Losing Battles Page 4

  “She’s a pretty good artist with that broom, but she don’t always make an appearance when she’s called,” giggled Aunt Birdie. “That’s her reputation.”

  “A good thing for ’em both they didn’t call for Lexie,” said Miss Lexie. “I’d killed both of ’em right on the spot, before they went an inch further.”

  “If you’d got close enough to the store, you might’ve caught a flying rattrap, sure enough.” Uncle Curtis told her. “But you couldn’t expect to put a stop to Jack and Curly. Your broom ain’t any longer than Miss Ora’s.”

  “ ‘Hand over the ring! Where you got it hid?’ Jack keeps hollering. ‘What’d you do, swallow it?’ he says.

  “ ‘Let go my windpipe,’ says Curly. ‘And quit turning my store upside down—I put it in my safe.’

  “ ‘Bust it open!’ says Jack.

  “ ‘I ain’t a-gonna!’

  “ ‘Don’t make so much racket,’ says Jack. ‘The new teacher’s over there trying to get a good start. Speak more quiet.’

  “ ‘Make me!’ says Curly.

  “So Jack he brought down on Curly’s crown with a sack of cottonseed meal—”

  “Without warning?” Aunt Cleo cried.

  “—of cottonseed meal that Curly had standing right there. Busted the sack wide open and covered that booger from head to foot with enough fertilize to last him the rest of his life. Then didn’t old Curly whirl!

  “Jack says, ‘Hold it, Curly! Vaughn, go back to your desk!’ Yes, that little feller’s slipped out and followed his big brother into battle.”

  “Couldn’t the new teacher hold onto her pupils any better’n that?” teased Uncle Noah Webster. “In my day, the teacher wielded a switch as long as my arm!”

  “You can’t keep children of mine shut up in school, if they can figure there’s something going on somewhere!” Miss Beulah called above the sudden spitting of the skillets in her kitchen. “They’re not exactly idiots!”

  “ ‘Vaughn, get out of men’s range,’ says Jack. And Vaughn’s still little enough to back off like his brother tells him, but big enough not to back no further than the best place to see. He squats him on the roof of the pump box and could see and hear.”

  “Here it comes!” sang the aunts.

  “Jack dives right over the counter into Curly and butts him out of reach of that old piece-of-mischief that Curly was whirling for, and it was loaded, you bet, and steers him out from behind that counter to the one clear spot in the middle of the floor—and the whole store busts wide open. All in a golden cloud of pure cotton-seed meal.”

  “That’s when I wish I could’ve waded in on top of ’em!” hollered Aunt Nanny. “Wielding the battle-stick I stir my clothes-pot with!”

  “The whole schoolhouse must’ve been equally ready to pop!” cried Aunt Birdie. “And the teacher, of course, she couldn’t do any good.”

  “Maybe not a teacher. But what was Gloria doing all this time? Where was she?“ asked Aunt Cleo. “She must come into this somewheres.”

  “If you teach, you’re expected to go on teaching whatever happens,” said the voice of Gloria. She spoke from her seat on the log.

  “Until you die or get married, one,” Aunt Birdie agreed.

  “You mean Gloria was the teacher?” shrieked Aunt Cleo.

  “That was only my first day.” Gloria turned her head only the least bit to tell them. “I wasn’t blind to what went on. I was taking full stock of that commotion from my windowsill, abreast the pencil sharpener. All the while careful to keep the brunt of the children behind me instead of where they were struggling for, so they couldn’t learn the example that was being set. And teaching them a poem to hold them down, the one about Columbus and behind him lay the gray Azores.”

  “And when Curly stretched his arm for the gun?” cried Aunt Birdie.

  “I rang that dinner bell,” said Gloria.

  “If Ella Fay could’ve just lasted till then! She had jelly in all her biscuits in her dinner pail, besides the rest of her dinner!” Miss Beulah cried from the kitchen.

  “ ‘Curly, hear that bell? It’s dinner time already,’ says Jack. ‘Give me the ring and be quick about it—you wouldn’t want me to keep the new teacher waiting on me.’

  “ ‘I ain’t going to bust open that safe,’ says Curly.

  “ ‘Stay put, then,’ says Jack. ‘And I’ll come back after dinner and bust it open for you.’

  “ ‘What’s gonna hold me?’ says Curly.

