Losing Battles Read online

  Books by

  EUDORA WELTY

  A Curtain of Green

  The Robber Bridegroom

  The Wide Net

  Delta Wedding

  The Golden Apples

  The Ponder Heart

  The Bride of the Innisfallen

  One Time, One Place

  The Optimist’s Daughter

  The Eye of the Story

  One Writer’s Beginnings

  VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, AUGUST 1990

  Copyright © 1970 by Eudora Welty

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Random House, Inc., in April 1970.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Welty, Eudora, 1909-

  Losing battles.

  I. Title

  PZ3. W4696Lo 1978 [PS3545.E6] 813’.5’2 89-40629

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78798-9

  v3.1

  To the memory of my brothers,

  Edward Jefferson Welty

  Walter Andrews Welty

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Part 6

  About the Author

  Characters in the Novel

  THE FAMILY:

  Elvira Jordan Vaughn, “Granny”

  Her grandchildren:

  Nathan Beecham

  Curtis Beecham, m. Beck

  Dolphus Beecham, m. Birdie

  Percy Beecham, m. Nanny

  Noah Webster Beecham, m. Cleo

  Sam Dale Beecham (deceased)

  Beulah Beecham, m. Ralph Renfro

  Beulah and Ralph Renfro’s children:

  Jack, m. Gloria

  Ella Fay

  Etoyle

  Elvie

  Vaughn

  Lady May Renfro, child of Jack and Gloria

  Miss Lexie Renfro, sister of Mr. Renfro

  Auntie Fay, sister of Mr. Renfro, m. Homer Champion

  Various descendants and cousins and married kin of the Beechams

  FROM BANNER COMMUNITY:

  Brother Bethune, a Baptist preacher

  Curly Stovall, Banner storekeeper

  Miss Ora Stovall, his sister

  Aycock Comfort, a friend of Jack’s

  Mr. Comfort and little Mis’ Comfort, Aycock’s father and mother

  Earl Comfort, Aycock’s uncle, a gravedigger

  Willy Trimble, a jack-of-all-trades

  Various others—Broadwees, Captain Billy Bangs, etc.

  FROM ELSEWHERE:

  Judge Oscar Moody, of Ludlow

  Mrs. Maud Eva Moody, his wife

  Miss Pet Hanks, telephone operator, of Medley

  Miss Julia Mortimer, once the teacher of Banner School, now of Alliance

  TIME:

  A summer in the 1930’s

  PLACE:

  The hill country of northeast Mississippi

  Part 1

  When the rooster crowed, the moon had still not left the world but was going down on flushed cheek, one day short of the full. A long thin cloud crossed it slowly, drawing itself out like a name being called. The air changed, as if a mile or so away a wooden door had swung open, and a smell, more of warmth than wet, from a river at low stage, moved upward into the clay hills that stood in darkness.

  Then a house appeared on its ridge, like an old man’s silver watch pulled once more out of its pocket. A dog leaped up from where he’d lain like a stone and began barking for today as if he meant never to stop.

  Then a baby bolted naked out of the house. She monkey-climbed down the steps and ran open-armed into the yard, knocking at the walls of flowers still colorless as faces, tagging in turn the four big trees that marked off the corners of the yard, tagging the gatepost, the well-piece, the birdhouse, the bell post, a log seat, a rope swing, and then, rounding the house, she used all her strength to push over a crate that let a stream of white Plymouth Rocks loose on the world. The chickens rushed ahead of the baby, running frantic, and behind the baby came a girl in a petticoat. A wide circle of curl-papers, paler than the streak of dawn, bounced around her head, but she ran on confident tiptoe as though she believed no eye could see her. She caught the baby and carried her back inside, the baby with her little legs still running like a windmill.

  The distant point of the ridge, like the tongue of a calf, put its red lick on the sky. Mists, voids, patches of woods and naked clay, flickered like live ashes, pink and blue. A mirror that hung within the porch on the house wall began to flicker as at the striking of kitchen matches. Suddenly two chinaberry trees at the foot of the yard lit up, like roosters astrut with golden tails. Caterpillar nets shone in the pecan tree. A swollen shadow bulked underneath it, familiar in shape as Noah’s Ark—a school bus.

