Losing Battles (17 page)

Around the circle of needles, slick and hot and sweet as skin under them, and dead quiet, they chased each other on the hobble, fast as children on their knees, around and around the tree. A family of locust shells with wide-open backs went praying up the trunk. Each time she turned to go the other way, Gloria re-gathered an armload of skirt to her breast. With flushed eyes and faces straight ahead, they kept from running into each other or into the baby, who now made efforts to join in. His face rushed like an engine toward hers.

They hugged as they collided, gasping and wet. Their hearts shook them, like two people pounding at the same time on both sides of a very thin door. Then Gloria threw back her head, with all the weight of her curls, and said, “Jack! This isn’t what we came out for!” She pulled herself to her feet. Lady May came, still running
hard, into her legs, and she gathered up both baby and satchel before Jack climbed upright again.

Even after they started again on the path, the well at the end of it seemed to go on turning. In its canopy of trumpet-vines it only slowed down gradually, like a merry-go-round after a ride.

Jack stepped to the well for them, and after the wait it took to get the splash and haul the bucket up, its long, long shriek came up with it. By the time he came bringing the jelly glass full, Gloria and Lady May were waiting all fresh, seated straight up on a fallen tree, and Gloria was daintily strapping up her satchel.

They passed the jelly glass back and forth, Lady May sitting between them, and then Gloria emptied what was left onto the ground. It was swallowed up at once there, leaving only a little deposit of what looked like red fillings.

They stood up together. In another step they were back on the farm track. Jack threw out both arms and went first, to bar Gloria and the baby from coming too fast down the perpendicular, and they were here, in a cloud of dust. Banner Road ran in front of them, standing table-high out of the ditch.

Here the road had all but reached its highest point. It came winding and climbing toward them between claybanks that reared up grooved and red as peach pits standing on end. Little pink and yellow gravelstones, set like the seeds in long cuts of watermelon, banded all the banks alike, running above the road—more gravel than the road had ever received in its life. Growing along the foot of the banks the branchy cosmos stood man-tall, lining the way. Their leaves and stalks looked dust-laden as the old carpentered chairs that take their places by more travelled roadsides in summer, but the morning’s own flowers were as yellow as embroidery floss.

“Not a soul’s been raising new dust. We beat Judge Moody altogether! And we’re travelling with a baby and he ain’t,” said Jack. With Lady May astride his neck he jumped the ditch, and held out his hand. Gloria jumped to him.

Directly in front of them across the road, Banner Top rose up. In shape it was like a wedge of cake being offered to them. icing side toward them, point facing away. With Jack going in front, carrying both baby and satchel, they proceeded up to the peak of the road and came back onto Banner Top by the gentler slope where the path crawled. There was a barbed-wire fence that
ran with the banks on this side of the road, climbing and dipping at sharp angles and pendant with small “Keep Off” signs ruby-red with rust, like the lavalier chains draped across the pages of a mailorder catalogue.

Jack walked a high step over the wire, holding the baby, then helped Gloria under it.

“Getting up on a rise! That’s what I was homesick for,” said Jack.

Up here, limestone cropped out of the clay and streaked it white. The real top of Banner Top was like part of a giant buried cup lying on its side. Taking Gloria’s hand in his free one Jack made straight across it. The way underfoot was ridged with little waves the size of children’s palms. There were places clean and white as if a cat’s tongue had licked them. The clay that there was was set with shallow trenches, and all around the edge it was scallopy with seats and saddles. The jumping-off place itself was grooved like the lip of a pitcher, sandy, peach-colored, grainy, and warm until long after dark in summer—it faced the summer moonrise. A tall old cedar tree was stubbornly growing out of the end and standing over it. A scattering of plum bushes, delicate and quivering, already hung with orange-colored fall plums of the kind whose sucked skins tasted like pennies, furnished the only screen to keep passers in the road from seeing exactly who was up here and what their business might be.

“Now, Lady May. The first thing you do is look out and see what you got around you,” Jack told the baby. “This right here is Banner Top, little girl, and around us is all its brothers and sisters.” He had set the baby up to ride his shoulders. As far as eye could see, the world was billowing in its reds and pinks that the heat had pearled over and the dust had coated until it seemed that everything swam as one bubble. The sky itself looked patched here and there with the thin pink plaster of earth.