  “ ‘Well, what’s that coffin been doing here in our way so long?’ says Jack, and packs him in so quick!”

  “Where’d it come from in such a hurry?” Aunt Cleo asked.

  “Made for him. Made just to hold Curly, thanks to Miss Ora his sister,” said Uncle Curtis. “It wasn’t nothing new. All his trade was pretty well used to falling over it. She had Willy Trimble to get busy on that coffin when Banner in general and her in particular had it settled Curly’s about to go in it—back when the Spanish Influenza was making its rounds. Then of course old Curly jumped up and fooled her. Well, that mistake is still taking up room in Curly’s store to this day.”

  “Cleo, that’s some coffin,” said Uncle Noah Webster. “Made out of two kinds of wood, cedar and pine. It would hold two of you. If it wasn’t Sunday, you could step in the store and take a look at the size of it.”

  “If it wasn’t Sunday she could step in and take a look at the size of Curly,” said Uncle Percy primly.

  “Vaughn says, ‘You can’t do that to our storekeeper!’

  “ ‘Just because nobody ever has?’ says Jack.”

  “Didn’t Curly Stovall object to being treated like that in his own store?” asked Aunt Cleo.

  “He let it shortly be known he wasn’t too happy about it,” whispered Uncle Percy. “Stuffed in backwards the way he was, yellow as sin from cottonseed meal, and boxed in as pretty as you please—all that was lacking was the lid on.”

  “Squeezed in tight on his old tee-hiney!” cried Aunt Birdie.

  “Right smack on his old humpty-dumpty!” shouted Aunt Nanny.

  “To a tighter fit than any galvanized tub ever give him. And chalked up the side of it’s running the words ‘Cash Sale Only, Make Me an Offer!’ I reckon up till that very day, old Curly’d been basking in the notion somebody’d come along from somewheres and cart that thing off his hands.” Uncle Noah Webster groaned with laughter. “Curly says, ‘Jack, wait! You go off to eat and leave me like this for my trade to find?’ ‘I better make sure,’ says Jack, and runs a little clothesline around. Laces him tight and ties the ends behind, so fat arms can’t reach. Like Nanny here—can’t untie her own apron strings.”

  “ ’Twas a mighty poor trick to play, then!” Aunt Nanny cried, delighted.

  Uncle Percy went on. “Vaughn says, ‘Now can I pop him?’ And Jack says, ‘You trot yourself back to the teacher and hand in your slingshot before she can ask you for it,’ he says. ‘That’s a teacher I want us to hang onto. Help me keep her rejoicing in Banner, so she’ll stay.’ Vaughn told it on him.

  “And without a word Jack skips to the safe, rakes off a forest of coal oil lamps and chimneys that’s crowding the top of it, squats him under it, and ups with the whole thing on his back. Packs it right on top of him! You can bet Curly loved seeing that safe get up and walk away from him—about as well as he’d love a dose of Paris green!” sang out Uncle Noah Webster, and Uncle Percy went wavering on:

  “Out Jack goes, staggers down the steps of the store, and starts across the road. The children’s got their lunch pails open, they’s already gobbling, but the teacher’s still on the doorstep pumping that bell. I reckon now’s when she drops it.”

  “And I reckon he was fixing to drop that safe, there at her feet,” said Aunt Beck gently. “But when he gets there, she’s ready for him.”

  They paused to look at Gloria. Small girl cousins had been drawn to her now, and marched in a circle around her, every little skirt a different length from the others.


  “Down on this carpet you must kneel

  Sure as the grass grows in this field,”

  the little girls were singing, loud through their noses.

  “ ‘You can’t bring that to school,’ says Miss Gloria. ‘School is not the place for it. Just keep your antics to the store.’ And she says, ‘If all this was to make me sit under the oak tree with you and open our lunch side by side, you’ve gone the wrong way about it, Jack Renfro,’ she says.”

  “My lands,” said Aunt Cleo, leaning back in her chair.

  “Little Elvie told it on her—she can copy Gloria just like Poll Parrot,” Aunt Nanny grinned.

