Chinaberry by James Still Page B

was to return the next day with a sample of feces.
    I was brought back the following day. The feces were examined, and a diagnosis was made. “Worm fever,” the doctor said. “Suffering from
Oxyuris vermicularis
. That means pinworms.”
    What followed was that Rosetta's and Angelica's families had to provide feces samples, too, as well as Lurie and Anson. So did Ernest and the Knuckleheads. The entire Chinaberry community. I was the only victim.
    â€œAlabama worms, then,” the doctor pronounced. “He brought them with him.”
    On the ride home the next day, Anson hummed a little joyous song that I did not recognize.
    During my sickness, I regressed. Hardheaded as I was, with a mind of my own, I was unused to being made much of, and I came to enjoy it. I was unused to caresses, lifting, being carried about. I let Anson spoon-feed me when he believed I should eat a bit more, after all. I allowed them to dress and undress me. They constantly checked my forehead to see if I was cold or hot. Even after I got better, I still regressed.
    I got to the point that I expected to go to sleep nightly in his lap, in a rocking chair, or sitting on the side of the bed, or in the porch swing. On a few oppressively hot nights when they slept on a mattress on the screened porch, I lay beside Anson. For a few minutes he would switch me over him to the middle, and when I turned toward Lurie, who smelled of violets, I laid myhead on her breast. More than once he said, “I'm getting jealous,” and returned me to the other side.
    When we were in their room, I sometimes had to get up to relieve myself. I stumbled over their brass bed, and he'd awake to make sure I was all right. When I returned, I'd put my hand on his pillow to let him know I was back, and he'd tuck me in beside him and say, “Is the baby lonesome?” On waking, I'd be back in my own bed.

“This boy's papa is giving me the devil about bringing him home to go to school,” Ernest told Anson.
    There was never any question about my attending; the problem was where. Some six miles to the east was a county-supported secondary school at a hamlet called Veasey, with some eighty enrolled, all the children of cotton growers. A third of these boarded in town during the week, as the distance was too great for walking and the farmers had no spare horses for transportation. Lurie or Blunt could drive me to and fro.
    The Veasey School was not to Anson's liking. The teachers were daughters of the area who'd had a bit of training at one of the colleges and were mostly old maiden aunts. Deprived by their rural upbringing, they imposed their deprivation upon the students, and Anson would not have that for me.
    There was another choice—Buffalo Wallow. The Wallow School was just across the Robertson County line, fully nine miles on the road to the Bent Y Ranch, and two miles farther on a side road, long abandoned by the county in upkeep and abandoned of support by the Board of Education when the number of students lowered to eight. They were now up to eleven. Ernest wrote to my father that I was attending the best school in the State of Texas and that Alabama could not boast its like.
    Surprisingly enough, Ernest may have been right. The ranchers in the area were all of some means, so they hired their own teacher, a man, and one who met every expectation. He was a young married professor with two crawling children and was very devoted to his calling. They kept his salary a whet above any other, kept a cow fresh in milk in his lot, a beef to slaughter, a pig in his pen, and any surpluses from their fields and gardens were dumped at his gate. Save for the isolation, lack of telephone, and a road fairly impassable after a rain, what other was there to wish for? The young professor was even given a car—a Reo—which was nearing the end of its mechanical life and sounded like a threshing machine.
    The Buffalo Wallow School was distant and