Losing Battles (53 page)

“Beulah! Do you know what you’re saying?” Uncle Curtis asked her.

“I was young and untried,” said Brother Bethune. “Needing to be shown the way, that’s all.”

“Well, the Lord only knows how I’m going to get home, even if I live till morning,” Mrs. Moody said.

“Mrs. Judge, you and Judge Moody’s welcome to our company room,” Mr. Renfro said immediately. “Where’s my wife? Hear it polite from her.”

“My car sitting up on the edge of nowhere, with nobody but a booby in it,” Mrs. Moody went on. “I guess before morning he’ll find my chocolate cake, and just sink his teeth in it.”

“Well, sir, I’ll be looking in next week’s
Boone County Vindicator
to read what’s the outcome. Ora Stovall is the Banner correspondent, she’ll get it all in. If the worst should happen to your car, most readers will say it served Curly just about right,” said Uncle Dolphus.

“What about the way it’ll serve me?” asked Judge Moody.

“It won’t be that bad,” Uncle Noah Webster promised him.

“Mother, hurry to invite ’em,” said Mr. Renfro, looking about for her. “Or they’ll go!”

“If you still got no place to be till morning, Judge and Mrs. Moody,” said Miss Beulah finally, “we got our company room. I’ll just move Gloria and the baby out of it before Jack gets in it, and now that Jack’s home, I’ll move Elvie out of it too and put Elvie on Vaughn’s cot on the back porch, since Lexie’s in with the other two girls, and Vaughn can sleep where he’s inclined.”

“Well, if that’s not any trouble,” said Mrs. Moody, while Elvie cried.

“But you’ll have to wait on it,” Miss Beulah said. “You can’t
even see your way in till some of this company starts saying goodnight and takes babies and hats and all away from the bed.”

All the women and nearly all the men sat with some child’s arm hanging a loop around them. Other children, still wide enough awake, ran stealthily behind the chairs, tickling their elders with hen feathers. Sleeping babies had been laid on the company bed long ago, there were sleepers on pallets in the passage, and others slept more companionably among the chair-legs and the human feet on the gallery floor, like rabbits in burrows, or they lay unbudging across laps.

“Well, you’re visiting an old part of the country here,” said Mr. Renfro. “If you was to go up Banner Top and hunt around, Judge Moody, you’d find little hollows here and there where the Bywy Indians used to pound their corn, and keep a signal fire going, and the rest of it. But there ain’t too much of their story left lying around. I’m afraid you could call them peace-loving.”

“Indian Leap,” said Granny.

“That’s the name my grandmother called it too. Blue Knob is another old-timey name for it,” said Aunt Beck.

“There’s nothing blue about Banner Top,” laughed Aunt Nanny. “It’s pure barefaced red.”

“You ever seen it in the evening from Mountain Creek?” asked Aunt Beck. “I was born in Mountain Creek. And from there Banner Top is as blue as that little throbbing vein in Granny’s forehead.”

“The Indians jumped off from there into the river and drowned ’emselves rather than leave their homes and go where they’d be more wanted. That’s Granny’s tale,” said Uncle Curtis.

“There’s a better name than any, and that’s the one it got christened by those that walked it here all the way from Carolina in early times and ought to knowed what they was talking about,” Mr. Renfro said to Judge Moody. “Renfros, that is. They called the whole parcel of it Long Hungry Ridge.”

“If tonight was as much as a hundred or more years ago,” Uncle Curtis said, addressing the Moodys, “you might not have had such an easy time finding us. There was just the thin little road, what you might call a trail, mighty faint, going along here through the standing
forest. So dim and hard to find in the trees that they thought it would be the best judgment in the long run to ring a bell to let the travelers know where they was. Once an hour they had to remember to ring it, and regular, or the woods would have been full of lost travellers, stumbling on one another’s heels. That was back in the days when there was more travelling through here than lately—folks was in a greater hurry to get somewhere, you know, while the country’s new.”

“There it is,” said Miss Beulah. “Straight ahead of your noses.”

The black iron bell hung from its yoke mounted on a black locust post that stood to itself. The leaves of a wisteria climbing there made a feathery moonlit bonnet around the bell.

“I’ve read somewhere about a bell like that on the Old Grenada Trail,” Judge Moody said to his wife. “Doubt if that one still exists.”

“That’s the Wayfarer’s Bell,” said Miss Beulah. “And it was here before any of the rest, I reckon. Before Granny was born.”

“I rang it this morning, a little before sunup,” said Granny.

“Yes, Granny dear,” said Uncle Percy, his voice nearly as much of a whisper as hers.

She nodded to either side of her. “Brought you running, didn’t it?”

“You missed things,” called Auntie Fay serenely, as the Champions’ chicken van bounced into the yard and stopped under a moonstruck fall of dust. “Gloria’s born a Beecham, she’s Sam Dale’s child—that’s the best surprise that was brought us. She’s here tonight as one of the family twice over.—Oh no she isn’t!—Well, believe what you want to.”

“Well, chickens come home to roost,” said Uncle Homer, stumbling once on the steps, the bright hearth of moonlight.

“We got a little extra company as usual,” Auntie Fay kept on. “Two that turned up with no place to sleep.”

Uncle Homer came on into the lamplight. “Judge Moody! What’s that man doing in this house?”

“He’s spending the night,” said Auntie Fay. “Beulah’s just asked him in spite of herself.”