“Mind you don’t step too close,” said Gloria, getting behind them. “Lady May doesn’t care for steep places.”

“You might even call this a mountain,” Jack invited Lady May. “If you do, I ain’t going to argue with you.”

Now the baby obscured Jack’s head. Her little draped behind, white as a tureen, rested on his neck, and she looked with all the hair of her own head standing up.

“And winding along the edge of everywhere is the old Bywy.
Right now it’s low as sin and you can’t see it. If this was bare winter, you could look right through yonder and see Grandpa’s church pointing up its finger at you.”

Both the baby’s hands pulled gently at the tufts of Jack’s hair as he turned with her, a little at a time, showing her the world.

“You can’t see dear old Banner from here. By the road it’s five miles away, at the bottom of the ridge. But it’s right—where—I’m pointing,” Jack told her. “Like a biddie under a wing. You just follow the road.”

He reached for Gloria’s arm and steered her, taking them back across the Top to where it hung over Banner Road. It ran deep between its banks that were bright as a melon at that instant split open. It came over its hill, rushed to the bottom, and disappeared around a claybank.

“Right here in the world is where I call it plain beautiful,” said Jack. “That way is Banner.” He pointed. “And that’s the other way. Your guess is as good as your daddy’s which end of the road that old booger’s on now.”

Lady May pointed her finger straight forward.

“Why, that’s Grandpa’s chimney again,” Jack told her.

Back on the other side, it stood drinking up the light, red like the claybanks, the same clay.

“Oh, Grandpa Vaughn! I come listening for his voice all the way up to the house this morning. And believed when he kissed me good-bye he’d live to be a hundred,” said Jack.

“Showing how much more you count on everybody than I do,” said Gloria. “Get back from this edge.”

Jack squeezed Lady May’s thin leg a little. “And listen to me: that was the strictest mortal that ever breathed. He’s asleep in the ground now, and don’t have us to pray over any longer. And I miss him! I miss his frowning presence just as I get myself ready to perform something.”

“If you’re wishing for somebody who’s hard to please and wouldn’t too well like what you’re planning on now, there’s one standing over your shoulder and alive this minute,” said Gloria. “Now, haven’t we had enough of Lover’s Leap?” she cried.

“That’s what they call Banner Top if they weren’t born here,” Jack told Lady May, smiling. “Gloria, there’s just one word I want to tell you about where they had me for a year and a half: it was flat.”

The baby complained, and Jack whispered to her, “Getting homesick? Then I can show you right back where we started. That new tin giving us the signal from away across yonder”—he pointed far—“is the roof of our house.” He pointed to the farm track, red as a strand of mitten-yarn, where it showed along the curving ridge, draping it, to fall in easy stages till the last minute, when it cut through the claybank and dropped twelve feet into Banner Road, with the ditch across its foot. “And that’s our road. It comes out right under our feet. Who’s that holding up the mailbox?” And he told her, “Uncle Sam.”

The wooden figure stood at the foot of the farm track like a paper doll made out of a plank, weatherbeaten but recognizable by its pink-tinted stripes and the shape of its overlarge hat. It held out the mailbox on a single plank arm.

“I brought you here by the short-cut,” said Jack.

“Now explain to your baby what we’re all here for,” Gloria challenged him.

“Family duty,” Jack told Lady May. “And it won’t take longer than a snap of your own little finger to get Judge Moody tucked away in a ditch like he was in, long enough to learn his lesson. To save precious time, I’m going to see to it that the ditch he goes in now is one he can get
himself
out of, for a change.”

“And what easy ditch do you know of?” asked Gloria.

“Ours. You just jumped it.”

He trotted with the baby along the edge to where the bank stood steepest over the road. In the thin fold of the clay wall at the top, a round peephole had in some past time been leisurely carved. It gave a view of the road around the turn, toward Banner.

“Now look through that and tell me if you see anybody coming.” Jack let Lady May peep, she smiled, and then he peeped and cried, “You do! You see Brother Bethune! He’s coming up the road on foot and the least bit weaving!”

“That’s who has to take Grandpa Vaughn’s place,” said Gloria. “He’s in Damascus pulpit on Second Sundays. And today he’s taking Grandpa’s place at the reunion.”

