Anson replied, and he gave his wife a peck on the cheek.

  Later, Ernest remarked that had this been his woman he'd have shown more ardor.

  Lurie had first laid eyes on Johnnes Anson Winters when she was twelve, and she had resolved to marry him or not marry at all. So she decided to wait for him. There was not a woman in the counties thereabouts, it was commented, who wouldn't abandon spouse and offspring should the opportunity have blossomed to be his second wife after the death of his first one. He was known, after all, as that cowboy who had carried his afflicted son in his arms from birth until his death at the age of six. The memory of Anson on horseback with a thumb in the baby's mouth for a pacifier stirred hearts.

  Anson was the second son of Big Jack Winters, owner of the Bent Y Ranch in one county and half a section of cotton land in another adjoining. The cotton farm was tended by Mexican sharecroppers, with Anson as their casual overseer. Anson insisted on living on the old home place where his father had taken up land in the last years of the past century. This despite the distance he had to drive to the Towerhouse, the name he used to refer to the main house of the ranch and its operations. None of the three brothers were any longer cowboys, and they engaged in various activities along with the affairs of the Bent Y.

  Anson's two brothers, Jack and Bronson, operated a farm each, with hired help, on land in the vicinity of the ranch. They raised hay and millet and corn; they reared horses for the remuda; and they sold the surplus of forage and grain and saddle stock. The Bent Y was a family cooperative, shared by its members. No authority was wrested from Big Jack, only supplemented. Now in his eighties, a bit uncertain on his feet, his word was law, and nobody wished otherwise.

  In earlier days, before he had left West Tennessee, where he had migrated from North Carolina, Big Jack Winters had married a widow some years his elder, who had not only a halfgrown son, Bronson, but also a sizable acreage of rich land bordering on the Mississippi River. In those pioneer days, women wore out like a cake of soap, and the widow was said to have died within a few months. At her passing, Big Jack sold the land for a sizable amount and headed west, Bronson in tow. He took up land in Texas under the Homestead Act and grew cotton until the windfall of the Towers Ranch came his way. He had the gold certificates in hand to make the deal when the odd chance presented itself. Anson told me his father had said those were the wild years, with claims and counterclaims, and a man's life was in constant danger. Every man carried a gun as commonly as he packed a pocketknife.

  In due course, Big Jack married the woman I was to be coached to call grandma, a woman near half his age. Bronson's age. It was not easy to say “Grandma.” I had to squeeze it out at first. I already had one live grandma back home in Alabama, and the other one had passed on.

  Because of the striking resemblance of Anson and Jack to their foster brother, Bronson, I long mistook him for their father. Neither had inherited the physical characteristics nor the brittle personality of Big Jack. Lest I mislead, I'll allow the readers to study on this at their leisure. The Winters family was the soul of honor, their morals Victorian.

  “Anson's heart is pure,” Lurie told me frequently. I believe that she meant he was vulnerable. She could never forget that she had been his third choice. There had been his first wife, of course. And there was the possibility of a liaison after the death of the first wife, which haunted her.

  Anson had married a childhood sweetheart after two years of college in Austin indulging in agricultural training. There had been some delay in his betrothal because he had loved two sisters and had trouble choosing between them. He was twenty-four years old.

  The sisters were not twins although they appeared to be, beauties the both, dressing in identical gowns and flowered hats with veils when they appeared in public, and the pride of their father. Since they were raised in town, one would suspect they knew little firsthand of the vicissitudes faced by women living on the ranches and farms around them. The sisters were from a prosperous family who dealt in hardware. Their father had migrated from Mississippi, as their soft voices and dropped r’s attested. Surnamed O'Kelly, the family had retained the O commonly dropped by most of Irish descent.

  Anson's dilemma was resolved somewhat when the younger sister, Irena, began to date a clerk in her father's store. It was assumed that she had bowed in favor of her older sister, not willingly but at her father's request. Yet she did not marry the clerk or any other of the young men who paid her court for several years. And as much as Anson cherished his marriage to Melba, he did not forget Irena.