  Then as if something came sliding out of the sky, the whole tin roof of the house ran with new blue. The posts along the porch softly bloomed downward, as if chalk marks were being drawn, one more time, down a still misty slate. The house was revealed as if standing there from pure memory against a now moonless sky. For the length of a breath, everything stayed shadowless, as under a lifting hand, and then a passage showed, running through the house, right through the middle of it, and at the head of the passage, in the center of the front gallery, a figure was revealed, a very old lady seated in a rocking chair with head cocked, as though wild to be seen.

  Then Sunday light raced over the farm as fast as the chickens were flying. Immediately the first straight shaft of heat, solid as a hickory stick, was laid on the ridge.

  Miss Beulah Renfro came out of the passage at a trot and cried in the voice of alarm which was her voice of praise, “Granny! Up, dressed, and waiting for ’em! All by yourself! Why didn’t you holler?”

  This old lady’s one granddaughter was in her late forties, tall, bony, impatient in movement, with brilliantly scrubbed skin that stretched to the thinnest and pinkest it could over the long, talking countenance. Above the sharp cheekbones her eyes were blue as jewels. She folded the old lady very gently in her arms, kissed her on the mouth, and cried, “And the birthday cake’s out of the oven!”

  “Yes, I can still smell,” said Granny.

  Miss Beulah gave her call that clanged like a dinner bell: “Come, children!”

  Her three daughters answered. The Renfro girls ran out of the still shadowy passageway: Ella Fay, sixteen, the only plump one; Etoyle, nine, fragrant of the cows and the morning milk; and Elvie, seven, this summer’s water hauler, with her bucket and ready to go. They lined up and put a kiss apiece, quick as a bite, on Granny’s hot cheek.

  “Happy birthday, Granny!” all three of them said at the same time.

  “I’m expecting to see all my living grandchildren, all my great-grandchildren, and all the great-great-grandchildren they care to show me, and see ’em early,” said Granny. “I’m a hundred today.”

  “Don’t contradict her,” Miss Beulah commanded as Etoyle opened her mouth. “And Granny, you’ll get the best present of all—the joy of your life’s coming home!”

  Granny nodded.

  “Won’t that be worth the waiting for?” cried Miss Beulah. Then she patted the old lady’s trembling hand.

  From the waterless earth some flowers bloomed in despite of it. Cannas came around the house on either side in a double row, like the Walls of Jericho, with their blooms unfurled—Miss Beulah’s favorite colors,
the kind that would brook no shadow. Rockets of morning-glory vines had been trained across the upper corners of the porch, and along the front, hanging in baskets from wires overhead, were the green stars of ferns. The sections of concrete pipe at the foot of the steps were overflowing with lacy-leaf verbena. Down the pasture-side of the yard ran a long row of montbretias blazing orange, with hummingbirds sipping without seeming to touch a flower. Red salvia, lemon lilies, and prince’s-feathers were crammed together in a tub-sized bed, and an althea bush had opened its flowers from top to bottom, pink as children’s faces. The big china trees at the gateposts looked bigger still for the silver antlers of last year’s dead branches that radiated outside the green. The farm track entered between them, where spreading and coming to an end it became the front yard. It lay before them in morning light the color of a human palm and still more groined and horny and bare.

  “He can come right now,” said Granny.

  “Then suppose you eat fast enough to be ready for him,” said Miss Beulah.

  Granny rocked herself to her feet and, fighting help, found the passage. Miss Beulah kept behind her, not touching her, as though the little pair of shoulders going low and trembling ahead of her might be fragile as butterfly wings, but framing her with both arms. The little girls followed, making up for going slowly by jumping all the way.

  Then Vaughn Renfro, the younger brother, who had finished doing what there was still nobody but him to do, catching and killing the escaped rooster and his whole escaped flock, put down his hatchet. He stepped up onto the porch and washed at the basin on the table. Taking the rag again, he swabbed the new dust off the mirror, so that it ran with a color delicate as watermelon juice on a clean plate, and looked at his face in there. This year he had turned twelve.

