Chinaberry (9 page)

Lurie and anson had dressed me like a toy cowboy. On my head was a small Stetson, on my feet, cowboy boots with sharp toes. My pants were store-bought, but the shirt was one Lurie had cut out and sewed to match Anson's.

The occasion for my outfit was a trip out to the ranch, where Anson was taking us that Sunday. When a job required his presence there most of the week, he usually spurned returning on Saturday or Sunday. Two months from now, during shipping season, he would have to be there seven days a week, so he cherished his weekends at home. But he wanted me to meet his parents, so he and Lurie had agreed to have Sunday supper at the main house.

Anson had been telling me about the ranch, the cows, the horses and their foals, the feeder calves, the cowboys. About the herd that grazed for miles and miles on a free range. We would see cowboys in action. He told me about Pop Cod. He talked somewhat of cotton farming, but there was nothing I needed to be told, as I had been in on the ground floor of the subject since birth.

“Is there a towerhouse with electric lights?” I asked.

“Naw, naw,” Anson said, and he laughed a little, cutting his eyes to Lurie, who smiled. “The house is just called the Towerhouse. On account of the man who built it.”

I was to learn of this man later, along with much more information.

I had heard many tales about everyone who lived at the ranch and was anxious to experience meeting them. There were Anson's parents, plus his brother Jack and Jack's three sons, who were always referred to as “the three Little Jacks.” Also Ellafronia Cauldwell, Bronson, the cook with the dim-witted son, the cowboys, and the helpers who might drop in at any hour and be fed at their appointed table.

Despite being told ahead of time that there was no tower at Towerhouse, unless I wanted to count the silo, I expected one as we turned down the drive. The Winters homestead sat atop a rise of ground that could be seen by keen eyes a full mile's distance, the spread of land about it as flat as a beaver's tail and planted in corn and millet. Still, this was no “big hill,” as Anson said, although I suppose it could be considered as such in a place as flat as East Texas. We had encountered no cotton since crossing into Robertson County. The distance from the main road to the house was accounted at two miles.

We stepped out of the car, and the sun hazed like a copper skillet. A light breeze stirred, as always.

We were met at the yard gate by Anson's mother, Jack, and the three Little Jacks. They stared at me and my toy cowboy getup. They were dressed well but not fancy.

We were chided for being late. Dinner awaited on the table, and after embracing her son and Lurie, Anson's mother—whom I had been instructed to call “Grandma”—put her hands on my shoulders and studied me lovingly. “So here's the boy I've been hearing brags about,” she exclaimed. “So this is the one.” She gave me a hug and a kiss and pushed me back, appraising me again. I resisted wiping away the damp spot on my cheek, which I wouldn't have hesitated to do back in Alabama.

Jack caught hold of my hand, and one of the Little Jacks pulled his father's hand loose and substituted his own. Everybody laughed at this.

“We all know who he reminds us of,” Grandma said. I didn't understand.

Anson picked me up, which pained me, as it usually did when we were in front of others. Lurie must have sensed my discomfort, because she touched his arm lightly. “Let him walk along with the three Little Jacks,” she said. So he did.

The moment we stepped onto the porch, I heard the grind of the ice cream freezer and smelled the mixed aromas familiar to Sunday dinners back home: fried chicken, dumplings, cured ham, gravy, smoking biscuits, green beans, potatoes, apple pie, pound cake, pickles, jams, and jellies. And most to my liking, there was the scent of sweet potato pie.

Having washed our hands at the water shelf on the back porch, we were led directly to the dining room and seated. Already at the table was Big Jack. He patted me on the head and said, “Good boy.” After that, he didn't more than glance my way. It turned out he had not been told about me. Later, I heard Anson whisper to Lurie, “No use telling Papa anything he might not be able to handle.”

I sat between Lurie and Anson. Anson served my plate, seeing to it that I got something of everything. Jack's wife, Nora, sat on one side of Grandpa, with Jack on the other. But wedged against Grandpa's chair was “Jacky Boy,” the middle of the three boys, who was Grandpa's favorite. Grandpa ate little but insisted on Jacky Boy's stuffing himself. Ellafronia flew up and down from her seat, to the kitchen and back with further dishes, checking to see that Grandpa actually ate something, which he wouldn't unless urged.