“Judge Moody, you was asked for over at Miss Julia Mortimer’s
all evening long!” cried Uncle Homer. “Doc Carruthers was about to go hunting the roads to see. if you’d fell in somewhere. I had to rake up a dozen excuses for you.”

“You
did? You’re the very fellow rode right by us this morning and left us to languish!” Mrs. Moody said. “And my car clinging to the edge of nowhere. If clinging it still is.”

“It is,” said Uncle Homer. “It evermore is, ma’am. Still clinging. I’m glad to be able to bring you the comforting word. I saw it again on my way back, just passed it.”

“Possum,” said Jack, low, “don’t tell Mama, but Uncle Homer’s back here the worse for wear. We ought to have been over yonder for the family in place of him. Paying respects is not Uncle Homer’s long suit.”

“I don’t suppose you heard anybody over there call my name, Homer Champion?” Miss Lexie said, coughing from her dry throat. “I don’t believe the splendid name of Renfro ever came up,” he said.

“I would have gone back and pitched in today, if anybody’d asked for me and sent after me. But they didn’t,” said Miss Lexie. “I listened hard to be asked for and I wasn’t.”

“Lexie, are you working up for a crying spell at this late hour?” Miss Beulah asked.

Miss Lexie raised her voice. “I can get my feelings hurt, the same as anybody else!”

“When I cry, I go off somewhere and cry by myself,” Miss Beulah said, taking a step away from her high on tiptoe to show her, “and I don’t come back till I’m good and over it. But if her crowd adds up to more than we’ve got here, Homer Champion, I’ll eat that table out there—I promise you!”

“If she’s got a crowd now, they didn’t come paying her any attention while she’s sick, any more than this crowd here,” said Miss Lexie.

“Well, darlin’, maybe all of ’em was waiting for now,” Aunt Beck said in consoling tones.

“That whole house is busy filling up with big shots! They’re everywhere, with hardly room left for the homefolks to sit down,” Uncle Homer was saying. “It ain’t just Boone County that’s over there. I saw tags tonight on cars from three or four different counties, and that ain’t all—they’re here from Alabama, Georgia, Carolina, and even places up North!”

“Found their way all right,” said Mrs. Moody, with a glance toward her husband.

“A Willys-Knight from Missouri liked-to crowded me off my own road! And Father Somebody-Something, that’s who’s going to preach her funeral, and he wears a skirt. He’s a big shot from somewhere too, just don’t ask me where,” said Uncle Homer.

“That’s no Presbyterian!” flashed Mrs. Moody. “No
Southern
Presbyterian!”

“The nearest one he reminds me of is Judge Moody,” said Uncle Homer.

“What bridge were all these crossing on?” Judge Moody asked.

“Dear old Banner bridge is the one I use. And you know who sent a telegram he wishes he was coming to the funeral tomorrow? Governor Somebody from I forgot to listen where! Getting telegrams is pretty high style,” said Uncle Homer.

“All right for high style. But the way we’ve been told, Miss Julia herself is still going without a place to be buried,” said Auntie Fay.

“That’s a false charge,” said Uncle Homer, holding up his hand. “When Miss Julia Mortimer’s letter came down on the supervisors to give her right-of-way to a grave under the schoolhouse doorstep and they said Nay, I went to work on it myself—until I got her a site in dear Banner Cemetery. That’s hitting it pretty close to her mark, ain’t it?”

“In Banner Cemetery? Homer Champion! You’re bringing her right smack in our midst?” cried Miss Beulah wildly. “She’s going to be buried with us?”

“Beulah, I got the site from Earl Comfort in return for a Comfort site and a Jersey cow. He said he couldn’t afford to turn it down, and little Mis’ Comfort could milk her for him. Mr. Comfort’s got to be buried in Ludlow among strangers for his brother’s pains, and little care I. Getting Miss Julia buried to Banner’s credit is worth a heap to me,” said Uncle Homer. “I can always point to it.”

“Well, old Earl come just about as close to digging his own grave as a man could get, and still tell it,” said Mr. Renfro. “Eh, Willy Trimble?”

But Mr. Willy Trimble sat there very papery, still as a finished fly in a web, his eyes shut.

“Homer Champion is not ungrateful,” said Uncle Homer. “Let
that never be told against him. Miss Julia Mortimer made me what I am today, and you could have heard me declaring so tonight if you’d been there. I grew up only a poor Banner boy, penniless, ignorant, and barefoot, and today I live in Foxtown in a brick veneer home on a gravel road, got water in the kitchen, four hundred chickens, and filling an office of public trust, asking only—”

“I’m never a particle surprised at you, Homer,” said Miss Beulah. “You’d find a platform anywhere at all.”

“So she’ll be going in in the morning,” Uncle Homer went on, clapping Brother Bethune on the shoulder. “And you can have your whack at her. I think you can look for a good crowd.”

But Brother Bethune now slept too, with his head thrown back and his mouth open. They had a glimpse of his old wrong tongue, shining like a little pocket-mirror back there. It was reflecting the moon.

“Damascus Church don’t even have an organ,” said Aunt Beck.

“The best sounding-board in the world! That’s all!” exclaimed Miss Beulah. “And voices do the rest. When Damascus lights into a hymn, the countryside will know what it’s in praise of!”

“The funeral won’t be ours. Just the burial, Sister Beulah,” said Uncle Homer. “Wait till Brother Bethune sees him coming—his rival in the skirt. Boys, they’re having ’em a high old time over yonder, let me tell you.”