Losing Battles (31 page)

“If forgiving Jack was what he was doing, I’d hate to think that’s his best effort,” said Aunt Beck.

“Judge Moody and Mrs. Moody! I hope your appetite is proving equal to the occasion,” Jack was saying, while the pickled peaches and the pear relish, the five kinds of bread, the sausages and ham—fried and boiled—and the four or five kinds of salad, and the fresh crocks of milk and butter that had been pulled up out of the well, were all being set within his reach. And then Aunt Beck’s
chicken pie was set down spouting and boiling hot right under his nose. “Mama’ll take it pretty hard if you go away leaving a scrap on your plate,” he told the Moodys.

Brother Bethune had come down to the World War. “All the Beecham boys but the youngest and the oldest went over with me to the trenches and ever’ last one of ’em but the youngest got back like me with their hides on. I don’t know how they did it, exactly, but I do know it’s a good deal more like the Beechams than it is like the Bethunes. A few scratches here and a few medals there to be put away and buried with ’em, but they come back the same old Beecham boys they always was, and just the good old Beecham boys we still know ’em to be. Like they’d never been gone.”

“If we go German-hunting again, I say don’t let’s us leave even a nit over there this time!” shouted Uncle Noah Webster. Laughter spilled out of his mouth like the cake crumbs.

“They say the next time, them Germans is coming over here after us,” whispered Uncle Percy.

“Let ’em come try!” shouted Uncle Dolphus.

“Will we arm ourselves as did the knights of old? Or will we turn and run, like that jack rabbit I see yonder?” asked Brother Bethune, arm shooting out to point, as every head turned to follow. Then came the laugh.

“Brother Bethune, I declare, you might get somewhere yet,” Uncle Dolphus declared, and Uncle Curtis said, “You’re not Grandpa Vaughn, but at least you know better now than try to be.”

Brother Bethune cleared his throat and looked all about him. “The old homestead here looks very natural,” he said, wearing the face of good news. He wheeled back to them so fast that he might have been expecting to find somebody already gone.

“Crops not what they used to be,” said Uncle Curtis, as though Brother Bethune needed prompting.

He went on in soothing tones. “I don’t reckon good old Mississippi’s ever been any poorer than she is right now, ’cept when we lost. And in all our glorious state I can’t think of any county likelier to take the cake for being the poorest and generally the hardest-suffering than dear old Boone.” Sighs of leisure and praise rose to encourage him, and Brother Bethune paused to suck up some lemonade. Then his smile broke. “Looks like some not too far from the sound of my voice is going to have to go on relief for the first time. Ha! Ha!”

“Not Ralph Renfro,” Mr. Renfro promised him shortly. He was at the lemonade tub too. He filled his cup and sat down again beside Judge Moody, so as to take pleasure in him.

“I believe we might even do a little material complaining around Banner, if we try right hard,” said Brother Bethune, managing to dip up a little more for himself by tilting the tub against his knee. “Floods all spring and drought all summer. We stand
some
chance of getting
about
as close to starvation this winter as we come yet. The least crop around here it would be possible for any man to make, I believe Mr. Ralph Renfro is going to make it this year.”

“Good old Brother Bethune,” somebody was murmuring out in the crowd, “he’s warming up now.”

“No corn in our cribs, no meal in our barrel, no feed and no shoes and no clothing—tra la la la!” he sang to the littlest one he could see, a baby tied in the wheelbarrow. “No credit except for the kind of rates nobody is inclined to pay. Pigs is eating on the watermelons. All you people without any watermelons come on over to my house. Too cheap to haul from the field this year! And yet! It’d be a mighty hard stunt to starve a bunch like us.” He spread his teasing smile over them all. “I reckon we’ll all, or nearly all, hold out for one more round.” As they cheered him on he called over them, “We got hay made and in the barn, we’ll soon have some fresh meat, the good ladies has stocked the closet shelf with what garden we saved by hauling water. We got milk and butter and eggs, and maybe even after today’s slaughter there’ll be a few chickens left. And if we must needs accept them old commodities again from Uncle Sam, come about Christmas time, here’s hoping he will have the preferences of Boone County better in mind than he did last year and leave out his wormy apples, ha ha! I expect he’s found out by now we can be a little more particular here than the next fella!”

“Tell us some more!” the men cried, their voices aching with laughter the same as his, while Miss Beulah behind Jack’s shoulder cried, “Ready for your next plateful? Here’s the sausage I saved you from last year’s hog! Here’s some more home-cured ham, make room for more chicken. Elvie! Buttermilk! This time bring him the whole pitcher!”

