Losing Battles (25 page)

“Oh, is that the case!” said Curly. “First you coaxed that car up Banner Top, by ways best known to you, planted Aycock inside, and you rigged up a trap for me so pretty I nearly fell in. All I had to do was rebuild the truck and pump in three gallons of gas and drive it past the right place at the right time, and turn it over to you to save one more lady. All right, I’m going to tell you what
is
the case!
I’m
going to go ahead and save her while you watch, and not charge you a dime for the privilege or your daddy a dime. I’ll just charge the lady.”

“Hurrah!” Mrs. Moody cried to Heaven. “He’s giving in!”

“And you want to know why I’m treating you like a son, Jack? It’s because old Curly Stovall is sorry for you!” Curly hollered.

“Jack! Jack, you’re going right pale!” cried Gloria, running out from behind the syrup stand with the crumbles of mulberry leaves pressed into her flashing legs. She set Lady May down on her own little feet and tried to help Jack rise.

“Well, hello, Peaches!” said Curly Stovall.

“Sorry
for me? Did you hear Curly say it? Nobody ever dared in his whole life to be sorry for Jack Renfro! Nobody in Banner or nowhere else ever so much as threatened to be sorry for me!” said Jack, holding onto Gloria.

“That’s the way it used to be, but it ain’t that way no longer!” Curly hollered. “It’s time you had your eyes opened, Jack—you come home to be pitied!”

Jack staggered where he stood. Gloria fanned his face with little bats of both hands. Lady May held to her mother’s knees and wailed.

“Curly don’t know what he’s talking about, Lady May,” said Jack, and she wailed louder. He took a running jump and landed with both feet on the running board.

“Jack, you ain’t got a prayer of getting this truck away from me, don’t you know it?” said Curly, inside.

“When it’s mine already? Something I made out of nothing, using about a ton of my own sweat?” Jack wrenched at the vibrating door against Curly’s pull. “Man alive, I’m taking what belongs to me!”

Curly Stovall leaned out the window into Jack’s face, his small mouth stretching into a grin. “Then ask your daddy! What do you think he give me to pay for that new tin roof? To keep folks from feeling sorry for your whole family?”

Jack tumbled backwards and sat down in the road. Lady May shrieked and Gloria ran and threw herself at him. “Lady May means she never loved you worse than now—seeing you so crestfallen,” she whispered, clutching him.

Curly blew the horn on the truck, adding to the racket a sound like the buzzing of a hundred flies.

“Come back here!” cried Mrs. Moody, as he raised the throttle.

“Didn’t you hear me say I was on my way to a fish-fry I’m giving myself?” he called out the window.

“But you’re who Providence sent, you big bully!” Mrs. Moody cried.

“I can’t be late to my own fish-fry, can I? The sandbar’s loading up with voters now. I got a lot of brethren waiting on me,” said Curly. “And my
ice
is melting!”

“With a lady in trouble like mine, you’re going off and
eat
?” she cried.

“Ladies tells Jack Renfro what to do, but they ain’t got me by the nose,” said Curly, as Jack got himself to his feet. “You all can try looking for me after milking time in the morning. I’ll come back and see what story the night has told.”

“Serve you right if by milking time in the morning there’s nothing here left for you to save!” Mrs. Moody cried as the wheels passed over the chunk and the truck started rolling down Banner
Road. “Oh, why wasn’t my husband here to take charge of that man? I doubt if he even realized who I was.”

The truck plunged.

“Curly, that was a close call you had, a close call!” Jack yelled as he ran to keep up with it. “You nearly got yourself in a fix you couldn’t even get out of by tomorrow, didn’t you?”

“Drop back, you’re licked!” called Curly. “Go on home and tell ’em! While I wind up my campaign in a blaze of glory!” Then there was a volley of backfire.

“We’ll see who gets the glory!” Jack yelled into it. He stood still in the road, his back to the others, looking after the truck. Bales of dust tumbled behind it, then it made the blind curve and went out of sight. “I still, I
still
don’t see how he ever got the thing on the road without me—his
or
mine,” he said. “So far as I could tell, those horns is the extent of everything he thought of that I hadn’t thought of first.”

Gloria ran to him, brought him the baby.

“Gloria! What would you rather most of all I’d do to that skunk now?” he begged her to tell him.

“Give him up!” she cried.

“I’m on your side now, Gloria,” said Etoyle. “Know why? Because you’re the one that’s bleeding.”

