Chinaberry (8 page)

So Lurie drove to see Anson and his baby. As she steered up the street, she wondered if Anson would remember that day when she had been twelve and he had been seventeen, standing at the high fence between the elementary school and the high school, and she had first told him she loved him.

Lurie was never to recall the actual moment she noticed him for the first time. The bonding to him in her imagination had built gradually as she stood at the fence with other grade-school girls to watch the high school baseball team practice. Anson commanded third base and often ran within yards to retrieve a ball or catch a wild throw. She had on several occasions stayed on a few minutes after the other girls had left, and in time the chance to meet him came. A ball was batted the long way to the fence and lodged beneath the wire at her feet. Running for it, then stooping to retrieve it, Anson noticed her eyes upon him. He faced her and said, “You're a good backstop,” and then Lurie was emboldened. “I love you,” she said, as if it might be her last chance.

Anson raised up, ball in hand, and there was a smile of both pleasure and surprise on his face. “Ah,” he said, “go play with your dolls.” He had spoken it good-naturedly.

“You are my doll,” she said.

The ball fell out of Anson's glove. He picked it up. He blushed. Lurie never forgot that.

“Little girl, what's your name?” he asked. He would have placed her by her surname, the circuit judge being her father.

She told him, and he ran back to his base. Once there, he turned around and faced her again and stared. And this was the last direct look between them until she stood in the door of the room in the hospital where the child lay. She was now seventeen, and he was twenty-two.

Lurie stood a full moment upon the doorsill before Anson, whose eyes were full of the sleeping infant, chanced to look up. Other than the child, he was alone.

He looked at her as if startled. And then she hurried from the room, not knowing what else to do, not even understanding why she had come. She had not even looked upon the child's face.

Lurie did not look upon Little Johnnes's face until six years later as he lay in his casket. She had been in Waco when her sister called to tell her, and she had driven through the night to be present at the funeral.

But Anson did not attend this funeral either. Hearsay had it that he lay in the hospital bed where his child had died, heavily sedated. Others had it that when Little Johnnes died Anson grabbed him up and tried to run out of the building and had to be restrained. It was also current that Anson had gone stark, raving mad.

Irena and her husband were not there either, as they were vacationing in Corpus Christi and did not receive word.

The telephone wires hummed.

None of the tales about Anson were true. He had not gone crazy. He was not drugged to forget his child's death. He had not tried to run away with the boy's body. In truth, Anson did lie on the child's bed, with Bronson holding his hand. His mother had sat there, too, stroking his head until it was time for her to depart for the funeral. Later she said, “Of all my children and grandchildren, I suppose I loved him the most because I worried about him the most.”

Lurie told me that Little Johnnes lay pale and thin in his casket, seeming not flesh of this earth. He was a porcelain figurine, a whited sculpture. To view his face was to search for evidence of his parentage, and she recognized characteristics of both Anson and Melba. Anson was there in the shape of the head, the cheekbones, the chin; Melba was more elusively mirrored in the child's countenance, defying description. The light brown hair haloing his face was unmistakably the gift of Melba. The absence of Anson from the funeral had been large in the minds of the audience, as confidences were shared, whispered, ear to ear. Lurie overheard some of them: “Anson is out of his mind.” “They've had to knock him out with laudanum.” “He's strapped to a bed.”

The rest of the Winters clan was there, save the absent daughter too distant to make the journey in time and Bronson, who had stayed by Anson's bedside. The menfolk presented a solemn attitude; the womenfolk wept silently. They did not cry, it was assumed, so much for the child who was now beyond pain and whose future had been cloudy. Instead, they wept for Anson, who had suffered from the child's suffering, who was in physical touch with him almost every moment from birth, who had kept him alive with his will and breath for six years.

The child was laid in the ground beside the marble slab of his mother, who had been the first of the Texas Winters family to
die and thus the first one in this graveyard, which had been chosen because it was the closest one to the ranch.

At the Beech Ledge Cemetery, the only audible grief heard came from Ellafronia Cauldwell, who had been in the family's employ for two years, first as housekeeper and cook's helper, and was now referred to as “Papa's slave” by Anson, Jack, and Bronson. Her sole duty had evolved into the care and feeding and cajoling of Big Jack. The sons held their father in awe and treated their mother with kindly tolerance, as their difference in age had weakened the bonding that originally existed.

Ellafronia Cauldwell—Ella—had come out from Georgia in the vicinity of Macon, where the most pronounced and beautiful of Southern speech is cultivated, to visit the family of an aunt. She had stayed on, winding up at the big house when, as gossip had it, her aunt grew jealous of the marked attentions of her husband to the newcomer. According to Lurie, Ella was not pretty. Good-looking might have been the word used by teasing cowboys. Everybody liked her. Her patience with Big Jack as he grew petulant was phenomenal. When any disagreement arose over the operation of the Bent Y, Ella could be counted on to mollify him. So Ella's sniffing, heard above the murmurs of the brief graveside ceremony, came to Lurie's attention. Ella was Anson's age, trapped in a territory where most men were married by nineteen, almost certainly by twenty-one. She had verged on spinsterhood in Georgia and passed it in Texas. No other unmarried woman came in contact more frequently with Anson.

