Chinaberry (18 page)

Chufas were sometimes a plague back home in Alabama. Papa once told us how a man got rich from a cure he guaranteed would solve the problem. In an advertisement in several agricultural journals, the man had guaranteed, money back, that he could rid a man of this herbal pest for only one dollar. Hundreds hurried in their dollars and received the cure: “Move off and leave it.”

I also had questions about tumblebugs. In Alabama, we had had these, too. Tumblebugs were hard-shelled bugs that rolled animal dung, or human dung if available, into balls and deposited their eggs therein. The hatching larvae fed on the feces.

In the barn lot, Anson and I observed such a scene, and when I asked why a creature would choose such a manner of existence that was so appalling to mankind, Dad-o answered the question to a satisfaction that obtains to this day. He said that mankind must not impose on other forms of life human way of thinking, social behavior, or morals. Not Dad-o's words in explaining this to me at the time, but they are mine, addressing the same phenomenon.

Life fed on death. I had observed a half-dozen young opossums feeding on the carcass of a dead cow and observed the buzzards so often circling over the pasture. Then there was that
troubling wisdom that the Winters cattle were grown to be later killed and eaten by man, as were hogs and chickens, and even the catfish in the lower pond, which had been stocked by hand for that purpose. So man was that much akin to the lower mammals and the insects.

Once, when I sat down to eat, forgetting to wash my hands first, Dad-o said, “I always thought it curious that even a muskrat washes its hands before eating.”

Sunday.quiet.still.

Dad-o had driven away after breakfast. A telephone call had alerted him to meet at mid-morning a representative of a Dallas packinghouse to work out a contract for next year's feeder calves. Those now being finished off were spring-dropped, had been full-fed during the summer in dry lot, and within the month would be trucked to a Katy Railroad siding. They were under contract before birth.

In the absence of Dad-o, as by premonition, Blunt appeared in the yard to watch after me. Lurie called her sister to come spend the day; Velvet's husband had delivered her and departed. From where I stood by the Osage fence, I could hear their voices though not comprehend their words.

Today I didn't peer into the Osage bushes, which were so thick and interwoven a chicken couldn't penetrate them. This I had done several days past, thinking to see what might be nesting or hiding, and had upset Lurie. There I had spied a pair of toy wheels separated by a spindle. Rusty as they were, the wheels spun when I stroked the rims. When I showed them to Lurie, she threw up her hands.

“Where did you find them?” she asked, obviously disturbed. I told her.

She held them as if they might break. Then, she said, “Don't tell your Dad-o. It will worry him. He wouldn't sleep a wink the whole night.”

I assured her I wouldn't. There was no need to tell me this was from a toy belonging to the child Johnnes. I guessed the fate of the wheels. They were handed to Angelica, who opened the parlor door, deposited them, and locked it again.

Walking along the hedge with a rubber ball in my hands, eyes straight ahead, I wondered if I could hide from Blunt. While I couldn't see him, I knew he had me in sight. Dad-o had told me of his and Jack's efforts to outwit Blunt during boyhood. They had never succeeded.

“You can't hide from an Indian,” was his statement.

With nothing else to do, I wandered about, planning a ruse and a spot wherein to disappear. My ramblings took me to the barn and beyond. I bounced the ball as I walked along. Going into one empty lot and then another, emerging on open ground beyond, I was close enough to the Martinez compound to hear children's voices, and on arriving at the final fence, I could see the corner of a shed.

The compound was the Winters family's term for the cluster of dwellings, shacks, barns, lots, chicken houses, turkey runs, and cowsheds where the Martinez “tribe” lived, along with visiting kin and seasonal workers.

The fence where I drew up was old and served no present purpose. Some of the cedar posts leaned either left or right. I turned full round, searching about, and did not see Blunt. Then I saw the heads of children peer from around a shelter and disappear. One head reappeared, came into the open, and the child advanced toward me. It was Nino, a boy my size if not my age. He had been pointed out to me once by Lurie, who saw him as a
possible playmate. But Nino and all the others who could drag a cotton sack down a row worked every day, daylight to dark. Except Sundays.

Nino came up to the fence and stopped. He said nothing. I said nothing, not knowing what to say. I bounced the ball. We stood facing each other and yet could find no words. I threw the ball over, Nino caught it, and threw it back. We exchanged the ball, back and forth, back and forth.

Presently, Nino turned and ran to the shed and came back with the iron rim of a wagon wheel. He swung it over the fence to me. He returned with another for himself. We rolled them about the empty pasture with our hands until Nino showed me how to maneuver the rims with a short stick held in hand. After a half hour, I was speeding the rims hither and yon.

I felt relief—I don't know why—to be beyond Blunt's gaze. If he could see me now, it would be from a distance, a quarter of a mile. I felt as if a cord tied to me had been broken and I was free at last. It was a trait developed then, and to stay with me, to wish to be unobserved.