“I would like to draw you a picture of Banner today,” said Brother Bethune, gazing upwards, with his lips smacking over the name just as they smacked over “Bethune.” But when he finished—“In Stovall’s cornfield, only this morning, I saw a snake so long it was
laying over seven and a half hills of corn. I didn’t get him, either, precious friends! There was the other one coming, and I stood there torn between ’em, let the pair of ’em get away. There’s a lesson in that!”—Aunt Cleo said, “He almost makes me glad I don’t live here.”

“That’s because you’ve listened to the wrong preacher,” said Aunt Beck.

“Now
I
didn’t
recognize
Banner,” claimed Aunt Birdie, pointing her finger at Brother Bethune. “And I was a Lovat and grew up right there, with the river right under my door. If that was Banner, I certainly wasn’t hearing any compliments for it.”

“I don’t think that’s high enough praise you’ve given the neighborhood, Brother Bethune,” said Aunt Beck. “I miss something in your words. Can’t you make that church rivalry sound a little stronger?”

Brother Bethune only looked down at them all from Grandpa’s old place. “Banner is better known today for what ain’t there than what is,” he said. “I can truthfully say it hasn’t growed one inch since I been preaching.”

“It’s been growing, but like the cow’s tail, down instead of up!” cried Uncle Noah Webster. “Cleo, the old place here was plum stocked with squirrel when we was boys. It was overrun with quail. And if you never saw the deer running in here, I saw ’em. It was filled—it was filled!—with every kind of good thing, this old dwelling, when me and the rest of us Beecham boys grew up here under Granny and Grandpa Vaughn’s strict raising. It’s got everlasting springs, a well with water as sweet as you could find in this world, and a pond and a creek both. But you’re seeing it today in dry summer.”

“It’s parched,” said Uncle Dolphus. “Just like mine. So dry the snakes is coming up in my yard to drink with the chickens.”

“And it’s a shame and a crime about them web worms, too,” said Aunt Nanny, looking to the other end of the yard where the majestic pecan tree rose, full of years. The caterpillar nets that infested it gave it the surface of some big old clouded mirror.

“It’s loaded, though,” said Mr. Renfro. “If you doubt that, Nanny, all you got to do is make a climb up there and count what’s coming.”

“I’ve about decided that nothing’s going to kill some bearers,” said Aunt Birdie. “Regardless of treatment.”

“And won’t you be glad when those little hard nuts start raining down,” said Aunt Beck. “They’re the sweetest, juiciest kind. The hardest to crack always is.”

“None of you have much, do you?” said Aunt Cleo.

“Farming is what we do. What we was raised for,” said Uncle Curtis in a formal manner, from there at Granny’s right.

“Farmers still and evermore will be,” said Uncle Dolphus, farther around on her left.

“We’re relying on Jack now. He’ll haul us out of our misery, and we thought he was going to haul us with that do-all truck.” Uncle Curtis’s long face cracked open into its first smile. “Since all my boys done up and left my farm.”

“Mine too. That’s only the way of it,” whispered Uncle Percy.

“But all nine of mine,” said Uncle Curtis, turning in his chair to gaze around at the crowd. “The only chance I get to see ’em, over and beyond the Sundays when their wives can drive ’em to church, is the reunion.”

“What did they leave home for? Wasn’t there enough to go round?” teased Aunt Cleo.

“It’s the same old story,” said Uncle Dolphus. “It’s the fault of the land going back on us, treating us the wrong way. There’s been too much of the substance washed away to grow enough to eat any more.”

“Now well’s run dry and river’s about to run dry. Around here there ain’t nothing running no more but snakes on the ground and candidates for office. And snakes and them both could do that in their sleep,” said Uncle Dolphus.

“Too bad we boys had to ever leave Grandpa and Granny and the old farm,” Uncle Curtis said. “All we boys had to come away and leave the old place so as to get by. We all tried not to take ourselves too far.”

“I was the last of Granny’s boys to go. I stayed to be the last one, didn’t I, Granny?” Uncle Noah Webster asked from his ladder.

“Benedict Arnold,” she said.

“How come everybody moved away?” Aunt Cleo teased. “Hungry?”

“There’s only so much of everything,” Aunt Nanny said.

“Takes a lot of doing without,” Aunt Beck said serenely.