At the Beech Ledge Cemetery, there were no beech trees and never had been. Nor was there any ledge. The ground was flat as a table. The original settler of the land thereabout had named it for the one where his parents were buried. Several of his children had died in infancy, along with two wives, and eventually he had been interred there himself. There were trees shading
the graves—great, evergreen live oaks, which had preceded the founding of the cemetery and which gummed the grave stones at their almost secret blooming in spring and showered the ground with spent leaves throughout the year.

Before the lowering of the casket into the grave, the Winters family departed, as was the custom. Others, who had arrived by buggy, carriage, and horseback, lingered. Only two automobiles had tracked the half-wilderness road to the isolated cemetery: the Winterses' Hudson and Lurie's Overland.

Lurie's vehicle drew attention, particularly that of the women. Yet the envy or the disapproval was masked. There was many an “Oh!” and “Ah!” The wife of the preacher cried out, “How cunning!” Whatever that meant. But Lurie was not attending these social nuances concerning the car, which spoke more than was actually put into words.

Lurie was struck by a symbolic act following the end of the preacher's exhortation when he had said “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” and dropped a rose into the open grave. Jack had stepped forward and more pitched than dropped a small object into the hole. It happened unexpectedly, and the viewers who usually missed nothing construed it to be another blossom. It made a small thud as it struck the casket, or so Lurie believed. There was no further mention of this act among them. Later she was to ask Jack directly, and he said it was the gold safety pin their sister had sent to the shower party given Melba after they had announced their forthcoming wedding. It had been Little Johnnes's first toy. Pinned to his collar, it served as a teether and had been latched to his rompers or shirt pocket all his life, as it had remained a wonder to him.

Lurie lingered among the graves, as anxious as any for details not known to her. Since the age of twelve she had filed away in her mind every scrap of information concerning the Winters
family. Here, under the live oaks, she listened. The shaking of hands, the greetings, the comments on the dead child. Talk of the father took place, as it would have at any funeral.

Lurie learned little, for they knew little.

“Anson could diaper a baby as good as any woman, and as quick.”

“I was in a grocery store once, and in came Anson Winters, and he bought something, and he stuck his hand in a pocket to get some change, and out came a bunch of safety pins along with the money. Sad and sort of funny, too.”

“Reckon he washed the diapers?”

“Naw, he has help at that cotton farm. At the ranch, too. Women to help.”

“Yes, women. Mexican women, at the farm.”

“Hmm! I wonder!”

“By the time the child was two, he didn't need help. Didn't want help. He was mostly holding on to the child, or the child holding on to him, all hours of day and night. They were one.”

“Anson done a job my husband wouldn't've undertook. I praise him for it.”

“With his wife gone, his child dead, what now?”

“Some floozy will hook him.”

“Wouldn't you like to be the one?”

Smothered laughter.

News of what did follow in the months ahead, or in the next two and a half years ahead, was hard to come by. But even in such a place, where farms and ranches were miles apart—sometimes counties apart—there was always somebody who knew somebody who had gleaned a grain of it and passed it along, however flawed in passage.

The telephone system was subject to frequent breakdowns, was given occasionally to unaccountable roarings the human
voice could barely surmount. Should you ring up past eight o'clock in the evening, you got an operator out of bed (since the switchboards were located in homes), and not always grudgingly, as the pleasure of listening in made up for the disturbance. If you called a party, you could be assured of a dozen or so listeners. Gossip pieces together like scraps of a quilt.

Lurie refused to listen in, but her sister was not so abstemious.

More than a year and a half passed before Velvet collected the bits and pieces about Anson's first visit to the grave of his son. During this time, Lurie had lived at the home of her parents, who had retired to a house next door to her brother, the cotton broker. She was leaning toward spinsterhood, to the concern of her brother. Her brother's wife saw to it that her social life was not lacking, that eligible unmarried men and a widower or two knew of her existence, were invited to dinner, and to Sunday evening socials. Suitors are not hard to find when the girl has property, along with gentle rearing and beauty. One of them might have made his way into her heart had it not been for her memory of Anson. He stood between her and any other man. Moreover, Irena had married at last. And there was no news of any matching up with Ellafronia, as handy as that might have been.

Eventually, talk of Anson's being crazy died out, so talk of him petered out, too. Lurie was suddenly deprived of any certain knowledge of Anson. For some six months he had lived at the ranch, and then the word was he had returned to Chinaberry, making himself busy with the production of cotton. As therapy, it was assumed. The tales had it that he actually worked occasionally in the fields and got his hands dirty. All three of the Winters brothers had long since given up cowpunching. Hired hands herded the cattle.

To occupy the time, Lurie enrolled in practical nursing classes at an Amarillo (pronounced Amirilla in those parts) hospital. Her bent was toward the illnesses and care of children. The courses were general—physiology and nutrition. Next, as much a prank as anything else, she took a charm class taught evenings at a beauty parlor. Above all else she learned about “hair culture,” which was the care and feeding of the female scalp, as well as the many ways she could “put up” her shoulder-length hair, which was to me as corn silk in sunlight. Her sister-in-law had put her up to it, to enhance still further her opportunities toward matrimony.

The time was hard to endure, the distance impossible to bear. So she went home to her sister. She would have rented a house or lived in one she owned, but it was not socially feasible for a lady of her age to live alone. Nor was it considered safe. For a widow perhaps, but not for an unmarried twenty-seven-year-old. It had been fifteen years since she had stood at the schoolyard fence and told Anson, “You are my doll.”