  “ ‘If you took up a ton on your back to let me know how good and strong you are, I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of laying it down,’ she says. ‘You can just keep on going. Carry it on home and see what your grandpa will say. I’ve already sent your sister crying home ahead of you. And here!’ She prisses to meet him, and hangs his own lunch pail on his other hand. Then she’s strapping up his history and arithmetic and geography and speller, and saddling ’em around his neck. ‘Go on,’ she says. ‘See how far this performance will carry you. If I’m going to hold down Banner School, I need to see right now what my future’s going to be like.’ ”

  “No wonder she had her pupils running out the door! I’m surprised they didn’t go climbing out the windows as well,” said Aunt Nanny, slapping her lap.

  “ ‘And come right straight back! And bring me a written excuse from your mother for coming home before school is out. Or take your punishment!’

  “Off he staggers.”

  “Say, wasn’t Jack showing off a good bit for the first day of school, when you start to adding it all up?” asked Aunt Cleo.

  “Oh, no more than the teacher,” said Miss Beulah coolly, standing there to look at her.

  A couple of butterflies flew over Gloria where she sat on her log, particles whirling around each other as though lifted through the air by an invisible eggbeater. But she sat perfectly still and stared straight ahead.

  “Well, I’m ready to hear the rest!” said Aunt Cleo. “How big a safe is it?”

  “It’s as big as a month-old calf!” cried Aunt Nanny.

  “Well, how big is Jack?”

  “He’s Renfro-size!” said Miss Beulah. “But he’s all Beecham, every inch of him!”

  “How come he didn’t just crack open that safe and try carrying home nothing but the ring?” asked Aunt Cleo.

  “Do you think he had all day?” cried Aunt Birdie.

  “Pore Jack! How he made it up that first hill is over and beyond my comprehension,” said Aunt Nanny.

  “Pore Jack! It’s just a wonder he didn’t fall flat on his face, once and for all,” said Aunt Beck.

  “Carrying the safe on his back, and books and lunch pail and the rest of the burdens he’s had piled on him, one on top the other! He ate the lunch, got rid of that much load—we don’t need to be told that,” cried Aunt Nanny.

  “Didn’t the safe alone pretty soon start weighing a ton?” asked Aunt Cleo.

  “It’s only a wonder he didn’t go through a single bridge with it,” Uncle Percy conceded. “It had to weigh as much as a cake of ice the same size, but a safe don’t melt as you go, more is the pity.”

  “I could see him coming when he started up through the field,” said Miss Beulah. “Oh, I wish I’d turned him around right there!”

  Ella Fay in the front yard giggled. “And Mama yells, ‘What’re you bringing now, to get in my way?’ I was crying so hard I couldn’t tell her!”

  “The day before, he’d brought up them old pieces of concrete pipe he’d unearthed from some bridge that’s gone, and upended them there by the foot of the steps for his mother to plant—so the new teacher’d see ’em when she went up the steps or down!” cried Miss Beulah. “And now this!”

  “Jack struggles through the gate and the yard and drops his load to the ground at the front steps. ‘Here’s Papa something to open,’ says Jack.”

  “What ways and means has Mr. Renfro got?” asked Aunt Cleo, as Mr. Renfro came around the house carrying a watermelon. “He don’t look like he’s got too many left.”

  “Never mind, he didn’t get the chance,” said Miss Beulah.

  “You knew something would go awry, you was just waiting for the first hint!” Aunt Birdie said, tugging on Aunt Cleo’s hefty arm. “Well, by the time that safe hits home soil, it’s already open! The door’s hanging wide—”

  “And the cupboard was bare,” whispered Uncle Percy. He turned to Granny. “There’s no more ring than I can show you right now in the palm of my hand.”

  Granny looked back at him through the long slits of her eyes.

  “Now what does Jack say?” Aunt Cleo asked.

  “ ‘Bring me a swallow,’ he says. So Ella Fay holds the dipper and when he can talk he says, ‘If Curly wants that safe now, after the behavior it’s give me, he’s going to have to come with his oxen and haul it down himself.’ Then he gives his mother the gist, and says, ‘Don’t worry about the ring, Mama. Tell Granny not to worry—somebody with bright eyes can help me find it.’ And he says, ‘The new teacher told me not to come back without a written excuse.’ ‘I wouldn’t write you an excuse this minute to please Anne the Queen,’ says Beulah. ‘I’m too provoked to guide a pencil, and what do you suppose Grandpa’s going to be?’ ‘Then I got to make haste,’ says Jack. ‘If I ain’t back by the last bell to take my punishment, she’s liable to kill me!’ Whistles for Dan. Onto his back and shoots off like a bolt.”