  The marriage was short-lived. Melba died of childbed fever almost to the day of their first wedding anniversary. The child's breathing problems, during which he sometimes stopped breathing altogether, could only be overcome by the manual pumping of his lungs and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which Anson would trust to no one else. The child, called Johnnes for his father's seldom-used first name, survived just beyond his sixth birthday.

  From the day of Little Johnnes's birth, Anson no longer rode the range with his brothers. A hand was hired in his stead, and from then on Big Jack's ranch was no longer wholly a family affair. The three sons, along with their father, had developed a cattle spread from an acreage the four of them could handle in its every aspect until the acquisition of more pasture, which spread until it bordered on free range. This became too much. The operation was so large that it required employing a crew of cowboys, who spelled each other on a regular basis. Bronson and Jack soon gave up their chaps and spurs and began to develop the farms that were to consume most of their attention. The brothers met at the Towerhouse most days, heard Big Jack out, had his pronouncements translated into more practical terms by their mother, and saw to the numerous chores. To Jack fell the job of looking after the family's other business interests, including an ice-making plant in one of the towns, a feed-and-grain store, and a partnership or a large share of stocks in a bank. They also had a seasonal fertilizer operation devoted to the grinding, sacking, and distributing of phosphate, which arrived unprocessed in open railroad cars. All else was given up during cattle-shipping season.

  All three brothers lived near the Towerhouse until Melba's death, upon which Anson returned to the farmstead of his birth, Chinaberry, and was undoubtedly assisted in caring for Little Johnnes by the Mexican families operating the cotton farm. Anson drove to the ranch weekdays with the baby propped on the seat beside him, and later, as he moved about mounted, the baby sat in his arms. During the first years his saddlebags were stuffed with diapers.

  The countryside saw much of him, at a distance, during the six years of Little Johnnes's life, and hardly saw him at all in the years following the child's death. It was said he was even taking a hand in the cultivation of the cotton, which went against the local wisdom: “Once a cowboy, never a plowboy.” But hard work is helpful in overcoming sorrow.

  Although the rural telephone system was subject to frequent breakdowns, country wives kept fairly good tabs over a large area of acquaintance. But in Anson's case, little was known or could be known. His brother Jack took over the chores that involved visits to towns or any public appearances and did not relinquish them until Anson married again. On the subject of Anson, the family was mute, and they probably assumed he had had a nervous breakdown.

  Lurie told me later what had happened, so far as she could find out, because she wanted me to understand Anson and not to fear him. However, we can never get plumb to the bottom of anybody, not all the way down to what is dark and hidden and cannot bear the light of recognition.

  I did not understand, being only thirteen and of little experience. But I was never afraid of him. Only overawed.

  And I was awed by Lurie
. Beautiful Lurie. Lucretia Jeffreys, she had been. From childhood her schoolmates and townspeople called her Lurie, but she was never addressed as such by her parents or brother or sister. In Henderson, Kentucky, where both her parents were born and married, the Jeffreys were said to have some social pretensions. Bluewater, Texas, where they moved after the birth of their son, was not the place to practice them. A frontier town not too long freed from the scourge of Indian raids, Bluewater was a place where the bones of buffaloes lay whitening in the sun, where everybody came from somewhere else. The land offices were matched in number only by the saloons. Land titles were in disarray, and the disputes were sometimes settled with a gun.

  Hampton Jeffreys, Lurie's father, arrived in Bluewater with a deed to a section of land that his father had bought on speculation long before. He fell into the business of real estate, which made him a rich man when the Katy Railroad came through and the land grew valuable. By the time Lurie was grown, her family did not want for anything, so her father sold off all his holdings except several dwellings and a half block of businesses and moved next door to Lurie's brother, who was some twenty years her elder and a cotton broker in Amarillo. Rent accruing from the Bluewater properties was divided between Lurie and her sister.

