Chinaberry (5 page)

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 poked 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.

Blunt was waiting at the door to lead me to the fields, along with Ernest and the Knuckleheads. When Anson brought me out he hesitated. “Maybe the boy ought to stay at the house. He's already had a long day,” he said.

“No longer than the rest of us,” Ernest said. He was not relinquishing his mandate readily. “Young fellows can take it better than us older ones. They bounce back quicker.”

The walk sliced through the fields of barely opened cotton to a farther field a half mile distant where the plants had a week's advance growth. Ahead we saw the pickers, some dozen of them, snatching at the bolls. Most of them were part of Blunt's Indian-Mexican family, the rest, other hired hands. Their arms worked like pistons. The most adept could pick up to four hundred pounds a day.

We were to work apart from this crowd, who busied the rows like a swarm of bees feeding on clover. We chose a set of rows and began. For me, it was as if I'd never left the business; with the others it was an awkwardness gradually overcome. To pick
a boll of cotton would seem not to be difficult, as it is not. The point is cotton weighs like air, next to nothing, and pays a cent a pound, so elbows must fly. And there is an art to snatching the locks without puncturing the cuticles of your fingers on the dry sharp point of the boll. I had acquired this art. Cadillac and Rance and Ernest had bleeding fingers within a half hour. And there was the sun beating down even at five in the evening, apparently refusing to set, and there was the headache breeze fanning across the land. That half hour convinced the three of them that our stay at Chinaberry had to be short, that we should move on as soon as we could raise a stake of money enough for grub and gasoline. And to replace all four tires, which were slick as a pool ball. The transmission had also been acting up.

The pickers strode back and forth to the wagon, where the waiting baskets were filled with cotton, then weighed and dumped. The three of us together—the Knuckleheads and I— had not yet filled a single basket. I was performing with the best of them, if not better, but still we hadn't gathered much.

We saw Anson approaching at a distance on his saddle horse, Blue. Blue was a roan, her name at odds with her coat. The identifying number at the auction where she was purchased had been stamped in azure paint on her rump.

On a Texas afternoon with the air like glass, you can see farther than any place earthly, and the man and his horse appeared long before they drew up at the wagon.

Anson set a glass jug—full of lemonade and wrapped in burlap—on the wagon and hitched Blue to the wagon wheel. He strode out to us, walking beside me and dropping cotton into my sack.

The three of us had not a dry thread on us and the water was dripping from our noses. Anson's face was dry as a hat. Not a bead of sweat dampened his brow.

Anson sauntered away down the row, an imposing silhouette against the white sky.

“Don't that man ever sweat?” Rance whispered.

In the field, a jackrabbit sprang up and hopped away, in not too much of a hurry.

“Gosh dog!” the Knuckleheads said as one.

Being only familiar with the cottontails back home in Alabama, we were astounded. It was as if a mouse had become as large as a cat.

“Them ears!” said one.

“Big as a calf!” said the other.

Ernest was less impressed. The sun beating down and the prospect of the endless rows of cotton before us would have dampened any elation. Lifting his hat, he rubbed a hand across his head back to front where the hair was thinning, and the gathered sweat came off in a shower.