Chinaberry

by James Still

  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 mot
her, 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.

  A short piece before they reached the cemetery, Anson asked Bronson to stop. The road had lost all semblance of being a road and was more like a trail. He said he would go on alone. Of the members of the family, Bronson had more confidence than the others that Anson only needed time. He would adjust, Bronson said. Bronson was old enough that he treated Jack and Anson as his sons, and you will remember they unaccountably resembled him. Bronson leaned against the car and watched as Anson disappeared behind the towering live oaks that hid the cemetery.

  Bronson, from long practice as a cowboy, retrieved his field glasses from the truck when Anson did not return within a half hour. Walking to the right, to get a view of the graves, he saw Anson kneeling, one hand on Melba's marble slab, the other upon Little Johnnes's mound. The bluebonnets rested on the child's grave. Bronson returned to the truck and put the field glasses back into the glove compartment. No reason to hurry Anson, he thought. Let him have it out with a grief nobody could truly share.

  Anson's mother, from the moment Anson and Bronson had driven off, had become restive. As time passed, she grew more disturbed and paced the floor, wringing her hands. Within less than twenty minutes, she and Jack had called Ellafronia to join them, and all had piled into a car, driving to the cemetery. There was nothing else to do.

  On reaching Bronson, who was parked near the cemetery, they all jumped out, and Bronson waved them back. “He's all right,” he yelled, softly. “I've checked.”

  They waited another thirty minutes before they all approached the cemetery, quietly and on foot.

  Anson lay stretched upon Little Johnnes's mound, his arms half-buried in the mud, reaching down. He was asleep. Blossoms of the bluebonnets were stuck to his face like stars.

  The winters family was an open-hearted group of people, even if they did not seem so to the casual onlooker. They owned gifts of the earth—land, cattle—and had money in the bank. They were not grasping, not asking for more. They had come by it hard, yet it had not hardened them.

  Many thought the Winterses were strange, not easy to know. The womenfolk did not “hang on the telephone,” which meant they had no confidantes. Any news of them was difficult to come by. On the paternal side, they were a transplanted Appalachian family. Big Jack's speech bore the imprint of his early years in Western North Carolina, with a dash of West Tennessee. As for the maternal side—who knew? Anson's mother had said that Big Jack had “carried her off” when she was not much more than a child of sixteen and he almost twice her age. “I didn't even love him,” she'd say, “then.” But she came to love him, and she came to love the Bent Y Ranch, where they eventually set up housekeeping after leaving Chinaberry.

  The Bent Y had begun from scratch, ranch land without so much as a cow. A few mavericks were branded, and among the calves there came a bull of stamina and quality. This bull set the standard for the short-legged, stocky longhorns that became the trademark of the Bent Y. But fashions in cattle change, bulls have their day, and ranch owners have eyes out for a male to upgrade their stock. They want less fat, more lean, all endurance.

  In the first year Big Jack added the ranch to his undertakings, and for a dozen succeeding years, the profits from Chinaberry's cotton crop were invested in livestock. As the cattle began to turn a profit, the earnings for both were used to buy more land and extend the borders of the ranch.

  From the beginning, Big Jack, Bronson (who was in his twenties at the time the ranch was started), and Blunt tended the growing herd. They were soon to be joined by Pop Cod. Within a half-dozen years, the ranch reached its limits in the north and south. No more land was for sale or apt to be.

  To the west was free range, where many herds grazed and to where the Bent Y drifted its herd at the end of summer when the grass there was most abundant, and as Big Jack put it, the cattle could be “brought into case” for fall shipment. On free range, any stray animal happened upon was promptly branded. It was a common practice, justified by the knowledge that other herdsmen were branding strays from other herds. In this way there was fair trade.

  One day Anson told me he had word that three antelopes had joined the herd, and when the cattle were close enough to reach and return in a day, he would take me there on horseback. By then there were two herds on the ranch, the smaller of which had the antelopes and was grazing just inside Bent Y property. The other was far afield, on free range that the Bent Y punchers referred to as “Japan.”

  The second time I was taken to the Towerhouse, I asked Pop Cod if the antelopes were branded as were the regular stock. It had always been said of me back home that I asked too many questions, and irritating ones, as they were usually ones to which nobody knew the answer. But Pop Cod knew.