“You need to eat a bit more now, Big Jack,” Ellafronia said in her tender way.

“Just to smell dinner fills me up,” he replied.

The cook came to the dining room door and looked us over. The grinding of the ice cream cooler stopped a moment, and then the cook's son peeped in, too. He was nineteen, but he had the mind of a three-year-old. I had heard Anson talking about him before, his voice full of pity.

I ate mostly sweet potato pie, yet no one questioned my choice. And then there was the ice cream, a heaping mound in a bowl when I had little room left. And the cook appeared with a giant bowl of charlotte russe, which he called the “piece de resistance.” As badly as I wanted to partake, there was no room left in my belly.

There was an empty chair saved for Ernest Roughton. Work hands didn't usually eat with the family. They had their meals with any cowpuncher who showed up at a table on the screened porch. But since I was to be at dinner, he had been invited. Was his absence due to the class distinction he wasn't subject to during other times? Perhaps he didn't feel right in breaking bread with them only because I was to be there.

He did come later, ate on the porch, and managed to get me aside. Not an easy matter with Anson present, and I was keenly aware of Anson's monitoring me while I talked to Ernest.

Anson's explanation for Ernest's absence at the table was that horses and calves and pigs and milk cows don't know Sunday from any other day of the week. They have to be fed, watered, catered to, or milked or curried or combed. Fence posts don't wait until Monday to be uprooted. A horse is as apt to throw a shoe on the Sabbath as on any other day of the week. Flies don't delay until a second day of the week to blow a heifer's laceration,
so you have to be quick with the tar even when church beckons. Anson had read my dejection over missing Ernest. I was counting on seeing him. My homesickness was sometimes worn like a cloak and sometimes glimmered at the back of my mind, but it was always there, and I hardly ever saw Ernest or the Knuckleheads lately. I needed Alabama voices.

After the long dinner—it was fully two o'clock and the hottest part of one of the hottest days we'd had thus far—Jack and the three Little Jacks returned to their nearby house. When they left I heard Jack say they were going early so Grandpa could “try the little one on for size,” talking about me.

Once they had gone, there came my nap time. My eyelids were dropping when Anson caught me up and deposited me on a cot on a shady side porch. Naps were especially important on this day, as we had all grown up with the spoken notion that “Everybody with gumption takes a nap on Sunday.” Anson stayed a moment to pull off my boots and loosen my collar, to fan me with his hat until I slept, and he was back when I waked with a pan of water and towel to freshen my hands and face.

By the time I arose, Grandpa had been told something about me. I was placed on his lap, which seemed large enough for several my size. His great hands were covered with spots. The flesh of his face had been so long tanned by wind and sun that it seemed like leather. He was in his eighties.

“You like Texas?” he asked.

“Yessir,” I said.

“Better than Alabama?”

“Nawsir.”

Big Jack grinned. “Well, he's honest.” Then he said to me, “I was born in East Tennessee and raised in West Tennessee. Learned to stay off the skid road in the logging woods of British Columbia.” He furrowed his brow and gave me a warning, having
noted Anson's penchant for carrying me: “Walk on your own legs. Don't let that son of mine make a puppy dog of you.”

Grandma chimed in, defending Anson: “I want Anson to do what in his heart he needs to do. This boy is good for him.”

“I raised Anson, and I know him from his ears to his toenails,” the old man said, his wit and wisdom coming through. “Come stay here at the Towerhouse with us and you'll fare better. We'll neglect you a little.”

Ellafronia Cauldwell came into the room to say Ernest was having his dinner on the screened porch and would like to see me. Anson started to follow, but Lurie stayed him.

“Hey-o, Skybo!” Ernest greeted me with much cheer.