“I should hope I am!” cried Gloria.

At the same time, there came a second clattering up the road from the direction of Halfway Forks. As wheels rattled to a stop, and an axle creaked, dust went up like a big revival tent with the flaps popping.

“Oscar!” Mrs. Moody cried when the white triangle of handkerchief emerged. Then, as the rest smoked into view, she said, “You’ve brought me nothing but another old man, with a team that looks about ready to fall down.”

Halted at the start of the downgrade, Mr. Willy Trimble’s mules with forefeet splayed might have just alighted from the upper air and struck Banner clay too hard.

“I expect it’s the other way round, Mrs. Judge, and Mr. Willy found
him
,” Jack told her. “He lives in the road. Good evening, Mr. Willy, the world treating you all right?”

“Ready for me to hitch my rope to your circus and give it a pull?” asked Mr. Willy, squinting up from under his hat brim at Banner Top.

“No sir, we still ain’t reached that point yet,” said Jack.

“Not saying I would if you’s to ask me. Looks like it might be liable to hurt my reputation to touch it,” said Mr. Willy.

Judge Moody was climbing down from the wagon still wrapped like a burglar against the dust. “I reckon I got fooled at the forks,” he began.

“You ought to have stayed here! I managed to get hold of a great big truck!” said Mrs. Moody. “But there’s strings tied to it.”

“No Sunday business?” Judge Moody sighed.

“First the man
threatened
me with bringing down my car. Then he discovered that’s what I wanted. So he said no Sunday business. I offered him everything in your pants pocket, but he went off to a fish-fry! At the last minute he said he’d come back here in the morning, and I consider I’m lucky just to be here—you might have had to bail me out of jail for trespassing!”

“Did you get his name?” asked Judge Moody.

“Oh, it’s the same one, the storekeeper,” she said. “He did have a truck after all—I’ll spare you what I had to stand here and listen to!”

“You did a better job than I did, Maud Eva. I got to a forks. I could see just one house. In the teeth of a dozen dogs I pounded, but nobody came.”

“That was the Broadwees’ house, sir. Even the women don’t stay home on Sunday,” said Jack.

“I found him drooping, and carried him back to you, lady. Told him better to stay put with who he’s with,” said Mr. Willy. “Stand still: your answer always comes along.”

“Yes indeed, I’ve seen just about every sample of it, counting you! And now I doubt if there’s anybody left at this end of the world
to
come,” Mrs. Moody said with indignation in her voice. “Just take a look at the emptiness of this road.”

There were only the claybanks and themselves. Where the Broadwees had been standing there was a newly gouged-out “B” like a cat sitting on its tail, and the two halves of a watermelon, eaten out, had been left beside the syrup stand like a pair of shoes beside a bed.

“It’s dinner time,” said Jack. “And even the Broadwees has bowed out. I reckon they’re down at the fish-fry.”

“Oscar,” Mrs. Moody said, “you are to shanghai the next thing on wheels that dares to come along here and make ’em carry
you back to civilization where you can beat somebody over the head till they come and haul us.”

“Cock your ears right now!” Etoyle cried.

Something came quaking over a Dry Creek bridge. Then a confused noise moved toward them up the road, again toward Banner, a rumble and creaking accompanied by a full register of women’s voices.

“Shanghai that!” said Mrs. Moody. A short broad bus, painted blue, came over the rise.

“Why, that’s a church bus, Mrs. Judge, and it’s headed the other way—he can’t turn
them
around,” said Jack. “And it’s packed tight. I wonder where it’s coming from and where it’s going so late.”

The bus sagged sideways, behind Mr. Willy Trimble’s wagon, then stopped. Out of every paneless window an excited face appeared.

“Gloria Short!” one of them cried, and then a smiling middle-aged lady in white hat and white dress leaned out of a forward window as far as her waist. “Dressed up and waiting by the side of the road! You looking for a ride?”

“No, Miss Pet, I’m not dressed up like this to go travelling,” said Gloria.

“You look like you’re fixing to get married all over again. What did you do to get so skinny?” another one cried. “Well, I believe it’s becoming to you.”

Jack came and stood in the road beside Gloria, and rested his hand on her shoulder.

“I see now what you’re dressed up for! You got your husband back,” said the smiling lady, who had the voice of a tease.

“I got him back this morning, Miss Pet.”

“And I hope you were ready for him!”

“Tried to be.”

“How many ladies is it?” Jack wondered aloud.