Again Nino ran away, to the compound, and returned. He came back with a pocketful of marbles—juggies, agates, cat's-eyes, glasses—and divided them with me. We dug the holes in the dry ground and without a word played roly-hole. The roly-hole marbles game was played in Texas the same as in Alabama. In no time, Nino had won all his marbles back. He divided them again with me, gave first go, and won them back. From the compound I heard the cries of children at play, roosters crowing, the patter-acking of guineas. We played soundlessly without spoken words, fully two hours.

Tiring of marbles, Nino devised another game. From the sheds he brought two poles—center poles used for haystacks. We jumped about like kangaroos. Jumping over a bush, and then
a taller one, and a taller one still became a challenge. It was not until I lined my pole up to jump the fence that I was halted. One of the fence posts I hadn't noticed had turned into Blunt. He held up a hand and granted “Yh,” his signal for no. But Nino jumped it several times without deterrence.

We heard Velvet's husband drive up and drive away, carrying her back home. And then we heard the purr of Dad-o's motor coming up the lane. Nino dropped his pole and fled home, as if expecting that I would have to return to the big house now that Dad-o had returned.

Not a word had been spoken all afternoon by either of us. And though I had averted my eyes not five minutes watching Nino making his last jumps, Blunt had disappeared. I looked individually at all the nearby fence posts, and none was Blunt.

The next morning, I asked Rosetta if Nino was dumb.

“You mean talk?” she asked, astonished.

I nodded.

“You hear that, Angelica? Little Anson wants to know if Nino can talk, if he's dumb.”

Rosetta began to laugh, and Angelica joined her. They made the air resound with their merriment. They clapped their hands and appeared to be choking. Tears ran out of Rosetta's eyes.

When she could speak, Angelica said: “We can't get that boy to shut up.”

It was shortly thereafter that Dad-o brought news of the upcoming departure of the Knuckleheads—for Alabama.

I was hurt that they had not come by to tell me themselves, or at least to ask if I wanted to return with them. I suppose by then they felt I was of a different class. I suppose that they, like every-one
one else in Robertson County, now thought of me as a member of the Winters clan instead of one of my own people back home in Alabama.

I had now been gone from home nearly three months. It seemed like ages.

I pictured the Knuckleheads returning to Chambers County, telling big tales of their adventures in Texas. But when I imagined this, I always saw my own family gathered round, listening.

These thoughts caused a dull pain to throb in my belly, a pain easily ignored, but one there all the same.

October. The chinaberry leaves were down, and those still clinging to the live oaks were troubled by a chilly southeast wind. Sunlight, pale as winter butter, made stark the brown cotton fields, now picked clean and awaiting a plowing-under. The early September duties that had required Dad-o's presence at the ranch were for the most part fulfilled. The feeder calves were shipped, the roundup accomplished, and the cattle for sale that year dispatched to the Omaha stockyards. What saddle stock they could part with was sold.

The day was Thursday. I was to skip school, which both pleased and puzzled me. Was Dad-o going to Bluewater, or somewhere else, and taking me with him?

This was all the more a mystery as Lurie had admitted to being ill in the night. She was up for breakfast but did not eat. She let Angelica comb and set her hair, an act she usually did for herself. Yet there was no air of gloom indoors. She smiled, if wanly. Her cheeks were puffy, as from a lack of sleep. Dad-o was jovial, and Rosetta chattered unceasingly in the kitchen, more to herself than to anybody else. Blunt had fires going in all three fireplaces of the front rooms.

Lurie saw to it that I was warmly dressed. The jacket lined with rabbit fur recently provided me was brought, and she helped me get my arms into the sleeves. I was to wear for the
first time wool mittens she had knitted; a wool cap was pulled down to my ears. I wore my cowboy boots and belt with the brand of the Bent Y Ranch. Everybody seemed to know our destination except me. It turned out to be too delicate a matter for ready explanation.

We went out into the yard, and it was not either the Hudson or the Marmon we climbed into. We would go this day on horseback. Blunt had Camilla, Lurie's mount, for me to ride, and Blue for Dad-o. And for the first time, I was to be helped into the saddle and allowed to ride without any holding lines. Wherever we were going could not be far. At the moment of our leaving, both Lurie and Dad-o grew solemn. Lurie embraced me and I clung to her, in silent commiseration for her illness.

Dad-o and I rode off, not down the lane to the big road. Instead, we headed for the barn and past it, into the lot beyond and almost to the abandoned fence where a cedar post hung in the air. The icy breeze was in our faces. Turning right, passing down the short lane, through a gap, we arrived at a big pasture and still kept going. We were going nowhere in particular. It was to be a day of revelation, with some attempt at a decision.

We drew up at last at a cattle shed, where the weathered boards cut off the wind. Here our mounts stood head to tail, side by side. Dad-o told me that Ernest was under obligation to take me back home within the week. At the mention of home something welled inside of me, something that had been growing. It overwhelmed me.

And when Dad-o asked, “Do you want to go?” I could only nod yes.