Losing Battles (5 page)

“Well, crops was laid by one more year. Time for the children to all be swallowed up in school,” Uncle Percy’s thready voice had already begun. “We can be sure that Grandpa Vaughn had started ’em off good, praying over ’em good and long here at the table, and they all left good and merry, fresh, clean and bright. Jack’s on his best behavior. Drove ’em off in the school bus, got ’em all there a-shrieking, ran and shot two or three dozen basketball goals without a miss, hung on the oak bough while Vaughn counted to a hundred out loud, and when it’s time to pledge allegiance he run up the flag and led the salute, and then come in and killed all the summer flies while the teacher was still getting started. That’s from Etoyle.”

“But it don’t take Ella Fay long!” prompted Aunt Nanny.

“Crammed in at her desk, she took a strong notion for candy,” Uncle Percy quavered. “So when the new teacher looked the other way, she’s across the road and into the store after it.”

“And shame once more on a big girl like that,” said Miss Lexie.

“Well, wouldn’t you have liked the same?” Uncle Noah Webster teased. “A little something sweet to hold in your cheek, Lexie?”

“Not I.”

Aunt Nanny winked at the porchful. “The first day
I
had to go back to Banner School, I’d get a gnawing and a craving for the same thing!”

“And been switched for it!” they cheered. “By a good strong right arm!”

“It didn’t take Ella Fay but one good jump across a dry mud-hole to the store. And old Curly Stovall’s just waiting.”

“Stovall? Wait a minute, slow down, halt,” interrupted Aunt Cleo.

“You’re a Stovall,” several guessed.

“Wrong. I was married to one, the first time round,” she said. “My first husband’s folks comes from Sandy. It’s a big roaring horde of ’em still there.”

“The first Stovalls around here walked into Banner barefooted—three of ’em, and one of ’em’s wife. I don’t know what description of hog-wallow they come from,” said Mr. Renfro, passing by in the yard, “but the storekeeper then alive put the one in long pants to work for him. Stovalls is with us and bury with us.”

“Visit their graves,” Aunt Beck invited Aunt Cleo. “They need attention.”

“Don’t you-all care for the Stovalls?” she asked, and Uncle Noah Webster slapped a hand on her leg and gave a shout, as though watching her find this out was one of the things he’d married her for.

“If I was any kind of a Stovall at all, I’d keep a little bit quiet for the rest of this story,” came the bell-like voice of Miss Beulah up the passage out of the kitchen.

“Well, Ella Fay didn’t much more than get herself inside the store than she had to start running for it,” said Uncle Percy.

“What had she done?” Aunt Cleo challenged them.

“Not a thing in the world that we know of but grow a little during the summer,” Uncle Percy went on mildly. “ ‘Well,’ says Curly, ‘look who they’re sending to pay the store.’ ‘I didn’t bring you anything, I come after a wineball,’ she says, as polite as you are. ‘Oh, you did?’ ” To speak the words of rascals, Uncle Percy pitched his poor voice as high as it would go into the confidential-falsetto. “ ‘And it’ll be another wineball tomorrow,’ he says, ‘and another one the tomorrow after that, every school morning till planting time next spring—I can’t afford it. Not another year o’ you!’ Jumps up. ‘When am I ever going to get something back on all that candy-eating?’ says he to her. And she starts to running.”

“Tell what he’s like, quick,” said Aunt Birdie.

“He’s great big and has little bitty eyes!” came the voice of Ella Fay from where she was pulling honeysuckle off the cow shed. “Baseball cap and sideburns!”

“She’s got it! Feel like I can see him coming right this minute,” said Aunt Nanny, hitching forward in her rocker.

“ ‘Don’t you come a-near me,’ Ella Fay says. She trots in front
of Curly around the store fast as she can, threading her way—you know how Banner Store ain’t
quite
as bright as day.”

“Pretty as she can be!” exclaimed the aunts.

“If only she didn’t have the tread of an elephant,” said Miss Beulah in the kitchen.

“Girls of his own church will run from him on occasion, so I’m told. Better Friendship Methodist is where he worships, and at protracted meetings, or so I’m told, every girl younger’n forty-five runs from him,” said Uncle Percy primly.

“Every bit of that is pure Baptist thinking,” said Aunt Beck. “I’d like you to remember there’s plenty of other reasons, just as good, to keep out of that storekeeper’s way, and my sympathies go out to his sister. She can’t even
bring
him to church.”

“Well, he’s coming behind Ella Fay and says, ‘Your folks been owing me for seed and feed since time was—and when’s your dad going to give me the next penny on it! You-all never did have anything and never will!’ And he’s just about to catch her. She turns around, reaches in, slides out in his face the most precious treasure there is, a gold ring! And that’s just the way her mind works,” said Aunt Nanny proudly.

