Chinaberry (14 page)

“Keep your eye on these boys,” Big Jack had told Blunt, and Blunt took the order to heart. From the time they were old enough to step outside the house, there was Blunt. Wherever they might ramble, to the barns, to the fields, Blunt followed at a distance, as if he just happened to be going in that direction. On many occasions, they had tried to hide from him, but Anson said you couldn't hide from an Indian. They came in time to buddy with him. They went horseback to school, and he was there waiting on his mount for them to emerge when school took out. Once, when they had shimmied up the steep roof of the cotton house to its peak before he could reach them, he had called them down, catching them as they slid across the metal roof. “If anything happened to you, I'd have to kill myself,” he said, a warning I was to hear myself. As long as he had known him, Anson said, he had never had a conversation with him. His black eyes darted about. He anticipated you, knew what you wanted before you said it. “Many's the time I've decided I'll take a trot on Blue as soon as I reach home, before supper,” Anson said. “I'll drive in and there's Blue, curried and combed and saddled up.”

One evening, as the three of us sat in the swing with me in the middle, Lurie asked Anson to tell me about the passing of Blunt's grandfather, Wounded Deer. Anson had to say that the story had got rusty in his mind since he last heard it himself.

“I'll have to ask Papa,” he said. “Papa never forgot anything he ever heard.” Old Jack had heard it from Blunt's wife, and how she had got so many words out would remain a mystery. Blunt's wife had died before Anson and Jack were born. Where he had buried her was not to be known.

It was my turn now to be guarded and followed by Blunt. He was behind me when I met the mail hack at the end of the lane on Saturday, in hopes of a letter from home. When I played roly-hole marbles in the yard, he sat on the lumber pile and mended harnesses, sewed moccasins, or did scrollwork on leather with an awl. During those lonesome days when Lurie was busy at her sewing machine or with her embroidery or tatting, there was Blunt nearby, and he was a comfort.

From the tender beginning of a few “smacks,” there was an increase to many. Mine were smacks; Lurie's were kisses. By Anson's definition, a smack was a light touching of the lips to a forehead, a chin, a cheek. Besides lifting me to greet me, he often pitched me into the air and caught me. As a prank, he sometimes carried me upside down and talked to my feet. The occasional red spots that turned up on my neck were whisker burns. Lurie chided him and treated my neck with cloverine salve.

Three times a week Lurie shaved Anson with a straight razor, and using the brush, he would lather my jaws, take out his pocketknife, and scrape it off.

“Practicing up for the future,” he would say. He brought home a new contraption, a Gillette razor, and began shaving himself the days between. That ended the razor burns.

For me, as for Anson and Lurie, there were freshly laundered garments every day. The gasoline-powered washing machine operated almost daily. We slept on fresh sheets and pillowcases all the months of August and September.

During the weeks of August, when Anson could come home before dark, or on a rare day in mid-afternoon, we would sit in the porch swing awaiting his arrival. Lurie would have begun her toilet an hour earlier. I remember her freshly ironed dress, usually one of her own making, her cheeks lightly rouged and
powdered, the scent of violets about her. Her golden hair, so frequently shampooed and brushed to a gleam by Angelica, would be done up in one of the various modes taught in a beauty course—hanging to the shoulder and caught up by a ribbon, or in large woven plaits or a bun on her head, secured by hairpins and combs.

Lest one might think Lurie too good to work, as the gossip had it about Anson's first wife, this was hardly the case. Lurie sewed and crocheted and tatted. Every bureau wore a sample of her handicraft. One task she did herself, save when heavy lifting was involved, was the making of beds. She made up their bed and my own every day. Mattresses and goose-feather pillows were often taken out to sun. I was to learn that the fragrance enhancing Lurie and Anson's brass bed was from sachets tucked inside the pillowcases. On occasion Lurie dusted and swept, but not regularly, as this was left for Rosetta. Nor did she ever enter the parlor, where the blinds were drawn and the door kept locked. This was Anson's place. Though latched, a skeleton key was in the lock, ready for turning.

