Chinaberry (4 page)

“The boy can ride with me,” Anson suggested.

“He'll stay with us,” Ernest replied, true to his mandate from Papa to keep me under his eye.

We had hardly started off, keeping our distance from the Overland to avoid the raised dust, when Rance leaned in close and said, “Boy, have you got it
made
! That big shot was eating you up with his eyes.”

“You can put rocks in your cotton sack when you weigh in, and he'll let you by with it,” Cadillac added.

“We'll just work for this man,” Ernest said, soberly, “and have nothing else to do with him.”

“Tell you what,” Cad said, “let's pick enough white stuff to buy gas and then get the hell back to Alabama.”

“What I say,” agreed Rance. “I don't want to stay where the water tastes like horse piss.”

Both were beginning to have the feeling of being lost, which always precedes genuine homesickness.

“You'll harden up,” Ernest said. “We intend to be here awhile.” Ernest had in mind trying out Texas with a view to settling down. It was already in his head, I was later to learn, to take the three of us back home should any permanent job turn up. Not cotton picking, which was seasonal. Ernest had several talents. Back home in Alabama, he had been living with a daughter and her husband, since his wife had been dead some ten years. Of his unworthy son-in-law, he had remarked to my father, “When he comes in the front door, I go out the back.”

How Ernest happened to take me along was that my father had loaned him some money for expenses in exchange for my experiencing Texas. Papa had once lived in Texas, and it had never gotten out of his blood. He wanted me to know what it was like, and it wouldn't hurt that I would be making some money along the way.

Why Ernest allowed the Knuckleheads to accompany us was a mystery even to himself and often exclaimed about along the way. They too probably furnished a few dollars and offered some companionship in a strange territory. Ernest and Cadillac and Rance hadn't been anywhere much. I'd barely been out of Chambers County, Alabama. And here we were on a real adventure in this world made up of half sky.

We had long left the swamps and lush landscape of East Texas, and as we followed the Overland there was nothing the eye could hit up against. It was a land without features, flat as a pancake, cotton fields stretching to the earth's edge. Dust rose
in a red cloud behind us. How far we traveled I can't say. It took fully an hour, and in those days thirty-five miles an hour was rated as a fast clip. Whereas the main road went straight as a pencil, we were soon off it and on a narrower new road that meandered from farm to farm.

We had left all signs of habitation when a low, rambling homestead appeared ahead. A lane some couple hundred yards in length began where stood a mailbox bearing the legend
A. W. Winters
. I noted the mailbox. It was to be my link to home.

Back home, in August our Alabama yard was half-filled with petunias, brown-eyed Susans, and gaillardias. I was used to a place that possessed a cape jasmine by the step, which needed only a bucket of cold water thrown on it to sweeten the air. But here there were hitching posts, horse apples scattered about, two great live oaks shading a corner of the house, and a clump of chinaberry trees—which gave the farm its name, Chinaberry—sheltering a wooden contraption of a swing, and a single pomegranate tree hanging with fruit, surrounded by a protecting fence. This was horse country. Farmers owning vehicles other than wagons were few. But there were two trucks parked in a side yard, one a cattle truck with high siding bespeaking the prosperity of the farm. The Winters cotton farm was the size of any three properties thereabouts.

Anson drew up at the front steps, and Ernest pulled alongside. There on the porch stood Lucretia Winters, known as Lurie. She was somewhat surprised by her husband's return at midday, by now this being about one o'clock in the afternoon. As you could hear a car coming a mile away, she had been warned and had put on a fresh gingham dress and white shoes, and her corn-silk hair was loose about her shoulders. If flowers were missing in the yard, there was a human blossom on the porch.

Lurie: she was as beautiful as my mother.

Ernest gasped, the Knuckleheads stared, and from that moment, all of Ernest's defenses were down. He made no objection when Anson reached into the car beside him, lifted me out, and carried me to the porch.

