Chinaberry

by James Still

  So Lurie decided that my lungs should be checked, to put Anson's mind at ease. Undoubtedly the doctor knew Anson's case well, and he reported accordingly. Thumping my chest, listening with a stethoscope front and back, he summoned the diagnosis. “Best set of bellows you'll ever find. You could hire him out to a blacksmith,” the doctor said. “He'll be breathing when the rest of us are dead.”

  We were to meet again, the doctor and I.

  Next, a dentist had a look at my teeth. “There's a couple wisdom teeth aiming to come through or try to,” he said, peering in at my mouth again. “He might need me then.”

  I was never to require his services.

  Anson was breaking me in.

  If he had not gone for the day when I awaked, it was he who brought the glass of freestone water with a lump of ice in it, along with the pan of warm water with a washrag to clear the “sand” from my eyes and freshen my face and hands. Chinaberry had recently acquired a portable water fountain, replete with a five-gallon glass jug of freestone water, half-housed in an insulated box kept filled with ice. One had only to turn a tap to fill a glass. It was almost as good as Alabama water. After my ice water and my face washing, Anson picked me up, carrying me as easily as a pillow to the bathroom. The same exchange always occurred. “Heavy,” I said. “As chicken feathers,” he said.

  I still was not used to Anson's need to pick me up, to carry me in his arms as he had his son for six years. I came gradually to not mind, but it was awkward. Then I was taking all my cues from Lurie. She approved, but she must have harbored fears about what appeared to be an emotional bondage. I'd glance round at her, she would nod, and up my arms would go for me to be taken up. We took trips to the barn to admire the saddle horses’ beauty, to the cotton house, to the edge of the fields where the cotton picking progressed, out to the mailbox, which was a good quarter-mile walk, one way. I would have already “robbed” the mailbox, looking for a letter from Alabama. One generally arrived on Saturday or Monday, from my mother. Gloomy were my weekend prospects if Saturday was not the day.

  Ernest came over to Chinaberry in his Model T to check on me every week or so.

  One morning I was hidden behind one of the swaying chinaberry trees when they all stood together, looking out across the flat plains. No one knew I was there.

  “You are spoiling that boy rotten,” Ernest said.

  “What I'm trying to do,” Anson admitted. “I want him to like me. When he does go back to Alabama, I want him to be so dissatisfied they'll send him back.”

  “I don't know,” Ernest said. “He's the first boy after five daughters. You can guess how a man feels about his first son after five tries.”

  Turning away, Anson said, “I don't want to hear it. Something may work out.”

  “I doubt it,” Ernest said, not to raise false hopes.

  “The boy's father let him come off with you. Proves he can get by without him. He's got two younger brothers, he says.”

  “You don't understand his pappy. I know him to the bone,” Ernest said. “He let this boy come in his stead. He homesteaded himself out here in the 1890s, out near Killeen, and never got Texas out of his mind. This minute he's wearing a Stetson and cowboy boots. Visiting back in Alabama, the family lost a child, and the mother decided against returning to Texas.”

  Anson had heard this before from me, and he also knew of my father's profession. “We could use a veterinarian,” he said. “Give him about all the work he could handle at our ranch alone, and there's the Bolton ranch north of us, twice the size of the Bent Y. They'd give more than he could do.”

  “That's an idea,” Ernest said.

  I could have told them with the little wisdom a thirteen-year-old had gathered that this couldn't happen. Mama had told us often of her promise to my sister, before she died of scarlet fever at age five, that she would never leave her. She was as committed to staying near the Rock Springs graveyard as Anson Winters was tied to the Beech Ledge Cemetery.

  Still, Anson was determined to have me.

  Anson and Lurie had been married almost three years. I put my face against the chinaberry tree, wondering why they had no child of their own.

  The temperature hovered at ninety degrees during most of August, often rising to ninety-eight, and more than occasionally past one hundred for the hottest part of the day. We took many cooling baths. Anson and I favored the shower in the washhouse while Lurie soaked in the bathtub. Understanding the curious modesty of boys my age, Anson never entered the washhouse while I was there, and we stood together under the shower only when wearing our undershorts or the truncated bathing suits.

