Chinaberry Page 7

  Anson was to tell me this: “Cowhands think more of their saddles than they do of their wives. Think they'd leave them in the tack room? Some saddles are worth hundreds of dollars for all the silver filigree on them.”

  As we walked by the bunkhouse, we spied an ancient man propped in a chair on the porch. “That's old Pop Cod,” Ernest whispered. This was the old cowboy I had heard so much about from Anson. “I'd introduce you, but he's had a sick spell. Just been out of bed a day or two.”

  We heard the Overland coming long before we could see it in the gathering dusk. Grandma had been right; Anson was coming back for me.

  Anson strode up onto the porch and picked me up.

  Grandma rose. “What's the matter?” she asked.

  “We need him,” Anson said.

  I was to hear of Lurie and Anson's courtship on one of those late afternoons when we sat outside, awaiting Anson's return. A telephone message came through from Towerhouse to let us know that Anson would be late; he was dickering with a buyer for the feeder calves. As Lurie and I were bathed and dressed in our freshly laundered garments, there was nothing else to do but sit in the swing and keep waiting for him.

  That day Lurie may have had her sunny hair done up in plaits, wrapped round her head, held in place by celluloid combs that bore tiny rhinestones. Or she may have had her hair in any of the other fashions she knew how to achieve, sometimes assisted by Angelica. One thing is sure: she smelled of violets. I was as scrubbed as she. Lurie would probably have rubbed some of Anson's Lucky Tiger tonic onto my hair, and if the Knuckleheads had seen me they would have clucked my ears and told me that I “stunk.”

  To whom else would Lurie have told of her courtship and marriage to Anson? Certainly not to Angelica and Rosetta, not to any of her own town acquaintances. Aside from her sister, I was likely the only person to ever hear the details.

  After Little Johnnes died, there was, of course, plenty of hearsay about Anson: he had donned spurs and chaps and become a cowpuncher again; he was out of his head and shut up in a room; he was living at Chinaberry, managing the seventy-five acres of cotton, sometimes even taking a hand at the plow. This last had turned out to be true, as Lurie was to learn for herself.

  On returning from the months spent in the households of her parents and brother—their houses stood side by side in Amarillo—she felt liberated enough to drive about in her Overland without female companions as chaperones. But not enough to live alone, in one of the houses that were now her own rental properties in town. Society allowed this privilege to widows only, as they were beyond the age of passion.

  Before leaving Amarillo, she had written Anson a letter expressing sympathy for the death of his son, addressing it to the Bent Y Ranch, Bluewater, Texas. In the letter, she identified herself as the twelve-year-old fan who, years before, had backstopped a baseball thrown for him at the schoolyard fence. There was no reply.

  On returning to her sister's home, she wrote another, repeating the greeting of sympathy and the reminder, on the assumption that the first letter had gone astray, not an unlikely happening in those days. This time she addressed it to Route 2, Clover Creek, Texas. The mail carrier furnished the address and assured its delivery. The result was silence.

  Lurie was to discover both these letters, along with several others addressed in unmistakable female script, in a drawer, unopened, years later. None, including her own, bore a return address on the envelopes. She wasn't alone in being concerned about Anson's welfare and in seeking his attention.

  There was only one other way to see Anson—to go to where he was. On the assumption that the rumor of his now living at Chinaberry was true, she began to drive past his farm two days a week, leaving the main highway south and taking the narrower lane of the mail route. Of this ruse she told no one, not even her sister. A two-day-a-week trip would go unnoticed.

  As luck, coincidence, or whatever force decides such matters would have it, on her sixth trip her gamble was rewarded. Anson was plowing, breaking ground with a moldboard plow, in the same field with another plowman, Blunt the Indian. It seemed not something Anson would ordinarily be doing. And it wasn't. He had taken over for Blunt for a short turn at the plow to get a feel for the elasticity of the soil. It was April, when moisture content, the readiness for planting, is fed by “feel” up through the plow handles.

