Losing Battles (4 page)

“Don’t everybody look at me like I’m the last thing of all,” Miss Lexie said. “My sister Fay hasn’t come, or her husband Homer Champion, I beat Nathan Beecham, and Brother Bethune’s not yet in sight. None of which surprises me.”

“No, and
Jack’s
still got to come!” cried Miss Beulah.

“Now that
would
surprise me,” said Miss Lexie.

“He’s coming! And you needn’t ask me how I know it,” cried Miss Beulah.

“What kind of a postcard did he manage to send you?” asked Miss Lexie.

“My oldest boy never did unduly care for pencil and paper,” Miss Beulah retorted. “But you couldn’t make him forget Granny’s birthday Sunday to save your life. He knows who’s here and waiting on him—that’s enough!”

Miss Lexie Renfro dipped her knees and tipped herself back, one tip. She didn’t make a sound, but this was her laugh.

“Take your hat off, then, Lexie,” said Miss Beulah.

“When I saw that hat coming, I thought—I thought you were going to be somebody else,” Gloria told Miss Lexie.

“I’m wearing her Sunday hat. I make no secret of it. She’ll never need a hat again,” Miss Lexie said. “Miss Julia Mortimer’s out of the public eye for good now.”

Mr. Renfro came forward to carry in her portmanteau. “You just come off and leave your lady, Lexie?” he asked his sister.

“I may be more needed here than there, before the day gets over with,” she answered.

Granny poked her shoe.

“You a nurse?” Aunt Cleo called, as Miss Lexie exchanged short greetings with the Beechams all around her and refused a seat on a nail keg.

“Well, let’s say I know what to do just about as well as the next fella,” said Miss Lexie.

“You’ve run up on the real thing now, sister,” Aunt Cleo said. “And I could tell you tales—!”

Vaughn, having led the mule out of the yard, lifted out of the wagon bed the cedar buckets and milk buckets full of water drawn from Grandpa Vaughn’s old well, the only one that hadn’t run dry. He lugged them to the house, replenished the drinking bucket on the porch, lugged the rest to the kitchen. Then he let Mr. Renfro take an end of each of the tables he had brought up from the dinner grounds at Damascus Church in Banner, along with one or two of their better benches, and help him get them down out of the wagon.

“Vaughn! Hurry up, and get your other clothes on! Don’t entertain the reunion looking like that!” called Miss Beulah.

Now there was family everywhere, front gallery and back, tracking in and out of the company room, filling the bedrooms and kitchen, breasting the passage. The passageway itself was creaking; sometimes it swayed under the step and sometimes it seemed to tremble of itself, as the suspension bridge over the river at Banner had the reputation of doing. With chairs, beds, windowsills, steps, boxes,
kegs, and buckets all taken up and little room left on the floor, they overflowed into the yard, and the men squatted down in the shade. Over in the pasture a baseball game had started up. The girls had the swing.

“Been coming too thick and fast for you?” Aunt Birdie asked Aunt Cleo.

“Everywheres I look is Beecham Beecham Beecham,” she said.

“Beulah’s brothers. Except for one, that circle is still unbroken,” said Miss Lexie Renfro. “Renfros come a bit more scarce.”

“Where they all get here from?” cried Aunt Cleo, looking full circle around her.

“Everywhere. Everywhere you ever heard of in Boone County—I can see faces from Banner, Peerless, Wisdom, Upright, Morning Star, Harmony, and Deepstep with no trouble at all.”

“And this is Banner. The very heart,” said Miss Beulah, calling from the kitchen.

“Never heard of any of it,” said Aunt Cleo. “Except Banner. Banner is all Noah Webster knows how to talk about. I hail from Piney.”

“I at present call Alliance my home,” said Miss Lexie. “That puts me across the river from everybody I see.” She went to put her hat away and came struggling backwards up the passage to them dragging something.

Miss Beulah shrieked, “Vaughn! Come get that away from your Aunt Lexie!” She was running behind it—a cactus growing in a wooden tub. “Little bantie you, pulling a forty-pound load of century plant, just to show us!”

“I’ve pulled a heavier load than this. And the company can just have that to march around,” Miss Lexie said. “Give ’em one thing more to do today besides eat and hear ’emselves talk.”

The cactus was tied up onto a broomstick but grew down in long reaches as if trying to clamber out of the tub. It was wan in color as sage or mistletoe.

“It’s threatening to bloom, Mother,” Mr. Renfro warned Miss Beulah.

“I see those buds as well as you do. And it’s high time, say I. Bloom! Bloom!” she cried at it gaily. “Yes, it’s making up its mind to bloom tonight—about time for ’em all to go home, if it knows what’s good for it.”

“Can’t tell a century plant what to do,” said Granny.

“Now, let that be enough out of you, Lexie. Set,” said Miss Beulah. “And help us look for Jack.”

“Jack Renfro? He won’t come. He hasn’t been in there long enough yet, by my reckoning,” said Miss Lexie. She had a gray, tired-looking face, gray-speckled hair cut Buster Brown with her own sewing scissors that were swinging wide on the ribbon tied around her neck as she walked around looking for something to do. “Better start thinking what
you’ll
look like if he
don’t
get here,” she said to Gloria. Her foot in its black leather, ragged-heeled shoe, feathered with dust, and wearing a skinny white sock, stepped on the end of Gloria’s sash.

“What’s she want to walk off and leave good company for?” asked Aunt Cleo the next minute. “She too good for us?”

For Gloria walked down the yard away from the house, through the circles of squatters, until she was all by herself. Her high heels tilted her nearly to tiptoe, like a bird ready to fly.

“Hair that flaming, it looks like it would hurt her,” murmured Aunt Beck. “More especially when she carries it right out in the broil.”

