Losing Battles (44 page)

“That’s her case, all right,” said Auntie Fay. “Lexie went charging through Banner School and got her diploma right on time. And she went and lived in Ludlow in a Baptist preacher’s widow’s boarding house, and in the afternoons and all day Saturday wrapped packages in the corner department store. We didn’t think she was strong enough to go to high school too.”

“I had my sights set,” said Miss Lexie, squinting her eye now
at the scissors in her hand. “But it took more strength than I had—I fell down on Virgil, and wasn’t shown any mercy.”

“They was just trying to keep you out of State Normal,” said Auntie Fay provocatively.

“I thought I could teach just as well without Virgil,” said Miss Lexie. “And I could have, if they hadn’t given me Banner right on top of Miss Julia. They’d put her out to pasture—against her will entirely and much to her surprise—it’s nothing but a state law. And who would dare come after her? I tried holding ’em down. But my nerves weren’t strong enough. I switched to caring for the sick.”

“Uh-oh!” said Aunt Cleo.

“And then it came. The Presbyterian sisterhood in Alliance sent out a call on both sides of the river for a settled white Christian lady with no home ties.”

“Oh,
those
are the scum of the earth!” Mrs. Moody burst out. “We had one of those for our preacher’s widow! Got her the same way!”

“And I presented myself,” Miss Lexie said. She was under Gloria’s arm now, snipping higher, at the gathers of her waist. Gloria had to keep both arms raised while Miss Lexie went around her, smelling of sour starch. “I left Mr. Hugg for her. I thought the change would have to be for the better.”

“I don’t know about the rest of it, but it looks to me like you’ve got a few ties,” remarked Mrs. Moody, as if a nerve still throbbed.

“The one thing I was sure of was I was the best she could do,” said Miss Lexie. “And that’s what I told her. You’re supposed to turn when I punch you,” she said to Gloria. “Have to get you from all sides. You would suppose she’d count it a blessing, getting for her nurse somebody she’d once put to work and encouraged. Somebody that knew her disposition and couldn’t be surprised at her ways. Another teacher.”

“Look where it’s brought both of you,” said Miss Beulah. “That’s a good place to stop your story now, Lexie.”

“For how long was she gracious?” asked Aunt Cleo with a short laugh.

“I wish I’d kept count of the few days,” said Miss Lexie. “She was the same to everybody, though. The same to people in Alliance as she was to me, no favorites. All her callers fell off, little at a time, then thick and fast. She made short work of the sisterhood in Alliance.”

“The very ones that went out of their way to bribe you to be her nurse?” asked Aunt Cleo, giving a nod.

“Miss Julia sent them packing when they came calling and told her the angels had sent me,” said Miss Lexie. “When they told her she’d finished her appointed work on earth and the Lord was preparing to send for her and she ought to be grateful in the mean-time. She clapped at ’em—they left backing away.”

“She was a Presbyterian, and no hiding that. But was she deep-dyed?” asked Aunt Beck. “There’s a whole lot of different grades of ’em, some of ’em aren’t too far off from Baptists.”

“I don’t care to say,” said Miss Lexie after a moment.

“I suppose they were right there again the next day, and the next,” said Aunt Cleo, nodding. “The sisterhood.”

“After Miss Julia Mortimer dismissed them?” Miss Lexie exclaimed. “No, nobody tried it again, and then she wondered what had happened to everybody. What had happened to
her?
”

“That’s the ticket,” said Aunt Cleo. “Well, whatever it was, it wasn’t your fault.”

“So they made me have her by myself, Sunday after Sunday we’d sit there and wait and nobody’d peep their heads in at all. ‘Are they keeping absent on purpose to miss today’s lesson?’ she’d ask. And she’d struggle to her feet and walk to the front porch and ask, “Where’s Gloria Short?’ You were right in style when you didn’t come,” Miss Lexie said, close to Gloria’s back. “There Miss Julia Mortimer and me would sit, getting older by the minute, both of us. Both foxed up for Sunday, I saw to that. Her on one side of the porch and me on the other, her in the wickerwork rocking chair and me in the oak swing. Pretty soon she’d stop rocking. ‘And what’re you doing here, then?’ says Miss Julia to me. ‘Suppose you take your presence out of here. How can I read with you in the house with me?’ She’d put her foot right down. I’d put my foot down. She’d stamp: one. I’d stamp: one. After all, we’d both learned our tactics in the schoolroom. In my opinion it didn’t matter all that much any longer who’d taught who or who’d started this contest. We’d stamp, stamp—and one-two-three she’d kilter.”

