Losing Battles (36 page)

“There’s something you can make live through the winter!” “And that’s something will bloom for you before you know it!” They all encouraged her.

Elvie came with the speckled puppy carried high to her cheek, his rump filling the cup of one careful hand, and with a sigh she gave him up, sank him into Granny’s lap. “He’ll run anything with fur on it. He’ll retrieve anything with feathers on it,” she said in the gruff voice of Uncle Dolphus. The puppy yawned into Granny’s face. In the open pan of his muzzle a good-sized acorn would have fitted closely. “He’ll do it all.”

“Now what’s that? It’s that Christmas cactus coming around again,” said Granny. “If there’s one thing I’m ever tired of!”

“Then ain’t these beautiful? And when Old Man Winter’s at your door, how you’ll love to eat on ’em,” said Uncle Percy, coming himself to bring her a bottle of his own hot peppers steeping in vinegar and turned blue, red, and high purple. “Pretty as chicken gizzards to me.”

The Champions’ present, wrapped up like an owl, was an owl—in brown china, big as a churn, with potbelly, sunflower-yellow feet, and eyes wired to flash on and off.

“Like I didn’t have enough of those outside without bringing one inside. Believe I’ll like the next present better. I know what
this
is,” Granny told them, as she took a box covered in yellowing holly paper from four children and clawed it open on her knee. She shook out the new piece-quilt. A hum of pleasure rose from every man’s and woman’s throat.

When the mire of the roads had permitted, the aunts and girl cousins had visited two and three together and pieced it on winter afternoons. It was in the pattern of “The Delectable Mountains” and measured eight feet square, the slanty red and white pieces running in to the eight-pointed star in the middle, with the called-for number of sheep spaced upon it. Then Aunt Beck had quilted it on her lap with her bent needle.

Granny’s eyes tried to see into theirs while she shimmered it at them. She turned and held it the other way to show the sky-blue lining. Peering at them, she put it next to her cheek.

“Finished it last night. Took me just about all night,” she said. “Pricked my finger a time or two.”

“She’ll be buried under that,” said Aunt Beck softly.

“I’m going to be buried under ‘Seek No Further,’ ” said Granny. “I’ve got more than one quilt to my name that’ll bear close inspection.”

The network of wrinkles in her face shifted a little, and deep within it for a moment her eyes shone blue as theirs. She bored her eyes into the nearest one there—it was Lady May.

“Look who’s standing there for her!” said Aunt Nanny. “Don’t she look like a little firecracker about to go off?”

The baby had come as close as she dared to all the presents, without having risked yet putting her hand on the puppy.

“What have you got for Granny, Lady May?” cried Aunt Birdie.

“I want a kiss,” said Granny, leaning toward the baby. “I want lovingkindness.”

Lady May bolted.

Miss Beulah threw back her head and in an unwavering note gave them the pitch. All their voices rose as one, with Uncle Noah Webster trailing his echoes in the bass.

“Gathering home! Gathering home!
Never to sorrow more, never to roam!
Gathering home! Gathering home!
God’s children are gathering home.”

As they sang, the tree over them, Billy Vaughn’s Switch, with its ever-spinning leaves all light-points at this hour, looked bright as a river, and the tables might have been a little train of barges it was carrying with it, moving slowly downstream. Brother Bethune’s gun, still resting against the trunk, was travelling too, and nothing at all was unmovable, or empowered to hold the scene still fixed or stake the reunion there.

Part 4

T
hey sang for a while longer, still in their chairs but settled back, some of them singing with their eyes closed. On the tables before them there were only the scraps and the bones, the boats of the eaten-out watermelons; yet still, now and again, a white chicken feather floated down from the sky and did a brief spin on the grass, or a curl of down landed on one of the tables.

“Why does she sing so old-timey?” Aunt Cleo asked. Granny was a jump ahead of everybody else with her fa-so-la, on up to the Amen of “Blessed Assurance.”

“She sings it that way because that’s the way she likes to hear it,” Miss Beulah told her. “If that ain’t the way you want it, my little granny’s going to go you one better than you want.”

By now the girls’ and boys’ baseball game had started again in the pasture. There was a board laid across the cedar trunk and little girls were seesawing.

“There’s Gloria’s perch those children are making free with,” observed Miss Lexie.

“I don’t need it any more, thank you,” Gloria said.

She was coming out of the house now at Jack’s shoulder; he was carrying a syrup bucket stuffed to the top.

“After Aycock gets his satisfaction out of this, I’ll carry word to little Mis’ Comfort where he is, so she can give up and go to bed,” Jack told Granny’s table.

“Is he going to eat it like a horse?” cried Miss Beulah.

“Promise me. Promise me when you get up there you won’t try anything single-handed, young fellow,” said Mrs. Moody.

“Yes, I’d like to have your word on that too,” said Judge Moody.

“Single-handed—that ain’t the way we do it around Banner,” Jack told them. “And I already promised Curly the same thing. We’re saving the Buick till in the morning.”

He bounced kisses on Gloria’s and his mother’s cheeks and on Granny’s chin, and walked away. There was nothing of the world to see any longer below their gate, only the low roof of dust lying over the road, fine-stretched and unbroken as skin, and Jack went down through that and out of sight.

“Don’t like the way they keep sneaking in and out on me,” said Granny.

“Never you fear,” Miss Beulah said to her quickly. “He’ll be back when we want him, he’s not one to fail us.”

