Losing Battles (6 page)

“Vaughn says, ‘You can’t do that to our storekeeper!’

“ ‘Just because nobody ever has?’ says Jack.”

“Didn’t Curly Stovall object to being treated like that in his own store?” asked Aunt Cleo.

“He let it shortly be known he wasn’t too happy about it,” whispered Uncle Percy. “Stuffed in backwards the way he was, yellow as sin from cottonseed meal, and boxed in as pretty as you please—all that was lacking was the lid on.”

“Squeezed in tight on his old tee-hiney!” cried Aunt Birdie.

“Right smack on his old humpty-dumpty!” shouted Aunt Nanny.

“To a tighter fit than any galvanized tub ever give him. And
chalked up the side of it’s running the words ‘Cash Sale Only, Make Me an Offer!’ I reckon up till that very day, old Curly’d been basking in the notion somebody’d come along from somewheres and cart that thing off his hands.” Uncle Noah Webster groaned with laughter. “Curly says, ‘Jack, wait! You go off to eat and leave me like this for my trade to find?’ ‘I better make sure,’ says Jack, and runs a little clothesline around. Laces him tight and ties the ends behind, so fat arms can’t reach. Like Nanny here—can’t untie her own apron strings.”

“ ’Twas a mighty poor trick to play, then!” Aunt Nanny cried, delighted.

Uncle Percy went on. “Vaughn says, ‘Now can I pop him?’ And Jack says, ‘You trot yourself back to the teacher and hand in your slingshot before she can ask you for it,’ he says. ‘That’s a teacher I want us to hang onto. Help me keep her rejoicing in Banner, so she’ll stay.’ Vaughn told it on him.

“And without a word Jack skips to the safe, rakes off a forest of coal oil lamps and chimneys that’s crowding the top of it, squats him under it, and ups with the whole thing on his back. Packs it right on top of him! You can bet Curly loved seeing that safe get up and walk away from him—about as well as he’d love a dose of Paris green!” sang out Uncle Noah Webster, and Uncle Percy went wavering on:

“Out Jack goes, staggers down the steps of the store, and starts across the road. The children’s got their lunch pails open, they’s already gobbling, but the teacher’s still on the doorstep pumping that bell. I reckon now’s when she drops it.”

“And I reckon he was fixing to drop that safe, there at her feet,” said Aunt Beck gently. “But when he gets there, she’s ready for him.”

They paused to look at Gloria. Small girl cousins had been drawn to her now, and marched in a circle around her, every little skirt a different length from the others.

“
Down on this carpet you must kneel
Sure as the grass grows in this field
,”

the little girls were singing, loud through their noses.

“ ‘You can’t bring that to school,’ says Miss Gloria. ‘School is not the place for it. Just keep your antics to the store.’ And she says,
‘If all this was to make me sit under the oak tree with you and open our lunch side by side, you’ve gone the wrong way about it, Jack Renfro,’ she says.”

“My lands,” said Aunt Cleo, leaning back in her chair.

“Little Elvie told it on her—she can copy Gloria just like Poll Parrot,” Aunt Nanny grinned.

“ ‘If you took up a ton on your back to let me know how good and strong you are, I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of laying it down,’ she says. ‘You can just keep on going. Carry it on home and see what your grandpa will say. I’ve already sent your sister crying home ahead of you. And here!’ She prisses to meet him, and hangs his own lunch pail on his other hand. Then she’s strapping up his history and arithmetic and geography and speller, and saddling ’em around his neck. ‘Go on,’ she says. ‘See how far this performance will carry you. If I’m going to hold down Banner School, I need to see right now what my future’s going to be like.’ ”

“No wonder she had her pupils running out the door! I’m surprised they didn’t go climbing out the windows as well,” said Aunt Nanny, slapping her lap.

“ ‘And come right straight back! And bring me a written excuse from your mother for coming home before school is out. Or take your punishment!’

“Off he staggers.”

“Say, wasn’t Jack showing off a good bit for the first day of school, when you start to adding it all up?” asked Aunt Cleo.

“Oh, no more than the teacher,” said Miss Beulah coolly, standing there to look at her.

A couple of butterflies flew over Gloria where she sat on her log, particles whirling around each other as though lifted through the air by an invisible eggbeater. But she sat perfectly still and stared straight ahead.

“Well, I’m ready to hear the rest!” said Aunt Cleo. “How big a safe is it?”

“It’s as big as a month-old calf!” cried Aunt Nanny.

“Well, how big is Jack?”

“He’s Renfro-size!” said Miss Beulah. “But he’s all Beecham, every inch of him!”