  Saturday afternoons I went with Anson to cool off at the horse pond, the smallest of the three ponds formed by a windmill pump, assisted by a gasoline engine when the wind failed to keep the five-hundred-gallon tank filled. Our bathing suits were made by Lurie, fashioned from a store-bought pattern, which decreed that only our heads, arms, and legs below the knee were showing. Later Lurie came upon a picture of folks on a California beach, which caused her to cut off the tops, freeing our arms and chests.

  Fans were everywhere at Chinaberry. At the foot of the beds, on bureaus, on the sideboard. Palmetto fans. Angelica and Rosetta fanned themselves with one hand and cooked with the other when the tasks allowed. In the swing, after supper, while dust settled about, I sat between Anson and Lurie. Anson's left arm embraced Lurie's shoulders while his right hand was engaged in keeping us fanned during the momentary lulls in the fairly constant breeze. Anson had explained that the wind caused the difference in temperature of earth and the air above it, the pause coming about when the temperature of both reached equality. He fanned us, never himself, keeping the air stirring. We would have had our baths, dressed in fresh clothes, and there would be the faint scent of violets about Lurie; Anson smelled of hand soap, and I emitted an odor of whatever fragrance Lurie saw fit to touch me with—Lilac Vegetal, and one day a week, Lucky Tiger. If I emitted fumes of Lucky Tiger, she had just given me a haircut. As this happened weekly, it was always a small clipping. Lurie eschewed face powders, out of deference to Anson's saying, “When I bite somebody, I want to taste raw meat.” He had three classifications for osculation: a kiss, a bite, and a smack.

  From Anson I received a couple of bites on the neck a day. Several smacks landed almost anywhere: cheek, forehead, nose. One night, in the swing, he informed me he'd been keeping count and that I owed him 283 smacks, and didn't I want to pay back 3 of them right now? That evening we had donned our sleeping garments. I was in my nightshirt, Lurie was in her lacy nightgown down to her ankles, and Anson in his pajamas. His pajama jacket was unbuttoned, so I reached over and touched my lips to his chest three times.

  He said nothing for a moment, then said, “There are other places.”

  On many such evenings, some of them moonlit, we sat thus, Anson telling us of events of the day, of the latest on the Knuckleheads, of the tales of Pop Cod, of the three Little Jacks, of how both Chinaberry and the Bent Y Ranch came about. Presently I would get sleepy. Anson would lift me into his lap and draw Lurie closer. Once he ascertained I was asleep, he would place me in Lurie's lap, and depending on how her hair was groomed for the day, unloose the plait or withdraw the hairpins and combs, put them in his shirt or pajama pockets, or hang them on the loops of the porch-swing chains. I had not always succumbed to slumber when this last happened.

  For those hot nights, we slept on fresh sheets and pillowcases, our heads on pillows sweetened by the sun. The nightshirts first made for me had been replaced by pajamas modeled on Anson's. Not long after, they noticed that for several nights I had waked dripping with perspiration, pajamas sweated through. Despite her training as a nurse, it did not occur to Lurie to check my temperature. Then she remembered that my regular naps were lasting the afternoon through. I lay abed in the morning even after my face and hands had been washed. So something was wrong with me.

  Lurie finally put a thermometer in my mouth on a Saturday morning. It
read 102 degrees. After cooling the instrument and trying again, she got the same reading. The thermometer was then inserted anally. I was 102 at both ends. Anson was alarmed.

  The grippe was unlikely in hot weather, but there were typhoid and dengue fever to consider, not to mention Rocky Mountain spotted fever. During all their searches, they'd never discovered a tick on me. Dengue was common in low-lying East Texas, in swampy areas of the coast, and had occurred when visitors brought it with them from Mississippi and Louisiana. There hadn't been a typhoid case in Inman or Robertson counties for five years. Who could say what I might have picked up sleeping on lumber piles, in churchyards, and on damp ground while crossing from Alabama? Or brought with me from home?