“Sandspurs are rough on the feet,” he explained. I was suddenly aware of my rusty ankles and elbows, my smudged face, which hadn't been properly washed in a week, and my dirty ears, within which my mother would have said birds had been roosting.

Anson smelled of Lucky Tiger, the lotion barbershops used to dispense. I was embarrassed by being carried at my age, so I wriggled, thinking he might put me down. Cadillac and Rance would have a good laugh over this. But he didn't.

“Heavy,” I said.

“As a chicken feather,” Anson replied, and he gave his wife a peck on the cheek.

Later, Ernest remarked that had this been his woman he'd have shown more ardor.

Lurie had first laid eyes on Johnnes Anson Winters when she was twelve, and she had resolved to marry him or not marry at all. So she decided to wait for him. There was not a woman in the counties thereabouts, it was commented, who wouldn't abandon spouse and offspring should the opportunity have blossomed to be his second wife after the death of his first one. He was known, after all, as that cowboy who had carried his afflicted son in his arms from birth until his death at the age of six. The memory of Anson on horseback with a thumb in the baby's mouth for a pacifier stirred hearts.

Anson was the second son of Big Jack Winters, owner of the Bent Y Ranch in one county and half a section of cotton land in another adjoining. The cotton farm was tended by Mexican sharecroppers, with Anson as their casual overseer. Anson insisted on living on the old home place where his father had taken up land in the last years of the past century. This despite the distance he had to drive to the Towerhouse, the name he used to refer to the main house of the ranch and its operations. None of the three brothers were any longer cowboys, and they engaged in various activities along with the affairs of the Bent Y.

Anson's two brothers, Jack and Bronson, operated a farm each, with hired help, on land in the vicinity of the ranch. They
raised hay and millet and corn; they reared horses for the remuda; and they sold the surplus of forage and grain and saddle stock. The Bent Y was a family cooperative, shared by its members. No authority was wrested from Big Jack, only supplemented. Now in his eighties, a bit uncertain on his feet, his word was law, and nobody wished otherwise.

In earlier days, before he had left West Tennessee, where he had migrated from North Carolina, Big Jack Winters had married a widow some years his elder, who had not only a halfgrown son, Bronson, but also a sizable acreage of rich land bordering on the Mississippi River. In those pioneer days, women wore out like a cake of soap, and the widow was said to have died within a few months. At her passing, Big Jack sold the land for a sizable amount and headed west, Bronson in tow. He took up land in Texas under the Homestead Act and grew cotton until the windfall of the Towers Ranch came his way. He had the gold certificates in hand to make the deal when the odd chance presented itself. Anson told me his father had said those were the wild years, with claims and counterclaims, and a man's life was in constant danger. Every man carried a gun as commonly as he packed a pocketknife.

In due course, Big Jack married the woman I was to be coached to call grandma, a woman near half his age. Bronson's age. It was not easy to say “Grandma.” I had to squeeze it out at first. I already had one live grandma back home in Alabama, and the other one had passed on.

Because of the striking resemblance of Anson and Jack to their foster brother, Bronson, I long mistook him for their father. Neither had inherited the physical characteristics nor the brittle personality of Big Jack. Lest I mislead, I'll allow the readers to study on this at their leisure. The Winters family was the soul of honor, their morals Victorian.

“Anson's heart is pure,” Lurie told me frequently. I believe that she meant he was vulnerable. She could never forget that she had been his third choice. There had been his first wife, of course. And there was the possibility of a liaison after the death of the first wife, which haunted her.

Anson had married a childhood sweetheart after two years of college in Austin indulging in agricultural training. There had been some delay in his betrothal because he had loved two sisters and had trouble choosing between them. He was twenty-four years old.

