Chinaberry by James Still Read Free Book Online Page A

were in the garden. When she tried to have them on the porch or yard, they were only destroyed. Once, a pony had climbed the steps and eaten those in pots.
    All during my exploration, Blunt followed me.
    I tried out the hammock under the cool shade of the chinaberries and then sat in the two-seated wooden swing. It required someone sitting opposite to balance the weight. Blunt came andsat down across from me, and we rocked back and forth awhile. I didn't know what to say, and he said nothing. Lastly, I revisited the cotton fields, near enough to the pickers to hear the drone of their voices.
    When Anson returned from his work that afternoon and asked for a report on my day, I couldn't get my mouth open. He was as yet too much a stranger to speak with freely. That too was soon to be remedied.
    Lurie had something to report. She had been sewing up two summer shirts with sleeves ending above the elbow, and no tails. There were buttons, yet to fasten only one or none at all was accounted sufficient in hot weather. A shirt without sleeves or tails! And a pair of short underpants. They had me go into another room and put them on. Anson took one look and told Lurie, “They're too tight. They're pinching his little fixing.” They were let out by sewing in a blue strip on either side. As I seemed to approve the adornment, subsequent pairs of my underpants had either blue or green piping, and Anson's as well thereafter. What he wore, I wore in a smaller version.
    â€œWe ought to do something about the boy's toe,” Anson said that evening as we sat on the porch with Ernest and Lurie.
    The three of them seated me in a chair. The big toe on my right foot was doused in camphor. Lurie, exercising her skill as a nurse apprentice, cut loose the hanging nail with a pair of embroidery scissors. Underneath the nail, tender to the touch, a new one was beginning to form.
    I had scrubbed my feet as clean as could be, yet the heels and ankles still looked dirty. Anson said these were grass and mineral stains that would wear off. Did I know the earth we walked on was chock-full of minerals? I told him I did.
    I didn't know much, except what I had overheard and what I had read in the four books that lived in my home back in Alabama.I was mostly a student of
The Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge
. The other three books were the Holy Bible,
The Anatomy of the Horse
, and a book bought from a colporteur,
The Palaces of Sin, or The Devil in Society
.
    The Bible was held in such reverence that nobody ever opened it.
    The Anatomy
served my father in his horse doctoring and was way too technical for me.
    I had learned all I needed to know about evil from
The Palaces of Sin
. Was there not a drawing in there of a dinner party at which Jenny Manly of Alabama was standing and berating her fellow diners for drinking wine at the table? Also mentioned in this book was the drinking of gin. And the gambling with cards. And more sins.
    So,
The Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge
was my chief instrument. What did a child know of the world in those days? Only what he could hear, or observe in the fields and at the barn, and the meager knowledge gained from schoolbooks. What I knew of the world came from
The Cyclopedia
. When I had first smelled Lurie's perfume, I had known what violets signified, as well as Anson's aftershave lotion, fragrant of lilacs. “The Language of Flowers” was a chapter in my family's beloved book.
    That evening I was ashamed of my dirty-looking feet. But Anson and Lurie would cure this. They had remedies for stained heels and ankles, mainly cloverine salve. Daily administrations would be applied, with my knees and elbows added to the undertaking. It worked. Gradually, with the salve at night and the wearing of moccasins by day, my feet whitened to the point that Anson picked up my foot one morning and nibbled on my toes to wake me.
    That night my trundle bed was placed in the room adjoining Anson and Lurie's. Anson came in