Losing Battles (26 page)

As if on signal, the door of the bus swung open and the breath
of the engine and the smell of candy mints spread out into the road.

“Come ride with a whole load of teachers and me! All going to pay tribute!” cried Miss Pet.

“She’s quaking a little. Maybe she’s going to have a fit,” said a teacher.

“No she ain’t,” said Jack. He clamped Gloria to him.

“The reason I’m one of the bunch is somebody had to be smart enough to think up the trip,” said Miss Pet. “We’ve got ’em from Gowdy, Roundtree, Stonewall, Medley, Foxtown, Flowery Branch, Freewill. And you’re the last on the line.”

“We started the minute church let out,” said one of the other voices. “We borrowed the Presbyterian bus because it stays the hardest-scrubbed—it’s from Stonewall. Isn’t it the luckiest thing it’s a Sunday she picked? Suppose it had been a school day, like tomorrow. We’d been cooped up.”

“I’m never cooped up. I never consider myself cooped up,” said Miss Pet Hanks, turning her head from side to side. “I’m a free soul, I am.”

“Come on. You’re still one of us, Gloria Short. Even though you didn’t wear too well or last as long as we did,” said the driver. “You can come without a hat—join the ride.”

“Because remember all you owe her,” said the old voice from back within.

“Owes her even more than we do. Owes her the most of all,” said another voice.

“The most of all!” they chorused.

“Besides owing her part of your education, you were just an orphan!” said Miss Pet Hanks. “I reckon I know how you begun!”

“She loved you the best and prized you the most—
you
started out with three strikes against you,” said the strict voice.

“What was the third strike?” asked Etoyle, with a pull on Gloria’s sash.

Gloria handed her Lady May, then slowly tears ran down both cheeks.

“It was my inspiration to pick you up and carry you just the way we found you!” cried Miss Pet.

“You certainly made yourself easy enough to find, Gloria,” said the driver. “We couldn’t have missed you.”

“And you aren’t glad after all to see some fellow teachers again?” asked one. “Don’t you appreciate still being counted?”

“Does your baby cry like that all the time?” the new teacher’s tiny voice asked.

“She’s crying for me.” Gloria turned her face into Jack’s shoulder and he patted her a little faster.

“All this happening to you on one pretty Sunday, I
wanted
to come hunting you and find out how you’d take it. I
wanted
to say ‘Come ride with us’ to see how quick you’d jump in,” said Miss Pet Hanks, turning her rose face in its wide-brimmed hat from side to side again, as if to accept praise from all corners of the world. Judge and Mrs. Moody stood as still as the Uncle Sam by the road. Judge Moody with his head sunk.

“You wanted to kill two birds with one stone,” Etoyle reminded Miss Pet Hanks. “Now I see the other bird. I see the new teacher’s face staring, the one we’re going to get tomorrow, oh-oh!”

“Raise your head, Possum. I’m here,” Jack told Gloria.

“No, let her cry,” voices said. “It’s good for her. Good if she could cry a little harder.”

“Listen at her now,” said a teacher to the others. “Makes you wonder how often she’s cried when there’s nobody to hear her.”

“Sure is lonesome up Banner way. I’d forgotten how lonesome,” said another.

“This is getting close to Miss Julia’s old stamping grounds, right here,” said Miss Pet Hanks.

“Yes’m, another five miles or so further on, and at the bottom of the hill just before you get to that bridge. There’s Banner School, if it hasn’t blown away,” the driver said.

“And how many tracked here once, going to school to Miss Julia? I did!” cried Miss Pet.

“Trudged! We didn’t have a bus like that one yonder, did we? School buses! What they do best is get away from the driver,” said the flower-hatted driver of the church bus. “Look at that one. Glad it’s over in the ditch if
I’ve
got to pass it.”

“When I was growing up close to Medley and trudging to school at Banner, the way there wasn’t as forlorn-looking as it is today,” said Miss Pet Hanks. “Not to me.”

“Not to me either, young lady,” said Mr. Trimble from his wagon. “Remember me, anybody? I’ll try you, Thelma Grierson: ‘
Willy Trimble?—Hope Not!
’ I sat behind you.”

“Willy Trimble, you put my pigtail in your inkwell,” replied the driver. “I remember you and I want you to hitch yourself a
little closer to that ditch and hold onto those mules. Thirty ladies want to get by you.”

