Losing Battles (52 page)

Mr. Renfro, the groom, was seated by the standing bride; he was in a chair with one of his legs offered to the forefront of the picture, set out on a cot like a loaf on a table; and the very bedspread on the cot was the one just inside the window on the company bed, visible now in the hot electric light.

“But you kept right on, Brother,” said Miss Lexie.

“I had to come behind Dearman and get the stumps out for a mighty lot of people,” Mr. Renfro said. “In those days I was called on here, thither, and yon.”

“Be grateful you was on earth to be in the picture at all,” said Miss Beulah. “Look, it’s got all the Beecham boys together, standing shoulder to shoulder. There’s precious Sam Dale, Granny!”

The old lady didn’t give out a word.

“Did he have inkling?” asked Aunt Cleo.

“Does he look like it?” countered Miss Beulah. “Look at that face—there’s nothing in it but plain goodness, goodness personified.”

“But it’s in twice,” said Etoyle.

Evidently by racing the crank of the camera and running behind backs, Sam Dale had got in on both ends of the panorama, putting his face smack and smack again into the face of oblivion. Though too young and smooth to print itself dark enough not to fade, his face could not be mistaken; the hair stood straight up on his forehead, luxuriant as a spring crop of oats.

“Wasn’t that a little mischief-making of him?” murmured Aunt Beck.

“That was being eighteen years old and fixing to march off to war,” said Miss Beulah shortly.

“Only one of the boys was married yet,” said Aunt Birdie. “So that only gave the right to Nanny to be in the picture.”

“Look, oh look, in those days Percy was bigger than Nanny. Now it’s the other way round,” said Aunt Birdie. “I always forget what tricks time likes to play.”

Aunt Nanny’s finger flattened on the blur where someone had moved, and she asked, “Rachel Sojourner?”

“Oh, those slipping fingers!” cried Miss Beulah. “Don’t bring back to me, please, how she tried to button me up in that dress—I thought those fingers’d never get to the foot of the row! Slipping, hurrying, and ice cold!” She pulled away Nanny’s finger. “But what’s she doing hiding in my wedding picture, and I never saw her before?”

“She’s been in the company room with you all this time, Gloria,” said Aunt Beck. “Your mother.”

“I can’t see what this girl looked like,” said Gloria, coming at last to look at the picture with them.

“She didn’t hold still. Beulah, this picture’s filling up with the dead,” said Aunt Beck. “After this year, let’s not try taking it off its shelf any more.”

“I’ll hand you this much: looking at it today you get the notion there was nobody on earth but Renfros,” said Miss Beulah. “And it was a big tribe to start with. They didn’t ever outshine the Beechams, but they did threaten once to out-crop ’em. All them’s Renfros! That’s Mr. Renfro’s father and mother, cocking their heads at each other. Dust these many years. All them’s Renfros! That’s Fay, with her finger in her mouth. And not a living man of ’em walking around today but the bridegroom I took for my husband.”

Mr. Renfro made her a bow.

“What kind of a dandy is this?” asked Aunt Cleo, whose finger was moving behind theirs, more slowly. “Walking cane! And a straw hat with a stripey band on it. A flowing tie! Is that Noah Webster?”

“That’s Nathan!” a chorus cried full of glee.

“Well, he’s got both hands,” Aunt Cleo challenged them. “Was he born like you and I?”

“That picture was taken before he surrendered to the Lord,” said Miss Beulah. “That’s enough of the picture. Carry it back in the house and stand it back on the shelf with my switches.”

“They didn’t have many pretty ones,” Aunt Cleo said, her
finger still moving slowly across the picture, across Miss Lexie’s face, then stopping. “I’d have to give the prize to that one.”

“Pull back your finger!” said Miss Beulah, pulling it back for her. “That’s not Vaughn, not Beecham, not even Renfro, that’s no kin to anybody here, and to my mind hadn’t much business here at my wedding. Grandpa and Granny Vaughn was boarding her here at the time of the big occasion. Now who’s the answer?”

