Losing Battles (47 page)

“She was getting a good deal like Mr. Hugg, or he’s getting like her, take your pick. Old men and old women, they lose that too,” said Miss Lexie, with what appeared to be contentment.

“Sister and ladies, she’s dead and not even covered,” said Mr. Renfro then, so softly that his voice barely made its tunnel through theirs. “Let’s leave her lay. We’ve lived through it now.”

“And Banner School makes just one more thing that’s
happened
to me,” Aunt Birdie confided to them. “It must’ve been pure poison while it lasted, but it didn’t leave me any scars. I was so young, and it was so far-fetched. And I’ve gone a long ways ahead of it now!” She blew a kiss at Gloria. “And you will too!”

Uncle Nathan now broke his long silence to say, “Many a little schoolhouse I pass on the mountainside today is a sister to Banner, and I pass it wondering if I was to knock on the door wouldn’t she come running out, all unchanged.”

“I can still hear her, myself,” said Uncle Noah Webster, gazing at his brother Nathan as he might at some passing spectacle. “Saying
the multiplication table or some such rigmarole. Her voice! She had a might of sweetness and power locked up in her voice. To waste it on teaching was a sin.”

“She spent her life in a draught!” said Aunt Birdie. “If I’d had to take her place for even a day, I’d have died of pneumonia.”

“What other mortal would know the way to die like she did? Just met her end all by herself—what other mortal would succeed?” cried Aunt Beck. “Even if they wanted to, for some contrary reason.”

“Going to meet it by herself in the road! Taking a chance of being found not even exactly decent. I can’t hold with that or give it my understanding,” Aunt Birdie said soberly.

“It seems to me like a right unkind thing to do unto others,” Aunt Beck said as if unwillingly. “Getting ’em all to feel like traitors, or even worse.”

But Miss Lexie said, “She was equal to it.”

“I could have told you she was threatening the schoolhouse,” said Auntie Fay. “Only it don’t amount to a row of pins.”

“Sissie, what do
you
know about her and the schoolhouse?” asked Miss Lexie.

“Homer says the board of supervisors got a letter from Miss Julia Mortimer—and that must have been through
your
fault, Lexie. Homer was tittering over it—said she told ’em like it was her royal due she wished to be buried right there by the schoolhouse when her time came. Those supervisors today, they were mostly boys of Banner School, and she just
told
’em.”

“The
bad
boys of Banner School,” Miss Lexie amended. “That’s why Homer Champion’s so thick with ’em, he’s another one.”

“The supervisors didn’t answer her letter and they voted her down,” said Auntie Fay. “The supervisors said Nay.”

“It don’t sound highly Christian to me either,” said Aunt Beck.

“Homer said the supervisors said that if you was to take the stone out of place for even long enough to sink her grave, the whole schoolhouse would give in and fall down in a heap,” said Auntie Fay.

“I can easily picture it,” said Miss Lexie. “I don’t need any supervisors to tell me. Grandfather Renfro started with that stone when he built that schoolhouse, and he meant it to stay. He didn’t mean it to come out for anybody. And didn’t think to foresee any such mischief out of the teacher, I don’t care how long she’d labored
or how crazy it had run her. I’m only surprised that bunch of supervisors had the gumption to stand up for the schoolhouse against her.”

“It was unanimous,” said Auntie Fay. “Homer heard the same thing from all of ’em.”

“Neither am I very happy about her wish,” muttered Judge Moody. “About what I read between the lines.” He took out his handkerchief and blotted his forehead.

“Can you be buried anywhere you want to?” Mrs. Moody asked him. “Just anywhere you want to?” She gave an abandoned wave of the hand.

“I don’t know, as I stand here. The question has never come up in a form like this, not in my experience,” he muttered. “At any rate, law or no law, she ought to have been talked out of it. She’d no business to humble herself—”

“Humble herself?” Miss Beulah laughed out loud. “She’s about as humble as I am serving a grand dinner to a hundred!”

“It wasn’t like her. It shows how poorly off she had gotten to be,” he said.

“Well, I’ll tell you what: I’m ashamed of her now,” Miss Beulah said as she folded her arms. “That’s the windup of her story for me, I’m ashamed
of
her and
for
her.”

“She was so wrought,” Aunt Beck said with a sigh.

“She ought to have married somebody,” said Aunt Birdie. “Then what she wanted wouldn’t mean a thing. She would be buried with him, and no questions asked.”

