Chinaberry (17 page)

When Anson arrived, we immediately went for a ride on Blue, whom Blunt already had prepared, always anticipating Anson and knowing what he wanted. We took a trot on Old Blue to the back of the pasture. Lurie went with us, which she didn't always do.

A town girl, Lurie had failed to develop a pleasure in horseback riding, and it was the single activity she did not always agree to when Anson urged her to join him. The ride we took that day, I was to recall later, was the last she had, and the last to which Anson invited her. Lurie rode sidesaddle, by choice rather than by adherence to the custom of the day. At home, on the rare occasions we boys rode in from the field with my father, we sat behind him, holding to his belt for balance. But Anson had settled me in front, a left arm lightly holding me for security.

That day we rode to the backside of the farm, the fields brown and bare from a second picking. We sauntered past a later planting, these fields at their peak of opening, with a white cloud settling
to earth and reaching to the dying sky. The sun was setting behind a cloud, and to rural wisdom this meant that bad weather could be expected. The air was unusually cool, so cool that the male pickers had put on their shirts. The women, who were as tan as they were ever to be, and with no fear of freckles, had unrolled their sleeves.

The pickers glanced up and smiled and did not stop. Their arms flew from bolls to sack. Blunt was among them, and while his right hand delivered a boll of cotton to the canvas sack he dragged along the row, his left was snatching another. Any good picker worked with both hands, as one might milk a cow, both hands going like pistons. Blunt always joined his family in the fields when he could. No one required or asked for this labor due to his age, but as he considered the cotton farm his high responsibility, nobody could talk him out of continuing to pick. He could pick an average of fifty pounds a day, quite a feat.

The pickers did not pause. The children of the Martinez family were paid for harvesting any amount over two hundred pounds. It was more game than profit. The best among them, given a daylight-to-dark performance, could top four hundred pounds in thick cotton. There was a rhythm to the picking, like a poem rising, verse to verse.

Night came early, for the sky clouded over. There were no stars. The yellow spot was where the moon was rising. Anson walked around the house to see that everything was battened down. The sparrows, heard chirping sleepily under the eaves at dusk, were quiet. The gloom of the outside came in and hovered just beyond reach of the reolite lamp. We could hear the flame burning the kerosene.

To enliven the somberness of the evening, Anson told us about the latest exploits of the Knuckleheads. He had heard from Ernest that they had for several weeks been living in a
rented room and were having their meals next door at the De Rossett Hotel dining room, which served all comers with a loaded table. There were no waitresses. The cook replenished any dish that was half-empty. A diner left a quarter by the plate in payment. In the case of regulars, such as the Knuckleheads, payment was left Saturday evening for the week, placed in an envelope the hotel furnished, the name on the cover. Both Cadillac and Rance had left a one-hundred-dollar Confederate bill with a note, “Keep the change.”

The upshot was that the female manager of the De Rossett was amused by this. She simply laughed and demanded green money, not gray. She also took the occasion to ask them to tone down their hospitality at the table. Let a stranger sit down, and they would begin to ply him with dishes faster than could be taken until the confused diner was surrounded by piled-up bowls. Insisting on ladling soup for a customer, Rance saw to it that a portion landed in the diner's lap by accident. The apology was always profuse. The Knuckleheads had been known to throw biscuits at each other across the table rather than pass the plate.

Lately they had left behind their usual fistfights and had started something even more childish: food fights. Baked potatoes and chunks of cornbread were their weapons. After one particularly messy food fight, the De Rossett manager had ousted them for good, and the landlady next door had removed their plunder to the porch and locked them out. They now lived in a shack that had been located for them by the manager at the ice plant. The shack was near the Katy Railroad station, and there they lived on pork and beans and sardines. “They're not long in Texas,” Ernest had told Anson.

Anson, who had a good head for names and places, told us of the Webb Latin School in Tennessee, where participants in
a fight were merely chided. The onlookers were the ones who were punished by lost privileges. Therefore no fights.

Remaining at the supper table long after the dishes were cleared, we sat listening to Anson. Other than his voice, there were no sounds. There was not a breath of air moving. The temperature of the earth and sky had reached equality. The coolness of the afternoon lingered. It was not so much the gloom of the night that oppressed me; it was the remembrances of the moment of terror when I had stood in a room with a picture swinging over my head, when the house lifted, the upper floor and porches ripped away. But maybe it was the homesickness that sometimes gnawed at me, too. Remembering that tornado inevitably made me think of home and my people there. My uneasiness was being gauged by both Anson and Lurie. He said, “Your eyes get bigger at night.”

Both Lurie and Anson sat on the bed beside me after I was ready for bed. They couldn't have missed I was trembling. I fought sleep, staying awake as long as I could. Anson liked to talk in the dark before drifting off. It was mentioned that the penned herd on the leased pasture should be soon visited. Blunt would be taken along to grease the windmill and repair it, if required. They would take me along. And this time of year, carnivals and circuses visited town thereabouts, and we would go when one showed up. And Anson had noticed a poster at the Bluewater Bijou showing Harry Carey, who would be starring in a cowboy motion picture this Saturday coming. Anson could abide movie cowboys only to laugh at their novelty. I slept at last, not hearing him intone his usual goodnight: “Sleep good so you'll be happy in the morning. Sleepy sleep. Sleepy sleep.”

I waked with a start. I was being carried through the dark down the long hall, onto the screened porch outside, where Anson had to bend to force his way through wind that tore at
our nightclothes. Lurie followed, holding to his belt for guidance, two pillows squeezed in an arm.