She was standing the last one on the back row, her head turned away from the crowd and ignoring the camera, looking off from this porch here as from her own promontory to survey the world. The full throat, firm long cheek, long-focused eye, the tall sweep of black hair laid with a rosebud that looked like a small diploma tied up in its ribbon, the very way the head was held, all said that the prospect was serious.

“Miss Julia Percival Mortimer,” Judge Moody said, standing with them, looking down.

“She’ll never git it all on one tombstone,” said Aunt Cleo. “Just what I’ve been telling Noah Webster Beecham.”

Mrs. Moody remarked, “It doesn’t sound to me like she’s even very sure of a grave.”

“Where was I?” Elvie asked, her eyes still fixed on the photograph.

“Lucky for you, you was nowhere on earth yet!” said Miss Beulah. “Now that you’re here, put this picture back where it belongs. Granny dear, don’t you want to see it? Just one more time before it goes?”

Granny waved it away. Elvie skipped.

“Look-a-there! Look at our light!” cried Etoyle, and some of the aunts involuntarily shielded their eyes.

Within the opening of the passage, the bright bulb on its cord rose up toward the ceiling, slowly, then dropped in fits and starts, then zoomed up with the speed of a moth. Close to the ceiling, into which its cord disappeared, the bulb clung for a minute, then dropped and danced to a standstill.

“Well, now you’re haunted,” said Miss Lexie.

“It’s starting afresh!” said Elvie.

“Jack!” yelled Miss Beulah, as the cord moved like a fishing line with a bite on it.

“I think now that whoever said ghosts is right, not that I ever held with ghosts. I’m a pretty good Presbyterian, back home,” Mrs. Moody said.

“Jack! Jack! Ever out of sight when most needed. Vaughn, you climb a piece of the way up under the roof, take a poker, and just poke for a second at what’s doing that,” said Miss Beulah. “Come back and tell us what we’ve got there. I bet you a pretty it’s alive, now.”

“Who’s going to wait on me like that when I get old?” crowed Miss Lexie, as Vaughn slowly went. “Not a soul, not a blessed soul!”

“You’ll have to go to the poor farm,” Aunt Cleo told her without taking her eyes from the ceiling. “If they still got room for you.”

“I’ll come wait on you, Aunt Lexie,” cried Elvie, jumping up and down to watch the ceiling. “As long as I ain’t too busy school-teaching. And if I don’t get married or have children before I know it. Look!”

“Ha ha ha!” Etoyle cawed out. Now the light was being let down on its cord, jerky as a school flag down its mast.

Then all the lights went out. It seemed a midnight moment before the moonlight gathered its wave and rolled back in.

“Well, that’s one more system that today’s put out of commission,” said Uncle Curtis, as if with favor.

In a moment they heard Vaughn come running up the passage, and now they made him out—he came cradling something alive. AH around, the dogs put up a clamor.

“Here’s who it was, Mama. Playing with us all from over our heads.”

“Uh-
huh
,” said Miss Beulah. “What did I tell you!”

“Horrors,” said Mrs. Moody. “Is that a monkey?”

“Don’t try to put him in my lap,” said Aunt Cleo. “I mean it.”

“Hey, Coony!” cried the little girls.

“He was just tantalizing you, Mama,” said Vaughn pleadingly.

“Eternal, everlasting mischief!” stormed Miss Beulah. “There’s always
that
you can count on! I said I wasn’t going to have coon or possum under my roof and I’m not,” she went on, with repeated pokes testing the coon’s needly teeth on her finger. “Yes sir, and you’re one little scrap of mischief I mean to send right back where it started from.”

While the boy cousins tried to keep back a battery of hounds, two enormous yellow globes moved out of the passage. Etoyle had gone for the oil lamps, even while Miss Beulah was calling over the frenzied barking of the held-back, straining dogs, “Bring the lamps! Don’t leave your great-grandmother sitting in the dark!” Etoyle brought the lamps to the coon.