“How come he didn’t just crack open that safe and try carrying home nothing but the ring?” asked Aunt Cleo.

“Do you think he had all day?” cried Aunt Birdie.

“Pore Jack! How he made it up that first hill is over and beyond my comprehension,” said Aunt Nanny.

“Pore Jack! It’s just a wonder he didn’t fall flat on his face, once and for all,” said Aunt Beck.

“Carrying the safe on his back, and books and lunch pail and the rest of the burdens he’s had piled on him, one on top the other! He ate the lunch, got rid of that much load—we don’t need to be told that,” cried Aunt Nanny.

“Didn’t the safe alone pretty soon start weighing a ton?” asked Aunt Cleo.

“It’s only a wonder he didn’t go through a single bridge with it,” Uncle Percy conceded. “It had to weigh as much as a cake of ice the same size, but a safe don’t melt as you go, more is the pity.”

“I could see him coming when he started up through the field,” said Miss Beulah. “Oh, I wish I’d turned him around right there!”

Ella Fay in the front yard giggled. “And Mama yells, ‘What’re you bringing now, to get in my way?’ I was crying so hard I couldn’t tell her!”

“The day before, he’d brought up them old pieces of concrete pipe he’d unearthed from some bridge that’s gone, and upended them there by the foot of the steps for his mother to plant—so the new teacher’d see ’em when she went up the steps or down!” cried Miss Beulah. “And now this!”

“Jack struggles through the gate and the yard and drops his load to the ground at the front steps. ‘Here’s Papa something to open,’ says Jack.”

“What ways and means has Mr. Renfro got?” asked Aunt Cleo, as Mr. Renfro came around the house carrying a watermelon. “He don’t look like he’s got too many left.”

“Never mind, he didn’t get the chance,” said Miss Beulah.

“You knew something would go awry, you was just waiting for the first hint!” Aunt Birdie said, tugging on Aunt Cleo’s hefty arm. “Well, by the time that safe hits home soil, it’s already open! The door’s hanging wide—”

“And the cupboard was bare,” whispered Uncle Percy. He turned to Granny. “There’s no more ring than I can show you right now in the palm of my hand.”

Granny looked back at him through the long slits of her eyes.

“
Now
what does Jack say?” Aunt Cleo asked.

“ ‘Bring me a swallow,’ he says. So Ella Fay holds the dipper
and when he can talk he says, ‘If Curly wants that safe now, after the behavior it’s give me, he’s going to have to come with his oxen and haul it down himself.’ Then he gives his mother the gist, and says, ‘Don’t worry about the ring, Mama. Tell Granny not to worry—somebody with bright eyes can help me find it.’ And he says, ‘The new teacher told me not to come back without a written excuse.’ ‘I wouldn’t write you an excuse this minute to please Anne the Queen,’ says Beulah. ‘I’m too provoked to guide a pencil, and what do you suppose Grandpa’s going to be?’ ‘Then I got to make haste,’ says Jack. ‘If I ain’t back by the last bell to take my punishment, she’s liable to kill me!’ Whistles for Dan. Onto his back and shoots off like a bolt.”

“And why ain’t he back?” asked Granny. “I’ve heard this tale before.”

“Never mind, Granny, he’s on his way right now,” boomed Uncle Noah Webster. “That’s what we’re doing—bringing him.”

“Who’d opened the safe?” asked Aunt Cleo.

“Nobody,” Uncle Noah Webster beamed at her. “It’d opened itself. Jack’d already hit the ground with it a time or two, coming.”

“Wouldn’t
you
have?” Miss Beulah cried. “It was as big as a house and twice as heavy!”

“Well, now, I wouldn’t say it’s all that sizeable,” said Mr. Renfro, coming around the house with another melon to put on exhibition. “Or all that heavy. I reckon the sides of the thing may have a certain amount of tin in ’em, Mother. Or you’d expect it to go through the store floor.”

“How do you know, Mr. Renfro?” asked Aunt Cleo.

“Used to be my safe,” he said. “Used to be my store.”

“My!” she said. “How did you come so far down in the world, then?”

“And my daddy’s before me,” he said. “And away back yonder, his granddaddy made the first start—trading post for the Indians. Come down to me and I lost it.”

“The year we married,” said Miss Beulah. “Never mind going any further.”

“I
see
all the rest,” Aunt Cleo told her.

“Just you be assured that that safe weighs a ton,” said Miss Beulah. “I heard the noise the
ground
made when the safe came down and shook it. Just exactly like thunder.”

“Let’s be fair, and say it wasn’t any more the fault of the safe
than the fault of this here soil,” said Uncle Curtis. “Banner clay is enough to break even a man’s back, when rain is withholden. Ain’t that the case, Mr. Renfro?” he asked. “Growing watermelons is about the best it can do now, ain’t it?”

