by James Still
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.
He studied me a moment and asked, “Do you want to come back?” And then he explained that Robertson County needed a veterinarian, and there would be no problems about our moving expenses. There would actually be more work than one man could handle.
Did I want to return? I could not reply to this. I was of two minds. I wanted to go and to stay. I wanted to live in Texas forever. And I knew then it was Lurie I could not give up. Until that moment, it had not truly occurred to me.
Dad-o was my security, Lurie, my love.
This was only in part what he had ridden out on that cold day to tell me, while the wind whistled through the loose boards of the cowshed. There was more, and I was left with a mystery. I was to have another bed, to be placed in the room adjoining. Until Lurie was well again, she would need the privacy of their room. I could sleep without being bothered if she was up and down in the night. Dad-o might have expected me to understand, but I did not. I felt pushed aside, abandoned, and in the next moment, liberated. I could have departed for Alabama without looking back.
I was glad, and I was sad, and I could not separate the two.
That night I slept in my new bed in the next room. I was awake both times that Dad-o came in to check on me, to see that I was warm enough, that I was accommodating my changed circumstances. Lurie was up and down all night, and I heard her moving about and Dad-o rising each time she did. I was privy to her retching in the bathroom down the hall. The next day he took her to Bluewater, to a doctor.
The telephone began ringing before breakfast the following morning. If the doctor honored his sworn oath, the practical nurse who assisted him felt no such obligation. The word was out.
Anson Winters was to have an heir.
The Winters watchers had been on short rations for some time. Now they could feast. People who had never set eyes on Lurie and never would found it a morsel to chew on. Would history repeat itself, with another afflicted child? Dad-o's mother knew this not to be a possibility. The bloodlines were right.
Dad-o—Anson—was both cheerful and grave at the same time. He kept answering the telephone:
“Yes,” and
“If it goes well,” and
“It's what the doctor says,” and
“I'll take either one, boy or girl. Or both. Both would suit us.”
Anson's father and mother drove up in the afternoon. Big Jack's comment was, “It's high time.”
They had brought the Towerhouse cook with them, and she possessed a caustic tongue. As I hovered in the door frame, I heard her talking to Angelica. “Now Anson won't have to go around picking up other people's young'uns,” she said.
There were two more bits of information that Anson would reveal shortly.
Irena and her husband, upon hearing the news of the impending birth, were sending a trunk for the remainder of her sister's furniture and all of Melba's other belongings, which were in the secret parlor room at Chinaberry.
The other thing was that a house would be under way near the Towerhouse as soon as the weather cleared in the spring. Chinaberry would not be home to Anson, Lurie, and their new child. Everything I had known in Texas would be no more. It would, however, stay the same forever in my memory.
I was back home, on our farm at the Carlisle Place, in Chambers County, Alabama. Returning in the Hudson borrowed from Anson, Ernest and I had crossed the piney scrubland of East Texas, the swamps of Louisiana, the empty cotton fields of Mississippi and Alabama, all in three and a half days. There were no breaking points. The Hudson never once went out to slow us down, as Ernest's Model T had done on our journey west. There were no Knuckleheads to plague us with pranks and insist that we stop in one town and another so they could look about. Ernest
drove all day and most of the night, drawing up in a churchyard around midnight for a couple- or three-hour snooze. He slept doubled up in the front seat, and I stretched out in the back, with the wool blanket Lurie had provided for my comfort and a cushion embroidered by her with the longhorn logo of the Bent Y Ranch under my head.
I slept in my clothes, not removing them for the whole trip. I was coming home, dressed as I had gone out, in bib overalls and shoes. The overalls were new; the shoes were fresh from a Bluewater store but not broken in. In a valise provided for me were the undershorts and shirts and wash pants and pajamas Lurie had made. My Stetson hat, the smallest one the company manufactured, was in its box in the trunk, safe from the dust and grime of the road. A hamper beside it held more food than we could eat: chicken fried crisp, sausage in Mason jars, canned peas and peaches and pears, and a box of cornflakes. Ernest had only to buy milk for the cereal and to kindle a fire for coffee. In his wallet, he had a bank draft made out to me, a dollar a day for every one I had spent at Chinaberry. I was being paid for helping Anson to help himself.
