Chinaberry Page 5

  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 th
at 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.

  So Lurie drove to see Anson and his baby. As she steered up the street, she wondered if Anson would remember that day when she had been twelve and he had been seventeen, standing at the high fence between the elementary school and the high school, and she had first told him she loved him.

  Lurie was never to recall the actual moment she noticed him for the first time. The bonding to him in her imagination had built gradually as she stood at the fence with other grade-school girls to watch the high school baseball team practice. Anson commanded third base and often ran within yards to retrieve a ball or catch a wild throw. She had on several occasions stayed on a few minutes after the other girls had left, and in time the chance to meet him came. A ball was batted the long way to the fence and lodged beneath the wire at her feet. Running for it, then stooping to retrieve it, Anson noticed her eyes upon him. He faced her and said, “You're a good backstop,” and then Lurie was emboldened. “I love you,” she said, as if it might be her last chance.

  Anson raised up, ball in hand, and there was a smile of both pleasure and surprise on his face. “Ah,” he said, “go play with your dolls.” He had spoken it good-naturedly.

  “You are my doll,” she said.

  The ball fell out of Anson's glove. He picked it up. He blushed. Lurie never forgot that.

  “Little girl, what's your name?” he asked. He would have placed her by her surname, the circuit judge being her father.

  She told him, and he ran back to his base. Once there, he turned around and faced her again and stared. And this was the last direct look between them until she stood in the door of the room in the hospital where the child lay. She was now seventeen, and he was twenty-two.

  Lurie stood a full moment upon the doorsill before Anson, whose eyes were full of the sleeping infant, chanced to look up. Other than the child, he was alone.

  He looked at her as if startled. And then she hurried from the room, not knowing what else to do, not even understanding why she had come. She had not even looked upon the child's face.

  Lurie did not look upon Little Johnnes's face until six years later as he lay in his casket. She had been in Waco when her sister called to tell her, and she had driven through the night to be present at the funeral.

  But Anson did not attend this funeral either. Hearsay had it that he lay in the hospital bed where his child had died, heavily sedated. Others had it that when Little Johnnes died Anson grabbed him up and tried to run out of the building and had to be restrained. It was also current that Anson had gone stark, raving mad.

  Irena and her husband were not there either, as they were vacationing in Corpus Christi and did not receive word.

  The telephone wires hummed.

  None of the tales about Anson were true. He had not gone crazy. He was not drugged to forget his child's death. He had not tried to run away with the boy's body. In truth, Anson did lie on the child's bed, with Bronson holding his hand. His mother had sat there, too, stroking his head until it was time for her to depart for the funeral. Later she said, “Of all my children and grandchildren, I suppose I loved him the most because I worried about him the most.”

  Lurie told me that Little Johnnes lay pale and thin in his casket, seeming not flesh of this earth. He was a porcelain figurine, a whited sculpture. To view his face was to search for evidence of his parentage, and she recognized characteristics of both Anson and Melba. Anson was there in the shape of the head, the cheekbones, the chin; Melba was more elusively mirrored in the child's countenance, defying description. The light brown hair haloing his face was unmistakably the gift of Melba. The absence of Anson from the funeral had been large in the minds of the audience, as confidences were shared, whispered, ear to ear. Lurie overheard some of them: “Anson is out of his mind.” “They've had to knock him out with laudanum.” “He's strapped to a bed.”

  The rest of the Winters clan was there, save the absent daughter too distant to make the journey in time and Bronson, who had stayed by Anson's bedside. The menfolk presented a solemn attitude; the womenfolk wept silently. They did not cry, it was assumed, so much for the child who was now beyond pain and whose future had been cloudy. Instead, they wept for Anson, who had suffered from the child's suffering, who was in physical touch with him almost every moment from birth, who had kept him alive with his will and breath for six years.

  The child was laid in the ground beside the marble slab of his mother, who had been the first of the Texas Winters family to die and thus the first one in this graveyard, which had been chosen because it was the closest one to the ranch.

  At the Beech Ledge Cemetery, the only audible grief heard came from Ellafronia Cauldwell, who had been in the family's employ for two years, first as housekeeper and cook's helper, and was now referred to as “Papa's slave” by Anson, Jack, and Bronson. Her sole duty had evolved into the care and feeding and cajoling of Big Jack. The sons held their father in awe and treated their mother with kindly tolerance, as their difference in age had weakened the bonding that originally existed.

  Ellafronia Cauldwell—Ella—had come out from Georgia in the vicinity of Macon, where the most pronounced and beautiful of Southern speech is cultivated, to visit the family of an aunt. She had stayed on, winding up at the big house when, as gossip had it, her aunt grew jealous of the marked attentions of her husband to the newcomer. According to Lurie, Ella was not pretty. Good-looking might have been the word used by teasing cowboys. Everybody liked her. Her patience with Big Jack as he grew petulant was phenomenal. When any disagreement arose over the operation of the Bent Y, Ella could be counted on to mollify him. So Ella's sniffing, heard above the murmurs of the brief graveside ceremony, came to Lurie's attention. Ella was Anson's age, trapped in a territory where most men were married by nineteen, almost certainly by twenty-one. She had verged on spinste
rhood in Georgia and passed it in Texas. No other unmarried woman came in contact more frequently with Anson.

  At the Beech Ledge Cemetery, there were no beech trees and never had been. Nor was there any ledge. The ground was flat as a table. The original settler of the land thereabout had named it for the one where his parents were buried. Several of his children had died in infancy, along with two wives, and eventually he had been interred there himself. There were trees shading the graves—great, evergreen live oaks, which had preceded the founding of the cemetery and which gummed the grave stones at their almost secret blooming in spring and showered the ground with spent leaves throughout the year.

  Before the lowering of the casket into the grave, the Winters family departed, as was the custom. Others, who had arrived by buggy, carriage, and horseback, lingered. Only two automobiles had tracked the half-wilderness road to the isolated cemetery: the Winterses’ Hudson and Lurie's Overland.

  Lurie's vehicle drew attention, particularly that of the women. Yet the envy or the disapproval was masked. There was many an “Oh!” and “Ah!” The wife of the preacher cried out, “How cunning!” Whatever that meant. But Lurie was not attending these social nuances concerning the car, which spoke more than was actually put into words.

  Lurie was struck by a symbolic act following the end of the preacher's exhortation when he had said “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” and dropped a rose into the open grave. Jack had stepped forward and more pitched than dropped a small object into the hole. It happened unexpectedly, and the viewers who usually missed nothing construed it to be another blossom. It made a small thud as it struck the casket, or so Lurie believed. There was no further mention of this act among them. Later she was to ask Jack directly, and he said it was the gold safety pin their sister had sent to the shower party given Melba after they had announced their forthcoming wedding. It had been Little Johnnes's first toy. Pinned to his collar, it served as a teether and had been latched to his rompers or shirt pocket all his life, as it had remained a wonder to him.