Mr. Renfro thumped his melon and left again for more.

“And just to think of an ignorant boy walking along this hilly old part of the world, dropping out pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters behind him! Wheresoever that boy walked there was good money laying in his tracks, and he didn’t know it!” Aunt Cleo cried.

They all laughed but Miss Beulah.

“It was the
ring
he lost!” she shrieked. “What he went to all the trouble for!”

“How’s Curly Stovall getting along?” Aunt Cleo cried.

“In his coffin? He ain’t any better,” said Uncle Noah Webster, giving her a clap on the shoulder.

“Curly in his own coffin is a picture I’d give anything in this world to see to this day, and just listening to his choice remarks,” said Uncle Curtis. “It happened on the wrong day of the week and that’s the only thing that’s the matter with it.”

“I reckon those precious children’s the only ones got a decent look at him,” said Aunt Cleo.

“That teacher, the minute they’s through gobbling, she lines ’em up and marches ’em right back inside the schoolhouse,” said Aunt Nanny. “They never knew what they missed. And she didn’t know no more about any coffin than they did!”

“Thought she could see so good with those bright eyes,” said Aunt Birdie.

“What good’s her eyes? In the first place, the store scales is standing right in front of the door, trying to block you. And in the second place, it’s dark inside,” Aunt Beck gently reminded them.

“You don’t know what’s there till you get in the store, and even when you can see it, sometimes it’ll bump you,” said Uncle Curtis. “That coffin.”

“And now there’s Curly stuck in it, as tight as Dick’s hatband, going sight unseen,” said Uncle Percy.

“Stuck and still wearing his baseball cap,” said Aunt Nanny, grinning. “Sideburns thick with meal. Like bunches of goldenrod hanging to his ears, Etoyle says.”

“How’d Etoyle get a look?” asked Aunt Cleo.

“She ate the fastest and run the quickest, then told her story and didn’t find any believers,” said Ella Fay in the yard. “She’s not but in the fourth grade and everybody knows she embroiders.”

“Well, what does Curly Stovall do?” asked Aunt Cleo.

“Hollers,” whispered Uncle Percy. “And not a soul can he summons. Calls again for Sister Ora. But she don’t come till she’s ready.”

“She can’t hear Curly half the time for the reason she’s talking to
him
,” said Aunt Birdie. “When he’s in the store she’s talking to him from the house. When he’s in the yard she’s talking to him from the store. I bet you she was there in the house talking to Curly the whole time. And he had to hear all she had to say, stuck in his own coffin.”

“I’m glad he did,” said Uncle Dolphus. “And for the good it done him.”

“So nothing he could do but go on raising as much racket as he was able. But who was he going to bring? It wasn’t Saturday. You could holler your own head off, but that don’t guarantee you’ll draw a soul if it ain’t no further along than Monday,” Uncle Percy went on.

“If I couldn’t get anybody by hollering, I believe I’d use the telephone,” Aunt Cleo said. “If I found myself in as friendless a spot as he’s in.”

“Sister Cleo, you must have walked in that store in some dream and seen where that coffin was put. It’s put facing the post where the only phone in seven earthly miles is hooked up,” said Aunt Birdie.

“That’s right, and after while, old Curly got his head poked out, in between them hanging boots and trailing shirt-tails, and butted the receiver off,” said Uncle Percy, and went into falsetto: “Hello? Find me the law! I’m tied up! Been robbed!”

“Miss Pet Hanks is Central in Medley. That means she’s got a Banner phone in her dining room,” said Aunt Birdie. “Sometimes when you’re trying to tell somebody your woes, you hear her cuckoo clock.”

“Well, you know her laugh. Miss Pet Hanks comes right back out of the receiver at him and says, ‘
You’re
the law, you old booger!’ ”

“Ha, ha,” said Ella Fay, coming out into the yard. She carried the preacher’s stand out in front of her and placed it in the shade, ready to twine it in honeysuckle vines.

“Sure, by that time hadn’t we started Curly on his way up? He was the marshal. So Miss Pet just lets him stew in his own juice awhile. She’s got that job for life,” Uncle Curtis said.

“Didn’t one earthly soul come in?” cried Aunt Cleo.

“Do you count Brother Bethune? When he comes in it’s with the one idea of helping himself to some shells out of the box. He calls to Curly how many he’s taking, and goes his way. Curly don’t let even a Baptist preacher have anything free. And it takes more than a Methodist storekeeper getting stuck in his own coffin to take Brother Bethune’s mind off his own business,” whispered Uncle Percy.