Losing Battles Read online

  “Everywheres I look is Beecham Beecham Beecham,” she said.

  “Beulah’s brothers. Except for one, that circle is still unbroken,” said Miss Lexie Renfro. “Renfros come a bit more scarce.”

  “Where they all get here from?” cried Aunt Cleo, looking full circle around her.

  “Everywhere. Everywhere you ever heard of in Boone County—I can see faces from Banner, Peerless, Wisdom, Upright, Morning Star, Harmony, and Deepstep with no trouble at all.”

  “And this is Banner. The very heart,” said Miss Beulah, calling from the kitchen.

  “Never heard of any of it,” said Aunt Cleo. “Except Banner. Banner is all Noah Webster knows how to talk about. I hail from Piney.”

  “I at present call Alliance my home,” said Miss Lexie. “That puts me across the river from everybody I see.” She went to put her hat away and came struggling backwards up the passage to them dragging something.

  Miss Beulah shrieked, “Vaughn! Come get that away from your Aunt Lexie!” She was running behind it—a cactus growing in a wooden tub. “Little bantie you, pulling a forty-pound load of century plant, just to show us!”

  “I’ve pulled a heavier load than this. And the company can just have that to march around,” Miss Lexie said. “Give ’em one thing more to do today besides eat and hear ’emselves talk.”

  The cactus was tied up onto a broomstick but grew down in long reaches as if trying to clamber out of the tub. It was wan in color as sage or mistletoe.

  “It’s threatening to bloom, Mother,” Mr. Renfro warned Miss Beulah.

  “I see those buds as well as you do. And it’s high time, say I. Bloom! Bloom!” she cried at it gaily. “Yes, it’s making up its mind to bloom tonight—about time for ’em all to go home, if it knows what’s good for it.”

  “Can’t tell a century plant what to do,” said Granny.

  “Now, let that be enough out of you, Lexie. Set,” said Miss Beulah. “And help us look for Jack.”

  “Jack Renfro? He won’t come. He hasn’t been in there long enough yet, by my reckoning,” said Miss Lexie. She had a gray, tired-looking face, gray-speckled hair cut Buster Brown with her own sewing scissors that were swinging wide on the ribbon tied around her neck as she walked around looking for something to do. “Better start thinking what you’ll look like if he don’t get here,” she said to Gloria. Her foot in its black leather, ragged-heeled shoe, feathered with dust, and wearing a skinny white sock, stepped on the end of Gloria’s sash.

  “What’s she want to walk off and leave good company for?” asked Aunt Cleo the next minute. “She too good for us?”

  For Gloria walked down the yard away from the house, through the circles of squatters, until she was all by herself. Her high heels tilted her nearly to tiptoe, like a bird ready to fly.

  “Hair that flaming, it looks like it would hurt her,” murmured Aunt Beck. “More especially when she carries it right out in the broil.”

  All the aunts, here on the gallery, were sheltering from sun as if from torrents of rain. Ferns in hanging wire baskets spread out just above their heads, dark as nests, one for each aunt but Aunt Lexie, who wouldn’t sit down.

  Aunt Nanny shaded her eyes and asked, “How far is Gloria going, anyway?”

  Down near the gate, a trimmed section of cedar trunk lay on the ground, silver in chinaberry shade. Clean-polished by the seasons, with its knobs bright and its convolutions smooth-polished, it looked like some pistony musical instrument.

  “That’s her perch,” said Miss Beulah as Gloria sat down on it with her back to them, her sash-ends hanging down behind her like an organist’s in church.

  “She’s got to be ready for her husband whether he gets here or not,” Aunt Beck said softly. “But she’s young, she can stand the disappointment.”

  “She’s too young to know any better. That’s the poorest way in the wide world to bring him,” Aunt Birdie said. “Getting ready so far ahead of time, then keeping your eyes on his road.”

  “Set still, Sister Gloria, keep your hands folded!” Jack’s little sisters chanted together. “Don’t let your dress get dirty! You got plenty-enough to do, just waiting, waiting, waiting on your husband!”

  “When I can’t see her determined little face any longer, but just her back, she looks mighty tender to my eyes,” Aunt Beck said in a warning voice to the other women. “Around her shoulder blades, she looks a mighty tender little bride.”

  A big spotted cat, moulting and foolish-looking, came out onto the porch, ramming its head against their feet, standing on its hind legs and making a raucous noise.

