Read Online Chinaberry by James Still - Free Book Online

sister called to tell her, and she had driven through the night to be present at the funeral.
    But Anson did not attend this funeral either. Hearsay had it that he lay in the hospital bed where his child had died, heavily sedated. Others had it that when Little Johnnes died Anson grabbed him up and tried to run out of the building and had to be restrained. It was also current that Anson had gone stark, raving mad.
    Irena and her husband were not there either, as they were vacationing in Corpus Christi and did not receive word.
    The telephone wires hummed.
    None of the tales about Anson were true. He had not gone crazy. He was not drugged to forget his child's death. He had not tried to run away with the boy's body. In truth, Anson did lie on the child's bed, with Bronson holding his hand. His mother had sat there, too, stroking his head until it was time for her to depart for the funeral. Later she said, “Of all my children and grandchildren, I suppose I loved him the most because I worried about him the most.”
    Lurie told me that Little Johnnes lay pale and thin in his casket, seeming not flesh of this earth. He was a porcelain figurine, a whited sculpture. To view his face was to search for evidence of his parentage, and she recognized characteristics of both Anson and Melba. Anson was there in the shape of the head, the cheekbones, the chin; Melba was more elusively mirrored in the child's countenance, defying description. The light brown hair haloing his face was unmistakably the gift of Melba. The absence of Anson from the funeral had been large in the minds of the audience, as confidences were shared, whispered, ear to ear. Lurie overheard some of them: “Anson is out of his mind.” “They've had to knock him out with laudanum.” “He's strapped to a bed.”
    The rest of the Winters clan was there, save the absent daughter too distant to make the journey in time and Bronson, who had stayed by Anson's bedside. The menfolk presented a solemn attitude; the womenfolk wept silently. They did not cry, it was assumed, so much for the child who was now beyond pain and whose future had been cloudy. Instead, they wept for Anson, who had suffered from the child's suffering, who was in physical touch with him almost every moment from birth, who had kept him alive with his will and breath for six years.
    The child was laid in the ground beside the marble slab of his mother, who had been the first of the Texas Winters family todie and thus the first one in this graveyard, which had been chosen because it was the closest one to the ranch.
    At the Beech Ledge Cemetery, the only audible grief heard came from Ellafronia Cauldwell, who had been in the family's employ for two years, first as housekeeper and cook's helper, and was now referred to as “Papa's slave” by Anson, Jack, and Bronson. Her sole duty had evolved into the care and feeding and cajoling of Big Jack. The sons held their father in awe and treated their mother with kindly tolerance, as their difference in age had weakened the bonding that originally existed.
    Ellafronia Cauldwell—Ella—had come out from Georgia in the vicinity of Macon, where the most pronounced and beautiful of Southern speech is cultivated, to visit the family of an aunt. She had stayed on, winding up at the big house when, as gossip had it, her aunt grew jealous of the marked attentions of her husband to the newcomer. According to Lurie, Ella was not pretty. Good-looking might have been the word used by teasing cowboys. Everybody liked her. Her patience with Big Jack as he grew petulant was phenomenal. When any disagreement arose over the operation of the Bent Y, Ella could be counted on to mollify him. So Ella's sniffing, heard above the murmurs of the brief graveside ceremony, came to Lurie's attention. Ella was Anson's age, trapped in a territory where most men were married by nineteen, almost certainly by twenty-one. She had verged on spinsterhood in