Chinaberry

Chapter Five | Little Johnnes

C H A P T E R five after the passing of the first wife, Melba, Anson had remained at the small lying-in hospital in the county seat for two weeks helping attend to Little Johnnes, who was fighting for his life and was hardly expected to survive. Anson did not attend Melba’s funeral, so precarious was the situation of their child, much to his mother-in-law’s dismay. To his father-in-law’s disapproval, Irena—Melba’s sister and the onetime object of Anson’s affection—insisted on spending the daylight hours assisting Anson. However, the father-inlaw did not forbid it, given the circumstance that the vigil was around the clock. There was no oxygen equipment, and the child could not be moved. Other physicians were brought in, one even from Austin, but after a cursory examination, they only shook their heads. The child, given to frequent smothering spells, had to be manipulated ever so gently to start him breathing again, and on many occasions Anson snatched him from death by forcing his own breath into the boy’s lungs. His mother was to say that Anson believed that by sharing his own good health with his ailing child he could save him. And he did, but for six years only. For those first two weeks, Anson sat beside the baby by day, tiny hand in his own, his eyes hardly straying from the child’s face. Little Johnnes lay half-somnolent, his flesh a cast of blue Little Johnnes 39 CH IN ABE R R Y from lack of oxygen. By night, Anson lay right beside the baby. Irena brought food and drink from home, food she herself had prepared and which, it was said, she actually had to spoon into his mouth, so great was his reluctance to eat. Though there were a cook and a washerwoman who served her parents’ household, IrenaalsosawthatAnsonhadfreshclothes,washedandironedby herownhand.Suchwasthenewsthatleakedtothewidecountryside , which thrived on such personal tidbits. The wisdom by telephone was that, despite religious injunctions against a brotherin -law marrying a sister-in-law and the expected objections of Irena’s parents, these two would turn up on a Saturday afternoon in a clerk’s office in some courthouse and be married. And it would be as if nothing had happened, except in the case that the child did survive, Irena would be there to share in his care. This was assumed despite the known fact that Irena was now engaged to a lawyer in the town, a lawyer of good family and rising promise. She even wore a diamond engagement ring. To confuse the issue, the young lawyer himself often stopped by the hospital, stood silently in the door to signify his concern. Anson knew him, though he rarely looked up. And then it was that some keen and prying eye noted that the engagement ring had disappeared from Irena’s finger. The telephones rang off the hook. Little Johnnes did mend, the blue cast of his flesh cleared, and his smothering spells lessened in frequency. Irena was to remember that, as the both of them bent over him one day, the infant opened his eyes, and so far as a ten-day-old can smile, he did. “I see brown eyes!” Anson said, and then he burst into tears, pressing the tiny body to him. “My baby.” Irena and Anson had embraced. They were to recall without even speaking of it in their sometimes meetings in years to 40 J AM E S STILL come. When this happened they wept again, the tears perhaps for what might have been. The Victorians won out. The father-in-law did put his foot down, and Irena submitted again. He had sacrificed one daughter to Anson Winters and would not provide another. The diamond engagement ring presently returned to Irena’s finger, although the marriage did not take place for several years. And Anson was not known to have looked at another woman. On this subject, the telephones operating in this wide community— such a relief and human satisfaction to isolated houses—had only questions, no confirmed answers. Where facts are missing, speculation takes over. During the two weeks of Little Johnnes’s crisis, the three-bed lying-in hospital had a number of visitors. Though the Winters generations kept largely to themselves, as did others of the large family conclaves of the region, they...