Losing Battles (48 page)

“It’s a wonder you ever opened such a thing after it got there, Oscar,” said Mrs. Moody. “That paper it’s written on has got a mighty suspicious gold edge. And those rounded corners. Don’t tell me it’s the flyleaf out of her Testament.”

Judge Moody stood silent.

“You can make sure by smelling it,” prompted Mrs. Moody, to no avail.

“I’ll tell you how she must have put one over on me,” said Miss Lexie. “It must have been still only July, for her to write it. I was getting overtired of always tying her sheet. She found her chance,
I reckon. Pulled up on the back of the chair till she could stand. Walked with the chair going in front of her, carrying the letter, out to the chicken house and robbed a nest. Walked back with her chair, carrying the letter plus the egg—she always had a pocket—down the hill to her mailbox, and put the letter there for the mail rider, along with the egg to pay him for the stamp. She learned one thing from the way it’s done in Banner! Then she made it back with her chair to her bed. And I never knew I slept more than thirty minutes at a time.”

“Can’t trust yourself any longer,” Aunt Nanny told her.

“Or I might even have been gone to town to pay the light bill,” said Miss Lexie. “If I’d found
my
chance.”

“The time, the effort, the trickery even, it cost that beleaguered woman to get this to me!” Judge Moody stared at Miss Lexie briefly and then widened his gaze to take in them all. “The complete and utter mortification of life! Of course,” he said, “this required an answer in person.”

“But here you are,” said Mrs. Moody.

“Exactly,” he said.

“You said ‘Anything for Miss Julia!’ ” Mrs. Moody said.

“Look here, Judge Moody,” interrupted Miss Beulah. She stopped her pacing. “I just this minute got a pretty good inspiration of what’s the matter with you—you’re kin to that woman!”

All cried out but the sleepers.

“Beulah, it’s true! That’s got to be it. That’s his secret!” Aunt Birdie cried. “That’s why he’s so mad at everybody.”

“Explains a whale of a lot!” Uncle Noah Webster cried.

“And so we’ve been allowed to talk about somebody who’s kin to present company?” Miss Beulah moved in on Judge Moody. “While you set here in our midst and let us rake her up one side and down the other, and never once put claim on her? Never give out one peep you was armed with a letter from her till you got good and ready and thought it was a good time to spring it?” She drew up her hand and pointed a finger at him. “Treatment I wouldn’t mete out to my worst enemy! Cheating on my hospitality like that!” She whirled on Mrs. Moody. “And you let him!”

Judge Moody had been holding up his hand toward her, palm flat. When he could be heard again, his voice was quiet. “Just a moment. I am not kin to Miss Julia—there are other ties.”

“You wasn’t
married
to her!” Uncle Noah Webster hollered
out. “You can’t stand here and tell us that, not after you brought your wife along to hear you!”

“I wouldn’t mind, when you’re ready, hearing a little more about you and Miss Julia myself,” said Mrs. Moody to her husband.

“There are other ties,” Judge Moody repeated.

“We don’t appreciate a comer like you getting up in our midst and making us listen to ourselves being criticized,” said Uncle Percy in a whisper. “If she couldn’t be kin I just wish anyway she’d taught you.”

“So she did,” said Judge Moody.

Aunt Nanny stamped her foot and hollered “Don’t believe it!” over the clamor of his listeners.

“She coached me,” said Judge Moody. “The house I grew up in in Ludlow was right across Main Street from hers.”

“That old house with the stone dragons?” asked Mrs. Moody.

“Missionary stock,” he said with a nod.

“Judge Moody’s just one of her Ludlow pets,” said Miss Lexie, and she tried her laugh.

“One summer,” said Judge Moody. “Myself along with some other high school boys who aimed for college. She coached me in rhetoric, and I won first place in the Mississippi Field Meet.”

“Oscar, your blood pressure,” said Mrs. Moody as if in despair, but he deepened his voice and mocked himself. “ ‘Archimedes said: “Give me a standing place and I will move the world.” ’ ”

“Never mind. If you lived across the street from her, you were in a dangerous enough place,” said Miss Beulah.

“Then what?” asked Mr. Renfro to lead him on.

“When I came home to practice, and pretty soon was made district attorney, she climbed the stairs to my office one day to say she was proud of me.”