All the aunts, here on the gallery, were sheltering from sun as if from torrents of rain. Ferns in hanging wire baskets spread out just above their heads, dark as nests, one for each aunt but Aunt Lexie, who wouldn’t sit down.

Aunt Nanny shaded her eyes and asked, “How far is Gloria going, anyway?”

Down near the gate, a trimmed section of cedar trunk lay on the ground, silver in chinaberry shade. Clean-polished by the seasons, with its knobs bright and its convolutions smooth-polished, it looked like some pistony musical instrument.

“That’s her perch,” said Miss Beulah as Gloria sat down on it with her back to them, her sash-ends hanging down behind her like an organist’s in church.

“She’s got to be ready for her husband whether he gets here or not,” Aunt Beck said softly. “But she’s young, she can stand the disappointment.”

“She’s too young to know any better. That’s the poorest way in the wide world to bring him,” Aunt Birdie said. “Getting ready so far ahead of time, then keeping your eyes on his road.”

“Set still, Sister Gloria, keep your hands folded!” Jack’s little sisters chanted together. “Don’t let your dress get dirty! You got
plenty-enough to do, just waiting, waiting, waiting on your husband!”

“When I can’t see her determined little face any longer, but just her back, she looks mighty tender to my eyes,” Aunt Beck said in a warning voice to the other women. “Around her shoulder blades, she looks a mighty tender little bride.”

A big spotted cat, moulting and foolish-looking, came out onto the porch, ramming its head against their feet, standing on its hind legs and making a raucous noise.

“He’s kept that up faithful. He’s looking for Jack,” said Etoyle. “That cat’s almost got to be a dog since Jack’s away.”

“Think he’d better whip up his horse now and come on,” said Granny.

“He’s coming, Granny, just as fast as he can,” Aunt Birdie promised her.

Aunt Nanny teased, “Listen, suppose they was all ready to let those boys out, then caught ’em in a fresh piece of mischief.”

“They’d just hold right tight onto their ears, then,” said Miss Lexie. She had a broom now and was sweeping underneath the school chair, the only one where nobody was sitting.

“You wouldn’t punish a boy on his last day, would you?” Uncle Noah Webster asked. “Would you now, Lexie?”

“Yes, I would. By George, I took my turn as a teacher!” Miss Lexie cried.

Vaughn ran the little girls out of the swing, and while the uncles climbed to their feet to watch he started setting out the long plank tables. There were five, gray and weatherbeaten as old row-boats, giving off smells of wet mustard, forgotten rain, and mulberry leaves. None of them were easily persuaded to stand true on their sawhorse legs. Vaughn looked down an imaginary line from the big bois d’arc to the chinaberry. Unless Gloria were to move from where she sat, there would have to be a jog in the middle of it.

Close to the house, the company dogs had fallen into long slack ranks, a congregation of leathery backs jolted like one long engine by the force of their breathing. Over the brown rocks of their foreheads flickered the yellow butterflies of August like dreams, some at their very noses. Sid, tied in the barn behind, did the barking all by
himself now. His appeals, appeals, appeals rang out without stopping.

“I guess,” said the new Aunt Cleo, “I guess I’m waiting for somebody to tell me what the welcome for Jack Renfro is all about! What’s he done that’s so much more than all these big grown uncles and boy cousins or even his cripple daddy ever done? When did he leave home, and if he ain’t let you have a card from him, what makes you so sure he’s coming back today? And what’s his wife got her wedding dress on for?”

Aunt Cleo had been left the school chair to sit on. She leaned her elbow on the writing-arm and crossed her feet.

Then the uncles stretched and came strolling back to the house. Uncle Noah Webster skidded across the porch floor, riding his splint chair turned backwards, so as to sit at her elbow.

“If you don’t know nothing to start with, I don’t reckon we could tell you all that in a hundred years, Sister Cleo,” said Aunt Birdie. “I’m scared Jack’d get here before we was through.”

“Take a chance,” she said.

There was not a breath of air. But all the heart-shaped leaves on the big bois d’arc tree by the house were as continually on the spin as if they were hung on threads. And whirly-winds of dust marched, like scatterbrained people, up and down the farm track, or pegged across the fields, popped off into nowhere.

“Can’t she wait till Brother Bethune gets here for dinner and tells it to us all at the table? Surely he’ll weave it into the family history,” pleaded Aunt Beck.

“This’ll be his first go at us,” Uncle Percy reminded her.

“If he shows up as poor in comparison to Grandpa Vaughn at the reunion as he shows up in the pulpit on Second Sundays, I’ll feel like he won’t even earn his dinner,” said Uncle Curtis.

“Brother Bethune is going to do the best he can, and we all enjoy the sound of his voice,” said Aunt Birdie. “Still, his own part in this story’s been fairly stingy. I wouldn’t put it past a preacher like him to just leave out what he wasn’t in on.”

“What I mainly want to hear is what they sent Jack to the pen for,” said Aunt Cleo.

Miss Beulah marched right away from them and in a moment her set of bangs and clatters came out of the kitchen.

Then a mockingbird pinwheeled, singing, to the peak of the barn roof. After moping and moulting all summer, he’d mounted to
his old perch. He began letting loose for all he was worth, singing the two sides of a fight.

Their voices went on with his—some like pans clanking on the stove, some like chains dropping into buckets, some like the pigeons in the barn, some like roosters in the morning, some like the evening song of katydids, making a chorus. The mourning dove’s voice was Aunt Beck, the five-year-old child’s was Aunt Birdie. But finally Aunt Nanny’s fat-lady’s voice prevailed: “Let Percy tell! His voice is so frail, getting frailer. Let him show how long can he last.”

Only at the last minute did Aunt Cleo cry out, “Is it long?”