“Giving us the family history?” cried Jack. “He’s licked to start with!”

“He’s heard our voices. Now look who you’re bringing right up here,” said Gloria.

The old man came right on up Banner Top, climbing the
path like a rickety ladder of his dreams. It was when he got to the top that he stumbled and fell. He kept hold of his gun, but everything else on him pitched to the ground. Jack and Gloria raised him to his feet and straightened him up between them.

“Don’t tell me where I am,” the old man warned them, as Gloria beat his hat for him and put it on his head and Jack beat the dust out of his black serge pants, dropped the tuning fork back into his shirt pocket, and scooped up his Bible, and the baby stood and watched and put her finger into her mouth. “Or where you think I’m headed. I want to tell you. It’ll all come back to me in good time.”

Brother Bethune’s Bible, bound in thin black leather skinned to the red of a school eraser, looked as if it had come to his door every Sunday by being thrown at it, rolled up like the Ludlow Sunday newspaper. Its pages, with rain-stained pink edges, looked as loose and fragilely layered as the feathers of a shot bird as Jack picked it out of a plum bush and blew on it to fly the dust.

“That looks like mine,” said Brother Bethune, reaching for his Bible and rolling it up to go back in his pocket. “Just stand still. I want you folks to keep me company right here till I can tell you who you are.”

“Jack, I wonder if this means everybody in Banner has forgotten you?” whispered Gloria.

“I hope not. And I’d be pretty quick to remind ’em!” he exclaimed. Then he cautioned her in a low voice, “But don’t tell him. You got to let him do it his own way, he’s old and a preacher.”

“He may be with us all day.”

“Suppose Judge Moody come spinning in sight before Brother Bethune knows it’s me?” Jack whispered. “And I’d just have to hold my mouth shut?”

“You should have thought of that before you started.”

“Vaughn!” Jack shouted, and made the sound of the name like a tree falling.

“Now you can’t catch me. Vaughns is all gone, I know that much—played out and gone to mouldering,” said Brother Bethune, his face beginning to light up.

Jack shouted, “If you want to start learning to be a Good Samaritan, we need a buggy ride from the mailbox!” Then he bent to Brother Bethune. “I’m just going to whisper you one thing, sir: your gun is loaded.”

Brother Bethune looked back at him in a fixed way. The skin on his bony, motionless face looked like the skin on chicken gravy when it has been allowed to cool, even to the little flecks and spots of brown trapped in it. “I know good and well I’m supposed to be carrying comfort and solace to somebody,” he said.

“Not today!” Jack warned him. “You can take my word for it, you’re headed where you can just lend your presence in the absence of somebody mightier, eat your share, and offer a few kind words in return for hospitality.”

“No death in the family, sudden or otherwise?” Brother Bethune argued. He looked from Jack to Gloria to the baby. “Now who in the world is that!” He tried to poke his finger into the baby’s mouth, his own mouth stretching in delight.

The trotting of hooves and the creaking of an axle sounded, as if approaching from down under, and stopped in the road just below them. They ran to peer down over. The dust climbed to their level in clouds like boxcars. As the red faded, then turned transparent, the first thing they could see was mule ears scissoring. Then they saw a bonnety hat, stationary, at the low point of the settling dust.

“Met your mule! She’s headed for the cemetery. Want to ride home with me?” called the driver.

“You don’t want to go with him, sir,” said Jack to Brother Bethune. “I’ll just tell you one thing more—it’s Mr. Willy Trimble.”

“The biggest old joker in Christendom!” said Brother Bethune, looking pleased as at a favorite game. “No sir, can’t catch me! No, I ain’t ready yet to ride in your old wagon, not till I’m ready for King dom Come! Ha! Ha! Ha!” Brother Bethune shouted laughter into the dust rising again as the team started on its way. Then he asked a bit quaveringly, “Am I all that far from some cold water?”

Jack went, and the well-pulley gave its squeal. He came back bringing the jelly glass full, all its faces stained tea-color from the beady Banner water.

“It’s warm as pee,” pondered Brother Bethune, then gave a cry. “The water give it away! It’s Banner! Today is First Sunday! And I’m good old Brother Bethune!”

“So far, he’s remembering everything in one grand rush,” said Jack.