Losing Battles (67 page)

As Jack and Gloria waited, the hearse trundled down off the bridge almost over their heads. Its most recent coat of paint, wrinkled like oilcloth, shone in the lightless air because it was wet.

Curly Stovall, standing at attention beside his gas pump, removed his hat and held it over his heart. Miss Ora stood beside him, counting those going by with a gesture from her folded umbrella. Cars with headlights burning on dim followed close one behind the other, and now and then would come a wagon, all alike filled with hatted passengers. At every departure off the bridge, the noise of those still coming was increased a little more.

The church bus came off the bridge washed to a blue as acid and strong as a stand of hydrangeas nobody could ever make bloom pink. It crawled past Jack and Gloria, windows packed with returning faces. “You haven’t got very far since yesterday!” the driver called as she went by.

Behind that came school buses, one after the other. Two looked worse than the Banner School bus, two looked better, and one was like the Banner bus all over again. Their special racket brought the children inside Banner School to the window. Through the paper flowers they watched the buses ride past full of schoolteachers.

“It’s a holiday!” cried Miss Pet Hanks, leaning out of one of them. “News went out far and wide! Spread like wildfire! Everybody knows it but Banner! I couldn’t get anybody to answer the phone. Children running wild all over Boone County so the teachers could come to her funeral.”

Judge Moody at the wheel of his car softly groaned.

“That’s your fault, Oscar, for not being on the job,” said Mrs. Moody. “You were supposed to prevent anything of the kind.”

Rocking over the railroad track, the procession was turning down into the Foxtown road that ran almost hidden between high banks of elderberry, following the track and the river.

“Count the license tags from away!” Miss Ora Stovall’s head turned from one side to the other for every vehicle that passed. “She taught all those folks. They’re all sprung from around here, no doubt about that. Those’re the ones got up and left home. I never supposed they’d show up here again till it’s time for us to bury
them
.”

On the bench by himself up on the porch, Captain Billy Bangs didn’t rise—he was too old to rise. “She taught me. She taught her elders. Because after the Surrender, they didn’t leave us no school to go to. She taught me the world’s round,” he said. “ ‘We ain’t standing still, Captain Billy,’ she says. ‘No sir, the world’s round and goes spinning.’ ‘And if that’s what it’s doing, daughter,’ I says back to her, ‘I’d hate to think there’s a can of kerosene setting anywheres on it.’ ” Captain Billy, who had slowly been raising one hand, finally touched one trembling finger to the brim of his hat.

The hearse had reappeared heading the long line climbing now up the cemetery hill. And at the same time, with a masterpiece of racket, Mr. Willy Trimble came last off the bridge and brought silence. His wagon was loaded with what looked like a bale of honeysuckle. The little boy who lived down the road from Miss Julia’s house in Alliance rode among the vines to keep them from flying loose. As they passed Banner School, he faced the window-packed schoolhouse, laid his thumb to his nose, and played on all his fingers at the imprisoned children.

“Now or never!” cried Mrs. Moody, grabbing the wheel along with her husband and helping him make the turn. The Buick moved slowly out of the store yard and edged into place behind Mr. Willy at the end of the line.

“His steering’s going to veer him a little from now on,” murmured Jack. “But I believe Judge Moody would rather I left him to find that out for himself.”

“Well, they every one of ’em made the bridge. It’d been something extra if they hadn’t,” said Miss Ora Stovall. “But there’s hardly an inch I’ve got left to fill up my Banner Notes anyway. With the crowd for the fish-fry and the crowd for that reunion and the crowd for this funeral, that’s a big set of names. Willy Trimble is getting his in three times. Wait for me!” She was stopping to put Orange Crushes and Grapettes and Cokes into the barrel with the fresh ice. “They won’t be very cold, but they’ll sell. After you been to a funeral, you’re glad to drink ’em warm or any other way you can get ’em,” she said.

Then she and Curly, Jack and Gloria set off to follow on foot. Jack’s little dog Sid was at Jack’s heels, jumping the puddles.

