Losing Battles (58 page)

Grandpa Vaughn’s hat came down low and made his ears stick out like funnels. Over and under the tired stepping of Bet, he could hear the night throb. He heard every sound going on, repeating itself, increasing, as if it were being recollected by loud night talking to itself. At times it might have been the rush of water—the Bywy on the rise in spring; or it might have been the rains catching up after them, to mire them in. Or it might have been that the whole wheel of the sky made the sound as it kept letting fall the soft fire of its turning. As long as he listened, sound prevailed. No matter how good at hollering back a boy might grow up to be, hollering back would never make the wheel stop. And he could never out-ride it. As he plodded on through the racket, it rang behind him and was ahead of him too. It was all-present enough to spill over into voices, as everything, he was ready to believe now, threatened to do, the closer he might come to where something might happen. The night might turn into more and more voices, all telling it—bragging, lying, singing, pretending, protesting, swearing everything into being, swearing everything away—but telling it. Even after people gave up each other’s company, said good-bye and went home, if there was only one left, Vaughn Renfro, the world around him was still one huge, soul-defying reunion.

Bet twitched her ears when he rode her out into Banner Road. In the moonlight the car on Banner Top looked like a big, shadowy
box mysteriously deposited there at the foot of the tree, not to be opened till morning. For a moment, he thought he heard somebody up there, moving. He thought he saw men flitting in the moonlight, like bats—he thought he could see the ears of Ears Broadwee.

He could have shouted when he saw the school bus again, peacefully stranded in the ditch.

He trotted downhill to it, reined in. He slid from Bet’s back. Then with the chain he’d brought he hitched her to the bus, took her around the neck, and led her; and without the slightest fuss about it, there in the moonlight the bus creaked once, rose out of its berth, and surfaced to the road.

“Without Jack, nothing would be no trouble at all.” Vaughn spoke it out. He laid his hand on the radiator, with its armor of moonlit scorch and rust, warm as a stove in which the fire has been banked all day. He carried well water to it in Grandpa’s hat. Climbing in through the still-open door, he took the steering wheel. It was warm and sticky as his own hands. He coasted the bus the rest of the way down the first hill, and before it reached the bottom up came a froglike chirping, then a sound like a slide of gravel, then bang, bang, bang—the engine was running for Vaughn just as any engine in the world ought to do.

If it would be morning now! He thought of tomorrow with such sharp pain that he might have just been asked to give it up. He so loved Banner School that he would have beaten sunup and driven there now, if the doors had had any way of opening for him.

Gritting his teeth, he backed the bus up again, far enough to turn in at his own road, accomplishing the drop and hurdle of the ditch.

The row of bois d’arc trees that lined the home road stirred like birds in their feathers in the moonlight. Some of the trunks were four or five trunks sprouted from one old stump, fused now into one, like a rope swollen barrel-thick. Where the big split stump was like two bears dancing, he turned off to the best hiding place he knew. A little way off from the truck, pale oaks hid the moon; heads of stars like elderberry bloom filled the space between the trees. He cut off the engine. Very loud and close he heard:

“Who cooks for you?
Who cooks for me?
AHA HA HA HA HA HA HA!”

He saw the owl sitting in a dead sycamore that had become a wreath of moonlight.

Biting mosquitoes were everywhere; he plucked them from his breast like thorns. But he kept one hand on the steering wheel. The bus, as long as he held the wheel, held him all around, and at the same time he could feel that bus on its own wheels rolling on his tongue, like a word of his own ready to be spoken, then swallowed back into his throat, going down, inside and inside. And at the same time, the sky that he could see went on performing—more stars fell, like a breaking chain.

Before he left the bus here, ready and secret till morning, he made sure of the book he had been sitting on, the new geography that he’d traded out of Curly Stovall. He dragged it to his cheek, where he could smell its print, sharper, blacker, dearer than the smell of new shoes.

Then he got on Bet when she caught up with him and rode her on home. He rode Bet to the barn and attended to her, and rounded the house for the water bucket.

Down past the empty tables, he saw the Wayfarer’s Bell against the stars, elevated and gathered into itself. It was just as ever, but nobody was lost any more. Might it give sound of its own accord on some night like this? It was the one voice that hadn’t spoken. Vaughn’s heart quailed. The Wayfarer’s Bell would not speak in silver like the rest of the night. It was iron, with an iron tongue, and it would say “Iron”—and go on saying it, go reaching with it all over the world. Though no one was lost any more, there could be no bell that does not say “I will ring again.”

Uncle Nathan’s tent was under the pecan tree like a pair of big black-spread wings that had dipped near to the ground to hover there all night. Among all who slept here slept one who had killed a man. But he might not be asleep. Perhaps Uncle Nathan never slept.

