Free Chinaberry by James Still Page A

now, Big Jack,” Ellafronia said in her tender way.
    â€œJust to smell dinner fills me up,” he replied.
    The cook came to the dining room door and looked us over. The grinding of the ice cream cooler stopped a moment, and then the cook's son peeped in, too. He was nineteen, but he had the mind of a three-year-old. I had heard Anson talking about him before, his voice full of pity.
    I ate mostly sweet potato pie, yet no one questioned my choice. And then there was the ice cream, a heaping mound in a bowl when I had little room left. And the cook appeared with a giant bowl of charlotte russe, which he called the “piece de resistance.” As badly as I wanted to partake, there was no room left in my belly.
    There was an empty chair saved for Ernest Roughton. Work hands didn't usually eat with the family. They had their meals with any cowpuncher who showed up at a table on the screened porch. But since I was to be at dinner, he had been invited. Was his absence due to the class distinction he wasn't subject to during other times? Perhaps he didn't feel right in breaking bread with them only because I was to be there.
    He did come later, ate on the porch, and managed to get me aside. Not an easy matter with Anson present, and I was keenly aware of Anson's monitoring me while I talked to Ernest.
    Anson's explanation for Ernest's absence at the table was that horses and calves and pigs and milk cows don't know Sunday from any other day of the week. They have to be fed, watered, catered to, or milked or curried or combed. Fence posts don't wait until Monday to be uprooted. A horse is as apt to throw a shoe on the Sabbath as on any other day of the week. Flies don't delay until a second day of the week to blow a heifer's laceration,so you have to be quick with the tar even when church beckons. Anson had read my dejection over missing Ernest. I was counting on seeing him. My homesickness was sometimes worn like a cloak and sometimes glimmered at the back of my mind, but it was always there, and I hardly ever saw Ernest or the Knuckleheads lately. I needed Alabama voices.
    After the long dinner—it was fully two o'clock and the hottest part of one of the hottest days we'd had thus far—Jack and the three Little Jacks returned to their nearby house. When they left I heard Jack say they were going early so Grandpa could “try the little one on for size,” talking about me.
    Once they had gone, there came my nap time. My eyelids were dropping when Anson caught me up and deposited me on a cot on a shady side porch. Naps were especially important on this day, as we had all grown up with the spoken notion that “Everybody with gumption takes a nap on Sunday.” Anson stayed a moment to pull off my boots and loosen my collar, to fan me with his hat until I slept, and he was back when I waked with a pan of water and towel to freshen my hands and face.
    By the time I arose, Grandpa had been told something about me. I was placed on his lap, which seemed large enough for several my size. His great hands were covered with spots. The flesh of his face had been so long tanned by wind and sun that it seemed like leather. He was in his eighties.
    â€œYou like Texas?” he asked.
    â€œYessir,” I said.
    â€œBetter than Alabama?”
    â€œNawsir.”
    Big Jack grinned. “Well, he's honest.” Then he said to me, “I was born in East Tennessee and raised in West Tennessee. Learned to stay off the skid road in the logging woods of British Columbia.” He furrowed his brow and gave me a warning, havingnoted Anson's penchant for carrying me: “Walk on your own legs. Don't let that son of mine make a puppy dog of you.”
    Grandma chimed in, defending Anson: “I want Anson to do what in his heart he needs to do. This boy is good for him.”
    â€œI raised Anson, and I know him from his ears to his toenails,” the old man said, his wit and wisdom coming through.