  “He’s kept that up faithful. He’s looking for Jack,” said Etoyle. “That cat’s almost got to be a dog since Jack’s away.”

  “Think he’d better whip up his horse now and come on,” said Granny.

  “He’s coming, Granny, just as fast as he can,” Aunt Birdie promised her.

  Aunt Nanny teased, “Listen, suppose they was all ready to let those boys out, then caught ’em in a fresh piece of mischief.”

  “They’d just hold right tight onto their ears, then,” said Miss Lexie. She had a broom now and was sweeping underneath the school chair, the only one where nobody was sitting.

  “You wouldn’t punish a boy on his last day, would you?” Uncle Noah Webster asked. “Would you now, Lexie?”

  “Yes, I would. By George, I took my turn as a teacher!” Miss Lexie cried.

  Vaughn ran the little girls out of the swing, and while the uncles climbed to their feet to watch he started setting out the long plank tables. There were five, gray and weatherbeaten as old row-boats, giving off smells of wet mustard, forgotten rain, and mulberry leaves. None of them were easily persuaded to stand true on their sawhorse legs. Vaughn looked down an imaginary line from the big bois d’arc to the chinaberry. Unless Gloria were to move from where she sat, there would have to be a jog in the middle of it.

  Close to the house, the company dogs had fallen into long slack ranks, a congregation of leathery backs jolted like one long engine by the force of their breathing. Over the brown rocks of their foreheads flickered the yellow butterflies of August like dreams, some at their very noses. Sid, tied in the barn behind, did the barking all by himself now. His appeals, appeals, appeals rang out without stopping.

  “I guess,” said the new Aunt Cleo, “I guess I’m waiting for somebody to tell me what the welcome for Jack Renfro is all about! What’s he done that’s so much more than all these big grown uncles and boy cousins or even his cripple daddy ever done? When did he leave home, and if he ain’t let you have a card from him, what makes you so sure he’s coming back today? And what’s his wife got her wedding dress on for?”

  Aunt Cleo had been left the school chair to sit on. She leaned her elbow on the writing-arm and crossed her feet.

  Then the uncles stretched and came strolling back to the house. Uncle Noah Webster skidded across the porch floor, riding his splint chair turned backwards, so as to sit at her elbow.

  “If you don’t know nothing to start with, I don’t reckon we could tell you all that in a hundred years, Sister Cleo,” said Aunt Birdie. “I’m scared Jack’d get here before we was through.”

  “Take a chance,” she said.

  There was not a breath of air. But all the heart-shaped leaves on the big bois d’arc tree by the house were as continually on the spin as if they were hung on threads. And whirly-winds of dust marched, like scatterbrained people, up and down the farm track, or pegged across the fields, popped off into nowhere.

  “Can’t she wait till Brother Bethune gets here for dinner and tells it to us all at the table? Surely he’ll weave it into the family history,” pleaded Aunt Beck.

  “This’ll be his first go at us,” Uncle Percy reminded her.

  “If he shows up as poor in comparison to Grandpa Vaughn at the reunion as he shows up in the pulpit on Second Sundays, I’ll feel like he won’t even earn his dinner,” said Uncle Curtis.

  “Brother Bethun
e is going to do the best he can, and we all enjoy the sound of his voice,” said Aunt Birdie. “Still, his own part in this story’s been fairly stingy. I wouldn’t put it past a preacher like him to just leave out what he wasn’t in on.”

  “What I mainly want to hear is what they sent Jack to the pen for,” said Aunt Cleo.

  Miss Beulah marched right away from them and in a moment her set of bangs and clatters came out of the kitchen.

  Then a mockingbird pinwheeled, singing, to the peak of the barn roof. After moping and moulting all summer, he’d mounted to his old perch. He began letting loose for all he was worth, singing the two sides of a fight.

  Their voices went on with his—some like pans clanking on the stove, some like chains dropping into buckets, some like the pigeons in the barn, some like roosters in the morning, some like the evening song of katydids, making a chorus. The mourning dove’s voice was Aunt Beck, the five-year-old child’s was Aunt Birdie. But finally Aunt Nanny’s fat-lady’s voice prevailed: “Let Percy tell! His voice is so frail, getting frailer. Let him show how long can he last.”

  Only at the last minute did Aunt Cleo cry out, “Is it long?”

