Chinaberry (19 page)

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:

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.