Losing Battles (13 page)

He might never have been under a roof from the day he left home until this minute. His open, blunt-featured face in its morning beard had burned to a red even deeper than the home clay. He was breathing hard, his chest going up and down fast, his mouth was open, and he was pouring sweat. With his eyes flared wide, his face smileless as a child’s, he stood and waited, with his arms open like gates.

Then it seemed that the whole reunion at once was trying to run in.

“Why ain’t you nearly perished?” Miss Beulah shrieked as she
shouldered her way through the rest and smacked his face with kisses.

“What did you bring me?” yelled Etoyle.

“What did you bring me?” yelled Elvie. They both beat their fists against him. Elvie beat on his legs, crying with joy, then found a cockleburr to pull off his pants, and Etoyle with a scream of triumph pinched a live June bug that was riding his sleeve—the torn sleeve that flowed free from his shoulder like some old flag carried home from far-off battle.

“Where’s mine?” teased the boy cousins. “Where’s mine, Jack?”

Ella Fay ended her shrieks at last and ran to get her hug. Then Vaughn came across the floor in long strides, his heavily starched pants weighted down by the deep folds at the bottom. He had put on his print-sack school shirt, new and readable front and back, from which the points of his collar were damply rising. Jack lunged forward looking ready to kiss him, but Vaughn said, “I’ve got on your pants.” He had with him a pair of dried cornstalks, and offered them. Jack took one and for a moment the brothers jousted with them, shaking them like giant rattles, banging them about like papery clubs.

“Was you a trusty?” Vaughn asked, then fled.

“And oh but he’s home tired, limping and sore after all his long hot way!” screamed Aunt Birdie, pulling down Jack’s head to kiss his cheeks and chin, while Aunt Nanny bear-hugged him from behind.

“Honey, you don’t know yet how hard we’ve been waiting on you,” said Aunt Beck, with great care ripping a briar away from his pants leg. “I wish you did.”

“Never wrote your family once—I got that out of your daddy,” Miss Lexie was sweeping up the cakes of clay and strings of briars his shoes had tracked in. “Might as well be coming back from the dead.”

“Don’t he get here fat and fine, though?” Aunt Nanny still squeezed him around the ribs. “Believe you put a little meat on your bones while you was away!”

“But I venture to say they never did succeed in feeding you like we’re fixing to feed you today,” said Aunt Birdie, pulling him loose.

“Well, did you bring us a rain?” Uncle Noah Webster was shouting at him as though from a rooftop.

The uncles plunged forward to pull on him and pound him, while Etoyle and Elvie sat on the floor and each anchored one of his feet.

“Where’s Gloria? Gloria, Glo-ri-a! Here’s him! You forgotten how to act glad? Girl, can’t you find him, can’t you fight your way through us?” It was the aunts screaming at her, while the uncles said to the aunts, “Hold back, then.”

They divided and there stood Gloria. Her hair came down in a big puff as far as her shoulders, where it broke into curls all of which would move when she did, smelling of Fairy soap. Across her forehead it hung in fine hooks, cinnamon-colored, like the stamens in a Dainty Bess rose. As though small bells had been hung, without her permission, on her shoulders, hips, breasts, even elbows, tinkling only just out of ears’ range, she stepped the length of the porch to meet him.

“Look at that walk.
Now
I’d know her for a teacher anywhere,” said Aunt Cleo.

Jack cocked his hands in front of his narrow-set hips as she came. Their young necks stretched, their lips tilted up, like a pair of rabbits yearning toward the same head of grass, and Jack snapped his vise around her waist with thumbs met.

“First kiss of their lives in public, I bet a hundred dollars,” Aunt Cleo observed.

“Speak, Jack, speak!” shrieked his mother.

“Speak, Jack!” they were crying at him. “You ain’t gone deaf and dumb, have you?”

“A new roof! I could see it a mile coming!” His lilting voice came at last. “What’s happened?”

“Bless his heart!” Miss Beulah thankfully cried.

“Well, I believe it’s one thing that may be on tight, son,” said Mr. Renfro. He still stood back, with his arms hugged together in front and the prong of his chin in his hand. But as Jack started parting his way toward him, Granny made a little noise of her own.

“Look who’s been waiting, just a speck!” Uncle Noah Webster shouted, as Jack, spinning and sweeping her from her feet, brought Granny up to meet him, chin to chin.