  “Well, crops was laid by one more year. Time for the children to all be swallowed up in school,” Uncle Percy’s thready voice had already begun. “We can be sure that Grandpa Vaughn had started ’em off good, praying over ’em good and long here at the table, and they all left good and merry, fresh, clean and bright. Jack’s on his best behavior. Drove ’em off in the school bus, got ’em all there a-shrieking, ran and shot two or three dozen basketball goals without a miss, hung on the oak bough while Vaughn counted to a hundred out loud, and when it’s time to pledge allegiance he run up the flag and led the salute, and then come in and killed all the summer flies while the teacher was still getting started. That’s from Etoyle.”

  “But it don’t take Ella Fay long!” prompted Aunt Nanny.

  “Crammed in at her desk, she took a strong notion for candy,” Uncle Percy quavered. “So when the new teacher looked the other way, she’s across the road and into the store after it.”

  “And shame once more on a big girl like that,” said Miss Lexie.

  “Well, wouldn’t you have liked the same?” Uncle Noah Webster teased. “A little something sweet to hold in your cheek, Lexie?”

  “Not I.”

  Aunt Nanny winked at the porchful. “The first day I had to go back to Banner School, I’d get a gnawing and a craving for the same thing!”

  “And been switched for it!” they cheered. “By a good strong right arm!”

  “It didn’t take Ella Fay but one good jump across a dry mud-hole to the store. And old Curly Stovall’s just waiting.”

  “Stovall? Wait a minute, slow down, halt,” interrupted Aunt Cleo.

  “You’re a Stovall,” several guessed.

  “Wrong. I was married to one, the first time round,” she said. “My first husband’s folks comes from Sandy. It’s a big roaring horde of ’em still there.”

  “The first Stovalls around here walked into Banner barefooted—three of ’em, and one of ’em’s wife. I don’t know what description of hog-wallow they come from,” said Mr. Renfro, passing by in the yard, “but the storekeeper then alive put the one in long pants to work for him. Stovalls is with us and bury with us.”

  “Visit their graves,” Aunt Beck invited Aunt Cleo. “They need attention.”

  “Don’t you-all care for the Stovalls?” she asked, and Uncle Noah Webster slapped a hand on her leg and gave a shout, as though watching her find this out was one of the things he’d married her for.

  “If I was any kind of a Stovall at all, I’d keep a little bit quiet for the rest of this story,” came the bell-like voice of Miss Beulah up the passage out of the kitchen.

  “Well, Ella Fay didn’t much more than get herself inside the store than she had to start running for it,” said Uncle Percy.

  “What had she done?” Aunt Cleo challenged them.

  “Not a thing in the world that we know of but grow a little during the summer,” Uncle Percy went on mildly. “ ‘Well,’ says Curly, ‘look who they’re sending to pay the store.’ ‘I didn’t bring you anything, I come after a wineball,’ she says, as polite as you are. ‘Oh, you did?’ ” To speak the words of rascals, Uncle Percy pitched his poor voice as high as it would go into the confidential-falsetto. “ ‘And it’ll be another wineball tomorrow,’ he says, ‘and another one the tomorrow after that, every school morning till planting time next spring—I can’t afford it. Not another year o’ you!’ Jumps up. ‘When am I ever going to get something back on all that candy-eating?’ says he to her. And she starts to running.”

  “Tell what he’s like, quick,” said Aunt Birdie.

  “He’s great big and has little bitty eyes!” came the voice of Ella Fay from where she was pulling honeysuckle off the cow shed. “Baseball cap and sideburns!”

  “She’s got it! Feel like I can see him coming right this minute,” said Aunt Nanny, hitching forward in her rocker.

  “ ‘Don’t you come a-near me,’ Ella Fay says. She trots in front of Curly around the store fast as she can, threading her way—you know how Banner Store ain’t quite as bright as day.”

  “Pretty as she can be!” exclaimed the aunts.

  “If only she didn’t have the tread of an elephant,” said Miss Beulah in the kitchen.

  “Girls of his own church will run from him on occasion, so I’m told. Better Friendship Methodist is where he worships, and at protracted meetings, or so I’m told, every girl younger’n forty-five runs from him,” said Uncle Percy primly.

  “Every bit of that is pure Baptist thinking,” said Aunt Beck. “I’d like you to remember there’s plenty of other reasons, just as good, to keep out of that storekeeper’s way, and my sympathies go out to his sister. She can’t even bring him to church.”