Ernest's haste was to meet my father's deadline for my return to Alabama: October 31 at the latest. The deadline had arrived in a letter, and since Ernest's Model T was not up to repeating the journey, Anson had offered us the Hudson. Anson would have accompanied us had it not been for Lurie's condition, he said. Yet he was sending an offer to my father: a house—one of Lurie's rental properties—rent-free until he got on his financial feet in Bluewater; funds advanced, if needed, to move to Texas—a remigration; and assurance of all the business a veterinarian could handle.
Ernest would deliver this mandated offer with little confidence. He knew well why my father had not returned to live in Texas, knew of my mother's promise to a sister who had died from scarlet fever before I was born, a promise to not leave her. She rested in the Rock Springs graveyard, and my mother would never be far away. As for bringing me back if at all possible, this too was wishful thinking.
And Ernest had yet another cause for haste—Ellafronia Cauldwell. Ellafronia had at last broken with her on-again off-again cowboy. Ernest had not been far to seek.
The long road home, the strip of earth balling up before my eyes, had its hypnotic effect. I slept or dozed. Nothing was new now. Crossing the Mississippi, we halted long enough for a tugboat pulling a string of barges to pass beneath us. I looked down the smokestack and felt a hot blast for an instant. The barges were stacked with bales of cotton, four bales high. Ernest waved, and I waved. We were answered by a toot of the steam whistle.
We reached Montgomery at noon on the third day, and we saw the dome of the capitol glittering in the sun. Four hours, by Ernest's calculation, before we would draw up at my house. As we sped up the highway toward Nolasulga, Ecleatic, Wetumpka, and Opelika, the tires began to hum. The song was happening in my head, and the tires on packed earth were accompanying the words:
Brave and pure thy men and women,
Better this than corn and wine,
Make us worthy, God in Heaven,
Of this goodly land of Thine;
Hearts as open as our doorways,
Liberal hands and spirits free,
Alabama, Alabama,
We will aye be true to thee!
We left Opelika, crossed out of Lee County and into Chambers. We left the low-lying range of the Buckelew Mountains behind, sped through Cussetta and Oak Bowery and Boyd's Tank, and then we were in the courthouse square of Lafayette. Here was the courthouse, where Old Puss Irvin had held me up to the fountain as a first-grader, where Joe Barrow always napped on the courtroom steps. Here was the Opera House, where I had seen the movie The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin, in which Huns were busily chopping off the hands of Belgian children. Here was the Bank of Lafayette, which was to close during the Great Depression and wipe out many a small family inheritance. In gathering dust, I could see the statue of the woman of Justice, still holding her scales that weighed men's fate. I had been away; she had not. She was a symbol; I was a fact.
Within fifteen minutes we were parked in our yard, and Mama and Papa and my sisters and brothers were outlined by the reolite lamp in the hall, awaiting us, my younger brother staring at my regalia.
Although I was in new overalls, these were in need of washing after nearly four days of steady wear. I wore my Stetson set jauntily on my head and the wide belt with the longhorns on the buckle, and I stood tall in my cowboy boots, so shiny they glittered in the lamplight.
“He's grown!” my mother exclaimed.
In my high-heeled boots, I stood fully two inches taller. But these were not the first pair of boots with Blunt's scrollwork.
“Taken on weight, too,” my father said. “Look at the fat jaws.”
I had gained six pounds, by the cotton-weighing steelyards.
“What happened to the freckles?” my eldest sister inquired.
“Thought you'd be burned black by the Texas sun, picking cotton.”
“We picked one day,” Ernest spoke up. “After then we did better.”
Papa was surprised. “What I remember most about Texas was the wind, that breeze that wouldn't quit hardly, and if it did quit, you'd look,” he said. I recalled but couldn't say what Anson had told me, about the wind.
They looked us over, invited us to the supper table. We were half-expected. There were the familiar plates with the cloverleaf design, the knives and forks and spoons that were not silver, although they were called such.