“That’s right—that dishpan full of chicken salad don’t want to wait much longer. Try Gloria Short one more time, and if she won’t jump in we’ll go on without her, carrying a perfectly good empty seat across that bridge,” said Miss Pet Hanks.

Jack said, “I’ll speak for her. She ain’t coming with you. I’m not letting her, that’s why.”

A black-bonneted, wrinkled face leaned out of a back window and the strict voice said, “Gloria Short, I’m as old as Julia myself. I think you just better find something to do with that husband of yours and climb on board and ride to Alliance while you get the chance. Or what’s to keep you from being sorry in afteryears?”

Gloria put up her head and asked the busful, “What makes you think a mother would run off and leave her baby?”

“It’s the other way round,” said Etoyle, jumping up and down beside her, pointing her finger up. “Look in the peephole!”

Jack pounded down the road. In the upper wall of the bank where Banner Top rose straightest from the downslant of the road, the peephole faced them at this hour with a shadowless rim, showing the circle of sky no brighter than the clay around it, just a different color of the same substance, like a seal on a document. Lady May’s face showed itself in it, peeped, went away. It reappeared, peeped, went away.

Jack was already clawing himself up the steep smooth wall below her, thrashing and swinging his body. In an instant he was halfway to the top, hanging spread-eagled to catch his first breath.

The baby’s face went away and out poked her foot with its little shoe gone. From below, it looked white and airy as a waving handkerchief.

“Jack! Climb! Climb for your baby!” Gloria screamed.

Then Lady May’s little leg and behind entered the hole and nearly came too far, like a too-small cork. At once she busied herself with trying to turn around in the hole, as if she meant all the time to take a seat there facing front, and all of a sudden she did it.

“Aycock! Jump! Run to my baby and catch her britches!” Jack hollered, while he scrambled, inches at a time.

“Come on in here with me, baby,” Aycock called.

“She’s just got herself too big a crowd,” moaned Gloria.

“I’m praying,” chattered Mrs. Moody, holding onto her husband.

“Don’t let that baby fall!” cried Etoyle.

Judge Moody lurched forward, but Mrs. Moody pulled him back by his coattail. “You’ll just scare her, make her fall quicker, that’s what you’re good for,” she said, with her teeth chattering.

Lady May watched them all from where she sat in the hole as if she were at home in the automobile tire that hung in the tree, waiting to be swung from behind. Jack took a recovering step and balanced on an outcrop of goldenrod. The sun had moved; only above him was the wall still rose red. That below was in deep brown shade, as if a big wave had come up out of the Bywy and filled everything but where the baby was. Out of it reached his shirtsleeves.

Lady May put up her arms and dropped to Jack’s, straight into his chest, where he folded her in.

Mrs. Moody grabbed Judge Moody at the same time and cried, “Couldn’t you kill both of ’em!”

“What a trip already! And we’re not even to the bridge!” cried Miss Pet Hanks.

Jack was studiously backing down the bank with Lady May. Once they were at the bottom, she hollered, turned herself upside down in the fold of his arm, and drove her little heel straight into his eye.

“Well, I’ve got me a tomboy,” announced Jack.

He walked up the road carrying her, smoothing back her hair, clearing her forehead, baring her ears, giving her a wan, older face. She looked back at him soberly now, flat-headed, as if water were streaming from her, as if she knew she’d been bodily snatched from something and was now beginning to wonder what it was.

“That little hidey-hole she found keeps the heat like Mama’s oven,” Jack told Gloria, giving the baby over. “No wonder she was ready to jump out like a little grain of popcorn.”

Lady May with one hand knocked her mother’s dress ajar and set a fist around the nipple inside. Her tuning-up sounds stopped abruptly. Gloria curved her arm around her and bent her head over her.

“This is going beyond the pale,” Mrs. Moody said to her husband.

“Can’t you understand?” Gloria asked the busload. “I’ve got my hands so full!”

“Oh. Of the living,” said one of the voices, gone flat.

“Stay right where you are, Gloria,” said the driver. “Seeing is believing.”

“Bye-bye, Gloria! You’re needed here. Your baby said it for you!” called Miss Pet Hanks. “And she looks exactly like you, congratulations. Mr. Willy Trimble, this is the first time I ever saw you but I know who you are: pull over further in that ditch and let thirty schoolteachers and a lady by, please kindly.”

Mr. Willy pulled over, saying, “I do like it when I come across a please, no matter how late.”