  “No,” he said, sitting propped in his chair on the bunkhouse porch. “I always liked to see them grazing. If you have to look at a bunch of brutes all day, it's good to rest your eyes on something different. Like looking at women instead of men.”

  What Pop Cod didn't tell me, but Anson did later, was that a request came in once from Austin, asking for two antelopes, one of each sex. That had been back during Pop Cod's active days. With some difficulty, they were lassoed and delivered, to be placed in a zoo or possibly a traveling circus. Pop Cod was to regret this to the end of his life, which was less than a month away from the day I asked him my question.

  One of the topics of conversation often heard among cattlemen is the location of a prize bull, one with the qualities to be bred into a herd. “No bull, no ranch” was a saying.

  When stockmen attend cattle shows, which either Jack or Anson or both did regularly, they have an eye out for such an animal, either to appreciate what God and man have wrought in the way of breeding or to bargain for them. Such was the trip the two brothers took to Waco in October.

  Jack was to bring the cattle truck from the ranch to Chinaberry, which was roughly on the way, pick up Anson, and drive to Waco and back, all in a single day. This would require their leaving before daylight and returning in the early hours of Sunday morning.

  This was Saturday, a day of no school and no mail, and I was glad of the first and sorrowful of the second. Jack arrived at Chinaberry when it was still dark, and I was wakened by the noise of the truck rack as it entered the yard. Jack carried in his arms his sleeping eldest son, Little Jack, and placed him fully clothed on the side of my bed.

  As he pulled off Little Jack's shoes and loosened his clothing, he told us that Little Jack had determined to go to Waco with them and couldn't be talked out of it. Such a trip, and the purpose of it, was out of the question for a ten-year-old.

  “He'll cry a little when he wakes up,” Jack said, “but he'll get over it. He'll be all right. When he starts playing with Little Anson, he'll forget all about it.”

  I was sitting up in bed, wide-eyed. Anson had told me before I went to sleep that he would be gone when I waked and I would be slumbering again before he returned. It had never occurred to me that I might go along.

  Anson lifted me up and asked, “You're not going to cry, are you?”

  I shook my head no. I was only partially awake and was almost back to sleep when he put me down.

  Little Jack waked me with his crying later that morning. Lur
ie appeared with a pan of warm water and a washcloth, and throwing open the blinds, she washed both our faces and hands as we sat up in bed.

  When Little Jack kept crying, Lurie asked him what he wanted.

  “My Dad-o,” he replied.

  Fifteen minutes later we were at the table, our chins hovering over bowls of cornflakes and milk, Little Jack grinning. To my eyes he was a young version of Bronson, his foster uncle, even more so than he was of Jack and Anson. The resemblance was too notable to overlook.

  Two years younger, Little Jack was a third larger in size than I was. When Blunt lifted us up by the seat of our pants and hung us on the steelyards, Little Jack weighed eighty-one. I weighed seventy-three, a four-pound gain from when I had arrived at Chinaberry. The candy Anson was sneaking to me, the morsel he poked into my mouth with a fork after I had stopped eating, was showing up. The day Lurie found a stick of licorice in my pocket she claimed to know it all along. “The smell of licorice hangs on like garlic,” she had said. The condition Anson had set for consuming the candy he slipped to me, even after the discovery, was waiting until after supper, not before. To begin with, it was a play-secret, known to the three of us.

  This was Little Jack's first extended visit to Chinaberry. We explored the house, entering every room across the hall except the locked one with the key hanging in the door. We climbed to the rafters in the cotton house and jumped into the great mound as soft as snow. We climbed the ladder into the barn lof to see what was there. We sat in the wooden swing under the chinaberry trees, facing each other to give it balance and make it rise higher than was wise, until Blunt—who all the while was keeping an eye on us—came to scotch the swing with a hand. And every hour or so, when it came to mind again, Little Jack cried for his father. In his view, his father had tricked him, abandoned him in his sleep. I began to agree with him, to join him in his moody moment, to feel that Anson should have taken me as well. Little Jack wept; I only puffed up in injury.