Chinaberry

Chapter Seven | Magnolia grandiflora ; Or, Anson and Lurie, Revisited

i was to hear of Lurie and Anson’s courtship on one of those late afternoons when we sat outside, awaiting Anson’s return. A telephone message came through from Towerhouse to let us know that Anson would be late; he was dickering with a buyer for the feeder calves. As Lurie and I were bathed and dressed in our freshly laundered garments, there was nothing else to do but sit in the swing and keep waiting for him. That day Lurie may have had her sunny hair done up in plaits, wrapped round her head, held in place by celluloid combs that bore tiny rhinestones. Or she may have had her hair in any of the other fashions she knew how to achieve, sometimes assisted by Angelica. One thing is sure: she smelled of violets. I was as scrubbed as she. Lurie would probably have rubbed some of Anson ’s Lucky Tiger tonic onto my hair, and if the Knuckleheads had seen me they would have clucked my ears and told me that I “stunk.” To whom else would Lurie have told of her courtship and marriage to Anson? Certainly not to Angelica and Rosetta, not to any of her own town acquaintances. Aside from her sister, I was likely the only person to ever hear the details. After Little Johnnes died, there was, of course, plenty of hearsay about Anson: he had donned spurs and chaps and Magnolia grandiflora; Or, Anson and Lurie, Revisited C H A P T E R seven 60 J AM E S STILL become a cowpuncher again; he was out of his head and shut up in a room; he was living at Chinaberry, managing the seventy -five acres of cotton, sometimes even taking a hand at the plow. This last had turned out to be true, as Lurie was to learn for herself. On returning from the months spent in the households of her parents and brother—their houses stood side by side in Amarillo —she felt liberated enough to drive about in her Overland without female companions as chaperones. But not enough to live alone, in one of the houses that were now her own rental properties in town. Society allowed this privilege to widows only, as they were beyond the age of passion. Before leaving Amarillo, she had written Anson a letter expressing sympathy for the death of his son, addressing it to the Bent Y Ranch, Bluewater, Texas. In the letter, she identified herself as the twelve-year-old fan who, years before, had backstopped a baseball thrown for him at the schoolyard fence. There was no reply. On returning to her sister’s home, she wrote another, repeating the greeting of sympathy and the reminder, on the assumption that the first letter had gone astray, not an unlikely happening in those days. This time she addressed it to Route 2, Clover Creek, Texas. The mail carrier furnished the address and assured its delivery. The result was silence. Lurie was to discover both these letters, along with several others addressed in unmistakable female script, in a drawer, unopened, years later. None, including her own, bore a return address on the envelopes. She wasn’t alone in being concerned about Anson’s welfare and in seeking his attention. There was only one other way to see Anson—to go to where he was. On the assumption that the rumor of his now living at Chinaberry was true, she began to drive past his farm two days a 61 CH IN ABE R R Y week, leaving the main highway south and taking the narrower lane of the mail route. Of this ruse she told no one, not even her sister. A two-day-a-week trip would go unnoticed. As luck, coincidence, or whatever force decides such matters would have it, on her sixth trip her gamble was rewarded. Anson was plowing, breaking ground with a moldboard plow, in the same field with another plowman, Blunt the Indian. It seemed not something Anson would ordinarily be doing. And it wasn’t. He had taken over for Blunt for a short turn at the plow to get a feel for the elasticity of the soil. It was April, when moisture content, the readiness for planting, is fed by “feel” up through the plow handles. There was nothing else for it. As Lurie had bravely stated her case in the...