Chinaberry (13 page)

A day came when Anson was slated to pick me up on the way home. He left word with Ellafronia at the Towerhouse to telephone Lurie at Chinaberry and have Blunt go for me after school instead. The lines were down over part of the route, and the Bluewater exchange agreed to forward the message through a second exchange, bypassing the affected area. The message didn't arrive, and Lurie was surprised at dusk when Anson drove up without me. Without getting out of the Hudson, Anson turned and raced back toward Buffalo Wallow.

When school had turned out at three-thirty, the professor took me home with him. His wife began preparing supper as soon as he turned up to watch after the two babies. The crawlers, if not twins, were within a year of each other, and they scooted over the floor like crawfish in a pond. As the afternoon faded and nobody came for me, I refused all entreaties to eat supper. A glass of milk and cookies were set before me anyhow, yet I declined. With dusk settling over the plains, I went into the yard and hung on the gate. Dark was fully accomplished when the headlights of the Hudson appeared, like two great eyes approaching. I did not run to meet Anson when he drew up. I let him come to me, to pull me loose from the gate. He saw instantly that I was swollen up with injury.

“Sorry, son,” he said. “There was a mix-up.”

I did not relent.

Anson did not pick me up. Holding my arm, he propelled me toward the house, where the Lewis family awaited. Walking into the lamp-lit room, he made his apologies for his tardiness, and
noticing the two babies, he held his arms out to them. One came to him readily, but the other refused. I had never seen him touch a child, even Jack's youngest. Lurie had told me that in the days of his early grief, more than one child had been offered to him to fondle, and his reply had always been, “It doesn't belong to me.”

Anson poked the baby's dimples and plucked his chin. Something rose inside me, from my stomach to my chest, my neglect forgotten. I was jealous.

“You've got two babies here,” Anson said. “You don't need both, so I'll take this one.”

The Lewises smiled at the joke.

Standing behind Anson I threw my arms around his legs impulsively. The tears came.

Anson restored the baby to the parents, picked me up, and started toward the car.

“Things get out of control once in a while,” Anson told me, as we made our way to the car beneath the starry blue sky of evening. “Nobody's fault. My life has a record of them.”

“All of the old heads in this territory came from somewhere else,” Anson told me. “Papa came from Tennessee, and he remembers a little about living earlier than that as a child in North Carolina. Mostly he says he recalls his mother dressing him in shirttails. He remembers the plow horse named Bess and his father scratching out ‘Oh! Susanna' on his fiddle.”

Anson's brother Jack was such a great admirer of his father that, except for the interposition of his wife, all his children would have been named Jack in some combination. In the event, his second son was, and his three boys were nicknamed Little Jack, Jacky Boy, and Baby Jack.

In the wide neighborhood, this was something of a joke, and the considerable landholdings of the Winters family were referred to as Jack Country. I was not wholly to escape.

While Grandma was the first to call me Little Anson, Anson himself, perhaps to please his father, perhaps as a nod to tradition, referred to me sometimes as “My Jack.” While this may be confusing to an outsider, everyone inside the family knew without explanation who was being talked about.

What I was to learn about this country came to me in bits and pieces, from various sources, beginning from my earliest memories. Not only had my father spent three years farming near Killeen, Texas, but two of my uncles had followed, on hearing
about the rich earth where cotton virtually jumped out of the ground. And my Aunt Ada, just turned sixteen, had eloped with a widower and headed west, never to return, even for a visit, until the year of Grandpa's death, 1925. And as a coincidence, her sister—who was actually named Texas—followed.

The Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge
had not a word to say about the blacklands of the state known as the Cotton Belt. How would it, as it was published in 1851 and was probably a quarter of a century in the making? A child could not know this: That buffalo and Indians possessed the black strip of earth, beginning just below Oklahoma Territory and running south for some four hundred miles past San Antonio, at its greatest width seventy-five miles, at its most narrow, twenty. In the whole of America, there was no other such fertile landmass, save smaller strips in Alabama and Mississippi. Black dirt, sticky as glue when wet, cracking like a broken windowpane when dry. Expandable clay.

Chambers County, in eastern Alabama, was north of this geological strip. There the land yielded, when supplemented with guano, at best a bale to the acre, at average, half a bale. Thus, the hearsay that Texas yielded two bales to the acre was a magnet to a generation of farmers, beginning in the years following the Civil War and extending well into the twentieth century.

At the time my source of wisdom,
The Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge
, was being formulated, and prior to it, the blacklands were hunting grounds of the various tribes of Indians: the Arikara, the Pawnee, the Comanche, the Caddo. Historians have stated that the Caddo tribe—unlike the others roaming the plains—were a settled people, living in villages, cultivating their corn and beans and pumpkins.

In telling me his family's history, Anson stuck mostly to episodes of tension, the year when men died of typhoid, untended by physicians on their isolated farms and ranches. The summer
he and his brother suffered a bout of dengue fever. The drought year. Tornadoes. Robertson County was referred to in the newspapers as Cyclone Alley. Most homes had some form of outdoor cellar the people repaired to when they deemed it necessary. We had one in Alabama called the flower pit. House and porch plants were placed there in winter below the frost line. The mention of cyclones troubled me. I had experienced one a couple years before and was lucky to be alive. If a black cloud appeared on the horizon, I became fearful. I had created a prayer that I uttered to myself over and over when a peal of thunder disturbed the sky: “Lord, preserve me…preserve me…preserve me.”

