Chinaberry

Chapter Sixteen | Questions Answered

a portion of the grassland was rich earth, taken over for grazing as the ranch expanded. Here the grass had been sown and cattle stood knee-deep in acres of clover, and there were even copses of trees that furnished them shade. At noon, many lay as if slain under the water oaks, shifting as the shade shifted, the ground appearing as a wall of flesh, heaving now and then, with a sudden rising at times. Anson, pointing to a cow standing in a stuck pose in the shelter pasture, asked me, “Do you know what she’s thinking about?” I didn’t. “She’s got her mind on the baby inside her.” And then he asked, “Do you know how come a baby calf is growing inside her? How it got there?” I shook my head no to the question, but the true answer was yes. After all I was thirteen, had driven cows to the bull on adjoining farms in Alabama, and though short of knowledge about animal obstetrics, I knew that much. I’d never witnessed the actual copulation, being ashamed to be a party to such knowledge and always hiding behind the barn until it was over. Farm boys might be woefully short of insight into human impregnation, but they were privy constantly to the ways of pigs and chickens, and copulation both bovine and equine. Yet there was mystery there, and I had thought and thought about it. Questions Answered C H A P T E R sixteen 122 J AM E S STILL One day I asked, “When cows die do they go to heaven?” He broke into a laugh and then checked himself. “That’s a new one,” he admitted. “Never occurred to me whether they did or not. If they do, we’ve sent a lot of them there.” “Do horses?” Now Anson, whom I was beginning to think of as Dad-o all the time, was serious. His face was grave. “I hope so,” he said. “Why not? I hope my Blue is there when I get there. Or follows me.” “Dogs?” “That’s a question. Do you want them to?” “I do. I want my dog Jack that I lost to be there.” This exchange of views with Dad-o was naturally related to Lurie within my hearing, with Dad-o adding, “Our boy thinks deep about things. He’s got a head on him.” I often questioned Anson about natural things, like why the wind was blowing all the time, at least a slight wafting breeze, when it didn’t act like that in Alabama. He had explained to me that it had to do with the differences in the temperature of the air and the ground. Ernest Roughton, bothered by this phenomenon, claimed it gave him a headache, and he said on several occasions, “Damn that headache wind.” But he got used to it, as did we all. There was no other choice. How would the torrid days of summer be endured without it, though? The moving air became the natural order of things, and what you did notice was that at times it ceased, sometimes inexplicably, and you stopped and tried to make something of it. Dad-o would say, “Come on, wind. Wake up and get moving.” And pretty soon it would. So many questions to ask, so many answers to be gained. Why did ticks enjoy burrowing into one’s skin? 123 CH IN ABE R R Y I was still undergoing the daily tick hunt. It was the storming of my last citadel, the exposure of my entire body, of which I was so protective, so ashamed, but I had finally relented and had my shirt raised and spied under, my breeches stripped down, and my “little fixings” checked for these bearers of Rocky Mountain fever. Not much was known then by folk generally about this dreaded disease, except that the bite of an infected tick was as dangerous as a sidewinder rattlesnake. Though the Winters family didn’t know of anybody firsthand who had suffered from this illness, there were tales aplenty about its high fever, its ravages , its ending in a frightful death. In examining me for ticks, Lurie now limited herself to my head, running her hand through it, eyeing the scalp. And then, sensing of my neck and shoulders and my heaving chest—I always , at first, would...