Losing Battles (49 page)

“I feel like we’ve
been
to her wake,” Mrs. Moody accused him.

“Watch out, everybody!” Elvie sang.

“Look! Granny’s rising up out of her chair,” said Uncle Percy hoarsely.

With the cup, the saucer, the pincushions tumbling, the quilt sliding down behind her, the little puppy sleepily following a few steps, Granny walked by herself into the middle and stood before them, at the height of a boy cousin. She lifted both little weightless hands. Miss Beulah started on the run toward her, then arrested herself.

Shoulders high, hands stiff but indicating the least little movement from side to side, Granny stood gathering herself, and then, in a quick, drumbeat voice just holding its own against the steady, directionless sound of crickets, she began to sing. Uncle Noah Webster rose, put his foot on the seat of a chair, and raised his banjo to his knee. Picking lightly, he fell in with her.

“Is it ‘Frog Went A-Courting’ or ‘Wondrous Love’?” Aunt Birdie whispered. “Sounds like a little of both.”

She knew ®very verse and was not sparing them one. When the verses were all sung, Granny, giving them calculating looks, kept on patting her foot. Uncle Noah Webster kept up with her, the banjo beat on, and as her left hand folded itself small as Elvie’s against her hip, she gave a pat with her right foot and was lifted bodily straight up—Uncle Curtis was ready for her—to the top of her own table and set down carefully among the platters and what was left of everything. Uncle Noah Webster’s hand came down sharp on the strings, and under its long skirt her foot, her whole leg, was lifted inches high to paddle the table in time to another chorus. The little black sliding-slipper with the silk-fuzz pompon
on the toe must have been a dozen years old, though it was as good as new.

“With that little patting foot, she comes in right on time,” said Uncle Dolphus. “Something she never showed us before.”

“Just so we ain’t seeing the last of Granny!” mourned Aunt Beck.

She danced in their faces.

“Mama, tell her it’s Sunday,” Elvie whispered.

“You got the brain of a bird? She’s got track of what day this is better than you have, better than anybody here,” said Miss Beulah fiercely, leaning forward and ready to spring. “Her own birthday.”

Then Granny’s old black hem began to trail and catch itself across the dishes behind her as she started to walk off the table.

“Catch-her-
Vaughn!
” screamed Miss Beulah in panic.

Electrified, the little boy opened his arms but like everybody else stood rooted where he was. It was Jack, racing in at that moment and flinging aside his empty bucket that rolled clang-clanging down the hill behind him, who got there and did the catching.

“Well. I’ve been
calling
ye times enough.” In Granny’s eyes gathered the helpless tears of the rescued. As he held her, she put up her arms to him. Her sleeves fell back. Moving like wands, her two little arms showed bare, strung and knotted with dark veins like long velvet Bible markers. Her hands reached for Jack’s face. Then a faint cry came, and her face, right in his, broke all to pieces. “But you’re not Sam Dale!”

Miss Beulah spread the birthday quilt over the chair and Jack carefully set her down within it.

“Granny, you just slipped back a generation there for a little,” said Uncle Noah Webster fondly, bending over her.

“Put the blame right on Brother Bethune,” urged Aunt Beck, fanning her.

“She’s all right, Granny’s all right,” said Miss Beulah in a desperate voice.

The old lady still looked at Jack in a fixed manner. Dust as if from a long journey twinkled back at the moon from the high plush crown of her hat. “Who are you?” she asked finally.

He dropped to his knees there beside her and whispered to her the only answer there was. “It’s Jack Jordan Renfro, Granny. Getting himself back home.”

Part 5

T
he substance fine as dust that began to sift down upon the world, to pick out the new roof, the running ghost of a dog, the metal bell, was moonlight.

“Nightfall!” said Aunt Birdie. “When did that happen!”

“And they’ve started back to biting,” said Aunt Nanny, spanking at her own arms and legs and at the invisible cloud of mosquitoes around her head.

“Let’s get Granny’s little soles off this ground!” cried Miss Beulah. “We don’t want the dew to catch her!”

By Jack alone the old lady was lifted up in her chair and carried through the crowd back to the porch and to her old place at the head of the steps. The others began to follow more slowly. Groaning, carrying their chairs, they moved away from the tables and through the yard back again to the house. Those who could found the same places for their chairs that they had marked out this morning. As many others, who sat on the ground or lay with their heads in somebody’s lap, elected to stay right where they were, not to move until they had to.

At Granny’s back, with his wild gypsy hair pale in the moonlight, Uncle Nathan again took up his post with his hand on her chair. Judge Moody brought up his wife’s chair and seated her, and when he brought the school chair up he placed it within the radius of Granny’s rocker, where her small black figure in its little black
hat waited perfectly still. He sat down there beside her.

“And we’re sitting here in the dark, ain’t we?” said somebody.

“If a stranger was to come along and find us like this, how could he tell who’s the prettiest?” teased Aunt Birdie.

“Turn on them lights, then, Vaughn!” Uncle Dolphus called. “Why did you let ’em snake in here and hook you up to current for? For mercy’s sakes let’s shine!”

Suddenly the moonlit world was doused; lights hard as pickaxe blows drove down from every ceiling and the roof of the passage, cutting the house and all in it away, leaving them an island now on black earth, afloat in night, and nowhere, with only each other. In that first moment every face, white-lit but with its caves of mouth and eyes opened wide, black with the lonesomeness and hilarity of survival, showed its kinship to Uncle Nathan’s, the face that floated over theirs. For the first time, all talk was cut off, and no baby offered to cry. Silence came travelling in on solid, man-made light.