I know it was locked, because I turned the knob once and did not dare do more. I was curious, my curiosity soon turning to a mild obsession.

Once, when the washing machine was short of fuel, Lurie was at a tub helping with the wash when Blunt thought to siphon gasoline from a truck. He couldn't stand to see her working that hard. We all worshipped her.

Lurie was not, admittedly, a country wife with hair strung about her face, rushing to the cookstove and the scrub brush, awaiting a husband coming in from ranch or field, a husband wearing pants with dirt enough in them to stand alone, the underarms of his shirt whitened by salt from evaporated sweat.

Lurie was not this kind of woman. Nor was I the boy just in from a torrid day in an Alabama cotton field.

In the evenings, waiting in the swing, I was as primped as a boy can be, thanks to Lurie. I was shining, bathed, my face and neck scrubbed raw. My fingernails had been scratched under and filed. I wore a shirt and wash pants of Lurie's making. My hair was slicked down, parted on the right side as Anson thought it ought to be. I was, in Alabama parlance, “stinking clean.” My sisters would have called me a mess.

Sitting in the swing, ears alert to the first sounds of Anson's approaching car, which could be heard from a mile away, Lurie told me many stories, mostly about Anson. She believed that to understand him was to appreciate him. It was obvious for a long time that I had not yet overcome my diffidence and fully accepted his affection. But she continued to describe her first attraction to Anson at age twelve, the empty years when she could barely sustain her hope, and their subsequent marriage.

It must have relieved some lingering anxiety on Lurie's part to talk about him, to have him understood. With whom else could she talk? Not with Angelica or Rosetta, who lived in a different world. Not with Anson's people, with whom circumspection was the rule and self-revelation unthinkable. She would have me know that Anson was a “good man.” She would often look off across the fields and repeat, quietly, “He has a pure heart.”

One evening, as we sat there dressed up and awaiting Anson's arrival, she told me about Anson's first visit to the child's grave, to engage my sympathy and understanding. The particulars of her story could have been known only by an outsider, as no member of the Winters family would have revealed these particulars, so I must assume that her account of the day's events
came from Ellafronia, who had been privy to all of the Winters family secrets since she arrived to serve at Towerhouse.

Following the death of Little Johnnes, Anson stayed for months at the ranch, under the eye of his mother, under everybody's eye. While he was not by nature self-destructive, they feared for him. Had not a cowboy on one of the ranches nearby, on the death of his young wife, put a shotgun his mouth and pulled the trigger? At the start, Anson stayed nights at Jack's house nearby, where it was thought the three Little Jacks would be some distraction. They were only a reminder, and after a single night, he fled to the big house. Anson's brother Jack, thinking to cheer him, had picked up the youngest of the three Little Jacks and placed him in Anson's arms. Anson had set the child aside, saying, “He's not my baby.”

As Blunt had watched over Anson and Jack as children, now it was the turn of Pop Cod, the aging cowpoke, to take up that duty. Anson often stepped out the door, wandering about the several barns, the feeder calf pens, the lots where brood mares with their foals were enclosed, and he would watch the antics of the young bull—and during all this, Pop Cod was watching. When Anson sometimes saddled up and rode for an hour on the ranch land, Pop Cod, for all the difficulty in mounting at his age, followed behind.

Pop Cod had been in on the establishment of the Bent Y. The first cowboy hired, in fact. He was Big Jack's age. He had gotten too old for the job, as had his boss. The ranch had expanded in size from a half-hundred cattle to a herd requiring six cowboys, three at a time, spelling each other on a regular schedule. Pop Cod had no admitted relatives. When asked, he had replied, “Orphaned. Kicked out the back door.” Pop Cod lived in the bunkhouse, a couple hundred yards behind Towerhouse. He kept the
bunkhouse in a semblance of order, and he had charge of the tack room.

“What he doesn't know about harnesses and saddles hasn't been discovered yet,” I was told.

But foremost, Pop Cod kept Big Jack out of mischief. They spent at least an hour most days on the porch of the bunkhouse, whittling and reminiscing about the days when the West was truly wild and woolly, legend and fact.