“I’m staying right here,” said Captain Billy.

“Honey, I’m sorry I can’t put you in my truck,” Jack said as they trudged up the short-cut. “So I could carry you like Judge Moody’s carrying Mrs. Judge.”

“Jack, do you know what that truck turned out to be? It was just a play-pretty,” said Gloria. “A man’s some thing-to-play-with.”

“It was my sweat.”

“It finished up being nothing but a bone of contention.”

“But I wasn’t through with it!” he cried. “And neither was old Curly!”

“I’d already learned enough about it to satisfy me. It was never going to carry
us
anywhere. We’d always have to be carrying
it
,” said Gloria. “I didn’t feel all that sorry to see it go.”

“Honey, you’re a soldier,” he said.

The path was one that led to the dinner grounds lying back of Damascus Church. Here it was empty like an empty room, exhausted of sound like a schoolroom in summer. There was a smell
that had steeped for years, of horses and leather and waiting and dust, and the ghost-smell of mulberry leaves and wet mustard belonging to the tables that had gone to yesterday’s reunion and were waiting now on Jack to bring back. Where each table had stood was a trough in the ground like that under a children’s swing or an old person’s chair by a roadside.

When they came to the old iron fence in its honeysuckle, Jack helped Gloria over it where two waist-high homemade ladders clasped in each other’s arms made a stile. Across an acre of billowing ground, the funeral procession was now inching to its destination.

Grandpa Vaughn’s grave was the brightest thing in sight. It was still an elevation, red as new brick, with only a few strands of grass hanging out of the clay, each a foot long, bleached but alive. The fruit jar of Granny’s seed dahlias stood on it; having lived through yesterday’s sun they had bowed to the rain this morning.

Jack dropped down and with his planting hand he straightened and firmed the small wooden cross, frail as kite-sticks.

“And I’m going to afford him a tombstone some day if it’s the last thing I ever do,” he said, jumping up.

The billowy Vaughn graves seemed to be shoving against one another for first place, tilting with their markers—some of iron, crested like giant doorkeys that might unlock at any moment.

“Where we’re walking now is where Granny’ll go,” Jack said. “The last Vaughn in the world! And not weighing much more for all her years than our baby weighs now. When I lifted her up for her birthday hug, she near-about shot out of my hands!”

The whole expanse they were crossing had the look of having been scythed yesterday. It smelled of hay that had been rained on. Even though it was wet, their own footsteps sounded on the bristles as though they were walking over some old giant’s stubbled chin. They walked faster.

“There’s Mama and all of ’em’s mother and dad going by,” Jack said, his hand going out to the double-tablet over the single grave, with only one grave close to keep it company. “Yet when you think back on the reunion and count how many him and her managed to leave behind! Like something had whispered to ’em ‘Quick!’ and they were smart enough to take heed.” An old crape myrtle stood with branches weighted down by rain and casting the preponderance of its bloom over Sam Dale Beecham. It grew with half a dozen trunks, not round but like girls’ arms, flat-sided; with
the drops of rain to honeycomb them the panicles of bloom looked heavy as flesh and twice as pink. Sam Dale Beecham’s marker had darkened, its surface like the smooth, loving slatings of a pencil on tablet paper laid over a buffalo nickel, but the rubbed name and the rubbed chain hanging in two, its broken link, shone out in the wet. A grasshopper of shadowless green and of a mouse’s size sat hunched there. It flew up before their hurrying steps and vanished in the stubble.

“Let him hop!” said Jack. “Sam Dale Beecham wasn’t hardly older than I am now when they put him in that grave of his.”

“He’d be old like the rest of ’em now. Even if he was just the baby brother,” Gloria reminded him, “if he hadn’t died, he’d be old, and expecting to be asked to tell everything he knew.”

Her feet almost stumbled—there were also three small stones, three in a row, like loaves baked by different hands but all bearing the same one word, “Infant.” Two were Aunt Nanny’s and Uncle Percy’s, all they’d had, and the other was Miss Beulah’s last.

