Looking back to my time at Chinaberry, I can now understand that Lurie was both delighted and concerned by my unexpected appearance in their midst. Concerned that I could only be temporary, that Anson's involvement with another child might be too great, only to suffer loss again. She was to tell me in due course, and at a moment of bitterness, that we were both substitutes. She was the substitute for his dead wife and maybe even for Irena, the sister whom he would have married. I was the substitute for the lost son, of course, the son who had been more than an offspring, who for six years had been pressed against him, or, when he needed both hands for a task, who would circle arms about his neck, to whom Anson would say, softly, “Hold on, baby. Hold on.”
For a long while she had believed that when he said “Hold on” in the middle of the night he was asleep. She learned from his reaching for what was not there and from his sitting up that it wasn't a dream. As often as twice a week, he rose up in the night and slipped on his moccasins and walked outside. The act of putting on the moccasins proved he was not sleepwalking. One moonlit night, from the doorway, she watched him in his nocturnal wandering, around the house, out to the fields, down the lane to the mailbox. Once he was gone fully two hours, having climbed on his saddle horse bareback and ridden off into the pasture.
When I came to live at Chinaberry, he was to go into the night only once more. But he did rise up in bed the second night of my stay and listen. I was asleep on the trundle bed in the adjoining room, where he had sat beside me until I slept, told me good night three times, and finally said over and over like an incantation, “Sleepy sleep, sleepy sleep.” At home I slept alone, and here I would have succumbed to slumber quicker had he not been there.
That night Anson had risen up in bed, and when Lurie brought herself to inquire, “What's the matter?” he had said, “I can't hear the baby breathing.”
“Go to him,” Lurie said, and he did.
Unknown to me, he placed a hand on my chest until he was satisfied my breathing was regular.
The next day my trundle bed was rolled into their bedroom, where they could keep better tabs. The room was not especially large, with their brass bed in one corner and my trundle in the other. I had only to call, should I need him, he said.
It came about that I was to address Anson as “Dad-o.” This was what the three Little Jacks called their father. I had dismissed “Papa,” which had been suggested. I had a papa back in Alabama. There could be no other.
I remember the first time I called him this, on a morning when he brought the pan of water and the washcloth for the morning's ablutions. This had been a busy week, and we had seen little of him. As I was just coming to consciousness from sleep, lingering somewhere in a dream world, Anson had leaned over me and asked, “Do you know me?”
I said, apparently without hesitation, “You're Dad-o.” This had pleased him to no end, according to Lurie. As I had come to represent a phantom Johnnes, Anson had become a father image, a stay against the homesickness that often haunted me. To my mind he even began to look like Papa: the sandy hair, the gray-blue eyes, the same set of jaw. When I sat on Anson's lap, I could imagine I was sitting on my father's, which I never recollect doing. My brother, who had taken my short-lived place as the baby, was in my own Papa's lap, in a place rightly mine. My mother and sisters nuzzled at my little brother, and I was assigned to adulthood at age two. I bore no resentment outwardly, but it must have been there inwardly. A neglected child was being belatedly rewarded. Given time, nature asserts itself, exacts its revenge.
In the case of Lurie, she never took on a maternal image in my mind. Beautiful, warmhearted, she took me into her confidence. I was kept fairly contented at Chinaberry because of her presence and ministrations. When she pressed me to her bosom, something stirred in my heart. It was that biologically unexplainable term—love.
I might even have grown a smidgen jealous of Anson. One day he came home from work and embraced me only hurriedly, moving on to her, whom he did not release from his embrace.
“Wait,” she said. “Later.”
But he wasn't about to let go of her. “I can't wait,” he said. Then he turned to me and said, “Go see what Blunt's doing.”
What did a thirteen-year-old in those days know? Not much. But I half-knew what they were about to do. I ran off the porch to the rear of the house, where Blunt sat working with his awls on a harness. Blunt saw my dolesome face, so he dropped his handwork, picked up a baseball nearby, and threw it to me. I let it fall. Blunt made no further effort.
When Anson came out to me, I was swelled up with resentment.
“Look at me,” he pleaded, but I wouldn't.
He pressed me against him, nibbled on my chin and my ears. “Cry a little, it will help,” he said.
Here was the politics of rejection. He struck a bargain with me, and he kept it. He promised if I would forgive him he'd never send me away again. And—the bonus—he would stay with me that night, all night. I submitted, and then the tears came. Homesickness overwhelmed me. I might have asked him then, while he was vulnerable, about this big thing that was in my head.