  Everything went by the boards. Anson called the doctor's office in Bluewater to be certain he was in and to announce we were on our way. He called the Towerhouse and ordered that Ernest be found wherever he might be and sent to meet us at the office. If it was not known where Ernest was at the moment, all available hands were to search for him. Lurie undressed me and placed me in the tub for a quick bath. Hurriedly clothed, Anson grabbed me up, without socks or shoes, and fairly ran to the Overland car. My feet would not touch the ground that whole day. I was placed in Lurie's lap, and the car sprang out of the yard. Before we reached the mailbox, Lurie realized that Anson was in no condition to drive. She had him pull off, and they exchanged places. Anson buried his face against my neck and kept murmuring, “You'll be all right. You'll be all right.”

  They had not far to seek Ernest. He had been in the horse barn grooming a mare. He, Anson's mother, and Bronson were sitting in the waiting room when we arrived. For Ernest to witness my being carried was embarrassment enough, and when the doctor summoned Anson into his office for prior consultation, he plunked me into Ernest's lap. I would have been willing to die on the spot rather than this.

  “Feeling bad, Skybo?” Ernest asked, feigning not to be worried. I shut my eyes, trying to imagine myself elsewhere. I could not. How Cadillac and Rance would laugh at this scene. As if he read my mind, Ernest said, “We won't let the Knuckleheads in on this, will we?”

  I nodded with gratitude.

  The doctor would see me alone. Anson left the examining room with protests, but he left.

  The doctor knew of me already. Anything that happened at Chinaberry, or to do with the Winters family, became common knowledge. My temperature had retreated to 100 degrees.

  “Sore here?” he asked, pressing my stomach.

  No.

  My knee jerk was normal.

  “Do you want to go home?” he asked.

  I didn't reply. Instead, tears flooded my eyes. The doctor handed me a paper handkerchief to dry them before he opened the door to admit Anson. I was to return the next day with a sample of feces.

  I was brought back the following day. The feces were examined, and a diagnosis was made. “Worm fever,” the doctor said. “Suffering from Oxyuris vermicularis. That means pinworms.”

  What followed was that Rosetta's and Angelica's families had to provide feces samples, too, as well as Lurie and Anson. So did Ernest and the Knuckleheads. The entire Chinaberry community. I was the only victim.

  “Alabama worms, then,” the doctor pronounced. “He brought them with him.”

  On the ride home the next day, Anson hummed a little joyous song that I did not recognize.

  During my sickness, I regressed. Hardheaded as I was, with a mind of my own, I was unused to being made much of, and I came to enjoy it. I was unused to caresses, lifting, being carried about. I let Anson spoon-feed me when he believed I should eat a bit more, after all. I allowed them to dress and undress me. They constantly checked my forehead to see if I was cold or hot. Even after I got better, I still regressed.

  I got to the point that I expected to go to sleep nightly in his lap, in a rocking chair, or sitting on the side of the bed, or in the porch swing. On a few oppressively hot nights when they slept on a mattress on the screened porch, I lay beside Anson. For a few minutes he would switch me over him to the middle, and when I turned toward Lurie, who smelled of violets, I laid my head on her breast. More than once he said, “I'm getting jealous,” and returned me to the other side.

  When we were in their room, I sometimes had to get up to relieve myself. I stumbled over their brass bed, and he'd awake to make sure I was all right. When I returned, I'd put my hand on his pillow to let him know I was back, and he'd tuck me in beside him and say, “Is the baby lonesome?” On waking, I'd be back in my own bed.

  “This boy's papa is giving me the devil about bringing him home to go to school,” Ernest told Anson.

  There was never any question about my attending; the problem was where. Some six miles to the east was a county-supported secondary school at a hamlet called Veasey, with some eighty enrolled, all the children of cotton growers. A third of these boarded in town during the week, as the distance was too great for walking and the farmers had no spare horses for transportation. Lurie or Blunt could drive me to and fro.