Inside the flower pit, with the slanting door closed, Anson struck a match to get us oriented. We bedded down on the half bed, my arms around Lurie's neck, my head on her breast, Anson's arms encircling us both. I was secure and felt no fear. I had once heard Anson say, “No mattress is too narrow for two people at peace with each other,” and now I knew what he meant, because to be this crowded in such a time felt wonderful.

Morning found me back in my bed, the sun shining, and the pickers were hours in the field already. I jumped out of bed, washed my own face, and put on my clothes and moccasins before it could be done for me. From then on, this was how it was to be.

I don't know why there was such a sudden change in me, but I felt different. I was thirteen years old; I would do for myself. I was not a baby. Both Anson and Lurie stared at me in recognition of my independence, and Anson respected it by day if not entirely by night.

Outside there had been high winds yet little rain. Blunt reported a strip of cotton blown out of the bolls, less than a hundred yards of it. A cyclone had touched down briefly, here and there, and had ripped the roof off one of the cotton storage houses, the one with less than a bale in it. The cotton had blown into the Osage orange row directly in front of it, and where yesterday it was green, it was now white.

“Looks like somebody has some oranges to pick today,” Anson observed. “White ones.”

Portion of the grassland was rich earth, taken over for grazing as the ranch expanded. Here the grass had been sown and cattle stood knee-deep in acres of clover, and there were even copses of trees that furnished them shade. At noon, many lay as if slain under the water oaks, shifting as the shade shifted, the ground appearing as a wall of flesh, heaving now and then, with a sudden rising at times.

Anson, pointing to a cow standing in a stuck pose in the shelter pasture, asked me, “Do you know what she's thinking about?” I didn't.

“She's got her mind on the baby inside her.” And then he asked, “Do you know how come a baby calf is growing inside her? How it got there?”

I shook my head no to the question, but the true answer was yes. After all I was thirteen, had driven cows to the bull on adjoining farms in Alabama, and though short of knowledge about animal obstetrics, I knew that much. I'd never witnessed the actual copulation, being ashamed to be a party to such knowledge and always hiding behind the barn until it was over. Farm boys might be woefully short of insight into human impregnation, but they were privy constantly to the ways of pigs and chickens, and copulation both bovine and equine. Yet there was mystery there, and I had thought and thought about it.

One day I asked, “When cows die do they go to heaven?”

He broke into a laugh and then checked himself. “That's a new one,” he admitted. “Never occurred to me whether they did or not. If they do, we've sent a lot of them there.”

“Do horses?”

Now Anson, whom I was beginning to think of as Dad-o all the time, was serious. His face was grave. “I hope so,” he said. “Why not? I hope my Blue is there when I get there. Or follows me.”

“Dogs?”

“That's a question. Do you want them to?”

“I do. I want my dog Jack that I lost to be there.”

This exchange of views with Dad-o was naturally related to Lurie within my hearing, with Dad-o adding, “Our boy thinks deep about things. He's got a head on him.”

I often questioned Anson about natural things, like why the wind was blowing all the time, at least a slight wafting breeze, when it didn't act like that in Alabama. He had explained to me that it had to do with the differences in the temperature of the air and the ground.

Ernest Roughton, bothered by this phenomenon, claimed it gave him a headache, and he said on several occasions, “Damn that headache wind.” But he got used to it, as did we all. There was no other choice.

How would the torrid days of summer be endured without it, though? The moving air became the natural order of things, and what you did notice was that at times it ceased, sometimes inexplicably, and you stopped and tried to make something of it.

Dad-o would say, “Come on, wind. Wake up and get moving.” And pretty soon it would.

So many questions to ask, so many answers to be gained. Why did ticks enjoy burrowing into one's skin?

I was still undergoing the daily tick hunt. It was the storming of my last citadel, the exposure of my entire body, of which I was so protective, so ashamed, but I had finally relented and had my shirt raised and spied under, my breeches stripped down, and my “little fixings” checked for these bearers of Rocky Mountain fever. Not much was known then by folk generally about this dreaded disease, except that the bite of an infected tick was as dangerous as a sidewinder rattlesnake. Though the Winters family didn't know of anybody firsthand who had suffered from this illness, there were tales aplenty about its high fever, its ravages, its ending in a frightful death.

In examining me for ticks, Lurie now limited herself to my head, running her hand through it, eyeing the scalp. And then, sensing of my neck and shoulders and my heaving chest—I always, at first, would begin to breathe rapidly and almost hyperventilate—she'd stop. “Calm down,” Dad-o would say. “We're just a-looking. We're not going to find anything. Just a precaution.” And he put a towel, or a cushion, whatever was handy, over my face. When I couldn't see what they were seeing, I relaxed.

There was a single comment made about my body that sticks in my mind. Not once but many times. Passing his hand over my rear end he would say, “That's the softest skin you'll ever feel. Just like a baby's. Press right here,” he'd say to Lurie. “Softest little but you'll ever touch.” And Lurie did on several occasions, but mostly she would agree with a “Yes.” This was the closest they came to breaking through the invisible protective shield a boy clothes himself in.

So what of bugs? Why did they exist and bother us so? Dad-o knew a great deal about them, and it was he who put it into my head the philosophical question of how life feeds on death. Which brings to mind a large boy teasing a smaller boy at the Buffalo Wallow School, accusing him of “eating dead
chicken.” When the smaller one denied it, tears streaming down his cheeks, his tormentor turned the knife in the wound by saying, “Ah, then you eat chicken alive! Run a chicken down and start biting it!”

During his time in college, Dad-o had heard a lot of talk about screwworms and their eradication. And he had to know about Johnson grass, which required drastic measures, and the abomination of chufas—sedge plants that, once they had captured a field, ran like wildfire across it, drinking up the moisture and nutrients in the ground. No known herbicide could stop them.