Losing Battles (2 page)

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 caught 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.

“If there’s anything I do abhor, it’s coming through the broad outdoors!” cried Aunt Birdie with elation. “New tin! Why, Beulah Renfro! What’d you give for it?”

“Ask Mr. Renfro!”

“And what’s the excuse?” Aunt Birdie cried, hugging her.

“My boy’s coming! My boy’s coming!” cried Miss Beulah. “He’s coming to surprise Granny—we just somehow know it.”

Aunt Birdie with a squeal of joy opened her arms and ran to Granny. She was faded but still all animation, as if long ago she’d been teased into perpetual suspense.

“Happy birthday, Granny! Jack’s coming! Won’t that make up for everything?” she cried into the old lady’s ear.

“My ears are perfectly good,” Granny said.

Then the little Beechams came up and tried to present Granny with a double armload of dahlias, each stalk as big as a rag-doll, a bushel of plushy cockscomb, and cooking pears tied in an apron. Miss Beulah rushed to her rescue.