Seeing Ernest aroused an emotion I hadn't expected. Before taking the trip west, I had never exchanged words with him. The poolroom he managed back home was off limits to youth, besides being rated a den of iniquity where men smoked cigars, spoke cuss words, gambled with cards, and probably drank liquor. A fifth-grade classmate reported passing Ernest's place once and heard somebody, perhaps having miscued a ball, shout “Damn!” I always glanced in furtively on the way to school and never saw anything untoward. This was my father's one vice, shooting pool. He was said to be a “mean” player.

When I saw Ernest, the homesickness that had been packed away and unacknowledged inside of me arose like a ball in my throat, choking me. I could only manage a “Hey.” There came instantly to mind a stanza of the Alabama state song we used to sing in school, not even thinking about the words we knew so well by heart:

Ernest spoke up: “Aye, they're fattening you! How many pounds have you picked up?”

“Three,” I said. Other words were like a foam in my mouth. I wanted to ask when we were going home, and I could not. I wanted to go home, and yet I didn't want to leave Anson and Lurie—particularly Lurie. It was a paradox too great for a thirteen-year-old to surmount.

It turned out that my mother was writing me weekly, Ernest said, and my father had had an exchange of a couple of letters with Ernest, checking on me.

Papa had wanted to know when Ernest was bringing me home, insisting on a date. Ernest had replied that he was back dealing with horses, back to the satisfactory days when he worked at a livery stable. He wanted to consolidate himself in his new job before asking for leave for a quick trip. But he would return. Moreover, if anything, I was being too well looked after, he told my father. He assured my parents that I was the cynosure of all eyes in the Anson Winters family and that my every step was trailed by the old Indian, who never allowed me out of his sight.

The second letter from my father reminded Ernest that Chambers County schools opened in middle September. He didn't want me to miss a day. Ernest's reply was news to me. The Winterses would start me in a Robertson County school at about the same time. And he reminded my father of his several years of residing in Texas, of his longtime regret that he hadn't remained.

Much later I was to read that letter:

You wanted this son of yours to experience Texas, the reason you wanted him to come with me. He's
experiencing
it in a fashion you'd never guess. Let him have it for a few more weeks. The only trouble will be, as it was with you, he'll never be plumb happy in Alabama if he stays in Texas too long. I'll try to get him returned before that happens.

This was enough to mollify my father for a while. My mother was not happy about this, though. With all the children she already had to look after, and with more to come, she wanted them all where she could see them.

Anson was chafing to leave when I returned to the living room, and during my absence Grandma was trying to convince him to let me stay overnight. As I walked in she was saying, “You'll be back here tomorrow anyway. Let him stay so I can talk to him, get better acquainted. He hasn't seen the colts, seen the place, looked around.”

I just wanted to see the cowboys.

Grandma was hard to deny. Anson had denied her only once, when she had insisted on caring for Little Johnnes after the death of his mother. Anson believed he alone could keep the child alive. “Ah,” she was to tell me, referring to the baby as “it,” as people were apt to do. “How he strove with it, when its wind shut off! He'd work with it, pump its lungs up and down, thought he could keep it alive forever with his own breath. Break your heart to watch him.”

Anson relented, and he and Lurie drove away. We watched the Overland for a long time, until it became a speck and vanished into the horizon. Then Grandma said, “He'll be back.”

Ernest took me in hand. We visited the horses and their foals in the corral, the feeder calves, the tack room, where harnesses
and saddles were hanging. I saw one cowpuncher ride in, pitch his saddle in the backseat of a Ford, put a finger to the brim of his worn hat when he saw me in my little Stetson and boots, and then he saluted, “Hey-o, cowboy.”

Anson was to tell me this: “Cowhands think more of their saddles than they do of their wives. Think they'd leave them in the tack room? Some saddles are worth hundreds of dollars for all the silver filigree on them.”

As we walked by the bunkhouse, we spied an ancient man propped in a chair on the porch. “That's old Pop Cod,” Ernest whispered. This was the old cowboy I had heard so much about from Anson. “I'd introduce you, but he's had a sick spell. Just been out of bed a day or two.”