“She was claiming you,” said Miss Lexie. “Taking the credit for you.”

Judge Moody was still.

“He don’t know her the way we did,” said Aunt Birdie. “See if you can tell us her horse’s name,” she challenged him.

“When she left Ludlow for good, to track across the county and give her life to Banner School, she was driving an automobile. A Ford coupe, a thank-you present from Senator Jarvis the year he went to Washington. I remember her style of backing out: she set the throttle, fixed her eyes straight ahead on the back wall of the
garage, and erected a perpendicular on it,” said Judge Moody. “She was teaching herself to drive. I used to wonder how many innocent bystanders she scattered without knowing it.” He took out his handkerchief and wiped it over his face.

“So there was a time when
you
laughed at her too,” Mrs. Moody told him.

“I don’t suppose even a Ford could get over these roads, not in winter,” he said.

“Was that good-bye?” asked Mr. Renfro.

“A little later on, at her request, I sold the house for her, the old Mortimer house,” he said.

“That means she wrote to you before. She had the habit of writing to you,” said Mrs. Moody.

“I handled things, acted for her once or twice,” he sighed. “That little inheritance. Taxes.”

“So you wrote to her.”

“Yes,” he said. “On occasion.”

“So not only was she writing letters. She was getting ’em,” said Aunt Beck mournfully.

“What did you do with the letters that came for her, Lexie?” asked Miss Beulah. “Throw ’em in the pig pen?”

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

“That’s what you threw in the pig pen.”

“Who was the best judge! She was too sick and bad off to be bothered with something she would have to give her mind to.”

“Oscar, you’re rocking on your feet,” said Mrs. Moody. “Sit down, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, standing up.”

“And then this morning,” said Judge Moody, reaching again inside his coat and bringing out another rumpled envelope, “in my box I found this. The envelope is one of my own, used over again. No letter inside, only a map she’d drawn me, showing how to get from Ludlow to Alliance and where she lived. That’s when I gave up and started.”

“I mailed it when I could, and not before!” cried Miss Lexie.

“And it’s a maze,” he said, squinting down at the old bill on which a web of lines radiated from some cross-mark ploughed into the center. “Just a maze. There wasn’t much right about her thinking any longer. I didn’t try to go by it—but I lost my own way on Boone County roads for the first time I can remember. I could almost believe I’d been
maneuvered
here,” he said in grieved, almost
hopeless tones. “To the root of it all, like the roots of a bad tooth. The very pocket of ignorance.” He raised his head suddenly. “What have I been thinking of? I came here and stood up and read her letter to you. And you,” he turned and said to his wife. “I’ve broken her confidence.”

“I think that was unlawyerlike,” she told him.

Judge Moody was struggling to get the map and the letter back inside their envelopes. “All the same, in my judgment, this bunch had it coming,” he said.

“I’d just like to hear now, Oscar,” said Mrs. Moody, “what you were doing getting letters like that at the office, and I didn’t even know about it.”

“Maud Eva,” he said. “Why, she felt free—”

“It irks the fire out of me!” Mrs. Moody exclaimed.

“Both of us wrote, occasionally,” he said.

“You and a poor, lonesome, old maid schoolteacher?” asked Mrs. Moody.

“Not always—” He stared down at her. “Why, every young blade in Ludlow was wild about Miss Julia Mortimer at one time.”

“When she was young?”

“When all of us were young.”

“A country schoolteacher? Why, that’s no more than I was,” said Mrs. Moody, eyebrows very high. She asked, “And you did your full share of courting her?”

“Oh, no. There were plenty without me, from Ludlow and all around. Herman Dearman, even, from this neck of the woods and crude as they come—even he aspired to her, knowing no better. She didn’t discourage him enough—perhaps didn’t know how,” said Judge Moody. “Perhaps was able to even see something in him.”

“Aspired!” said Mrs. Moody.

“He came to a sorry end, I believe.”

“Sorry is right,” said Uncle Curtis.

“There, that’s enough,” said Miss Beulah.

“So did Gerard Carruthers,” said Judge Moody.

“So did he what?” asked his wife.

“Aspire. He trotted off and worked himself to the bone in Pennsylvania Medical School to come home and set up a country practice, you know,” said Judge Moody. “He had a fond allegiance to her. And he kept coming, didn’t he, attending her?”