“Ain’t you got me a little sugar?” she inquired.

“I didn’t quite hear Grandpa’s thunder as I came through the
lot,” Jack told her after she’d got her kiss, still holding her up where he could see her. “Where have you got him hid, Granny?”

“Jack, we’ve lost Grandpa,” Miss Beulah called up, hands frantic at her lips.

“We lost Grandpa Vaughn, one year ago today,” Uncle Curtis said, and as all went quiet, like the rattle of tiny drums came the sound of one more kettle coming to a boil in the kitchen.

“You never stopped coming for long enough to see if there’s a new grave in the cemetery with fresh flowers on it?” Miss Beulah asked, reading his face. “It would have been staring right at you.”

“It was the last place I thought to look,” gasped Jack.

“Yes, son. And oh but you know how an old lady grieves! We was all worried for fear we couldn’t keep her for you, either,” Miss Beulah cried.

Granny, up in the air, only looked him back cockily in the eye. Carefully he lowered her down to the floor, and when she got her footing he brushed some of his dust off her sleeves.

“Oh, Jack’s cheek is ready to wipe,” said Aunt Birdie.

“We’ve got a mighty good little surprise ready for now,” Aunt Nanny said.

“When people need it most! That’s the time to bring it out,” said Aunt Birdie.

“Gloria! What have you got for Jack? Ain’t it just about time to show him?” The crowd caught up with her in the kitchen, clamoring to her.

“I’ll be the judge,” said Gloria from the stove.

Jack came plunging into the smoke and steam, turned her around, circled the table at a hop, counting his mother’s cakes out loud, stealing a wing from the mountain of fried chicken heaped on the bread board, and kissed the icing off the blade of a knife. Then, sinking into the kitchen rocker, he took off his shoes and held them out to the nearest sister.

Under the red dust that coated them the uppers were worn nearly through. Their soles were split. The strings hung heavy with dust and weeds and their own extra knots. They were the shoes he had left home in. Elvie bore them off to the company room, while Jack lifted a crock from the table and drank off the top of the milk.

“And here’s who’s been doing the most of that barking,” cried Aunt Nanny.

Sid ran in panting, a festive-looking little dog with a long coat,
black and white with a marking down his breast like a flowing polka-dot tie. He was like a tiny shepherd. Jack gathered him onto his knee, raised the moulting cat to his shoulder, and rocked the two together.

“What would we have done if you
hadn’t
got here and
wasn’t
sitting right now in that chair?” Miss Beulah screamed at him.

“Well, Mama, I believe I’m right on time,” he said with milky mouth.

“Jack Renfro, you’re home early, by my reckoning,” Miss Lexie Renfro now marched up and said with the bang of her own kiss. “Now how’d you get rewarded like that?”

“Aunt Lexie, what they told me it was for was my behavior.”

“Surprised
they’d
know good behavior when they saw it!” snorted his mother, and forced a saved-up square of gingerbread whole into his mouth.

Chewing softly, he kept his eyes on Gloria, and now in a wreath of steam she came toward him. She bent to his ear and whispered her first private word.

“Jack, there’s precious little water in this house, but I saved you back some and I’ve got it to boiling.”

“Whose is it?” he whispered back.

“Lady May’s.”

The whole round circle of blue showed in his eyes.

“There’s a foot tub waiting in you and Vaughn’s old room. Scrub. Then you can shave those whiskers so they won’t scare somebody else.” She put into his groping hand the lump of sweet-soap, gave him a towel she had ready, stiff as pasteboard from the clothesline and hot too, and walked ahead of him carrying from the stove the boiler of slightly milky, steam-breathing water.

“I’ve been in the river already,” he said humbly there at her heels.

“Like I couldn’t help but know!”

The front porch that he had emptied of all company by going back to the kitchen was for the moment still deserted. It was only draped with their coats, set about with their packed buckets and bundles, and its floor was bulging as if pressed up from below by Mr. Renfro’s melons underneath.

Jack came leaping over a banjo laid on a folded coat, and straddling a bucket of zinnias he planted himself before the mirror. She pointed out to him where all this time they’d kept his shaving
brush in the dish. Then she put into his hand the razor she’d stropped.

“Don’t just look at me,” she said.

The mirror was mottled like a bird egg. He filled it with his urgent face.

“She’s being a real little wife, she’s making him earn his surprise,” said Aunt Birdie. A circle had re-formed on the porch.