  There was nothing else for it. As Lurie had bravely stated her case in the schoolyard years before, she parked the car on a grassy shoulder and walked across the broken ground to Anson. Blunt retreated to a distance out of hearing.

  Anson stood holding the plow lines, motionless. He pulled off his straw hat, a sombrero, and wiped his forehead with a sleeve. As Lurie told it to me, she remembered everything. The butterflies in the sun. The bobwhites calling from the hedgerows. The wedding ring still on Anson's finger. His gray eyes looking puzzled.

  They greeted each other. She expressed regrets at the loss of his child, and he seemed to have no words in reply. Then she asked, “Do you remember me?”

  “Very well,” he said. “You're the little girl who backstopped my baseball. And told me something.”

  “You remember that?” “I do. And I remember another thing. Your hair—your beautiful hair.”

  Lurie was on the verge of tears, telling this part.

  Regaining her car, she thought to herself to drive on past, wait until he had plowed out of sight, then turn around and drive back the way she had come. She wanted to leave the impression that her passing was accidental. When she came past she saw him still standing by the moldboard plow. He hadn't moved.

  When she reached her sister's home and confessed to this transgression of good manners, Velvet told her she should now show some encouragement to the suitor her same age, who drove the long distance occasionally to see her. He had finished medical school and was doing his internship in New Braunfels. He was ideal in her sister's eyes: personable, a good raising, with a future. To Lurie, this man might have everything, but he was not Anson.

  Three Sundays later, Anson arrived at Lurie's sister's home in middle afternoon. He would not come into the house or sit on the porch. “Passing by,” he said, and he did sit a moment on a top step, talking with her brother-in-law.

  The next Sunday he was back and was persuaded to sit on the porch. The next, he came riding a saddle horse and leading another. They went for a canter down the main street of the town and a half mile beyond until they approached a cemetery. He turned abruptly about, and they rode back. The following Saturday he came in a Stutz, and they rode for miles. She wrote to her suitor in New Braunfels and said she hoped they could remain friends.

  “The telephone will be ringing,” she told Anson. “People will talk.”

  Neither of them cared.

  More than a year passed. He seemed to be making an adjustment in his mind to break free from a bond that held him. One Sunday, in July, he brought a magnolia blossom and pressed its twig into her hair. He had made many a comment on her hair, had taken to stroking it. He wanted her to wear it loose about her shoulders, but she felt that was for a younger person than her age. Yet, to please him, she did wear it long occasionally, tied with a ribbon. The first kiss from him was on the ear, with her hair pulled over his face.

  On the day he brought the magnolia, he suddenly indicated the finger bearing a wedding ring and asked, “Would you ask me to pull this off?”

  Lurie assured him she would not.

  That constituted his proposal of marriage.

  He said he had already made arrangements.

  “For when?”

  “Tomorrow, in the clerk's office.” And, he added, “So the telephones will stop ringing.”

  Although he offered many endearments during his courtship, he had never said “I love you.” She wondered if this would come later. Lurie was alert to every nuance. She noted that he called her “sweet heart”—two words, not “sweetheart.”

  “Does your family know about this?” Lurie found herself asking.<
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  “No, we'll surprise them.”

  “How will they feel about it?”

  “They'll be tickled,” he said. “Especially Mama.”

  Then Lurie pressed, surprised at her courage. “Do you love me?”

  “I need you,” Anson said.

  Looking back to my time at Chinaberry, I can now understand that Lurie was both delighted and concerned by my unexpected appearance in their midst. Concerned that I could only be temporary, that Anson's involvement with another child might be too great, only to suffer loss again. She was to tell me in due course, and at a moment of bitterness, that we were both substitutes. She was the substitute for his dead wife and maybe even for Irena, the sister whom he would have married. I was the substitute for the lost son, of course, the son who had been more than an offspring, who for six years had been pressed against him, or, when he needed both hands for a task, who would circle arms about his neck, to whom Anson would say, softly, “Hold on, baby. Hold on.”