“He was a liquorite, now that was his trouble,” Miss Lexie
replied. “He came. But in the end she dismissed him, and he went.”

Judge Moody persisted. “She’s made her a Superior Court judge, the best eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Kansas City, and a history professor somewhere—they’re all scattered wide, of course. She could get them started, lick ’em into shape, but she couldn’t get ’em to stay!”

“You stayed,” said Mrs. Moody.

He sat down hard in the protesting chair.

“That irks the fire out of me,” Mrs. Moody said again. “There’s still something from way back somewhere that you haven’t told me. I can tell by looking at the way your hair’s all standing on end. What did you do, propose to her? To have her turn you down?” she pressed.

He put his hand over his eyes. “That’s not it.”

“Well, did she propose to you?” cried Aunt Nanny with a daring grin.

“Like you did to Percy?” a chorus called.

“It was owing to her I made the decision I did. That’s right. She expressed her satisfaction that I hadn’t chased off somewhere but was staying here, working with my own. In consequence, I never moved out of the state, or to a better part of the state.”

“Oh, my! To think if only you had left!” Miss Beulah sighed.

“I had chances, you know, Maud Eva. I’m where I am today because she talked me into staying, doing what I could here at home, through the Boone County Courts.” After a pause he said, “Well, and I never fully forgave her.”

“Who did you take it out on?” Miss Beulah asked with a sage face.

Judge Moody turned again to his wife and seemed to repeat the question to her silently. As the company looked at him they could see his lined face glisten. He said, “Well, it’s owing to her we’re both here.”

“Here? Right here?” asked Miss Beulah.

“Where I am on earth. Yes ma’am, here in the middle of you all right now. She’s still the reason,” Judge Moody said. “Mrs. Moody was shrewd—I wasn’t anxious enough at all to see Miss Julia today, find out what had happened to her—I admit that, Maud Eva. I suffered an attack of cowardice, there on the road.”

“I don’t know why you keep addressing these complaints to me,” said Mrs. Moody. “I made a six-egg cake, and piled on that
icing, and skipped Sunday School too on account of your conscience, and I rode up front with you. I’ve been trying to get you there all day.”

“I was already too late when I started,” he said. “She said come and she meant
now
.”

“She wouldn’t have known you by the time you got there anyway,” Mrs. Moody all at once told him. “Might not have known who she was herself, after you made the trip.” She threw up her hands.

He struck at the breast pocket of his coat where the letters were. “She knew exactly who she was. And what she was. What she didn’t know till she got to it was what would
happen
to what she was. Any more than any of us here know,” he said. As she stared at him he added, “It could make you cry.”

“All I know is we’re all put into this world to serve a purpose,” said Mrs. Moody.

“It could make a stone cry,” said Judge Moody.

Around them the white tablecloths, clotted with shadows, still held the light, and so did old men’s white shirts, and Sunday dresses with their skirts spread round or in points on the evening hill. The tables in their line appeared strung and hinged like the Big Dipper in the night sky, and the diamonds of the other cloths seemed to repeat themselves for a space far out on the deep blue of dust that now reached to Heaven. Now and then a flying child, calling a name, still streaked through everybody, and some of the die-hards turned themselves round and round or rolled themselves over and over down the long front hill, time after time, toward an exhaustion of joy.

Mrs. Moody still leaned toward her hubsand. “Yet you vow it was all platonic?”

Silence that was all one big question opened like a tunnel, long enough for all the birds in Boone County to have flown through in one long line going to roost.

“Don’t try to read any secrets into this, Maud Eva,” said Judge Moody then.

“Your real secrets are the ones you don’t know you’ve got,” said his wife, as if she’d been irked into knowing that, and she still waited on his answer.

“I’m not kin to her, was only once living nearby, only counted
as a summer pupil, didn’t try to propose to her, didn’t do all my duty by her, she gave me advice I took and cherished against her, and when at the last she sent for me, I failed to get there: I was her friend, and she was mine.”

“Well, she was older than you, you fool,” said Mrs. Moody.

“Ten years,” he said, staring as if aghast into the purple of first-dark.

“Then what’s got wrong with you, after all this time?”

In a voice so still and so stubborn that he might have been speaking to himself alone, Judge Moody said, “Nothing wrong. Only I don’t care quite the same about living as I did this morning.”