Chinaberry Read Online Free PDF Page B

management of the Indian foreman, Blunt, and his extended Mexican family. Anson's mother wanted all her own family around her, and certainly none missing at the Sunday dinner table.
    When Anson was absent, I was much company to Lurie, and besides welcoming me she took on the duty of explaining Anson to me as far as she could. Most of all there was the prodding to not fear him, which I never did, except once. “He suffered a traumatic loss in the death of the baby,” she'd say. “He went through a terrible brain fever.”
    She reported that by day Anson's outward ruggedness belied the trials he had suffered. He laughed, made jokes, and trusted everybody except cottonseed buyers at the gin.
    By night it was another matter. He often turned and tossed, sometimes arose and slipped into moccasins so he could walk about, to the barn or to the mailbox. Lurie would stand in the door and watch him unseen until he returned. She decided there had been some amelioration of the past except the loss of Little Johnnes. In his sleep he would mutter “My baby, my baby” or “Hold on, hold on.”
    She may have told me more than intended, having no one else to talk to. In her own fashion she divulged that we were both substitutes.
    â€œYou know, I heard Anson whistling yesterday for the first time,” she told me, a week after my arrival. “The first time ever.”

We had arrived at siesta, that period between high noon and two when the Texas sun is at its most torrid and brightest, and the leaves of the trees hang limp and blades of the corn curl. “Nappy time,” Anson dubbed it. All labor ceased. Following dinner, everybody slept or found a cool spot to await a lessening of the heat.
    The sounds of our approach aroused Blunt and set him to gathering horse apples. Blunt was a full-blooded Comanche Indian. He was father and grandfather to the workers in the field and the house, having married a Mexican woman in years past, and he was a longtime guardian of Chinaberry. How close a watchdog I was to learn. I had noticed that no dog had run out to greet his master when we had first arrived at the house. In Alabama every house has a dog to bark warning at the strangers. Blunt served this purpose at Chinaberry.
    While he scooped the apples into a coal scuttle with a stone shovel, he aroused two women from a hammock strung from live oaks behind the house. They were Angelica and Rosetta, who aided in the housekeeping and cooking. At Chinaberry the siesta was elongated, from eleven until four. Cotton gathering began at four in the morning and continued until dark. You can see cotton before you can see anything else, and later.
    Anson had said, “We've got some hungry workers here,” and that was all that was needed to set Angelica and Rosetta to cooking and Blunt to lighting a charcoal brazier. We were shown to our quarters, down a hall on the right side of the house, two doors below the parlor, which Lurie, for reasons of her own, had never entered and never would. Later I would learn that this was not from distaste, but because the parlor was sacred to her husband.
    In our room there were two beds. Cadillac and Rance would occupy one, Ernest the other. A trundle bed was rolled in for me. The size of the building indicated it had once housed a family greater in size than occupied it now. Anson and Lurie rarely crossed the hall to this side of the dwelling. The house had recently been wired for lights, but the sockets were empty, awaiting a gasoline generator.
    Things began to happen. The aroma of grilling steaks drifted from the yard. We were invited to clean up before the meal, to use the shower in an outbuilding directly in front of a tank fed by a windmill. The water was more than tepid. Our clothes, thrown out the door for Angelica to pick up and thrust into a gasoline-driven washing machine, were soon on the line, drying. Ernest alone had a fresh change available; the rest of us had soiled