Vaughn went to the water bucket, and the dipper rattled in it—it was empty. He climbed the steps, and there lay Jack and Gloria asleep on the porch, in his way. They were lying one behind the other in running positions. Though they lay perfectly still, they looked like race runners all the same. Jack’s head was thrown back, but Gloria was in front. He had never before seen her barefooted, much less asleep—now he saw her blistered heels. The moonlight lay on her back-flung hair like ashes over coals. He
stepped over Jack and waded through the moonlight around her forward, unshielded arm. Had she still counted as a teacher, had she not married Jack, it would have said in her voice: “I am not asleep.” He could smell their sweat—it went against his face as would the moist palm of a hand. Then he saw—the smell must be coming from the flowers. They looked like big clods of the moonlight freshly turned up from this night—almost phosphorescent. All of him shied, as if a harness had bloomed.

Veering, he almost collided with the baby. He had forgotten there was a baby. She was lying up over the sleepers in the hide seat of Granny’s rocker, with something gauzy wrapped around her, as though she’d been in that spokey cart clear to the moon and back.

He got by her, and his shirt-tail brushed the spokes of Granny’s spinning wheel, which by daylight’s gloom stood like a part of the wall but was now lit up. It softly struck like a clock. He tiptoed into the now moonlit passage. A nail nailing its shadow to a high board was where Uncle Noah Webster’s banjo always hung before he went to live with Aunt Cleo. There the loom stood, open to the night like the never-closed-in passage itself. The moon picked out its spider web. It looked as tall as Banner bridge, and better made, stretching from the old loom to the ceiling of the passage. His mother’s broom tore it down every morning, it was back new every night.

But here, with people on every side and behind every door, no more voices came—only knocks, night-sounds. Even from the heart of the house no sound came now except the beat, beat that was given off by the swifts in the chimney, where they stirred and shifted, a hundred deep or more.

Then all of a sudden there came through the passage a current of air. A door swung open in Vaughn’s face and there was Granny, tiny in her bed in full lamplight. For a moment the black bearskin on the floor by the bed shone red-haired, live enough to spring at him. After the moonlight and the outdoors, the room was as yellow and close as if he and Granny were embedded together in a bar of yellow soap.

“Take off your hat,” Granny’s mouth said. “And climb in wi’ me.”

He fled out of her dazzled sight. “She didn’t know who I was,” he told himself, running. And then, “She didn’t care!”

He ran on, onto the back porch and past moonlit Elvie reigning
on his cot, and forgetting the kitchen where there might be water in the bucket, he stumbled out of the house and ran for the barn. He got himself inside, met the old smells thick as croker sacks hanging from the rafters, so thick he seemed to have to part them with his arms. He heard Bet still feeding, saw the dark shape of the broken buggy, which the muffled clucking of nesting hens seemed to be moving on oars down the night. The stall was full of the electrical memory of Dan the horse, the upper regions full of Grandpa Vaughn’s prayers. Granny’s side saddle hung on the wall in the dark, invisible but in its place, and he saw it in his mind, the leather crumbling and flaking like sycamore bark. Brother Bethune’s mule had found his way to the Renfro barn; Vaughn saw the whites of his eyes, but they were to him only the extra eyes of confusion, and he pulled himself up the ladder into the loft. While saying his prayers, he tumbled over from his knees and was asleep before his forehead rolled on the floor.

Silent as the pulse itself that went beating on through sleep, there was lightning deep in the south, like the first pink down in the kindling—only a muscle that moved, like a bird in the net. A sky-wide stretch of cottony cloud came up and spread itself, so it appeared, under the moon, pallet-like. A different air streamed slowly toward the house and stirred the moonstruck nightgowns on the porch.

The cloud showed motion within, like an old transport truck piled high with crate on crate of sleepy white chickens. The moon, like an eye turned up in a trance, filmed over and seemed to turn loose from its track and to float sightless. First floating veils, then coarse dark tents were being packed across the sky, then the heavy, chained-together shapes humped after them.

Lightning branched and ran over the world with an insect lightness. Eventually, thunder followed. A ragged cloud ran in front, the moon was round for a minute longer, like a berry in the open beak of a bird, then it was swallowed.

Then thunder moved in and out of the house freely, like the voice of Uncle Noah Webster come back to say once more, “Goodnight, blessed sweethearts.”

Then the new roof resounded with all the noise of battle. With the noise and the smell as sudden as from water being poured into a smoking skillet, in the black dark it began to rain. Miss Beulah, who sprang up as at the alarm of fire, ran through the house slamming everything tight shut, company room included. Elvie, perhaps in her sleep, rose long enough to set two cedar buckets outside on the back steps.

Jack and Gloria never stirred.

Hearing what sounded like great treads going over her head, the baby opened her eyes. She put her voice into the fray, and spoke to it the first sentence of her life: “What you huntin’, man?”

Miss Beulah ran out onto the porch, snatched up the baby, and ran with her back to her own bed, as if a life had been saved.

Part 6

“G
ranny’s sleeping her little head off this morning,” said Miss Beulah, running around the kitchen table, where Mr. Renfro, the Renfro girls, Miss Lexie, and Uncle Nathan were eating breakfast by lamplight.