Later, when my heels and knees and elbows came to notice, these once-rusty parts of my anatomy now as fair of flesh as a baby's cheeks (another Alabama summer would bring them back to their former state), Ernest made the joking explanation, “They kept him in a fishbowl.” And then, not to embarrass me, he added, “You wanted him to experience Texas—well, he did, but not what was expected. Learned more in three months than most boys will ever learn.”
That evening Aunt Joney, this great wrath of a black woman, came across the fields. She was both feared and admired for her gift of prophecy and her ability to “see through.” She called to me from the fence beyond the flower pit.
“Ah,” she said on sight. “Something's done happened to you like I said it would. It's writ on your forehead and buried in your eyes. Whatever it was, it'll go with you to the grave. Whoever it was, you'll be looking for them till death takes your breath.”
When Ernest presented the bank draft made out to me, Papa looked at it and said, “Huh!” in surprise. That was all. I was rich, and all Papa could say was “Huh!”
Ernest slept at our house for three nights before heading back to Texas. He hung out for a day at the poolroom he had once owned, looked up the livery stable acquaintance, and visited several hours with his daughter, returning with the usual report: “When my son-in-law came in the front door, I went out the back.”
Ernest looked up both the Knuckleheads. Cadillac and Rance were back in the cotton mill at Shawmut, feeding spools to looms, and they had many a tale about Texas for any who'd stand still long enough to listen.
They were immobilized for the time being, as the car they owned together had been impounded by the sheriff for speeding. They had claimed their speed was to “blow out the rust,” which had not been a good enough defense for the judge.
When Ernest drove away in the Hudson after three days, I followed the vehicle with my eyes as he moved down our lane onto the main road, toward LaFayette, toward Montgomery, the Mississippi River, Chinaberry, the Towerhouse, the Bent Y Ranch. He drove off toward all those stories I had heard. Toward all those graves. Toward all those people.
The car vanished into the mist of distance, fixed in time and memory.
That last morning at Chinaberry was writ large in my recollection.
As Ernest would be coming early to pick me up, Anson came to my bed at first light with a pan of warm water and a washcloth, a return to a routine now past. I sat up in bed. Presently he sat beside me.
After a while, he arose, withdrawing from
me. He went out to the barn and did not return until he had milked three cows, fed the pigs and the rest of the stock. I sat up in bed, but he did not offer to hand my clothes to me, clothes freshly laid out by Lurie, or to put on my shoes. Nothing much was said until after breakfast. There was a telephone call from Ernest, telling Anson he was on the way to pick me up and head for Alabama.
Anson came into the kitchen, where I sat at the table, picking at my food. “I won't have my little salty dog around to prank with,” he said. “He's here,” he added, with no apparent emotion. But he looked pale and drained.
“I'm not going,” I declared.
“They're coming for you,” he said.
“I'll come back,” I said. “I will.”
He made no answer, went to the bedroom, and sat in his chair, the chair we had occupied so often. I stood stunned in the middle of the room. And then we heard the car drive up, and someone from out there called, “Hurry up!”
Anson sat without moving, as calm as the first day I saw him.
From the yard came another call: “We're here! Make it snappy.”
At this anguished moment, I sprang toward Anson, fell at his feet, and embraced his knees. He did not respond.
Lurie stepped into the room and said, “Don't go outside.”
“I'll not,” Anson answered. He watched me grovel at his feet, and when he did not reach for me, I sprang into his lap, crushed his neck with my arms. He held me loosely.
“Get your readies on!” came the call from the porch.
“I'm not going!” I screamed.
“Yes, you are,” Ernest hollered. “I'll come get you if I have to.”
I pressed tight in Anson's arms, pressed hard with my teeth against his shoulder. The fantasy had vanished. The one thousand miles that would separate us forever were already accomplished.
I heard the hum of the motor in my head.
Anson pried me loose and stood me on my feet, and I caught the frightened look on Lurie's face in the kitchen door. Then she ran forward and embraced me, and withdrew.