Losing Battles (37 page)

“She’s not crying yet,” said Etoyle.

“Don’t start tormenting her,” said Aunt Beck. Now the aunts were passing her from one to the next to hug her and kiss her cheek. “I know you’re being pulled two ways,” she said to Gloria.

“Life’s given to tricks like that,” scoffed Miss Beulah at Granny’s chair. “You just have to be equal to the pulling.”

“It’s not fair,” Gloria was saying to each one who kissed her.

“I carried her in out of the sun, and then raised a good holler,” Mr. Willy went on. “ ‘Anybody here?’ And you know who it was? Little fellow from down the road, crying like he’d just took a whipping from somebody. I give him a drink of water and sent him home.”

“And I’d like to know if any of this explains what you’re doing
here
, Willy Trimble!” cried Miss Beulah.

“Well, do you know I just been run off from
there?
” Mr. Willy asked them all around. “I got it made to a T, a nice coffin, got all the way over there with it, and the crowd in the yard run me off. Like they’d never heard of such a thing or heard of me either. She’s already fitted, they says. Don’t need any present. I thought they’d be having a fit over it and welcome me with open arms. Seems like they opened up and got her one in Gilfoy. It’s a Jew. They don’t believe in Jesus—I reckon Sunday’s just like any other day to him. When I went breaking the Sabbath for her! Then for it to get thrown back at me.”

“I hope you didn’t come bringing it here,” warned Miss Beulah.

“I felt like I’d tailored my work to suit her,” Mr. Willy said in a voice grown more and more proudly aggrieved. “I considered it dovetails correct, it’s good good wood, there’s not a thing cheap about it from one end to the other, or a thing shoddy about the way I fashioned it—squared off the ends and rabbitted them joints and the rest of it. I had full faith in it. For one thing, you know who taught me how to use a handsaw? She did.”

“Exactly when?” asked Miss Lexie Renfro.

“Miss Julia Mortimer elected me every year I showed up at school to split up the wood for the potbelly stove, and I proved to her what I was good at. Oh, when I finally got my toolbox, time I was forty, I made her chicken coops a-plenty, flower-boxes, yard seats, porch swings, and till I got ’em right, too. She was ever the least bit hard to please. I don’t believe, if she was still listening, she’d stop me from saying that. She was pretty smart, herself! She could have made her own coffin if she thought she had to. Of course, her
eye
was true, she couldn’t help how true her eye was,” apologized Mr. Willy. “As a child I recall her tacking up a crokersack over a busted school window on a snowy day. With a good ten or twenty tacks in her mouth all at one time, she’d
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not a miss. They all went in straight. And still hearing the history lesson. I told ’em my story in Alliance. It didn’t budge ’em.”

“Maybe it wasn’t them to blame. Maybe it was you,” said Miss Beulah.

“ ‘Why, I’m the one milks for her!’ I says. ‘I wanted to do something for her. She taught me to use hammer and saw when I was a shirt-tail lad, I’ve made many a coffin in Banner, and now I made hers. I made her a beauty.’ They just went back in the house and left me with it.”

“Willy Trimble, I’m going to tell you something, if you’re all that anxious to find out,” said Miss Beulah. “The main thing you know how to do is overstep. Just because you milk for a lady don’t mean you’re welcome, the next thing, to make her coffin. And until you get an invitation, you ought to stay home.”

“Well,” he said, “she told me herself, when I was that shirt-tail lad, she thought I’d wind up making hers in the end, her coffin.”

“Let me tell you right here and now, I don’t want you making mine,” said Miss Beulah. “And nobody else’s you might have an eye on.

“I owed it to her, that’s how I figured it,” he went right on. “After she taught me just about everything I know. Once I got started, I just never looked back.”

“Mr. Willy, between here and the schoolhouse I can count nine Uncle Sams, and they every one looks like you,” said Etoyle.

“Well, I’m the artist,” he said benevolently. “And it’s all because she put a hammer in my hand. And it was for her I commenced
writing my name with the question mark after it. ‘Willy Trimble?’ ”

“She told you to?” asked Uncle Percy respectfully.

“Well, she told me not to. That’s the way I’m down on the poll books today: ‘Willy Trimble?’ But she rammed a good deal down me, spelling, arithmetic—well, history’s where she fell down,” he said. “There’s a heap of history I don’t know, standing right here before you.” He scraped his foot, gave them a bow. “But she knew it all. She had it by heart. There’s just one thing Miss Julia come to find she couldn’t do as well as I could, and that’s to milk a cow. She got too old, and there wasn’t anybody else, and she got me to do that for her.” He turned and gave Gloria a bow to herself. “You want to climb on now?” he asked her. “I’ll head back over. I ain’t too proud to try anybody a second time. Maybe you could get
me
in.”