  Then he clomped in after the girls and women.

  Distance had already vanished in the haze of heat, but the passageway down which they had just gone was bright as the eye of a needle. The other end was sky. The house was just what it seemed, two in one. The second house had been built side by side with the original—all a long time ago—and the space between the two had been floored over and roofed but not to this day closed in. The passage, in which Granny’s old loom could stand respected and not be in the way, was wider than the rooms on either side. The logs had been chinked tight with clay and limestone, in places faced with cedar board, now weathered almost pink. Chimneys rose from the side at either end. The galleries ran the full width of the house back and front, and under the roof’s low swing, the six slender posts along the front stood hewn four-square and even-spaced by rule of a true eye. Pegs in the wood showed square as thumbnails along the seams; in the posts, the heart-grain rose to the touch. The makings of the house had never been hidden to the Mississippi air, which was now, this first Sunday in August, and at this hour, still soft as milk.

  When Granny, Miss Beulah, and the children took their places at the kitchen table, Mr. Renfro came in and joined them. He was smaller than Miss Beulah his wife, and walked with a kind of hobble that made him seem to give a little bow with every step. He came to the table bowing to Granny, to his wife, to his children, bowing to the day. He took his place at the foot of the table.

  “Now where’s she?“ asked Miss Beulah.

  The three young sisters raising their voices together called through their noses, “Glo-ri-a! Sister Gloria!”

  From the company room up front a sweet cool voice called back, “We’re busy right now. Go on without us.”

  “Well, ask the blessing like a streak o’ lightning, Mr. Renfro,” Miss Beulah told her husband. “The rest of us has got a world to do!”

  All heads were bowed. Mr. Renfro’s was bald, darkened by the sun and marked with little humped veins in the same pattern on both sides, like the shell of a terrapin. Vaughn’s was silver-pink, shaved against the heat, with ears sticking out like tabs he might be picked up and shaken by. Miss Beulah and her three daughters all raked their hair straight back, cleaved it down the middle, pulled it skintight into plaits. Miss Beulah ran hers straight as a railroad track around her head; they were tar-black and bradded down with the pins she’d been married in, now bright as nickel. The girls skewered their braids into wreaths tight enough to last till bedtime. Elvie’s hair was still pale as wax-beans, Etoyle’s was darkening in stripes, Ella Fay’s was already raven. Granny’s braids were no longer able to reach full circle themselves; they were wound up behind in two knots tight as a baby’s pair of fists.

  After the Amen, Mr. Renfro bent over and gave Granny her birthday kiss.

  She said, “Young man, your nose is cold.”

  Miss Beulah flew to wait on them. “Now eat like a flash! Don’t let ’em catch you at the table!”

  “Who’ll be the first to get here?” Ella Fay began.

  “I say Uncle Homer will be the last, because we’re counting on him and Auntie Fay to bring the ice,” said Etoyle.

  “I say Brother Bethune will be the last, because he’s got to fill Grandpa’s shoes today,” said Elvie, an owlish look on her thin little face.

  They all looked quickly at Granny, but she was busy licking up syrup in her spoon.

  “I say Uncle Nathan will be the last,” said Ella Fay. “He’s coming afoot.”

  “And doing the Lord’s work along his way,” Miss Beulah said from the stove. “He’ll never fail us, though. He’s Granny’s oldest.”

  “Jack will be the last.”

  “Who said that? Who said my oldest boy will be the last?” Miss Beulah whirled from the stove and began stepping fast around the table, raising high the graniteware coffee pot, with its profile like her own and George Washington’s at the same time, and darting looks at each member of the family under it before she quickly poured.

  “It was Vaughn,” said Etoyle, smiling.

  “Vaughn Renfro, have you taken it in your head to behave contrary today of all days?” cried Miss Beulah, giving him a big splash in his cup.

  “Jack’s got him the farthest to come. Providing he can get him started,” said Vaughn, his stubborn voice still soft as a girl’s.

  Etoyle laughed. “How do you know how far it is? You never been out of Banner!”