The coon, circular-eyed, lamp-eyed itself, fluffed up and drew one long breath, hoarse and male.

Then it got itself thrust into the lap of Ella Fay, who hollered, “Jack!”

“Hold him, Ella Fay, hold him!” shouted the uncles. “That’s not the way! He’s scrambling!”

“Don’t let him run off with anything belonging to me,” said Aunt Cleo. “Oh, they’re great for thieving.”

“Oscar, I want to go home,” said Mrs. Moody piteously.

Held up by Elvie, Lady May was shaken awake again to see the coon. When she saw it, her eyes went three-cornered and her cheeks went plump as two Duchess roses on a stem.

“Look at that smile. There it comes! And it’s her mother’s. And looks like you’re going to have to work just as hard to get it,” Aunt Birdie said.

“Mama, I believe he knows you’re the cook,” pleaded Vaughn. “See how he wants to follow you. Let’s keep him, let’s keep him! When I get him chained up and you bring him some food in a saucer, he’ll quit his monkeying. I want to name him Parchman.”

“He’ll go!” said Miss Beulah. “And I don’t want to have any coon-and-dog battle on the premises. Boys! Tighten up on those visiting dogs! Come here to me, Sid.”

Little Sid, to their laughter, ran at even draw with the head of the pack as the coon streaked straight to meet them. In the moonlight Sid showed his teeth like a row of lace.

“I give the coon fifty-fifty and the dogs fifty-fifty,” said Uncle Curtis in leisurely tones.

“There’s a little more racket out there than I like to hear,” moaned Miss Beulah.

The dogs’ tails, white and moonlit and all beating at once, disappeared last, speeding down the hill towards joy. But a boy cousin came plodding back into view to tell them, “He got away. Coony got away. It looked like he was heading for Banner Top.”

“That coon didn’t put up the fight those dogs expected of him,”

said Uncle Dolphus. “He’d been suffocating under that roof too long, that might have been his trouble. Better luck next time!”

The moon shone now at full power. The front gallery seemed to spread away and take the surrounding hills and gullies all into its apron. Banner Top seemed right in their laps. Banner itself all but showed itself over the rim, as though the only reason why anything on earth was still invisible tonight was that it had taken the right steps to make itself so.

“You know, I can hear that thing running from here,” said Aunt Beck. “Mrs. Judge, your motor sounds to me like the old courthouse clock trying to strike again, and not making it.”

“You sure are stranded here,” said Mrs. Moody. “Mercy, what a long way off from everything!”

“Long way off? They’re right in the thick,” cried Aunt Birdie. “This is where I wish I was when I get hungry to see something happen.”

“In my young days,” said Brother Bethune, “I incurred the wrath of the law-abiding, one sweet summer’s night.”

“Brother Bethune!” the aunts turned slightly in their chairs to exclaim. “Never dreamed that,” said one.

“Are you trying to tell us you got yourself marched off to jail?” Miss Beulah asked.

“I’m trying to tell you I incurred the wrath of the law-abiding. There was at one time a little whiskey-making going on in and around these peaceful moonlight hills. And I supplied ’em the sugar.”

“Brother Bethune!”

“Every last one of us got caught. Yes, in my day revenuers roamed these moonlight roads as thick as thieves. But I was the only one arrested that they let run back in his house a minute. They said I could gather up my Bible.”

“They owed you at least that much!” hollered Uncle Noah Webster. “What happened to the makings? They drink it up then and there?”

“I went on out through the back window,” said Brother Bethune. “Into the moonlight.”

“Well, it done you good to come out and tell us, didn’t it?”
said Aunt Birdie. “Now we know at least one thing
you’re
sorry for.”

“Brother Bethune, I think you might go back to it,” Miss Beulah broke out. “Go back to making your moonshine. There’s less chance of mistakes than there is in trying to preach the Lord’s Word. Grandpa’s turned in his grave more than once or twice today.”