The sisters were not twins although they appeared to be, beauties the both, dressing in identical gowns and flowered hats with veils when they appeared in public, and the pride of their father. Since they were raised in town, one would suspect they knew little firsthand of the vicissitudes faced by women living on the ranches and farms around them. The sisters were from a prosperous family who dealt in hardware. Their father had migrated from Mississippi, as their soft voices and dropped
r
's attested. Surnamed O'Kelly, the family had retained the
O
commonly dropped by most of Irish descent.

Anson's dilemma was resolved somewhat when the younger sister, Irena, began to date a clerk in her father's store. It was assumed that she had bowed in favor of her older sister, not willingly but at her father's request. Yet she did not marry the clerk or any other of the young men who paid her court for several years. And as much as Anson cherished his marriage to Melba, he did not forget Irena.

The marriage was short-lived. Melba died of childbed fever almost to the day of their first wedding anniversary. The child's breathing problems, during which he sometimes stopped breathing altogether, could only be overcome by the manual pumping of his lungs and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which
Anson would trust to no one else. The child, called Johnnes for his father's seldom-used first name, survived just beyond his sixth birthday.

From the day of Little Johnnes's birth, Anson no longer rode the range with his brothers. A hand was hired in his stead, and from then on Big Jack's ranch was no longer wholly a family affair. The three sons, along with their father, had developed a cattle spread from an acreage the four of them could handle in its every aspect until the acquisition of more pasture, which spread until it bordered on free range. This became too much. The operation was so large that it required employing a crew of cowboys, who spelled each other on a regular basis. Bronson and Jack soon gave up their chaps and spurs and began to develop the farms that were to consume most of their attention. The brothers met at the Towerhouse most days, heard Big Jack out, had his pronouncements translated into more practical terms by their mother, and saw to the numerous chores. To Jack fell the job of looking after the family's other business interests, including an ice-making plant in one of the towns, a feed-and-grain store, and a partnership or a large share of stocks in a bank. They also had a seasonal fertilizer operation devoted to the grinding, sacking, and distributing of phosphate, which arrived unprocessed in open railroad cars. All else was given up during cattle-shipping season.

All three brothers lived near the Towerhouse until Melba's death, upon which Anson returned to the farmstead of his birth, Chinaberry, and was undoubtedly assisted in caring for Little Johnnes by the Mexican families operating the cotton farm. Anson drove to the ranch weekdays with the baby propped on the seat beside him, and later, as he moved about mounted, the baby sat in his arms. During the first years his saddlebags were stuffed with diapers.

The countryside saw much of him, at a distance, during the six years of Little Johnnes's life, and hardly saw him at all in the years following the child's death. It was said he was even taking a hand in the cultivation of the cotton, which went against the local wisdom: “Once a cowboy, never a plowboy.” But hard work is helpful in overcoming sorrow.

Although the rural telephone system was subject to frequent breakdowns, country wives kept fairly good tabs over a large area of acquaintance. But in Anson's case, little was known or could be known. His brother Jack took over the chores that involved visits to towns or any public appearances and did not relinquish them until Anson married again. On the subject of Anson, the family was mute, and they probably assumed he had had a nervous breakdown.

Lurie told me later what had happened, so far as she could find out, because she wanted me to understand Anson and not to fear him. However, we can never get plumb to the bottom of anybody, not all the way down to what is dark and hidden and cannot bear the light of recognition.

I did not understand, being only thirteen and of little experience. But I was never afraid of him. Only overawed.

And I was awed by Lurie. Beautiful Lurie. Lucretia Jeffreys, she had been. From childhood her schoolmates and townspeople called her Lurie, but she was never addressed as such by her parents or brother or sister. In Henderson, Kentucky, where both her parents were born and married, the Jeffreys were said to have some social pretensions. Bluewater, Texas, where they moved after the birth of their son, was not the place to practice them. A frontier town not too long freed from the scourge of Indian raids, Bluewater was a place where the bones of buffaloes lay whitening in the sun, where everybody came from
somewhere else. The land offices were matched in number only by the saloons. Land titles were in disarray, and the disputes were sometimes settled with a gun.