  For a long while she had believed that when he said “Hold on” in the middle of the night he was asleep. She learned from his reaching for what was not there and from his sitting up that it wasn't a dream. As often as twice a week, he rose up in the night and slipped on his moccasins and walked outside. The act of putting on the moccasins proved he was not sleepwalking. One moonlit night, from the doorway, she watched him in his nocturnal wandering, around the house, out to the fields, down the lane to the mailbox. Once he was gone fully two hours, having climbed on his saddle horse bareback and ridden off into the pasture.

  When I came to live at Chinaberry, he was to go into the night only once more. But he did rise up in bed the second night of my stay and listen. I was asleep on the trundle bed in the adjoining room, where he had sat beside me until I slept, told me good night three times, and finally said over and over like an incantation, “Sleepy sleep, sleepy sleep.” At home I slept alone, and here I would have succumbed to slumber quicker had he not been there.

  That night Anson had risen up in bed, and when Lurie brought herself to inquire, “What's the matter?” he had said, “I can't hear the baby breathing.”

  “Go to him,” Lurie said, and he did.

  Unknown to me, he placed a hand on my chest until he was satisfied my breathing was regular.

  The next day my trundle bed was rolled into their bedroom, where they could keep better tabs. The room was not especially large, with their brass bed in one corner and my trundle in the other. I had only to call, should I need him, he said.

  It came about that I was to address Anson as “Dad-o.” This was what the three Little Jacks called their father. I had dismissed “Papa,” which had been suggested. I had a papa back in Alabama. There could be no other.

  I remember the first time I called him this, on a morning when he brought the pan of water and the washcloth for the morning's ablutions. This had been a busy week, and we had seen little of him. As I was just coming to consciousness from sleep, lingering somewhere in a dream world, Anson had leaned over me and asked, “Do you know me?”

  I said, apparently without hesitation, “You're Dad-o.” This had pleased him to no end, according to Lurie. As I had come to represent a phantom Johnnes, Anson had become a father image, a stay against the homesickness that often haunted me. To my mind he even began to look like Papa: the sandy hair, the gray-blue eyes, the same set of jaw. When I sat on Anson's lap, I could imagine I was sitting on my father's, which I never recollect doing. My brother, who had taken my short-lived place as the baby, was in my own Papa's lap, in a place rightly mine. My mother and sisters nuzzled at my little brother, and I was assigned to adulthood at age two. I bore no resentment outwardly, but it must have been there inwardly. A neglected child was being belatedly rewarded. Given time, nature asserts itself, exacts its revenge.

  In the case of Lurie, she never took on a maternal image in my mind. Beautiful, warmhearted, she took me into her confidence. I was kept fairly contented at Chinaberry because of her presence and ministrations. When she pressed me to her bosom, something stirred in my heart. It was that biologically unexplainable term—love.

  I might even have grown a smidgen jealous of Anson. One day he came home from work and embraced me only hurriedly, moving on to her, whom he did not release from his embrace.

  “Wait,” she said. “Later.”

  But he wasn't about to let go of her. “I can't wait,” he said. Then he turned to me and said, “Go see what Blunt's doing.”

  What did a thirteen-year-old in those days know? Not much. But I half-knew what they were about to do. I ran off the porch to the rear of the house, where Blunt sat working with his awls on a harness. Blunt saw my dolesome face, so he dropped his handwork, picked up a baseball nearby, and threw it to me. I let it fall. Blunt made no further effort.

  When Anson came out to me, I was swelled up with resentment.

  “Look at me,” he pleaded, but I wouldn't.

  He pressed me against him, nibbled on my chin and my ears. “Cry a little, it will help,” he said.

  I wanted to, but I couldn't.

  Here was the politics of rejection. He struck a bargain with me, and he kept it. He promised if I would forgive him he'd never send me away again. And—the bonus—he would stay with me that night, all night. I submitted, and then the tears came. Homesickness overwhelmed me. I might have asked him then, while he was vulnerable, about this big thing that was in my head.

  But I waited until night, while we were in bed, after the mantle lamp had been blown out. When he asked me, as he did daily, “Are you still my baby boy?” I did not answer “Yes, sir,” as I had been coached by Lurie to do. Not right away. I hesitated, finally saying, “Uh huh,” which had a degree of disrespect in it. Then, I said, “Dad-o?”