If Anson told me how his father came by a section of Robertson County land, I have forgotten. I have forgotten much of what he told me in evenings in the swing, on trips I took with him, or perhaps it is still recorded in the tissues of my brain, awaiting some code word to bring it forth. I seem to remember more than most, and I have always been a good listener. “All ears,” my mother said. When I was born, my mother thought my ears stuck out a bit farther than necessary. I had to wear a band about my head until my ears assumed an acceptable position.

A man by the name of Johnnes Tower had—one way or another, some thought legal—come by a sizable tract of land in Robertson County only eleven miles from Chinaberry. He was in the process of trying to acquire more to start up a ranch. Robertson County was where the geological miracle of black dirt ended, visibly, if you went by the green growing a half mile beyond Towerhouse, where fields of corn and millet and gardens flourished. Within a space of three hundred yards, scrubland began, the ground capable of supporting only cattle, and only then if they were kept on the move.

Another oddity, if not a miracle, was that Anson—Johnnes Anson Winters—was named for this man, not for Big Jack.

Grandma undoubtedly had a hand in the naming, to honor the man to whom they owed so much. Anson was her maiden name. She claimed Anson, the first governor of the Republic of Texas, as a forebear, though the line of kinship was not readily traceable.

A day came when Johnnes Tower found it necessary to leave the country suddenly, overnight. A common thing in those unsettled days. He was a loner. No family, no relatives anybody knew about, no indication of where he had come from originally. But where there is money, even if secretly held, the news of it will get out. There being no established bank around, Johnnes Tower knew Big Jack had the gold certificates gained from the sale of the farm in West Tennessee hidden behind a loose plank in the floor. At that time, Big Jack had not married Maryellen Anson; he was batching with Bronson, his seventeen-year-old foster son, and raising cotton at Chinaberry.

It was a cliché situation—a man had killed another, or wronged someone grievously, and felt it wise to leave the area until anger cooled or time healed. There is probably not a county or a town in the State of Texas where this had not occurred, in some, more than once. Disappearances, while infrequent, were not a wonder. A recent migrant would often be stricken with yearning for Georgia, the hills of Kentucky, or the meadows of Dan in Virginia, and would strike out without a word.

Johnnes Tower arrived at Chinaberry past midnight on horseback, and he had with him a court clerk bearing the seal of Texas, empowered to make deeds. When it became evident Big Jack did not have money enough to purchase the whole of Tower's land, a deal was struck, to wit: Big Jack would be deeded half, the land on the east; the western half would be his effective ten years hence if Tower did not return to claim it.

Tower imposed a condition. He had a squatter, a Comanche. He was the only Indian known to be living in the blacklands.

Most people had never seen one, the last of them being driven out or resettled in Oklahoma long ago. This Comanche was called Wounded Deer, and he had with him a grandson some twenty years of age. The aged Comanche had no command of English, but his grandson, who called himself Little Wounded Bear and came to be known as Blunt, had in some way learned the language. The old Indian had said, “I have come here to die. My father died here, and I will follow him.” And then, mysteriously: “I am my father.”

In later years, Blunt had told Big Jack about the song his grandfather sang:

Tower's request was that this aged Indian be allowed to accomplish his days on the ranch and that Big Jack take the young buck into his employ. Tower rode off into the night, followed by the clerk, and was never seen or heard of again. During the ten years when Big Jack's hold on the ranch was tenuous at best, considering he had paid out his last dollar, Big Jack lived part-time at Chinaberry and part-time at the ranch, gradually buying stock and starting a herd, working hand in hand with Bronson. They could hardly say themselves how they had managed. They hired help as needed or when they could afford it. Big Jack eventually married Maryellen and fathered a daughter and two sons. After ten years had passed, he renamed the ranch, calling it the Bent Y, even though the house was still referred to as Towerhouse.

Blunt had indicated one day that he would take a journey to his people and would be gone from the dark of the moon to the full. When he returned, he brought a wife and two children
with him. They spoke both English and Spanish. One child was José, who now had children of his own—a godsend to a family in need of cotton pickers. The mother had given her surname as Martinez. To register to vote, Little Wounded Bear became Blunt Martinez—borrowing his wife's surname.

Blunt was already an old man when Anson and Jack were children. Or so it appeared. From year to year, he seemed not to grow any older. This man, with skin like the leather he worked into harnesses, saddle, and shoes, seemed ageless, impervious to change. He could tell you he was born in Arizona the year of the long winter, the year the Great Spirit hid the buffalo and members of the tribe died of starvation, including his mother and brother. His father had walked out into a blizzard in search of food and never returned. A few members of the tribe had survived by boiling buffalo robes for nutrients. When that was, he could not say. Little Wounded Bear, Blunt, must have been nearing Big Jack's age. How his great-grandfather happened to die in what was now Robertson County, he had no knowledge.

Blunt and his Mexican wife had children, and the children in their late teens went away. Two sons left, to where could not be ascertained, for, as Anson said, “Never ask an Indian, even a part one, why, when, or wherefore.” They later returned with Spanish-speaking wives—Angelica and Rosetta—and began to work for Anson.

As the cattle herd increased in size at the Bent Y, Blunt became more and more in charge of the cotton crops at Chinaberry. Yet by the time Anson and Jack were out of rompers, José had taken over this duty, and the aging Blunt became watchdog at Chinaberry house.

This had come about in part because of the anxiety of Big Jack for children. His own younger brother, playing alone, had somehow gotten tangled in a harness and died of asphyxiation.
Had an adult been by, rescuing would have been simple. And as he and Bronson were so often away, there needed to be some reliable man on the place just in case of anything untoward happening.