“Well,” said Mr. Renfro, “we was never going to move, me and
Beulah. Granny’s got us. And now, Jack and his family—we got them.”

Everybody looked at Jack and Gloria, as they pulled a wishbone between them.

There came a louder report. Kneeling on the ground, Mr. Renfro had split open the first watermelon. He rose with the long halves facing outward from his arms, like the tablets of the Ten Commandments. He served Granny first, then around he started, cracking his melons, making his bows, putting down a half at each place.

Brother Bethune was going on, too, telling of the wanderings of his father and the one time he got help from an angel on Banner Road.

Aunt Birdie, unable to contain herself any longer, put her head around and said, “Jack boy, when Judge Moody finishes his dinner, you reckon he’ll arrest you? Is that his idea, you reckon?”

“Well, it couldn’t have been his idea when he started out, Aunt Birdie,” said Jack. Over his watermelon he gave a smile at Judge Moody. “He’d sentenced me himself and he can count. He’d know I wasn’t even due back here till tomorrow.”

“Explain a little something right quick to Judge Moody, son,” directed Miss Beulah, who was following Mr. Renfro, taking around the salt. “He looks like he’s getting ready to lay down his knife and go home.”

“I don’t want to hear any further,” Judge Moody said to Jack.

“Our reunion is one that don’t wait, sir,” Jack said at the same time. “Nobody, not even my wife, would have forgiven me for the rest of my life if I hadn’t showed up today.”

“You escaped?” Gloria cried out.

“Horrors!” cried Mrs. Moody.

“It was up to me,” Jack said. “What good would it have done anybody for me to get back here tomorrow?”

Aunt Nanny was already laughing. “How’d you get rid of your stripes, darlin’?” she called out. “Ain’t you supposed to wear striped britches? I don’t see any!”

“Sh!” came from Uncle Curtis.

“Scaled the wall, I suppose, then fell off like Humpty Dumpty,” Aunt Birdie said. “Or did you scoot right quick through the fence?”

“Out of Parchman? You couldn’t find a fence,” said Jack.
“Aunt Birdie, Parchman is too big to fence. There’s just no end to it, that’s all.”

“You didn’t just walk out of Parchman,” muttered Judge Moody.

Jack said, “I come out on Dexter.”

“I don’t follow,” said Judge Moody.

“Get up on a horse and just
ride
him out of there on a Sunday morning, while it’s still cool—that seemed reasonable, and it was reasonable,” said Jack. “I rode Dexter. He knows me. There’s a overseer that rides him every day but Sunday. The kind of horse Dexter is, he’s almost an overseer himself. He took me overseeing all over those acres, and finally he conducted me out onto a little road that meant business.”

“Was Aycock riding on behind you?”

“Aunt Birdie, riding double could have caused somebody to look twice. Aycock come along behind the horse’s tail, crouching lower than the cotton.”

“Jack, you ought to have kept that a dim secret,” Gloria whispered to him. “But you don’t know how—somebody’s got to keep your secrets for you.”

“Roped my shirt and tied him to a shady cottonwood and talked to him and left him, and now if you’re ready to laugh, Aunt Nanny,” said Jack, “I don’t even know whose pants these are I jumped into.” She shrieked. “I traded with a clothesline. At first we couldn’t find but one pair of pants. Aycock nearabout had to wear a bedspread. But we persevered, and the first preacher that came pitching down the road, we jumped in the car with him. And the story he told us, to get us to Winona! How somebody’d burnt down our courthouse!”

“Well, you can just go and change those pants instead of telling it here,” said Miss Beulah.

“Keep on the pants you’ve got, Jack,” Aunt Birdie begged him. “We’re used to ’em now. Tell us the rest, do, please!”

“He just rode a plough horse out of Parchman,” said Judge Moody to his wife, who was looking at him.

“Being church time, the roads was fairly well packed with Good Samaritans. Judge Moody was one and didn’t know it.” Jack turned to the Judge. “For about as long as it takes to tell it, I was riding behind on your spare, sir, and so was Aycock. Then we all went in together into Mr. Willy’s ditch.”

Judge Moody sat with a fixed expression on his face, while Mr. Renfro looked at him with enjoyment.

“Reckon they might come after him yet—using bloodhounds? It’s a good thing we’ve got their equals!” Aunt Birdie squealed.

“I believe they’ll let well enough alone,” Mr. Renfro said to Judge Moody.

“If I was Parchman, I would,” Mrs. Moody vowed, while the Judge just looked at her.