Chinaberry by James Still

Texas.”
    Anson had heard this before from me, and he also knew of my father's profession. “We could use a veterinarian,” he said. “Give him about all the work he could handle at our ranch alone,and there's the Bolton ranch north of us, twice the size of the Bent Y. They'd give more than he could do.”
    â€œThat's an idea,” Ernest said.
    I could have told them with the little wisdom a thirteen-year-old had gathered that this couldn't happen. Mama had told us often of her promise to my sister, before she died of scarlet fever at age five, that she would never leave her. She was as committed to staying near the Rock Springs graveyard as Anson Winters was tied to the Beech Ledge Cemetery.
    Still, Anson was determined to have me.
    Anson and Lurie had been married almost three years. I put my face against the chinaberry tree, wondering why they had no child of their own.

The temperature hovered at ninety degrees during most of August, often rising to ninety-eight, and more than occasionally past one hundred for the hottest part of the day. We took many cooling baths. Anson and I favored the shower in the washhouse while Lurie soaked in the bathtub. Understanding the curious modesty of boys my age, Anson never entered the washhouse while I was there, and we stood together under the shower only when wearing our undershorts or the truncated bathing suits.
    Saturday afternoons I went with Anson to cool off at the horse pond, the smallest of the three ponds formed by a windmill pump, assisted by a gasoline engine when the wind failed to keep the five-hundred-gallon tank filled. Our bathing suits were made by Lurie, fashioned from a store-bought pattern, which decreed that only our heads, arms, and legs below the knee were showing. Later Lurie came upon a picture of folks on a California beach, which caused her to cut off the tops, freeing our arms and chests.
    Fans were everywhere at Chinaberry. At the foot of the beds, on bureaus, on the sideboard. Palmetto fans. Angelica and Rosetta fanned themselves with one hand and cooked with the other when the tasks allowed. In the swing, after supper, while dust settled about, I sat between Anson and Lurie. Anson's left armembraced Lurie's shoulders while his right hand was engaged in keeping us fanned during the momentary lulls in the fairly constant breeze. Anson had explained that the wind caused the difference in temperature of earth and the air above it, the pause coming about when the temperature of both reached equality. He fanned us, never himself, keeping the air stirring. We would have had our baths, dressed in fresh clothes, and there would be the faint scent of violets about Lurie; Anson smelled of hand soap, and I emitted an odor of whatever fragrance Lurie saw fit to touch me with—Lilac Vegetal, and one day a week, Lucky Tiger. If I emitted fumes of Lucky Tiger, she had just given me a haircut. As this happened weekly, it was always a small clipping. Lurie eschewed face powders, out of deference to Anson's saying, “When I bite somebody, I want to taste raw meat.” He had three classifications for osculation: a kiss, a bite, and a smack.
    From Anson I received a couple of bites on the neck a day. Several smacks landed almost anywhere: cheek, forehead, nose. One night, in the swing, he informed me he'd been keeping count and that I owed him 283 smacks, and didn't I want to pay back 3 of them right now? That evening we had donned our sleeping garments. I was in my nightshirt, Lurie was in her lacy nightgown down to her ankles, and Anson in his pajamas. His pajama jacket was unbuttoned, so I reached over and touched my lips to his chest three times.
    He said nothing for a moment, then said, “There are other places.”
    On many such evenings, some of them moonlit, we sat thus, Anson telling us of events of the day, of the latest on the Knuckleheads, of the tales of Pop Cod, of the three Little Jacks, of how both Chinaberry and the