But I waited until night, while we were in bed, after the mantle lamp had been blown out. When he asked me, as he did daily, “Are you still my baby boy?” I did not answer “Yes, sir,” as I had been coached by Lurie to do. Not right away. I hesitated, finally saying, “Uh huh,” which had a degree of disrespect in it. Then, I said, “Dad-o?”
“Yes, baby,” he said. In speaking to Lurie, Anson referred to me as “the baby.” To others he referred to me as “the little man” or “the boy.”
I couldn't get the words clear of my teeth. While I knew he would do anything within reason for me, my request couldn't come forth for a moment. Finally, it came out with a rush, and to fortify my request, I locked my arms about his neck. “Take me home,” I said, and saying it came hard. What I had already envisaged was that he and Lurie would drive me back to Alabama in the Hudson, and after a few days they'd decide to stay there with me and my family. Either that or my family would go back with us. As my parents had agreed to almost everything I had proposed in my life, including the unprecedented trip to Texas of a thirteen-year-old in company of a friend, I could not imagine they'd insist that I stay in Alabama. Anson had only to ask, I thought. Nobody ever denied Anson anything.
Anson did not reply for a long while. He alternately pushed me away from him and embraced me tighter. Pressing his mouth to my ear, he said, “My little man…my little Anson…my baby boy—you're already home.”
From the night when Anson had snipped off my hanging toenail, my feet had been the subject of inspection at bedtime. Nothing was going to make them lose their brownness. From May first until first frost, no country boy in Alabama wore shoes except on Church Sunday, which was one day out of the month.
My skin was also always attended to by Lurie, using both the arts of medicine and her beauty training. My ankles and heels were rubbed with cold cream, as were my elbows. The red spots caused by mosquitoes were touched with turpentine.
Then there were my haircuts. Anson always stood by to advise, to make sure it was cut to his specification, to the pattern of his own. Lurie was an expert. After cutting my hair, they combed it this way and that. He combed it one way, she combed it another. They fussed a little, as much of a disagreement as they were ever to have, except for when they argued about how little I ate, or some other little thing.
What I wanted to eat most of all were cornflakes, floating around in sweet milk, heavily sweetened. They wanted me to eat eggs and biscuits and bacon. At supper Anson piled meat and potatoes and beans onto my plate. I would eat a portion, then look at the pie or cake. To glance at it was to be served a slice by Lurie. Anson thought I should eat more of the “solid stuff,” and he would poke additional bites with a fork into my mouth. Lurie, from her limited hospital experience, believed that I should not be coerced into eating more than I wanted. Given time, I would adjust, she said. I always drank buttermilk, shunning the evilsmelling and bad-tasting drinking water.
My presence brought about two changes, one overnight, the other within a couple of weeks. The outdoor privy, used by Angelica and Rosetta, and most anyone else not a member of the family, was the one I used out of necessity. There were three holes, one child-size. The bathroom in the house was down a long hall from our bedroom, pitch dark at night. It was so far a distance that a chamber pot was placed at the foot of my bed, one I never found cause to use. My natural functions took place during daylight hours. In this bathroom, the commode was too high from the floor, too large at the opening. I couldn't reach the pull-chain to flush. Blunt had the remedy. A board, with a hole to fit my anatomy, was fashioned so I wouldn't fall in. It could be readily set onto the commode. A box platform was constructed to support my feet. A boot string lengthened the pull-chain.
Our noon meal was treated as a picnic. Angelica and Rosetta served Lurie and me sandwiches—chicken, turkey, peanut butter, or pimento. And iced tea spiked with lemon flavoring, sweetened for me. Four tablespoons of sugar almost killed the curious taste of the water. Not quite, though. Our favorite dining spot was the double wooden swing under the chinaberry trees, where those on the swing had to face each other for balance.
After one such leisurely lunch, Lurie carted me to the doctor. She had decided I needed to go because Anson had taken to doing asthma exercises on me every morning. He made a game of it, stretching me out flat on the carpet, placing a hand on either side of my chest, raising me up and pressing down, pumping air into my lungs. I didn't understand the need for it, but somehow I knew that it was more for Anson than for me. On several occasions, while setting up the breathing routine, he whispered, “I had a little boy once.”
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.