“Honey, no time to stand still! They can bury people before you know it,” said Jack, swinging Gloria over a mud puddle.

“You didn’t hear Brother Bethune bury Grandpa. It was like the reunion, never-ending.”

“I hope nobody got forgiven before he was through!”

An army of tablets, some black as slates, marked half a hill-load of husbands and wives buried close together—all the Renfros. This time, Aunt Lexie and Auntie Fay, Uncle Homer Champion, Mr. Renfro and Miss Beulah, their children—Jack and Gloria themselves, and Lady May Renfro—were the skips. The original grasshopper was repeated here too, repeated everywhere and a hundred times over, grave-sitting or grave-hopping in the stubble, rising up in front of their hurrying feet and dropping behind them after they passed, grasshoppers by the hundreds.

They had made the short-cut to the little road, and along its side, in among the honeysuckle-shrouded trees and the Spanish daggers in their lowlit bloom, the cars and wagons, horses and buses had been already left behind. There was the Buick, its engine softly running at low throttle. Next to it was the postman’s pony and cart, mail left in a cigar box, gathered in by a rubber band. There was Uncle Homer’s van with a fresh sign decorating it, “It’s Homer’s Turn.” The school buses had put new scrapes on one another’s sides trying to line up where they wouldn’t get stuck. The church
bus had been left with its door open; every seat was laid with a hat, for a little rain still dripped from the branches of cemetery trees. Mr. Willy Trimble’s mules stood docile, cement-gray, like monuments themselves, quietly eating honeysuckle off the fence.

“We made it,” Jack whispered, lips warm at Gloria’s ear. “We’re just in time.”

The hearse was already backed in among the graves. It was standing still, and Gloria and Jack flew past it and joined the crowd.

They rounded a great clump of ribbon-grass as high as a haystack, out of which Rachel Sojourner’s grave seemed to slide, ready to go over the edge of the bank, like a disobedient child. The small lamb on its headstone had turned dark as a blackened lamp chimney.

The crowd was forming around three sides of the new grave hole. Where Mr. Comfort had been supposed to go was the last grave at the river end of the cemetery. At its back stood only an old cedar trunk, white against gray space. Its bark was sharp-folded as linen, it was white as a tablecloth. Wreaths and sprays of spikey florist flowers from Ludlow—gladioli and carnations and ferns—were being stood on their wire frames around the grave, and the homemade offerings—the flower-heads sewn onto box-lids and shirt cardboards, and the fruit jars and one milk can packed with yard lilies and purple phlox and snow-on-the-mountain—were given room to the side.

Jack held Gloria’s hand and led her out in front of the known and the unknown faces around them, making for right in front. As though magnetized to the tallest monument in the cemetery, both Curly Stovall and Uncle Homer Champion stood at Dearman’s grave, both glaring straight in front of them, both with their candidate’s hats laid over their hearts. A little taller than they were, Dearman’s shaft rose behind them, on its top the moss-ringed finger that pointed straight up from its hand in a chiseled cuff above the words “At Rest.”

“That boy walking in front of you has brought himself to a funeral without a shirt-tail behind,” said a voice at their backs.

“It’s Jack Renfro. I feel like telling his mother,” said somebody else.

“
She’s
not much better. Look at
her
collar and cuffs. Look at her skirt.”

“They’re married. And I heard that before you could shake a stick at him, he’d gone to the pen for a hold-up.”

“She’ll have to stick to him now. They’ve got a baby not even weaned. I’ve laid eyes on it.”

“He’s probably the best she could do. Little old orphan! If she didn’t want to teach school the rest of her days.”

“Look at his eye when he turns around to look back at us. You know what? I saw his baby kick him in that eye. Right out in the public yesterday. I saw his baby jump and saw him catch her and she delivered him something special.”

“He could still wear a shirt-tail to a funeral.”

“Just keep your mind on what’s coming, honey,” Jack whispered to Gloria. “You’ve done grand so far, been a soldier as good as Mama.”

“I don’t think they’ve got any business at a funeral,” said the voice of a very old man or a very old woman.