“Where was Miss Julia Mortimer born, for pity’s sakes?” asked Aunt Cleo. “Is there some reason why they can’t go against her wishes and carry her back there?”

“Born in Ludlow! She sold her house behind her, to go on teaching. So, where she had left to go, when they put her to pasture, was across the river—the house her mother came from,” said Miss Lexie. “But you can’t miss it. She lives on Star Route, in sight of the Alliance water tank. The hot afternoons while she’s asleep and I’ve walked to the Jew’s store and back for a needle and thread for me and a fresh cake of soap for her! It’s all of a mile and a half.”

“She came out of Boone County, the same soil we did. What made her to be Miss Julia Mortimer, only the good Lord can tell you,” said Uncle Curtis.

“You’ll have to put her
somewhere
,” said Aunt Cleo.

“Watch out, Oscar,” said Mrs. Moody.

He stood there looking as if he’d found his hands too full, holding the speller, and he answered his wife by taking a step to lay it in her lap. His hand reached into the breast pocket of the coat he’d kept on all day, and he brought out an envelope, dusty, flattened, and bent. From this he pulled forth some folded sheets covered on both sides with handwriting.

“How’d you get
that?
” Miss Lexie sharply cried.

“It reached me through the U.S. Mail. It came to my post-office box in Ludlow,” he said.

“Lexie, I thought you threw those letters in the pig pen,” said Miss Beulah.

“I
mailed
’em. I couldn’t think to my soul what else to do with ’em!” cried out Miss Lexie. “I may not have mailed ’em right on the day she told me. I had more to do than go trotting to the mailbox every whipstitch.”

“Don’t read it to us!” cried more than one voice at Judge Moody.

It was almost too late to see to read. The world had turned the hyacinth-blue that eyes see behind their lids when closed against the sun. The moon was all above the horizon now. It looked as though it had been added to with a generous packing of Banner clay all around.

“I couldn’t have imagined it this morning,” Judge Moody said. “When I set out with this letter in my pocket, I couldn’t have imagined ending up in circumstances under which I would share it with anybody. I hadn’t even meant to show it to my wife.” Abruptly he spread out the page. The paper was thin, unlined, not the kind that comes in a school tablet; even in the poor light it looked all but transparent. The high, precise steeples of handwriting, a degree uphill on one side of the page and a degree downhill on the other, appeared one puzzle that crossed and locked in the middle.

“Looks like it’s our fate to sit through one more lesson,” protested Aunt Birdie. “Ain’t we remembered enough about Miss Julia Mortimer?”

“Your memory’s got a dozen holes in it. And some sad mistakes,” said Judge Moody.

They sat stiffly, as though some homemade thing they’d all had a hand in, like the quilt, were being criticized.

“ ‘I have always pretty well known what I was doing.’ ”

At the opening words he read, they all shouted. He might have
just flashed Miss Julia’s face on the screen of the bois d’arc tree with a magic lantern. Even Aunt Beck laughed, putting a corner of her handkerchief to her eyes.

Judge Moody ignored them and read on. “ ‘All my life I’ve fought a hard war with ignorance. Except in those cases that you can count off on your fingers, I lost every battle. Year in, year out, my children at Banner School took up the cause of the other side and held the fort against me. We both fought faithfully and single-mindedly, bravely, maybe even fairly. Mostly I lost, they won. But as long as I was still young, I always thought if I could marshal strength enough of body and spirit and push with it, every ounce, I could change the future.’ ”

“I can’t understand it when he reads it to us. Can’t he just tell it?” complained Aunt Birdie.

“Come on, tell us what it says, Judge Moody,” said Aunt Nanny. “Don’t be so bashful.”

Judge Moody with a rattle turned the page over and read on. “ ‘Oscar, it’s only now, when I’ve come to lie flat of my back, that I’ve had it driven in on me—the reason I never could win for good is that both sides were using the same tactics. Very likely true of all wars. A teacher teaches and a pupil learns or fights against learning with the same force behind him. It’s the survival instinct. It’s a mighty power, it’s an iron weapon while it lasts. It’s the desperation of staying alive against all odds that keeps both sides encouraged. But the side that gets licked gets to the truth first. When the battle’s over, something may dawn there—with no help from the teacher, no help from the pupil, no help from the book. After the lessons give out and the eyes give out, when memory’s trying its best to cheat you—to lie and hide from you, and you know some day it could even run off and leave you, there’s just one thing, one reliable thing, left.’ ”

“Wait,” said Aunt Birdie. “I don’t know what those long words are talking about.”