In his grief, Anson sat at a table at Towerhouse and did not eat. He lost weight. His mother poked food into his mouth as one might a child's, as he later served me when he thought I hadn't eaten enough. He lay abed nights and did not sleep. A light was kept burning, and when he arose in the night and walked about, someone else arose and was attentive. The household took turns. Ofttimes it was Ellafronia's turn.

And the story she had told about Anson visiting Little Johnnes's grave zigged and zagged as Lurie retold it to me, going further into the past. I ate up every bit of it.

Upon our arrival at Chinaberry, I had noticed that there was no dog that came out to greet us, as there would have been at any home back in Alabama. Lurie said there was a reason for this.

When he was six, Anson had come by a puppy. He had fed it, watered it, informed all and sundry it was his property, and sneaked it into bed with him at night. The pup went to school with him, awaited him at the door. Anson carried two lunches to school, one for himself, one for the dog. Then this beloved animal disappeared, and young Anson was inconsolable. The search was wide, advertised in the county paper, and a sizable reward was offered. Anson grieved for the longest while.

At a later time, it was surmised that the animal had fallen into a well dug in a nearby pasture, now served by a windmill.

The water came out briny, and the well was covered over for a time until it could be filled in. The dog had probably wormed its way under the metal cover and become trapped. Lurie reported Anson's mother as saying, “When Anson loves something or somebody, he holds on too tight. He won't let loose.”

For nearly a month, Anson never mentioned Little Johnnes to anyone. But both in his fitful sleep and even sitting up, wide awake in bed, he would call to him: “Baby, baby, oh my baby.” Nor did he suggest going to the cemetery. He must have known he was not ready. Then one day, he mentioned Beech Ledge to his mother.

“Someday,” she had replied. “Not now.”

Anson insisted, yet not too strenuously. So they reached an agreement. He could go within three months. She had him make the promise. When the three months were up, she put him off another month, until the first of May. They were all watching over him as tenderly as they could, after all. Even Big Jack had softened. He would sometimes put a hand on Anson's shoulder and say, “My son, my son,” just the way Anson mourned for his own son in his sleep and in his waking dreams. They kept all the guns locked up, standing by helplessly as Anson lost more and more weight.

But time heals to some degree. Anson began to improve, and he even gained back the pounds he lost. Everybody in the household started to sleep without expectation of alarm. Pop Cod gave up his vigil. Anson eventually rode out to the herd and did not return for a week. A cowboy returning from his stint reported Anson was his old self again. He had taken a turn at night watch; he had actually laughed at some of the jokes cracked around the campfire. He was only restrained, and he did not join in when they sang, with mouth-harp accompaniment, “Tenting Tonight on the Old Camp Ground.” A sad song.

Yet the Winters household was tense on the day Anson was to go to Beech Ledge. Anson had slept in his clothes the night before, sat up staring outside into the early spring drizzle. By six o'clock he had bathed and shaved and had donned his Sunday cowboy attire. The weather cleared as if for him. His boots shone. The solid silver buckle of his wide belt—fashioned by Blunt and worn only on special occasions—possessed the sign of the Bent Y Ranch, and it shone with the boots when it caught sunlight. His wearing of the belt buckle was somehow troubling to his mother, so she kept an eye on the gun rack that morning, fearing he might take a pistol with him to lie down beside Little Johnnes's grave and do something she would not be able to bear.

They had planned to go together: Anson, his mother, Big Jack, Jack, and Bronson. There was a bouquet of bluebonnets to be taken. But, no, Anson wanted to go alone. After some palaver, he allowed Bronson to accompany him. They set off in a truck, as the night's rain had muddied the roads. There is no mud so successful as Texas mud. The earth was so soft that the truck created deeper ruts as it went. Anticipating this day, Jack had taken a couple of hands to clean up the cemetery a week earlier. The child's grave was still covered with mounded dirt, and a marble slab to match his mother's was sitting three feet away, awaiting the settling of the earth about the casket.