  “Yes, baby,” he said. In speaking to Lurie, Anson referred to me as “the baby.” To others he referred to me as “the little man” or “the boy.”

  I couldn't get the words clear of my teeth. While I knew he would do anything within reason for me, my request couldn't come forth for a moment. Finally, it came out with a rush, and to fortify my request, I locked my arms about his neck. “Take me home,” I said, and saying it came hard. What I had already envisaged was that he and Lurie would drive me back to Alabama in the Hudson, and after a few days they'd decide to stay there with me and my family. Either that or my family would go back with us. As my parents had agreed to almost everything I had proposed in my life, including the unprecedented trip to Texas of a thirteen-year-old in company of a friend, I could not imagine they'd insist that I stay in Alabama. Anson had only to ask, I thought. Nobody ever denied Anson anything.

  Anson did not reply for a long while. He alternately pushed me away from him and embraced me tighter. Pressing his mouth to my ear, he said, “My little man…my little Anson…my baby boy—you're already home.”

  From the night when Anson had snipped off my hanging toenail, my feet had been the subject of inspection at bedtime. Nothing was going to make them lose their brownness. From May first until first frost, no country boy in Alabama wore shoes except on Church Sunday, which was one day out of the month.

  My skin was also always attended to by Lurie, using both the arts of medicine and her beauty training. My ankles and heels were rubbed with cold cream, as were my elbows. The red spots caused by mosquitoes were touched with turpentine.

  Then there were my haircuts. Anson always stood by to advise, to make sure it was cut to his specification, to the pattern of his own. Lurie was an expert. After cutting my hair, they combed it this way and that. He combed it one way, she combed it another. They fussed a little, as much of a disagreement as they were ever to have, except for when they argued about how little I ate, or some other little thing.

  What I wanted to eat most of all were cornflakes, floating around in sweet milk, heavily sweetened. They wanted me to eat eggs and biscuits and bacon. At supper Anson piled meat and potatoes and beans onto my plate. I would eat a portion, then look at
the pie or cake. To glance at it was to be served a slice by Lurie. Anson thought I should eat more of the “solid stuff,” and he would poke additional bites with a fork into my mouth. Lurie, from her limited hospital experience, believed that I should not be coerced into eating more than I wanted. Given time, I would adjust, she said. I always drank buttermilk, shunning the evilsmelling and bad-tasting drinking water.

  My presence brought about two changes, one overnight, the other within a couple of weeks. The outdoor privy, used by Angelica and Rosetta, and most anyone else not a member of the family, was the one I used out of necessity. There were three holes, one child-size. The bathroom in the house was down a long hall from our bedroom, pitch dark at night. It was so far a distance that a chamber pot was placed at the foot of my bed, one I never found cause to use. My natural functions took place during daylight hours. In this bathroom, the commode was too high from the floor, too large at the opening. I couldn't reach the pull-chain to flush. Blunt had the remedy. A board, with a hole to fit my anatomy, was fashioned so I wouldn't fall in. It could be readily set onto the commode. A box platform was constructed to support my feet. A boot string lengthened the pull-chain.

  Our noon meal was treated as a picnic. Angelica and Rosetta served Lurie and me sandwiches—chicken, turkey, peanut butter, or pimento. And iced tea spiked with lemon flavoring, sweetened for me. Four tablespoons of sugar almost killed the curious taste of the water. Not quite, though. Our favorite dining spot was the double wooden swing under the chinaberry trees, where those on the swing had to face each other for balance.

  After one such leisurely lunch, Lurie carted me to the doctor. She had decided I needed to go because Anson had taken to doing asthma exercises on me every morning. He made a game of it, stretching me out flat on the carpet, placing a hand on either side of my chest, raising me up and pressing down, pumping air into my lungs. I didn't understand the need for it, but somehow I knew that it was more for Anson than for me. On several occasions, while setting up the breathing routine, he whispered, “I had a little boy once.”