“She’s borrowed it out of Granny’s Bible for the first day of school,” said Aunt Birdie. “Yes sir, and had it tucked in where Granny tucks her silver snuffbox.”

“Little devil,” said Aunt Nanny.

“And he put out his great paw and taken it! Of course she right away asks him to please kindly give that back.”

“And he wouldn’t give it back?” a chorus of cries came, as hilarious as if none of them here had ever heard. “And what excuse did he offer for such behavior?” said Aunt Birdie in sassy tones.

“Oho, she didn’t give him time to resurrect one. Out of that store she flies! Not even his wineball would she take—spit it right out in the road. And put out her tongue at him, to remind him just who she was,” cried Aunt Nanny, hitching herself forward a little farther.

“Pure gold?” Aunt Cleo asked.

Uncle Noah Webster rumbled at her: “Our dead mother’s. Granny’s keeping it in her Bible. That’s your answer.”

“What was a half-grown girl like that doing with it?” she asked.

“Carrying it to school. She’d already shown it to the other girls,” Aunt Beck said with a sigh. “I don’t know yet how she
escaped having the teacher take it up, first thing.”

“Teacher’s too young and green,” voices teased.

Gloria sat on, before their eyes, with her back to them. Out beyond the gate, the heat flickered and danced, and devil’s whirlwinds skittered across the road.

“Ella Fay Renfro’d go parading off in your
hat
if you didn’t stop her,” Miss Lexie Renfro said.

“She’s over-hungry to be gauding herself up, living in the land o’ dreams,” said Aunt Nanny, winking. “Something like me, back when I was a schoolgirl.”

“All right, then what does she do?” cried Aunt Cleo.

“Planted herself right there in the road and bawls: ‘Big booger’s got Granny’s gold ring!’ Etoyle says that’s the swiftest she ever saw her brother Jack brought out of his desk.”

“Oh, Jack is
so
dependable!” sighed Aunt Beck.

“Is it always Jack?” asked Aunt Cleo.

“Try hollering help yourself one time and see,” cried Miss Beulah from the kitchen.

“Sprung over his desk like a blessed deer and tore out of the schoolhouse and in that store he prances. And in two shakes Jack Renfro and Curly Stovall’s yoked up in another fight.”

“A schoolboy fighting an old man?” cried Aunt Cleo.

“Listen, Curly Stovall ain’t old. He’s just mean!” Uncle Noah Webster told her.

“And Jack wasn’t due to be a schoolboy much longer!” grinned Aunt Nanny. “He didn’t know it but his days were already numbered.”

“Listen, Sister Cleo, here’s what Curly Stovall is: big and broad as the kitchen stove, red in the face as Tom Turkey, and ugly as sin all over. Old Curly Stovall ain’t old and I don’t think he’ll
get
old,” said Uncle Dolphus.

“The Mr. Stovall I buried was old,” she said. “Creepin’!”

“You can forget him.” Uncle Dolphus brought the front legs of his chair down hard. “Had they but saved it for Saturday!” he cried to his brothers. “It wasn’t only that we had to miss a good one. But fifteen or twenty more fellows at least would’ve been on hand, and ready and able to tell it afterwards, in Court or out, and help us give the world a little better picture of the way we do it in Banner.”

“But like it was, everybody’s busy getting in the last of their peas,” said Uncle Percy. “Well, Curly skinned Jack’s ear, and Jack
had to skin Curly’s ear, and so on, and old Curly’s getting pretty fractious, and calling now for his pup to come and take a piece out of Jack’s britches. He comes, and Jack’s little dog Sid that’s there waiting for the end of school, he frolics in too, with a kiss for that ugly hound! ‘Sic ’em, Frosty!’ Curly hollers, and if you’d been there, you’d had to stand well out of the way, or hid behind the pickle barrel. Curly even calls for his sister! Calls for Miss Ora to come out of the dwelling house back of the store and swat Jack with her broom.”

“She’s a pretty good artist with that broom, but she don’t always make an appearance when she’s called,” giggled Aunt Birdie. “That’s her reputation.”

“A good thing for ’em both they didn’t call for Lexie,” said Miss Lexie. “I’d killed both of ’em right on the spot, before they went an inch further.”

“If you’d got close enough to the store, you might’ve caught a flying rattrap, sure enough.” Uncle Curtis told her. “But you couldn’t expect to put a stop to Jack and Curly. Your broom ain’t any longer than Miss Ora’s.”