“And where was you, Lexie?” cried Aunt Birdie.

“Right behind her!” Miss Lexie called, right behind Gloria.

“Don’t!” Gloria cried.

“Don’t, yourself. Stop quivering, because I’m fixing now to take a great big whack out of your skirt. I had to puff a little bit to
catch Miss Julia. She was too used to charging off in a hurry. She was looking all at one time in the vegetable patch and in the shed where her car gathered dust and behind the peach trees and under the grape vine and even in the cow pasture, to see where the bad ones were hiding. There was I, chasing her over her flower yard, those tangly old beds, stumbling over ’em like graves where the bulbs were so many of ’em crowding up from down below—and on to the front, packed tight as a trunk with rosebushes, scratch you like the briar patch—and down into those old white flags spearing up through the vines all the way down her bank as far as the road, thick as teeth—and there in the empty road she’d even crack open her mailbox, and look inside!”

“How long did she keep it up, looking for company?” asked Aunt Cleo. “A week? A month?”

“Longer! If you could see today the trough her feet have worn under that old wickerwork chair in the yard—she had me lug it right off the porch to where she could sit and watch the road. Like children wear under a swing,” said Miss Lexie. “I used to say, ‘Miss Julia, you come on back inside the house. Hear? People aren’t used to seeing you outside like this. They aren’t coming visiting. Nobody’s coming. And what if they did, and found you outside with your hair all streaming?’ I’d say, ‘Why are you turning so contrary? Why won’t you just give up, Miss Julia, and come on in the cool house with me?’ And when she was inside again, then she turned around and ran me out and dared me to come back in! ‘Get out of here, old woman!’ And she’s full eleven years older than me!”

“She’s a scrapper, all right.” Granny was nodding her head. “Knew it the minute I got my first look at the girl, teaching her elders.”

“She put up her fists next?” asked Aunt Cleo.

“If I got to the door and locked it first, she’d try to get out of her own house,” Miss Lexie said. “Shake—she’d shake that big oak door! You ever see a spider shake his web when you lay a pine-straw in it just for meanness? She could shake her door like a web was all it was. I felt sometimes like just everything, not only her house but me in it, was about to go flying, and me no more’n a pine-straw myself, something in her way.”

“I’m ready for you to stop,” whispered Gloria.

“I tied her, that was the upshoot,” said Miss Lexie. “Tied her in bed. I didn’t want to, but anybody you’d ask would tell you the
same: you may have to.” Gloria tried to move, but Miss Lexie gripped her that moment by the ankle and said, “Don’t shift your weight.”

“If Lexie can find something to do the hard way, she’ll do it,” said Miss Beulah. “Setting a patch in that skirt, now, with the girl inside it!” She paced around them.

“It’s a matter of being equal to circumstances,” Miss Lexie asserted. “Every day, Miss Julia there in her bed called me to bring her her book. ‘Which book?’ I ask her. She said just bring her her book. I couldn’t do that, I told her, ‘because I don’t know which book you mean. Which book do you mean?’ Because she had more books than anything. I couldn’t make her tell me which book she meant. So she didn’t get any.”

“Book! It looks like of all things she’d have been glad she was through with and thankful
not
to have brought her!” exclaimed Aunt Birdie.

“Bet Gloria could have picked one out,” teased Aunt Nanny.

“Gloria, I think it was really you that must have disappointed her the most,” said Aunt Beck, as though she offered a compliment. “She hoped so hard for something out of you.”

Gloria cried out.

“Elvie, bring me a row of pins!—But no, you never came to see your old teacher, all the time she lay getting worse,” said Miss Lexie. “She was peeping out for you, right straight along. First she’d say, ‘Gloria Short will be here soon now. She knows it’s for her own good to get here on time.’ Even in bed, she’d lean close to her window, press her face to the glass even on rainy mornings, not to miss the first sight of Gloria coming.”

“Where was you hiding, girl?” Aunt Cleo cried with a laugh.

“Hiding? I was having a baby,” Gloria broke out. “That’s what I was doing, and you can die from that.”

“You can die from anything if you try good and hard,” said Miss Beulah.

“I said, ‘Oh, she’s just forgotten you, Julia, like everybody else has,’ ” said Miss Lexie.

Granny had begun to look from one face to the next, her breath coming a little fast. Miss Beulah saw, and went to stand beside her.

“So the next thing, didn’t she ask me for her bell. She wanted the school bell!” said Miss Lexie.