  “Well, he’s coming behind Ella Fay and says, ‘Your folks been owing me for seed and feed since time was—and when’s your dad going to give me the next penny on it! You-all never did have anything and never will!’ And he’s just about to catch her. She turns around, reaches in, slides out in his face the most precious treasure there is, a gold ring! And that’s just the way her mind works,” said Aunt Nanny proudly.

  “She’s borrowed it out of Granny’s Bible for the first day of school,” said Aunt Birdie. “Yes sir, and had it tucked in where Granny tucks her silver snuffbox.”

  “Little devil,” said Aunt Nanny.

  “And he put out his great paw and taken it! Of course she right away asks him to please kindly give that back.”

  “And he wouldn’t give it back?” a chorus of cries came, as hilarious as if none of them here had ever heard. “And what excuse did he offer for such behavior?” said Aunt Birdie in sassy tones.

  “Oho, she didn’t give him time to resurrect one. Out of that store she flies! Not even his wineball would she take—spit it right out in the road. And put out her tongue at him, to remind him just who she was,” cried Aunt Nanny, hitching herself forward a little farther.

  “Pure gold?” Aunt Cleo asked.

  Uncle Noah Webster rumbled at her: “Our dead mother’s. Granny’s keeping it in her Bible. That’s your answer.”

  “What was a half-grown girl like that doing with it?” she asked.

  “Carrying it to school. She’d already shown it to the other girls,” Aunt Beck said with a sigh. “I don’t know yet how she escaped having the teacher take it up, first thing.”

  “Teacher’s too young and green,” voices teased.

  Gloria sat on, before their eyes, with her back to them. Out beyond the gate, the heat flickered and danced, and devil’s whirlwinds skittered across the road.

  “Ella Fay Renfro’d go parading off in your hat if you didn’t stop her,” Miss Lexie Renfro said.

  “She’s over-hungry to be gauding herself up, living in the land o’ dreams,” said Aunt Nanny, winking. “Something like me, back when I
was a schoolgirl.”

  “All right, then what does she do?” cried Aunt Cleo.

  “Planted herself right there in the road and bawls: ‘Big booger’s got Granny’s gold ring!’ Etoyle says that’s the swiftest she ever saw her brother Jack brought out of his desk.”

  “Oh, Jack is so dependable!” sighed Aunt Beck.

  “Is it always Jack?” asked Aunt Cleo.

  “Try hollering help yourself one time and see,” cried Miss Beulah from the kitchen.

  “Sprung over his desk like a blessed deer and tore out of the schoolhouse and in that store he prances. And in two shakes Jack Renfro and Curly Stovall’s yoked up in another fight.”

  “A schoolboy fighting an old man?” cried Aunt Cleo.

  “Listen, Curly Stovall ain’t old. He’s just mean!” Uncle Noah Webster told her.

  “And Jack wasn’t due to be a schoolboy much longer!” grinned Aunt Nanny. “He didn’t know it but his days were already numbered.”

  “Listen, Sister Cleo, here’s what Curly Stovall is: big and broad as the kitchen stove, red in the face as Tom Turkey, and ugly as sin all over. Old Curly Stovall ain’t old and I don’t think he’ll get old,” said Uncle Dolphus.

  “The Mr. Stovall I buried was old,” she said. “Creepin’!”

  “You can forget him.” Uncle Dolphus brought the front legs of his chair down hard. “Had they but saved it for Saturday!” he cried to his brothers. “It wasn’t only that we had to miss a good one. But fifteen or twenty more fellows at least would’ve been on hand, and ready and able to tell it afterwards, in Court or out, and help us give the world a little better picture of the way we do it in Banner.”

  “But like it was, everybody’s busy getting in the last of their peas,” said Uncle Percy. “Well, Curly skinned Jack’s ear, and Jack had to skin Curly’s ear, and so on, and old Curly’s getting pretty fractious, and calling now for his pup to come and take a piece out of Jack’s britches. He comes, and Jack’s little dog Sid that’s there waiting for the end of school, he frolics in too, with a kiss for that ugly hound! ‘Sic ’em, Frosty!’ Curly hollers, and if you’d been there, you’d had to stand well out of the way, or hid behind the pickle barrel. Curly even calls for his sister! Calls for Miss Ora to come out of the dwelling house back of the store and swat Jack with her broom.”