  Vaughn’s blue eyes swam suddenly. “I’ve been to school! I seen a map of the whole world!”

  “Fiddle. My boy’d get here today from anywhere he had to,” said Miss Beulah loudly. “He knows exactly who’s waiting on him.”

  Granny, with her spoon to her lips, paused long enough to nod.

  “And as for you, Mr. Renfro!” Miss Beulah cried. “If you don’t stop bringing a face like that to the table and looking like the world might come to an end today, people will turn around and start going home before they even get here!”

  At that moment the barking of the little dog Sid was increased twenty-fold by the thunder of shepherd dogs and the ringing clamor of hounds. Ella Fay, Etoyle, and Elvie ran pounding up the passageway, ahead of everybody.

  The three girls lined up on the gallery’s edge and even before they could see a soul coming they began their waving. Their dresses, made alike from the same print of flour sack, covered with Robin Hood and his Merry Men shooting with bow and arrow, were in three orders of brightness—the oldest girl wore the newest dress. They were rattling clean, marbleized with starch, the edging on the sleeves pricking at their busy arms as sharp as little feist teeth.

  A wall of copper-colored dust came moving up the hill. It was being brought by a ten-year-old Chevrolet sedan that had been made into a hauler by tearing out the back seat and the window glass. It rocked into the yard with a rider on the running board waving in a pitcher’s glove, and packed inside with excited faces, some dogs’ faces among them, it carried a cargo of tomato baskets spaced out on its roof, hood, and front fenders, every basket holding a red and yellow pyramid of peaches. With the dogs in the yard and the dogs in the car all barking together, the car bumped across the yard to the pecan tree, and halted behind the school bus, and then the dust c
aught up with it.

  Uncle Curtis Beecham; next-to-oldest of Miss Beulah’s brothers, climbed down from the wheel. He walked low to the ground and stepped tall, and bore shoulder-high on each slewed-out palm a basket of his peaches. Behind him a crowd of his sons and their jumping children and their wives hurrying after them poured out of the car, the dogs streaking to the four corners of the farm.

  The Renfro sisters ran to take Uncle Curtis’s baskets and put the little points of their tongues out sweetly to thank him.

  “A new roof! You got a new roof!” Uncle Curtis shouted to his sister Miss Beulah, as though her ears wouldn’t believe it.

  “Jack’s coming home!” she shrieked. “My oldest boy will be here!”

  “That roof’s sound as a drum,” said Mr. Renfro, lining up on the porch with Miss Beulah and Granny. “Or better be.”

  “Oh, I don’t blame you a bit for it,” Aunt Beck protested. She climbed the steps in the wake of Uncle Curtis. Her pink, plain face was like a badge of safety. Over her pink scalp, tiny curls of a creamy color were scattered in crowds, like the stars of a clematis vine.

  “You brought your chicken pie,” Miss Beulah said, relieving her of the apron-covered dishpan.

  “And Jack’s exactly who I made it for,” said Aunt Beck. “If I made my good chicken pie, he’ll come eat it, I thought, every dusty mile of the way.”

  She and Uncle Curtis were from the Morning Star community. She kissed Granny, and kissed Mr. Renfro along with Miss Beulah and the girls, calling him Cousin Ralph. Then she went back to Granny and kissed her again, saying, “Granny stays so good and brave! What’s her secret!”

  The old lady took her seat in the rocking chair. She precisely adjusted her hat, a black plush of unknowable age. Her purplish-black cambric dress was by now many sizes too large and she was furled in by it. She had little black pompons on the toes of her sliding-slippers.

  “Here’s more!” screamed Etoyle.

  Coming out of the dust that still obliterated the track appeared an old pickup riding on a flat tire, packed in behind with people too crowded in to wave, and with babies hanging over the sides on their folded arms, like the cherubs out of Heaven in pictures in the family Bible. This belonged to Uncle Dolphus and Aunt Birdie Beecham, of Harmony. In another minute the truck emptied. Little Aunt Birdie and the daughters came speeding ahead of the others, under every sort of hat and bonnet, as if dust and heat and light were one raging storm directed at women and girls. All were laden.