“Pshaw!” said Miss Beulah.

“Gloria’s staying right here! She don’t want to leave the reunion!” cried Aunt Birdie. She put up a loyal fist. “We wouldn’t
let
you go, you belong where you are, with us,” she told Gloria.

“We had to tease you, just the first minute, because you was looking so found out, Gloria,” said Aunt Nanny, poking her, and then pushing her back down into the baby rocker.

“Nobody’s going over there with you, Willy Trimble,” Miss Lexie Renfro said sharply.

“Then I reckon I’ll just visit here a while, with some other folks that’s left out,” he said.

“
Left out?
” screamed Miss Beulah. “Mr. Willy, let’s not have one of your jokes.” She threw up her hands.

“I’ll tell you one thing sure. I wouldn’t go back over there unless I was sent for,” said Miss Lexie Renfro.

“Lexie, you’re supposed to be there now,” said Aunt Nanny, with a wink at the table. “And I bet you was paid for it.”

“I don’t suppose you heard anybody over there call my name?” Miss Lexie asked, defying Mr. Willy, and he shook his head at her.

“But we can spare you,” said Miss Beulah. “If that’s what you want.”

“There’s others!” said Miss Lexie. “And people can always find you if they want you.”

Aunt Beck said, “Well, I don’t know about that. And I’m afraid, Lexie, you’d have a hard time persuading any of us to go with you.”

“To the wake of somebody you don’t know? I can’t think of more than once or twice I’ve ever been persuaded,” said Aunt Cleo.

“Somebody we don’t know?” came a chorus from all around.

“You
all
know her?” asked Aunt Cleo.

“Know her?” a whole chorus cried. “Suffered under her!” cried Aunt Birdie.

“We all
had
her! She was our teacher, all the long way through Banner School,” said Aunt Beck. “That’s how well we know her, and so do a hundred other people born just as unlucky.”

“Well, they know how to give you a hard time,” Aunt Cleo said with an easy nod. “Whatever this one was like, though, I bet you I had one in Piney that would outshine her.”

“Bet you a hundred silver dollars you didn’t!” Uncle Noah Webster said.

“Mine was a regular hornet’s nest to run up against,” said Aunt Cleo. “I’m surprised the majority lived through mine. The only thing about mine is, I can’t remember her name.”

“You’d never forget the name of Miss Julia Mortimer,” Aunt Beck said. “Or ever hope Miss Julia Mortimer would forget yours.”

“She taught every single soul I see, leaving out three or four. Why, it’s like coming back to school right here, as good as over there, gathered in her own house right now,” said Mr. Willy, looking around him.

Brother Bethune excused himself and went off with his gun.

“How many’s she got over yonder already?” asked Auntie Fay.

“She’s got your husband, if that’s what you’re asking. Got all Alliance, half of Ludlow, and most of Foxtown. A little sprinkling from Freewill,” said Mr. Willy. “It’s as many as you got.”

“That’s as many as she taught, all right,” said Miss Beulah. “Oh, and teach us she did. Here’s one I bet she remembered right up to the end.”

“She taught you, Mama?” Etoyle cried. “How could a teacher be as old as that?”

“She taught me,” said Miss Beulah coolly. “She’s responsible for a good deal I know right here today.”

“Beulah, I want you to save and give her that compliment when you get to Heaven with her,” said Uncle Curtis. “I bet she never expected to draw one out of you.”

“Who do you suppose started the woman off? How do you suppose she’d get started teaching without having some Beechams
to teach?” Miss Beulah asked Etoyle and Elvie, who stood with their arms wound around each other’s waists.

“Miss Julia taught me, and that was back-breaking effort,” said Uncle Noah Webster to the children. “But I reckon she about cut her teeth on Nathan. He was her shining light.”

“She taught us every one. I can see her this minute while I tell it, thumping horseback to school, wrapped up in that red sweater,” cried Aunt Birdie. “Red as a railroad lantern, of her own knitting. Ready to throw open school and light straight into us.”

“I remember her waiting for us on the old doorstep, a-ringing that bell. She had more arm than any other woman alive,” said Uncle Curtis. “That was her switching arm, too.”

“She didn’t scare the girls with her whistling switch. She scared ’em off by expecting a whole world
out
of ’em,” said Aunt Beck.