“Now that’s better,” Mrs. Moody said. “Seems like we’re back in civilization for the time being.”

“Gloria!” Jack cried. “Where is our baby girl?”

He leaped back into the dark. They watched until they saw him come walking up out of it, carrying the baby. One of Lady May’s arms hung over his shoulder, swinging lightly as a strand of hair.

“She had her a nest all made in the grass,” Jack said as he came up the steps. He stopped before Granny in her chair and then rocked the baby downwards into the old lap. The baby was gone in sleep, where any nest is the same.

“Jack, I called and called you and you didn’t come. Mr. Willy Trimble invited himself here and told the whole reunion on Miss Julia, how she died by herself and let him find her,” cried Gloria. “Miss Julia and Judge Moody were two old cronies!”

He stopped her, his face struggling. “I was listening. I was standing to the back. I heard that teacher’s life.” Then he broke out, “That sounds about like the equal of getting put in the Hole! Kept in the dark, on bread and water, and nobody coming to get you out!”

“Jack—oh, don’t let it spoil your welcome!” Miss Beulah said wildly.

“And she ain’t calling you. They quit calling you after they’re dead, son,” said Uncle Dolphus.

“I’d rather have ploughed Parchman,” said Jack to Judge Moody. Then he placed his hands on Gloria’s shoulders. “I’m thankful I come along in time to save my wife from a life like hers.”

“But were you here to see what your family did to
me?
” Gloria cried. “That’s when I wanted you! That’s when I called you. Listen to me—they pulled me down on dusty ground and got me in a watermelon fight!”

“I know you proved equal to that,” Jack said, his voice soft again for her. They stood right under the naked light where it blazed the strongest, facing close; he was patting her on the shoulder.

“They didn’t hesitate to wash my face in their sticky watermelon juice!”

“And you let ’em? What’s happened to your old fight since morning?” he teased under his breath.

“They washed out my mouth with it! And I called ‘Jack! Jack!’ and you didn’t come. They found the tear in my dress and Aunt Lexie sewed it right up on me in front of all, sticking her needle and scissors into my tender side. They all banded together against me!”

“Anyway, they’ve quit making company out of you, Possum,” he said softly. “You’re one of the family now.”

“Oh, Jack,” she said, all the more despairingly, “they say I’m your own cousin.”

“Well, the sky hasn’t fallen,” he said, and smiled at her.

“May yet,” said both Miss Lexie and Uncle Percy.

“They say Sam Dale Beecham’s my daddy though he had no business being,” Gloria rushed on.

“Uncle Sam Dale? Why, bless his mighty heart!” Jack cried, turning toward Granny. But she sat silent, looking straight ahead.

“And my mother was Rachel Sojourner, who never taught a day. They never had time to get married, they both of them died, all apart from each other, and here I am now. One way or the other, I’m kin to everybody in Banner,” she said in a voice of despair.

“They’ll be proud to hear it,” Jack told her, and he stood back to hold her at arm’s length as though never had she been more radiant.

“And my
baby
is kin to everybody,” she mourned.

“This makes my welcome even better this time than it was this morning!” he cried.

“I might as well never have burned Miss Julia Mortimer’s letter!”

“You got one too?” cried Aunt Nanny. “Glad it’s gone!”

“It’s still in words of fire on my brain. It said if I was going to marry who I threatened to marry, to stop right there. And come to see her—there were still things I needed to know,” said Gloria. “She said she’d been delving into her own mind, and was still delving.”

“Just to see what she could find?” cried Aunt Birdie.

“I was praying against her!” cried Gloria.

“What’s delving?” Aunt Beck asked miserably, and Aunt Nanny asked, “Gloria, what did you
do?
”

“Tore up that letter. Put the pieces in the stove. Never answered. Never went. I got married!”

“Decided to fly in her face and go ahead with it anyway. Without telling no more than Jack himself, I bet a pretty penny, without telling the Beechams, without telling the Renfros, or Granny, or Grandpa, or the Man in the Moon. Pretty brave,” said Aunt Birdie. “Or else pretty sneaky.”

“I just try to mind my own business,” said Gloria. “It hasn’t been easy!” she cried to Mrs. Moody.

“Didn’t you realize, young lady?” Judge Moody asked her. “Do you
ever
realize your danger?”

“But I didn’t have to believe her just because she’s Miss Julia!” Gloria said. “I had eyes of my own. And if I was an unmarried Banner girl’s child, like she’d have me believe, all I had to do was take one look around the church at my own wedding, and see the whole population gathered, to know what family I was safe with. There was just one unmarried lady.” Gloria turned and faced Miss Lexie. Shouts of appreciation rose up for a moment.

Gloria hushed them all with her pleading hand. “Miss Julia didn’t tell me it was my
father
to be scared of. Or that my mother even had to be dead.”

“She’d been saving the worst till she got you there,” said Aunt Beck, shaking her head over at where she thought Alliance lay.

“I’d still like to know what Miss Julia Mortimer was so busy warning
you
for, Gloria!” cried Miss Beulah.
“You
did the only
safe thing in the world—married your own cousin and found a home.”

“Not safe,” said Judge Moody. He spoke from his same school chair but it was closer to them now, and his voice louder. “Not safe if that’s what
has
happened, and supposing the State has any way to prove it.”

“We proved it, right yonder at the table,” said Miss Beulah.

“I don’t think much of your proof—I listened, without being able to help myself,” the Judge said, while the chair creaked under his weight. “In fact, there’s not a particle of it I’d accept as evidence. Fishing back in old memories. Postcard from the dead. Wise sayings.”