  Her mother was forty-four when Lurie was born, and the surprise pregnancy had been an embarrassment. Her brother, who was then in college, switching between law and medicine and business administration, claimed to be ashamed. Lurie's sister, Velvet, now married to Sam Somerwell, twelve years Lurie's senior, became her de facto mother. Lurie stayed at the Somerwells as much as at home, and when her parents went to live in Amarillo, she did not follow at once. She was not to switch her interest as did her brother. She had spotted Anson when she was twelve, and the die had been cast.

  The fact that Anson was five years older than her cast no weight. The clear knowledge that he was often in the company of Melba and Irena and would surely marry one of them eventually was no deterrent to her either. Velvet would point out to Lurie that Jack Winters, the brother of Anson, was nearer her own age and apparently fancy-free, and why did she not make some accommodation with him? Lurie could not say what it was about Anson that separated him from all other men, even from the brother who appeared to be cast in the same mold. Both were handsome in the rugged way a frontier town and the sun and Texas winds write on a face. She had no words to describe it until after their marriage when Anson's mother, clearly asking some indulgence for the trials her son had endured, told Lurie, “He has a pure heart.” Thus Lurie's declaration of this same thing to me. It was in his eyes as in no other man's she had ever known, she said. The fact that he could not easily shake off the human contracts he had made was an earnest of it. And his mother had said, “He still has a little way to go.”

  The truth is, she loved him, and she finally got him, just as she had planned.

  Anybody who saw Lurie at Chinaberry would have asked themselves what a woman of such carriage and personality and beauty was doing on a Texas cotton farm miles from anywhere. But she was there, and always looking fresh as rain.

  Lurie had had no expectations of remaining out of touch with civilization for long. There was already a spot chosen for a house near the ranch. Anson's mother was her chief accomplice in encouraging him to leave Chinaberry to the full management of the Indian foreman, Blunt, and his extended Mexican family. Anson's mother wanted all her own family around her, and certainly none missing at the Sunday dinner table.

  When Anson was absent, I was much company to Lurie, and besides welcoming me she took on the duty of explaining Anson to me as far as she could. Most of all there was the prodding to not fear him, which I never did, except once. “He suffered a traumatic loss in the death of the baby,” she'd say. “He went through a terrible brain fever.”

  She reported that by day Anson's outward ruggedness belied the trials he had suffered. He laughed, made jokes, and trusted everybody except cottonseed buyers at the gin.

  By night it was another matter. He often turned and tossed, sometimes arose and slipped into moccasins so he could walk about, to the barn or to the mailbox. Lurie would stand in the door and watch him unseen until he returned. She decided there had been some amelioration of the past except the loss of Little Johnnes. In his sleep he would mutter “My baby, my baby” or “Hold on, hold on.”

  She may have told me more than intended, having no one else to talk to. In her own fashion she divulged that we were both substitutes.

  “You know, I heard Anson whistling yesterday for the first time,” she told me, a week after my arrival. “The first time ever.”

  We had arrived at siesta, that period between high noon and two when the Texas sun is at its most torrid and brightest, and the leaves of the trees hang limp and blades of the corn curl. “Nappy time,” Anson dubbed it. All labor ceased. Following dinner, everybody slept or found a cool spot to await a lessening of the heat.

  The sounds of our approach aroused Blunt and set him to gathering horse apples. Blunt was a full-blooded Comanche Indian. He was father and grandfather to the workers in the field and the house, having married a Mexican woman in years past, and he was a longtime guardian of Chinaberry. How close a watchdog I was to learn. I had noticed that no dog had run out to greet his master when we had first arrived at the house. In Alabama every house has a dog to bark warning at the strangers. Blunt served this purpose at Chinaberry.

  While he scooped the apples into a coal scuttle with a stone shovel, he aroused two women from a hammock strung from live oaks behind the house. They were Angelica and Rosetta, who aided in the housekeeping and cooking. At Chinaberry the siesta was elongated, from eleven until four. Cotton gathering began at four in the morning and continued until dark. You can see cotton before you can see anything else, and later.

