Chinaberry Read Online Free PDF

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 fromsomewhere 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.
    Hampton Jeffreys, Lurie's father, arrived in Bluewater with a deed to a section of land that his father had bought on speculation long before. He fell into the business of real estate, which made him a rich man when the Katy Railroad came through and the land grew valuable. By the time Lurie was grown, her family did not want for anything, so her father sold off all his holdings except several dwellings and a half block of businesses and moved next door to Lurie's brother, who was some twenty years her elder and a cotton broker in Amarillo. Rent accruing from the Bluewater properties was divided between Lurie and her sister.
    Her mother was forty-four when Lurie was born, and the surprise pregnancy had been an embarrassment. Her brother, who was then in college, switching between law and medicine and business administration, claimed to be ashamed. Lurie's sister, Velvet, now married to Sam Somerwell, twelve years Lurie's senior, became her de facto mother. Lurie stayed at the Somerwells as much as at home, and when her parents went to live in Amarillo, she did not follow at once. She was not to switch her interest as did her brother. She had spotted Anson when she was twelve, and the die had been cast.
    The fact that Anson was five years older than her cast no weight. The clear knowledge that he was often in the company of Melba and Irena and would surely marry one of them eventually was no deterrent to her either. Velvet would point out to Lurie that Jack Winters, the brother of Anson, was nearer her own age and apparently fancy-free, and why did she not make some accommodation with him? Lurie could not say what it was about Anson that separated him from all other men, even fromthe brother who appeared to be cast in the same mold. Both were handsome in the rugged way a frontier town and the sun and Texas winds write on a face. She had no words to describe it until after their marriage when Anson's mother, clearly asking some indulgence for the trials her son had endured, told Lurie, “He has a pure heart.” Thus Lurie's declaration of this same thing to me. It was in his eyes as in no other man's she had ever known, she said. The fact that he could not easily shake off the human contracts he had made was an earnest of it. And his mother had said, “He still has a little way to go.”
    The truth is, she loved him, and she finally got him, just as she had planned.
    Anybody who saw Lurie at Chinaberry would have asked themselves what a woman of such carriage and personality and beauty was doing on a Texas cotton farm miles from anywhere. But she was there, and always looking fresh as rain.
    Lurie had had no expectations of remaining out of touch with civilization for long. There was already a spot chosen for a house near the ranch. Anson's mother was her chief accomplice in encouraging him to leave Chinaberry to the full