Jack spurted forward to give the bus a push, and the engine at length turned over, a tenor engine that sounded fighting mad. With all the teachers looking back, the bus went past them, went past the wagon and then the school bus. Shutting off the throttle, the driver took it to the bottom of the hill on the glide.

Mr. Willy Trimble took off his bonnety hat and leaned down from his wagon toward Gloria. “That’s right, daughter. This morning it was,” he said. “Down fell she. End of
her
. You’re looking at the very one found her.”

Judge Moody, out in the road, put his hands to his cheeks and rolled the tied-on handkerchief up into a ring around his forehead, and there was his naked face.

Lady May gave an outcry. Perhaps she had simply expected that under that handkerchief there was a face like Jack’s, or Mr. Renfro’s or Bet’s, or even no face at all—but not one she had never seen before, not one more new hot red face. And with it all in view, and the long lines creasing it, his eyes seemed to everybody there to show for the first time, brown and sad.

“All right, Oscar. And now let me tell you something more,” said Mrs. Moody. “That church bus would have let you jump in with them. They had a seat for you. Men are the rankest cowards!” She stood up too. “Now what?”

“Judge and Mrs. Judge,” Jack said, “there ain’t all the time there was. I ain’t going to let anybody at all stand out on Banner Road, roofless and perishing, with the sun already started down the sky. Now your Buick’s got seven or eight good inches of gas to go—she can purr right ahead without the benefit of you watching, just as
long as Aycock donates his weight to your balance. I invite you to come to our reunion.”

“Jack!” Gloria cried out faintly.

“Nothing is too good for Judge Moody, he saved my wife and baby. If I hadn’t been here for Lady May this time, he’d have had to save her again.” He turned around and planted himself in front of the Judge. “But Judge Moody, before you start to thanking me, wait. Think back. Have you ever seen me before, sir?” Jack drove his face close and stared at him.

Judge Moody took a step back. From behind him Mrs. Moody suddenly exclaimed, “I have! I have! Oscar, I swear it.”

“I believe you are getting to look a little bit familiar to me too,” said Judge Moody. “Now from how long ago—?”

Jack stood closer, his eyes open to squares.

“This very morning!” Mrs. Moody cried at him. “Our car went in the ditch and the first one to come along was you.”

Judge Moody groaned. “A good safe ditch. A perfectly good safe ditch. I have no doubt it was you, and you ought to have left us there.”

“But who was that Good Samaritan?” asked Jack urgently. “Go back farther than the ditch, Judge Moody. My name is
Jack Jordan Renfro
. That’s what I came here to tell you and it looks like I finally caught up with the chance. Jack Jordan Renfro, from Banner.” He looked Judge Moody intently in the face and got his stare returned.

“Son, I bet you a nickel we’ve had you behind bars!” said Mrs. Moody in a sudden flash.

“For doing what?” challenged Etoyle.

Judge Moody had fixed him with his eye. “Are you the fellow that subjected me to the screeching mother bird in court? And corrected the court on the name of the bird?”

“That’s right! It was a purple martin. Start with her and you may remember it all in a grand rush,” said Jack.

“What was your case?” Judge Moody asked. “You tell me.”

Gloria, still giving the baby her breast, said in a voice from which exhaustion was not now far away, “Your honor, I’m here to tell you Jack Renfro’s case in two words—home ties. Jack Renfro has got family piled all over him.”

“Proud of it,” said Jack. “And they had ’em a sorry time of it,
Judge, while I was away ploughing Parchman.”

“I expect so.” Judge Moody sighed. “Though I’m also sure that the first time they showed up like this and put in a plea for you”—without really looking at Gloria and the baby he nodded their way—“Parchman turned you loose, didn’t they? Don’t tell this court about home ties, I’m entirely familiar with ’em. How long have you been out?”

“Got in this morning, sir, in time to get the reunion warmed up to a good start,” said Jack. “I wish you could’ve seen my baby streak in to surprise me.”

“I saw her try it on me. What did I sentence you for?” asked Judge Moody, as if he barely could hold back a coming groan.

“Aggravated battery,” said Jack. “And I might just as well have held my blow, sir—he’s the same old Curly today.”

“The same storekeeper that’s going to bring the truck—when he feels like it?”

“There ain’t but one!” said Jack.

“They’re all in this together,” said Mrs. Moody.

“And your partner?” Judge Moody looked up at the car. “Back from Parchman?”