“Now that cheek looks more like you. It would take more’n the whole wide world to change you, Jack,” said Aunt Beck.

“Don’t let those fingers slip! I bet he’s already lost a gallon of sweat just proving how glad he is to see us,” said Aunt Birdie.

Aunt Cleo pushed in front of the others, leaned over Jack’s shoulders, and got into the mirror with him.

“Who you think this is?” she asked.

He almost cut his cheek. Everybody laughed but Gloria, Granny Vaughn, Miss Beulah, and Aunt Cleo.

“Her story is,” said Aunt Nanny, “your Uncle Noah Webster gave the Market Bulletin a free ad for a settled white Christian lady with no home ties and drawing a pension to come keep house for him.”

“Wasn’t that just the same as handing Aunt Lexie an invitation?” he asked, shaving his perplexed jaw.

“You know I’d be turned down,” Miss Lexie said.

“The bus halted at Foxtown store,” said Aunt Nanny. “And when she climbed off it was Cleo. ‘Well, now that I’ve seen your house,’ she says to Noah Webster when she’s ready to go, Suppose you ride back with me and I’ll show you mine.’ Well, he climbed on.”

“I ended up my ad, ‘Don’t care if you drink, dip, cuss, flirt or philander, just so you can wield a broom and enjoy the banjo,’ “ said Uncle Noah Webster.

“I started not to even come,” Aunt Cleo said.

“I got a pretty fair little set of answers altogether,” said Uncle Noah Webster.

“You’re still gettin’ ’em. Bulletin never did know how to
quit
running an ad,” said Uncle Dolphus. “Mailman says if you don’t want ’em, he does.”

“But Jack,” said Uncle Noah Webster, “it was when I spotted the name Stovall peeping out of Cleo’s answer that I saw the first familiar thing. I’d found my pick!”

“And guess what she is,” they cried. “A Stovall’s widow.”

Gloria had to take the razor or it would have fallen out of his hand.

“Not Curly!” the circle, all except smiling Aunt Cleo, cried into his boiled, well-alarmed face.

“For a minute you had me thinking somebody had fell for Curly, married him, and the shock had killed him,” Jack told Aunt Cleo. He beat his hands and face with Gloria’s towel, and put his welcome on Cleo’s cheek.

“And she keeps house for him fine except they’re married and living in hers, and it’s clear down away from us all in South Mississippi,” Aunt Birdie said.

“He thinks we’ve forgiven him for it,” called Miss Beulah.

Gloria took hold of Jack’s still undried wrist, and led him straight from the porch to the door of the company room, then stopped him.

“You can’t come any farther till the reunion’s over—the company room is chock-full,” she told him. She pushed open the door upon thick hot air as palpable as a wedge of watermelon. “Take your nose back,” she warned him, and pressed the door against his naked toes, leaving only a crack.

Inside a ring of ladies’ hats and tied-up presents, the width of the bed was filled with babies, as many as a dozen, all of them asleep, tumbled on top of or burrowed into one another. Gloria hovered for a minute over the baby whose eyelids were not quite sealed, and whose girl-hair streamed soft as a breath against a mother’s palm. As if to show she remembered the way she’d looked when she first came, Lady May buried her face away from the light, and down the nape of her neck lay the same little trigger of hair, nasturtium pink.

Then Gloria pulled her valise from under the bed and took something out. When she slipped into the passage again, she was holding it up—a store shirt, never worn.

“Somebody that’s never seen you before wants to see you a little better adorned,” she whispered. “Curly Stovall traded me this for black walnuts, Jack. I picked ’em all up between here and the store, just keeping to my way. A barrel full.”

“The hog,” he said hoarsely.

Without ever taking his eyes from her, and without moving to get the old shirt off till she peeled it from his back, he punched one arm down the stiffened sleeve. She helped him. He drove in the
other fist. It seemed to require their double strength to crack the starch she’d ironed into it, to get his wet body inside. She began to button him down, as his arms cranked down to a resting place and cocked themselves there. The smell of the cloth flooded over them, like a bottle of school ink spilled—the color was blue, a shade that after a few boilings in the pot would match her sky-blue sash.

By the time she stood with her back against the door to get the last button through the buttonhole, he was leaning like the side of a house against her. His cheek came down against hers like a hoarse voice speaking too loud.

Then the voices of others, that tread which was only just a little lighter than feet, ran over them. Somebody else was arriving.