“What long words?” said Judge Moody. He read on. “ ‘Oscar Moody, I’m going to admit something to you. What I live by is inspiration. I always did—I started out on nothing else but naked inspiration. Of course I had sense enough to know that doesn’t get you anywhere all by itself.’ ” Judge Moody’s mouth shut for a moment in a hard line. “ ‘Now that the effort it took has been put a stop to, and I can survey the years, I can see it all needs doing over, starting
from the beginning. But even if Providence allowed us the second chance, doubling back on my tracks has never been my principle. Even if I can’t see very far ahead of me now, that’s where I’m going.

“I wish we didn’t have to hear it,” Aunt Beck said, sighing.

“I don’t know how much time goes by in between the parts of her letter, when the writing gets worse,” said Judge Moody under his breath, frowning at the page. “ ‘I’m alive as ever, on the brink of oblivion, and I caught myself once on the verge of disgrace. Things like this are put in your path to teach you. You can make use of them, they’ll bring you one stage, one milestone, further along your road. You can go crawling next along the edge of madness, if that’s where you’ve come to. There’s a lesson in it. You can profit from knowing that you needn’t be ashamed to crawl—to keep on crawling, to be proud to crawl to where you can’t crawl any further. Then you can find yourself lying flat on your back—look what’s carried you another mile. From flat on your back you may not be able to lick the world, but at least you can keep the world from licking you. I haven’t spent a lifetime fighting my battle to give up now. I’m ready for all they send me. There’s a measure of enjoyment in it.’ ”

“Now I know she’s a crazy,” Miss Beulah was interrupting. “We’re getting it right out of her own mouth, by listening long enough.”

“ ‘But I’ve come to a puzzler. Something walls me in, crowds me around, outwits me, dims my eyesight, loses the pencil I had in my hand. I don’t trust this, I have my suspicions of it, I don’t know what it is I’ve come to. I don’t know any longer. They prattle around me of the nearness of Heaven. Is this Heaven, where you lie wide-open to the mercies of others who think they know better than you do what’s best—what’s true and what isn’t? Contradictors, interferers, and prevaricators—are those angels?’ ” Aunt Birdie gave out a little scream but Judge Moody didn’t stop for it. “ ‘I think I’m in ignorance, not Heaven.’ ”

“How can you see any longer to give us those words?” Miss Beulah asked from where she stood stock-still at her grandmother’s chair.

“I have read the letter to myself, before now,” Judge Moody said. It was the rose-light from the sun already down that he read by. The moon did not yet give off light—it was only turned to the light, like a human head. He read on. “ ‘I’m right here on my old battle-ground,
that’s where I am. And there’s something I want to impart to you, Oscar Moody. It’s a warning.’ ”

“Oscar, listen to me,” said Mrs. Moody. “I suggest you sit down.”

“ ‘There’s been one thing I never did take into account,’ ” he continued. “ ‘Most likely, neither did you. Watch out for innocence. Could
you
be tempted by it, Oscar—to your own mortification—and conspire with the ignorant and the lawless and the foolish and even the wicked, to
hold your tongue?
’ ” Judge Moody steered the sheet of paper around where a few more lines of writing ran under his eyes along the margin. “ ‘Oscar Moody, I want to see you here in Alliance at your earliest convenience. Bring your Mississippi law with you, but you’ll have to hear the story. It leads to a child. If I’m finally to reach my undoing, I won’t be surprised to meet it in a child. That’s what I started with. You’d better get here fast.’ ” He stood still, lowering the letter in his hands.

“Is that all?” asked Granny dismissively.

“Listen at Gloria,” Aunt Nanny said. “She’s shedding tears.”

“That’s right, Gloria. Now’s a good time,” Aunt Beck said lovingly. “A few tears for somebody else, you can spare those.”

“They’re not for somebody else,” wept Gloria.

Miss Lexie Renfro had stalked her way forward, She cried to the Judge, “When did that come?”

“The letter? I’ve been carrying the letter around in my coat pocket for the better part of a month,” Judge Moody said in his hard voice.

“Let’s see that envelope.” Miss Lexie filched it out of his hand. “An old one she used over again—it’s the one the light bill came in.
I
didn’t mail that. Don’t blame me. I wouldn’t have wanted the mail rider to see it.” She put it back into his hand.