“ ‘Hand over the ring! Where you got it hid?’ Jack keeps hollering. ‘What’d you do, swallow it?’ he says.

“ ‘Let go my windpipe,’ says Curly. ‘And quit turning my store upside down—I put it in my safe.’

“ ‘Bust it open!’ says Jack.

“ ‘I ain’t a-gonna!’

“ ‘Don’t make so much racket,’ says Jack. ‘The new teacher’s over there trying to get a good start. Speak more quiet.’

“ ‘Make me!’ says Curly.

“So Jack he brought down on Curly’s crown with a sack of cottonseed meal—”

“Without warning?” Aunt Cleo cried.

“—of cottonseed meal that Curly had standing right there. Busted the sack wide open and covered that booger from head to foot with enough fertilize to last him the rest of his life. Then didn’t old Curly whirl!

“Jack says, ‘Hold it, Curly! Vaughn, go back to your desk!’ Yes, that little feller’s slipped out and followed his big brother into battle.”

“Couldn’t the new teacher hold onto her pupils any better’n
that?” teased Uncle Noah Webster. “In my day, the teacher wielded a switch as long as my arm!”

“You can’t keep children of
mine
shut up in school, if they can figure there’s something going on somewhere!” Miss Beulah called above the sudden spitting of the skillets in her kitchen. “They’re not exactly idiots!”

“ ‘Vaughn, get out of men’s range,’ says Jack. And Vaughn’s still little enough to back off like his brother tells him, but big enough not to back no further than the best place to see. He squats him on the roof of the pump box and could see and hear.”

“Here it comes!” sang the aunts.

“Jack dives right over the counter into Curly and butts him out of reach of that old piece-of-mischief that Curly was whirling for, and it was loaded, you bet, and steers him out from behind that counter to the one clear spot in the middle of the floor—and the whole store busts wide open. All in a golden cloud of pure cotton-seed meal.”

“That’s when I wish I could’ve waded in on top of ’em!” hollered Aunt Nanny. “Wielding the battle-stick I stir my clothes-pot with!”

“The whole schoolhouse must’ve been equally ready to pop!” cried Aunt Birdie. “And the teacher, of course, she couldn’t do any good.”

“Maybe not a
teacher
. But what was Gloria doing all this time? Where was
she?
“ asked Aunt Cleo. “She must come into this somewheres.”

“If you teach, you’re expected to go on teaching whatever happens,” said the voice of Gloria. She spoke from her seat on the log.

“Until you die or get married, one,” Aunt Birdie agreed.

“You mean
Gloria
was the teacher?” shrieked Aunt Cleo.

“That was only my first day.” Gloria turned her head only the least bit to tell them. “I wasn’t blind to what went on. I was taking full stock of that commotion from my windowsill, abreast the pencil sharpener. All the while careful to keep the brunt of the children behind me instead of where they were struggling for, so they couldn’t learn the example that was being set. And teaching them a poem to hold them down, the one about Columbus and behind him lay the gray Azores.”

“And when Curly stretched his arm for the gun?” cried Aunt Birdie.

“I rang that dinner bell,” said Gloria.

“If Ella Fay could’ve just lasted till then! She had jelly in all her biscuits in her dinner pail, besides the rest of her dinner!” Miss Beulah cried from the kitchen.

“ ‘Curly, hear that bell? It’s dinner time already,’ says Jack. ‘Give me the ring and be quick about it—you wouldn’t want me to keep the new teacher waiting on me.’

“ ‘I ain’t going to bust open that safe,’ says Curly.

“ ‘Stay put, then,’ says Jack. ‘And I’ll come back after dinner and bust it open for you.’

“ ‘What’s gonna hold me?’ says Curly.

“ ‘Well, what’s that coffin been doing here in our way so long?’ says Jack, and packs him in so quick!”

“Where’d it come from in such a hurry?” Aunt Cleo asked.

“Made for him. Made just to hold Curly, thanks to Miss Ora his sister,” said Uncle Curtis. “It wasn’t nothing new. All his trade was pretty well used to falling over it. She had Willy Trimble to get busy on that coffin when Banner in general and her in particular had it settled Curly’s about to go in it—back when the Spanish Influenza was making its rounds. Then of course old Curly jumped up and fooled her. Well, that mistake is still taking up room in Curly’s store to this day.”

“Cleo, that’s some coffin,” said Uncle Noah Webster. “Made out of two kinds of wood, cedar and pine. It would hold two of you. If it wasn’t Sunday, you could step in the store and take a look at the size of it.”

“If it wasn’t Sunday she could step in and take a look at the size of Curly,” said Uncle Percy primly.