  The Veasey School was not to Anson's liking. The teachers were daughters of the area who'd had a bit of training at one of the colleges and were mostly old maiden aunts. Deprived by their rural upbringing, they imposed their deprivation upon the students, and Anson would not have that for me.

  There was another choice—Buffalo Wallow. The Wallow School was just across the Robertson County line, fully nine miles on the road to the Bent Y Ranch, and two miles farther on a side road, long abandoned by the county in upkeep and abandoned of support by the Board of Education when the number of students lowered to eight. They were now up to eleven. Ernest wrote to my father that I was attending the best school in the State of Texas and that Alabama could not boast its like.

  Surprisingly enough, Ernest may have been right. The ranchers in the area were all of some means, so they hired their own teacher, a man, and one who met every expectation. He was a young married professor with two crawling children and was very devoted to his calling. They kept his salary a whet above any other, kept a cow fresh in milk in his lot, a beef to slaughter, a pig in his pen, and any surpluses from their fields and gardens were dumped at his gate. Save for the isolation, lack of telephone, and a road fairly impassable after a rain, what other was there to wish for? The young professor was even given a car—a Reo—which was nearing the end of its mechanical life and sounded like a threshing machine.

  The Buffalo Wallow School was distant and inconvenient, yet it had the advantage of Anson's delivering me on his way to the ranch and picking me up in the afternoon. This, however, could last only until the fall roundup, when the daylight shortened and Anson's working hours almost doubled. Blunt and Lurie would have to take up the chore when that occurred.

  The schoolhouse, newly painted and reshingled, stood in a slight depression that had been a wallowing ground from ancient times for buffalo. Otherwise, the land stretched as far as the eye could see, flat as a carpenter's level. The professor's domicile sat nearby. There was nothing between it and the horizon. The world seemed three-quarters sky. The professor's little home and the schoolhouse and the live oaks that sheltered it from the sun were all there was.

  As the single new student, I brought the enrollment up to a dozen, and I was the only one to arrive by car. The other eleven came on horseback. Often a couple at a time came on horseback, and sometimes a pony supported three on its back. This school was like no other in the county, I was told. The seats were new, without a scratch or a carving. There were freestanding charts and maps, and the blackboards were at three levels. The walls were decorated with framed pictures of George Washington and the Alamo, along with the students’ drawings and papers that had received good marks. When I asked Anson what this subscription school cost for a student, he said, “Not enough—worth more than it's costing.” And then, “The teacher is the main thing.”

  Both Anson and Lurie took me that first day. When Professor Lewis asked my name to enroll me, Anson spoke up and said, “
Anson.”

  “Anson, Junior?” the professor asked.

  “You can list him so,” Anson answered.

  So I had lost my name. Besides, nobody except Ernest had spoken it since I'd left Alabama. The Knuckleheads had created a variety of nicknames on the way out, the most frequent being “Short Stuff” and “Little Doc.”

  The professor had no need to ask, as news of my presence had penetrated to the farthest ends of the county. Even the children knew of me, and they smiled at first when my odd Alabama brogue reached their ears. Although all of their grandfathers had brought their ways of speaking from different areas of the country, their speech had now melded to the uniform pattern for Robertson County, Texas.

  What grade had I completed at school, I was asked. The fifth, was my reply. Judging by my size, the teacher doubted it, but he would give me a try. And so he was to do. I was above my grade in reading skills, below it in arithmetic. This last would be remedied, both by his ministrations and by Anson's.

  When I was to sign my name on a lesson, I hesitated. My pencil was poised, but the professor must have read the turmoil in my head and said, “Just write it.” I did. I signed it “Anson, Jr.”

  When this paper was shown to Anson by Lurie, he smiled, and great tears gathered in his eyes. He picked me up and walked up and down the hall several times.

  In the Buffalo Wallow School that year, three students were beginners, one was in the eighth grade, the others scattered between. I was alone in the sixth. The professor sat beside me or stood beside me at the blackboard to hear my recitation or correct my figuring. For an hour a day, he taught us all together in history and geography, his instructions fitting both the young and the older. When I recited, the others were all eyes and ears. I remained a curiosity.