“She used the same weapon on the boys,” Uncle Dolphus argued. “ ‘Where’s your ambition bump?’ And she’d rub her chalky hand over our pore hot skulls.”

“Though sometimes she’d only come and stand close while you sat trying. Like if she could just blow on you, you would know the right answer,” said Aunt Beck.

“She had designs on everybody. She wanted a doctor and a lawyer and all else we might have to holler for some day, to come right out of Banner. So she’d get behind some barefooted boy and push,” said Uncle Percy. “She put an end to good fishing.”

“She’d follow you, right to your door!” Uncle Dolphus said.

“Taking over more’n her territory, that was her downfall,” said Miss Beulah, nodding. “Made herself fair nuisance with the boys in particular. When these Beecham boys was shirt-tail lads, they was fairly high-spirited.”

“Miss Julia Mortimer and her whistling switch put an end to their dreams,” Aunt Nanny teased.

“That’s right! Not many escaped her yardstick. Boys, she wanted us to learn something if it was to kill us,” Uncle Percy said with ragged voice. He had started to whittle his stick of wood.

“She held that five months took out of our lives every year wasn’t punishment enough. She had us commencing our schooling in August instead of November. And after planting time was over in spring she called us back and made us finish what we’d started, beginning at the very spot we’d left off,” said Uncle Dolphus. “She was our bane.”

“She drove what she could into us,” said Miss Beulah. “But nobody could hold a Beecham boy down. Not if you was to kill yourself trying. Nobody could but Grandpa.”

“Outside the home, we boys was more used to sitting on the bridge fishing than lining the recitation bench. Now she wanted that changed,” said Uncle Curtis.

“She thought if she mortified you long enough, you might have hope of turning out something you wasn’t!” cried Uncle Noah Webster.

“And then she’d take the credit!” cried Miss Beulah. “Where ninety percent of the time, the credit was owing to the splendid mothers at home!”

“ ‘Children never change,’ she’d say. ‘They come to school three kinds—good, bad, and hungry.’ ” said Miss Lexie, making a face like a hungry one.

“It appeared to be her notion nobody around here could give their children enough to eat at home,” said Uncle Curtis, looking innocent. “Every Monday morning on her horse, she carted milk to school in a ten-gallon can—and give that milk to children at dinner time to wash their biscuit down with.”

“Of course we had to pour ours right out on the ground,” said Aunt Nanny. “Broadwees is as good as she is.”

“She told us a time or two what her aim was! She wanted us to quit worshipping ourselves quite so wholehearted!” cried Miss Beulah, and set her hands on her hips.

“Maybe just about then is when we quit worshipping her,” Uncle Curtis said.

“If I ever worshipped Miss Julia Mortimer, it was a pretty short romance!” shouted Uncle Dolphus.

“Deliver me from the schoolroom,” said Aunt Birdie with finality. “I hate the very thought now of trying to teach anybody anything. If they came begging to me, I’d have to send ’em to you, Beck.”

Auntie Fay primmed her lips. “Remember the day I got to be one of you?”

“Here goes Sissie. All right! Tell yours,” said Miss Lexie sardonically.

“I wasn’t but five years old that morning—and it all went dark, dark in the house, and I ran and got the door open. I says, ‘Something’s
coming
!’ I heard it! ‘Get out, Lexie! Run!’ It was the
wind
I heard. The air was too thick to see through. Too thick to breathe any of. Too strong to stand up in. And I went down on my hands and knees and I shut my eyes and crawled,” said Auntie Fay. She was telling it with her eyes shut. “Blind crawled.”

“Where was you going?” asked Aunt Cleo. “Did you think it would do you any good?”

“I was crossing the road to go to school but I didn’t know it,” said Auntie Fay.

“You went off and left me,” said Miss Lexie.

“You was kept home from school with the chicken pox. I
called
you.”

“The rest of us children was already right where we belonged, inside Banner School with Miss Julia Mortimer telling us it was the best place to be,” said Miss Beulah with her straight-lipped smile. “She taught right ahead. We could perfectly well hear all outdoors fixing to come apart. I reckon most of Banner was trying to get loose and go flying. All of a sudden, the schoolhouse roof took off and went right up to the sky. The cyclone was on top of Banner School like a drove of cattle. There was our stove, waltzing around with our lunch pails, and the map flapping its wings and flying away, and our coats was galloping over our heads with Miss Julia’s cape trying to catch ’em. And the wind shrieking like a bunch of rivals at us children! But Miss Julia makes herself heard all the same. ‘Hold on! Hold onto each other! All hold onto me! We’re in the best place right here!’ Didn’t she?” she cried to the others.