“Why, that’s a heavy old thing,” said Uncle Curtis. “Solid brass and a long handle—”

“She couldn’t have raised it. Never at all. Never again in her life. And I told her so. ‘And no matter if you could,’ I reminded her, ‘you haven’t got the school bell. Banner School’s got it! It doesn’t belong to you,’ I said. ‘Banner School’s got the bell and you’ve been put out to pasture—they’re through with you.’ I thought that would finish the subject. But ‘Give me back my bell,’ she’d say. And look at me, with living dread in her face.”

“Dread?” scoffed Miss Beulah, staunch beside Granny.

“You’re hurting me,” whispered Gloria.

“It’s not me, it’s my scissors. I’d say, ‘Julia’—I’d got to the point where I didn’t call her anything but Julia—‘what is it you
want
that bell for? Give me a good reason, then maybe I’ll get it for you. You want to bring ’em, make ’em come? Or is this the way you’re going to drive ’em off if they try? Make up your poor mind if the world is welcome or unwelcome. The world isn’t going to let you have a thing both ways.’ ”

“You can’t always easily fool ’em,” said Aunt Cleo. “I’m a real nurse,
used
to all that,
used
to going in other people’s houses, and just like today becoming one of the family. I’ve had a worlds of experience, now, just a worlds. And I could tell
you
tales, now.”

Miss Lexie said, “And she looks me back in the face trying to think of an answer, and all she can think of to say, and she said it loud and clear, was ‘Ding dong! Ding dong bell!’ ”

“But where was her mind?” cried Miss Beulah.

“I asked her, plenty of times,” said Miss Lexie.

“But why wasn’t Miss Julia content with her lot?” asked Aunt Beck in a low voice. “Like an ordinary Christian?”

“An ordinary Christian wouldn’t want to wear her red sweater and keep her shoes on in bed,” said Miss Lexie. “And if she didn’t know what she was doing, any better than that, bed was right where she belonged. And I wasn’t to touch her fingernails, either. They grew a mile long. She said she wanted to be ready for me.”

“She must have put up some battle, for somebody that’s part-paralyzed,” said Aunt Birdie.

“She wasn’t paralyzed anywhere. That would have made it easier.”

“But I happen to know about a lady who wouldn’t cut her own
toenails,” Aunt Cleo said. “And she wasn’t paralyzed, either. Until they crossed each other over all her toes and weaved back and forth over her feet sharp as knives, and she finally had to go with ’em to the hospital. The doctors said they’d met with a lot before, but not that. Her funeral was held with a sealed coffin.”

“They could never have paralyzed Miss Julia Mortimer,” said Miss Lexie. “I’d say, ‘Why don’t you quit fighting kind hands?’ She’d say, ‘Only way to keep myself alive!’ Knocks my arm back with her weak little fist. ‘I
love
you,’ I says. ‘You used to be my inspiration.’ ‘You get out of my house, old woman. Go home! If you’ve got a home,’ she says.”

“She hit the nail on the head when she said you didn’t have elsewhere to go,” said Miss Beulah. “Not unless you went back to Mr. Hugg, took care of him again.” She patted Granny’s bent shoulder.

“Then she quoted some poetry at me. I don’t mean Scripture,” said Miss Lexie.

“Sure-enough, Lexie, we didn’t mean to ask you all that,” said Aunt Birdie.

“Old Lexie’s truly been stirring up the bottom,” said Aunt Nanny.

“Lexie, you’d take all night long to sew up a little hole in your stockin’!” cried Miss Beulah.

“I take pains with all I do and I want my results to show it.”

“You’ve got coming night to contend with now. I warned you,” Miss Beulah said.

“Oh, I’m used to putting out my eyes! Here’s where you climb up and stand on a chair for me,” said Miss Lexie to Gloria. “I’m tacking your fresh hem in. Oh, she never forgot she had something to tell
you
.”

Mr. Willy Trimble hopped to bring Miss Lexie up her own chair, and she took it and shooed him back. She drew a needle from her collar with a thread that was never seen, lost like the outlines of Gloria’s dress now in the glow of evening that was all around them. She went to work on Gloria where she stood with arms slowly lifting, legs ladylike, feet one in front of the other on the rush seat.

“If it’d been me doing it, I wouldn’t have used my scissors and cut my thread behind me. I’d have it now to put in over again,” said Auntie Fay.

“Sissie, do you forget I’m the one taught you to sew?”

“How late in the game was it, Lexie, when Miss Julia took it in she’d met her match?” asked Aunt Nanny.

“If the news ever sunk in, she kept it a pretty good secret,” said Miss Lexie. “I reckon what it amounted to was the two of us settling down finally to see which would be first to wear the other one out.”