  “And why ain’t he back?” asked Granny. “I’ve heard this tale before.”

  “Never mind, Granny, he’s on his way right now,” boomed Uncle Noah Webster. “That’s what we’re doing—bringing him.”

  “Who’d opened the safe?” asked Aunt Cleo.

  “Nobody,” Uncle Noah Webster beamed at her. “It’d opened itself. Jack’d already hit the ground with it a time or two, coming.”

  “Wouldn’t you have?” Miss Beulah cried. “It was as big as a house and twice as heavy!”

  “Well, now, I wouldn’t say it’s all that sizeable,” said Mr. Renfro, coming around the house with another melon to put on exhibition. “Or all that heavy. I reckon the sides of the thing may have a certain amount of tin in ’em, Mother. Or you’d expect it to go through the store floor.”

  “How do you know, Mr. Renfro?” asked Aunt Cleo.

  “Used to be my safe,” he said. “Used to be my store.”

  “My!” she said. “How did you come so far down in the world, then?”

  “And my daddy’s before me,” he said. “And away back yonder, his granddaddy made the first start—trading post for the Indians. Come down to me and I lost it.”

  “The year we married,” said Miss Beulah. “Never mind going any further.”

  “I see all the rest,” Aunt Cleo told her.

  “Just you be assured that that safe weighs a ton,” said Miss Beulah. “I heard the noise the ground made when the safe came down and shook it. Just exactly like thunder.”

  “Let’s be fair, and say it wasn’t any more the fault of the safe than the fault of this here soil,” said Uncle Curtis. “Banner clay is enough to break even a man’s back, when rain is withholden. Ain’t that the case, Mr. Renfro?” he asked. “Growing watermelons is about the best it can do now, ain’t it?”

  Mr. Renfro thumped his melon and left again for more.

  “And just to think of an ignorant boy walking along this hilly old part of the world, dropping out pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters behind him! Wheresoever that boy walked there was good money laying in his tracks, and he didn’t know it!” Aunt Cleo cried.

  They all laughed but Miss Beulah.

  “It was the ring he lost!” she shrieked. “What he went to all the trouble for!”

  “How’s Curly Stovall getting along?” Aunt Cleo cried.

  “In his coffin? He ain’t any better,” said Uncle Noah W
ebster, giving her a clap on the shoulder.

  “Curly in his own coffin is a picture I’d give anything in this world to see to this day, and just listening to his choice remarks,” said Uncle Curtis. “It happened on the wrong day of the week and that’s the only thing that’s the matter with it.”

  “I reckon those precious children’s the only ones got a decent look at him,” said Aunt Cleo.

  “That teacher, the minute they’s through gobbling, she lines ’em up and marches ’em right back inside the schoolhouse,” said Aunt Nanny. “They never knew what they missed. And she didn’t know no more about any coffin than they did!”

  “Thought she could see so good with those bright eyes,” said Aunt Birdie.

  “What good’s her eyes? In the first place, the store scales is standing right in front of the door, trying to block you. And in the second place, it’s dark inside,” Aunt Beck gently reminded them.

  “You don’t know what’s there till you get in the store, and even when you can see it, sometimes it’ll bump you,” said Uncle Curtis. “That coffin.”

  “And now there’s Curly stuck in it, as tight as Dick’s hatband, going sight unseen,” said Uncle Percy.

  “Stuck and still wearing his baseball cap,” said Aunt Nanny, grinning. “Sideburns thick with meal. Like bunches of goldenrod hanging to his ears, Etoyle says.”

  “How’d Etoyle get a look?” asked Aunt Cleo.

  “She ate the fastest and run the quickest, then told her story and didn’t find any believers,” said Ella Fay in the yard. “She’s not but in the fourth grade and everybody knows she embroiders.”

  “Well, what does Curly Stovall do?” asked Aunt Cleo.

  “Hollers,” whispered Uncle Percy. “And not a soul can he summons. Calls again for Sister Ora. But she don’t come till she’s ready.”

  “She can’t hear Curly half the time for the reason she’s talking to him,” said Aunt Birdie. “When he’s in the store she’s talking to him from the house. When he’s in the yard she’s talking to him from the store. I bet you she was there in the house talking to Curly the whole time. And he had to hear all she had to say, stuck in his own coffin.”