“Seems to me you’ve let an awful lot hinge on Aycock. I wonder if you know a great deal about his appetite,” Mr. Renfro said to Judge Moody. “I think of the time Jack got home from a little hunting and Aycock tagged along with him, and it was supper time.” He hitched his keg a little closer to Judge Moody, there at his elbow, “Well, to let Aycock have a sample of what hospitality means around here, Beulah fried up Jack’s squirrels along with the rest of supper, and she set those on a platter in front of Aycock’s plate while he’s eating. And remember, Mother, how one after the other he forked those over and et ’em all? Et fourteen squirrel? I counted, because that’s how many times he apologized, once for each squirrel, saying he hadn’t had a real solid meal since morning.” Mr. Renfro sat looking into Judge Moody’s face. “All them mouth-watering squirrels went into Aycock’s mouth one by one, while we mostly just set and felt sorry for him,” he said. “There don’t seem to be nothing there to tell him when he’s reached the point of enough.”

“Jack can handle Aycock,” said Miss Beulah.

“Then tomorrow there’s Curly Stovall, and that tree to get around,” said Mr. Renfro. “And it’s a pretty stubborn old tree.”

“Jack Renfro will find his own way,” said Miss Beulah. “He’s come along too splendid now to get himself licked in the morning.”

“What a fellow’s got to do is suit his strategy to the tree,” Mr. Renfro said to Judge Moody. “I think now of a tree that must’ve
been forty foot up to the first good branch when I come up against it. A honey tree that was, a poplar. You could hear those bees just boiling inside—oh, they was working heavy. So the way I licked it, I went and got me a good augur—inch-and-a-half, I reckon. Bored me a hole in the trunk and drove me in a peg and climbed up and stood on that. Drove me in the next one. Well, sir, I pegged me a ladder all the forty foot up that tree trunk, winding my way around it two or three times, and when I pulled up to that hollow limb, was it ever a-roaring around my ears! I hadn’t climbed all that way without a saw at my belt. Sawed it through and let it down gentle on my rope, honey, bees, and all, the whole limb, until there, where she’s standing down on the ground waiting, was Beulah’s honey.”

“Oh,
she
was the one making you,” said Aunt Cleo.

“Beulah let it out some way—I managed to get it out of her—that however I could manage to reach it, she’d pretty dearly like to have it,” said Mr. Renfro. “Truth is she’d been heartbroken going without it. Like Mrs. Moody’d be without her car, if my guess is any good.”

“Can you see today where you went up, Papa?” asked Elvie from a branch of the bois d’arc.

“All healed over. Oh no, the tree’s grown all over that now,” he said. “If it’s standing at all, that is.”

“I wouldn’t mind having another sample of that very honey,” said Miss Beulah right behind him.

“I was a climbing fool,” said Mr. Renfro to Judge Moody.

“We’ve got more company,” called Etoyle up above Elvie. “Watch out, Gloria!”

The squeak of an axle cut through a song somewhere and the head of a white horse came swinging up through the dust, and its wagon with an old man driving it came past the seesawing children and tunnelled into the shade under the boughs. The dry yard, packed though it was with people, wagons, and cars, sounded hollow under the wheels like the floor of an empty barn.

“Willy Trimble, I’m always just on the point of forgetting about you!” Miss Beulah cried out like the best praise she had for him.

Mr. Willy saluted back by holding up his whip as if to crack it. Gloria jumped as if to get ready to run.

“What do you think you’re doing here, Willy Trimble?” asked Miss Beulah. “We’re holding our family reunion, or trying to, the best way we can.”

“Happy birthday,” Mr. Willy called down to Granny as he reined in.

“Go back where you came from,” she suggested.

Mr. Willy got down from the wagon, gave them all a nod. “How’re you, Lexie?”

“I’m livin’.” That was the most that question ever got out of her.

Mr. Willy cocked his head at her. “And who’s looking after your lady while you’re gallivanting?”

“A nurse. One that’s seven years old. I let him wear my Mother Hubbard tied up high around his neck. It’s a little boy that can’t know much,” she said. “Lives down the road. And he don’t know what Miss Julia Mortimer will do and Miss Julia Mortimer don’t know what he’ll do. So they’re evens.”

“And what are you going to have to give that little-old boy when you get back?” asked Aunt Cleo.

“A whipping if he breaks something!” cried Miss Lexie.

“Suppose she’s played us all a trick,” said Mr. Willy Trimble.

As Gloria’s breath came fast, Miss Lexie said, “Now that I’m not there to soldier her, you couldn’t surprise me with anything she’d try.”

Miss Beulah hummed her high note with which she corrected the pitch of the congregation in church. “Let’s not be served with any of your story today, Lexie,” she said.

“Miss Julia took a tumble. And I’m the one found her,” Mr. Willy Trimble said, his expression all self-amazement. “She’d made it down to the road, and pitched in the dust. I raised her up. Her face told its story.”

“Now who’s Miss Julia Mortimer?” asked Aunt Cleo into the sudden quiet.

“Hush up!” came a big chorus.

“Down fell she. End of
her
. And her cow was calling its head off,” Mr. Willy Trimble said.

“It’s not fair!” cried out Gloria.

Etoyle and Elvie jumped down from the tree. Locking knuckles they went spinning together around and around in a chicken fight, while the aunts gathered themselves to their feet.

“Gloria, sounds like it’s your turn to go,” said Aunt Nanny.

“That’s right! You just better switch on over there the soonest
way you can,” said Aunt Birdie. “There’ll be work cut out for you to do, girlie.”

“You owe her a debt of gratitude, Gloria,” said Aunt Beck, coming to give her an embrace. “I’m sorry
for
you.”

“Find somebody to take you, and go on. That’s better than standing here crying,” Aunt Nanny said, coming toward her. “There’ll be ones there to cry with you.”