Chinaberry

Chapter Eight | The Breaking In

looking back to my time at Chinaberry, I can now understand that Lurie was both delighted and concerned by my unexpected appearance in their midst. Concerned that I could only be temporary, that Anson’s involvement with another child might be too great, only to suffer loss again. She was to tell me in due course, and at a moment of bitterness, that we were both substitutes . She was the substitute for his dead wife and maybe even for Irena, the sister whom he would have married. I was the substitute for the lost son, of course, the son who had been more than an offspring, who for six years had been pressed against him, or, when he needed both hands for a task, who would circle arms about his neck, to whom Anson would say, softly, “Hold on, baby. Hold on.” For a long while she had believed that when he said “Hold on” in the middle of the night he was asleep. She learned from his reaching for what was not there and from his sitting up that it wasn’t a dream. As often as twice a week, he rose up in the night and slipped on his moccasins and walked outside. The act of putting on the moccasins proved he was not sleepwalking. One moonlit night, from the doorway, she watched him in his nocturnal wandering, around the house, out to the fields, down the lane to the mailbox. Once he was gone fully two hours, having climbed on his saddle horse bareback and ridden off into the pasture. C H A P T E R eight The Breaking In 65 CH IN ABE R R Y When I came to live at Chinaberry, he was to go into the night only once more. But he did rise up in bed the second night of my stay and listen. I was asleep on the trundle bed in the adjoining room, where he had sat beside me until I slept, told me good night three times, and finally said over and over like an incantation , “Sleepy sleep, sleepy sleep.” At home I slept alone, and here I would have succumbed to slumber quicker had he not been there. That night Anson had risen up in bed, and when Lurie brought herself to inquire, “What’s the matter?” he had said, “I can’t hear the baby breathing.” “Go to him,” Lurie said, and he did. Unknown to me, he placed a hand on my chest until he was satisfied my breathing was regular. The next day my trundle bed was rolled into their bedroom, where they could keep better tabs. The room was not especially large, with their brass bed in one corner and my trundle in the other. I had only to call, should I need him, he said. It came about that I was to address Anson as “Dad-o.” This was what the three Little Jacks called their father. I had dismissed “Papa,” which had been suggested. I had a papa back in Alabama. There could be no other. I remember the first time I called him this, on a morning when he brought the pan of water and the washcloth for the morning’s ablutions. This had been a busy week, and we had seen little of him. As I was just coming to consciousness from sleep, lingering somewhere in a dream world, Anson had leaned over me and asked, “Do you know me?” I said, apparently without hesitation, “You’re Dad-o.” This had pleased him to no end, according to Lurie. As I had come to represent a phantom Johnnes, Anson had become a father image, a stay against the homesickness that often haunted me. To my mind he even began to look like Papa: the sandy hair, the 66 J AM E S STILL gray-blue eyes, the same set of jaw. When I sat on Anson’s lap, I could imagine I was sitting on my father’s, which I never recollect doing. My brother, who had taken my short-lived place as the baby, was in my own Papa’s lap, in a place rightly mine. My mother and sisters nuzzled at my little brother, and I was assigned to adulthood at age two. I bore no resentment outwardly, but it must have been there inwardly. A neglected child was being belatedly rewarded. Given time, nature...