  Anson had said, “We've got some hungry workers here,” and that was all that was needed to set Angelica and Rosetta to cooking and Blunt to lighting a charcoal brazier. We were shown to our quarters, down a hall on the right side of the house, two doors below the parlor, which Lurie, for reasons of her own, had never entered and never would. Later I would learn that this was not from distaste, but because the parlor was sacred to her husband.

  In our room there were two beds. Cadillac and Rance would occupy one, Ernest the other. A trundle bed was rolled in for me. The size of the building indicated it had once housed a family greater in size than occupied it now. Anson and Lurie rarely crossed the hall to this side of the dwelling. The house had recently been wired for lights, but the sockets were empty, awaiting a gasoline generator.

  Things began to happen. The aroma of grilling steaks drifted from the yard. We were invited to clean up before the meal, to use the shower in an outbuilding directly in front of a tank fed by a windmill. The water was more than tepid. Our clothes, thrown out the door for Angelica to pick up and thrust into a gasoline-driven washing machine, were soon on the line, drying. Ernest alone had a fresh change available; the rest of us had soiled the extra pairs of bib overalls we possessed by the time we had reached the Louisiana line. These too were washed in due course.

  At least our faces and hands were clean when we sat down to a table covered with a variety of foods. Even sweet potato pie, my favorite. Lurie stood by until we had our first serving, then left the room, Ernest's eyes following her as she passed the dishes and until she left us. There can be so much food that some hunger is assuaged by merely looking at it. Ernest was to remark later, “You'd of thought they knew we were coming,” and Cadillac, reading Ernest's thoughts, said, “That's some woman he's got. Who'd of figured on finding such a looker out here in the middle of nowhere?” Ernest had only grunted.

  At the table Anson stood beside me, and when he saw I tasted the glass of water and rejected it, even with lumps of ice, he poured a tumbler of buttermilk for me, the summertime drink of choice in Alabama. And noting my difficulty cutting a piece from the steak, he divided it into bite-sized pieces. He even took up a fork and poke
d a morsel into my mouth, with Cadillac and Rance taking note the whole while. I shunned the beans and potatoes, the beets and mustard greens. As nobody counseled me to make a better choice of foods, as they would have at home, I dined mostly on pie and pound cake and pear preserves. And drank buttermilk. My thirst seemed endless.

  It was no wonder that we were ready for a nap on the cool grass under the chinaberries after such a gorging. But not before the Knuckleheads got in their licks.

  “Boy, have you got it made,” said one.

  “Got him eating out of your hand,” said the other.

  “If I was in your place I'd make it pay off.”

  Ernest added a halfhearted piece of advice. “Just watch yourself.” He saw that he was losing authority.

  Surfeited with food and drink as we were, we slept longer than intended. About four o'clock, Ernest waked us and said, “Let's get cracking. We're making no dough laying here.” Blunt brought cotton sacks for the three of them, and Anson led me into the house for a fitting of my own sack. It was already sewed, lacking only the strap, which needed merely stitching on. Though something of a toy sack, it would drag along the ground a full yard and a half behind me, as did sacks in Texas, where rows seemed endless. A body picked until the bag was half-full, then cut off a row and picked back toward the beginning. A wagon would be there with steelyard scales to weigh the harvest.

  Lurie sewed on the loop and hung it across my shoulder for measurement. Then she suddenly pressed my head against her bosom. My face tore up. I cried soundlessly, tears smearing my cheeks. I hardly knew why I cried. Because I was so far from home—from Alabama?

  “My baby,” Lurie breathed.

  Through my tears I saw Anson's discomfort, a sudden jerking of his head so his own tears might not be seen and his leaving the room for a moment. A wound had been opened, as I was to learn. Anson and Lurie had been together three years and were childless, for whatever reason. Lurie was in her late twenties, Anson in his mid-thirties.