“This is a busload of schoolteachers, all of them teachers but Miss Pet Hanks,” Gloria told Jack. “It looks like all the teachers of the Consolidated School System of Boone County. This is the first time any of them’s come to see me since I was married.”

His lips moved to her ear. “Honey, ask those teachers what they want with you now.”

“You got some mighty dressed-up friends, too,” said Miss Pet. “You-all doing your visiting here in the road?”

“They’re waiting to leave in their car. Try looking straight up over my head,” said Gloria.

“Why, that’s Lover’s Leap,” said Miss Pet Hanks with a wink. “As we used to call it. And yonder’s somebody hugging somebody in the back of that car in broad, open daylight.”

“It’s not somebody, it’s just a guitar he’s hugging,” said Etoyle, who had been running and skipping up and down, up and down the bank without attracting much notice.

“He’d do better to back up instead. I wouldn’t give you two cents for where I think he’s headed,” said a teacher.

“Looks like he aimed for the moon and didn’t quite get there. I rather they all stayed on the ground,” said the flower-hatted driver.

“He’s about to go off over the edge of doom and there’s not much you and I can do about it, Mrs. Grierson. We’re only teachers,” said a cranky voice from nearer the back.

“Some of
your
work?” Miss Pet Hanks playfully pointed her finger out the window at Jack.

Gloria said, “Jack’s here to help, he feels called on.”

“Then I only hope you’ve been standing by to keep him from making any more mistakes,” said Miss Pet.

“That’s exactly what I’m doing,” Gloria said.

Jack gripped her closer. “Honey, ask ’em what’s the calamity,” he whispered.

“I declare, Gloria, we picked a busy day to find you, didn’t we?” teased Miss Pet Hanks.

“We’re not sparing any effort,” said Gloria. “It may be a long story yet, getting that car down without a scratch.”

“Well, I daresay it was quite a story how it got up there,” said the cranky voice.

“It’ll fall, and solve your problems,” two other voices said in unison and then everybody in the bus laughed and the two speakers made a wish on it.

“Aycock Comfort!” Miss Pet Hanks exclaimed, as his face turned full toward them. “Imagine you being where you are!”

“Is he kin to any
Mrs
. Comfort?” asked a new and timid voice from the crowded, benchlike seat at the back end of the bus. “Mrs. Comfort that lives in walking distance of Banner School and wants to board the teacher?”

“Sure! If that’s all you ladies came for, just keep going,” Jack
said. “Take the last chance you get to turn off before you start down to the bridge—you have to squeeze around a big old blackjack oak, but if the school bus can make it, you can.”

“If there’s one thing I was hoping I wouldn’t get, up here, it was bad news,” said Aycock in the car.

“Good-bye, then,” said Jack to the teachers.

“Good-bye,” said Gloria.

Leaning out of the windows, some of them standing and peeping over the others’ shoulders, they looked down from the bus at Gloria. They themselves were rainbow-dressed in Teachers’ Meeting dresses of spring crêpe, teachers’ hats shading their rouge spots, and their voices competed together like sisters’.

“Gloria Short, we’re going all the way to Alliance,” Miss Pet Hanks called through the others. “Miss Julia Mortimer dropped dead this morning and I rounded up every teacher I could find and said, ‘Let’s all go!’ ”

Gloria stood as if she had been struck in the forehead by a stone out of a slingshot.

“She took a fall in her own home,” said an old lady’s voice. “Nobody with her. Somebody had to
find
her. Home’s the most dangerous place after all, they say.”

Jack was supporting Gloria—she looked ready to fall backwards.

“I spread the news, the minute somebody started trying to find her doctor. It went through me,” said Miss Pet Hanks. “Gloria, I rung two longs and a short all morning long in Stovall’s store and nobody ever came to the phone to take the message. Well! Some exchanges would give up, but that isn’t my style.” She laughed excitedly.

“Is Gloria crying? I don’t think she’s crying yet,” said a voice farther back in the bus.

“The baby’s crying,” said another.

“And so,” said Miss Pet Hanks, “as long as we could come by Banner as easy as any other way, and we still had one seat, I says, ‘Let’s pile in the new teacher that goes to Banner School and dump her where she boards, and let’s hunt up Gloria Short on Banner Road—and she can have Myrtle Ruth’s seat and ride with us the rest of the way to Alliance.’ I says, ‘Kill two birds with one stone! Be inexcusable to go all that way with an empty seat.’ ”