Losing Battles (68 page)

The grave hole, up close, smelled like the iron shovel that had dug it and the wet ropes that would harness the coffin down into it. As though thirsty and greedy enough to take anything, it had swallowed all the rain it had received and waited slick and bright. The raw clods grubbed out of the ground outshone those on Grandpa Vaughn’s now older grave; they had been piled un-gravelike as a heap of dug sweet potatoes on the far side of Mr. Earl Comfort standing there on a trampled clump of cemetery iris.

“I never saw so many grayheads in one place at one time,” said Miss Ora Stovall’s voice. “There wouldn’t even be time now to count ’em. And look at that one! What does
he
call
himself?
”

It was the priest in his vestments. His skirts dragged rhythmically over the objecting stubble. Behind him marched the pall-bearers; Judge Moody with his own bared head was first on the right.

“That pallbearer came in such a hurry he hasn’t even shaved,” came a voice.

The coffin had been draped with the Mississippi flag.

“If I know that flag, it’s one that’s been wrapped up all summer, lying on top of a school piano with the march music. Let’s just hope it didn’t sour,” came a carrying voice from where the school-teachers stood, all sticking together.

As the pallbearers reached where they were going, owls in a stream, one after the other, came up out of the old cedar tree. Owls lifted like a puff of smoke over the priest and the pallbearers and the coffin as it rocked once, suspended over the grave, lifted over the
morning’s crowd, over monuments and trees, and away. Even the last old cedar was inhabited.

The priest stood imperturbable, waiting on the pallbearers’ final success, on the silence of those present. A little blackface robin sat reared back near the opened ground, watching all their moves, as if to see what was in it for him. Then the priest opened his mouth and words came out—unfamiliar in Banner Cemetery, not a one of them understood. His syllables following one another fell like multiple leaves in the rain. Then he made a movement with his hands, and his head turned an inch or two. He seemed to be yielding gracefully to some offer of assistance.

“Where’s Brother Bethune? It’s his turn,” whispered Jack.

The priest gave him only a moment, wherever he was, and went on without him. He lifted both hands and spoke in a low voice and rapidly, keeping to the same tongue. When he came to a stop, Mr. Willy Trimble came scrambling toward him with the agility of a roof-climber over the graves between, both his arms loaded with honey-suckle, and said for Brother Bethune, “Amen.” Mr. Earl Comfort took a step forward in a patched red rubber boot, and then the first clods fell.

At once the crowd broke, moved, and started streaming away. The priest had got away first, before they knew it.

“And I reckon all that was just to say ‘Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,’ ” said a voice. “Worshipped himself, didn’t he? Just loved hearing the sound of his own voice.”

“Where was good old Brother Bethune? He’s going to be disappointed when he gets here.”

“Neglect!” said a heavy, red-flushed pallbearer in a limp Palm Beach suit, striding there between the Moodys towards the cars. “Neglect, neglect!
Of course
you can die of it! Cheeks were a skeleton’s! I call it starvation, pure and simple.”

“She’s past minding now, Dr. Carruthers,” said Mrs. Moody.

“And now I mind!” he said.

“And she’d already completed her task here on earth. But I do think she could have given in enough to allow down-to-earth Presbyterians to take charge of her funeral. All that jabber we got here in order to be served with! Just because she once taught that fellow algebra!”

The three of them picked their way out among the graves and
disappeared through the trees. “You pick a funny time to laugh, Oscar,” Mrs. Moody’s voice said, fading.

Then there was only the racket of departure, and Mr. Earl Comfort, with a groan as though he needed help, was filling the grave.

“Look! We’re to ourselves, Jack,” said Gloria.

He drew her close and led her a little distance away, toward the edge of the bank. Rachel Sojourner’s ribbon grass had a rainy sheen—it was like last night’s moonlight hanging in threads. Down below their feet was the river.

The Bywy, running close to the Banner side here, where it was called Deepening Bend, was the color of steeping tea, clearer at the top. Stranded motionless just under the surface, a long and colorless tree lay crosswise to the current they couldn’t see, and heaped in its arms, submerged, were white and green leaves and the debris it had caught. Lying under the water with the drifts of fine rain on it, it was like a fern being pressed in a book.

“Oh, this is the way it could always be. It’s what I’ve dreamed of,” Gloria said, reaching both arms around Jack’s neck. “I’ve got you all by myself, Jack Renfro. Nobody talking, nobody listening, nobody coming—nobody about to call you or walk in on us—there’s nobody left but you and me, and nothing to be in our way.”

He stood in her arms without answering, and she dropped her own voice to a whisper. “If we could stay this way always—build us a little two-room house, where nobody in the world could find us—”

He drew her close, as if out of sudden danger.

The first sun had started to come out. Light touched the other side of the river, the other bank went salt-white. A shadow plunged down a fold of rock where the cave was, a black opening like a mouth with song interrupted. The banks of the other side shelved forward with the sun, close enough to show the porous face of the stone. It was like a loaf sliced through with a dull knife. The high-water mark was yellow and coarse as corn meal, and travelling along its band some wavery letters spelled out “Live For Him.”

“I’m glad Uncle Nathan didn’t ever have to go to the pen. They would never have let him put up his tent and bring his own syrup. Or be an artist,” said Jack presently. “As long as I went and took my turn, maybe it’s evened up, and now the poor old man can rest.”

“He’d have to be talked into it,” said Gloria.

“At the next reunion I might get a chance to speak to him.”

“He only washes in the Bywy River. I hope he won’t come.”

“He loves his grandma,” said Jack. “And I rather hear his cornet blow for a poor soul than a hundred funeral orations, long or short.” He took her hand to lead her out the way they had come. “I’m sorry you had to lose your teacher,” he said. “But I’m glad I could get you here on time and you got your respects paid.”

Gloria didn’t speak until they got to the fence. Then she said, “Miss Julia Mortimer didn’t want anybody left in the dark, not about anything. She wanted everything brought out in the wide open, to see and be known. She wanted people to spread out their minds and their hearts to other people, so they could be read like books.”

“She sounds like Solomon,” said Jack. “Like she ought to have been Solomon.”

“No, people don’t want to be read like books.”

“I expect she might be the only one could have understood a word out of that man burying her. If he was a man,” said Jack. “She was away up over our heads, you and me.”

“Once. But she changed. I’ll never change!” she cried out to him, and he clasped her.

While he helped her back over the stile, the sun came following fast behind them. The cemetery everywhere began to steam. The gravestones looked small and white and alike, all like one gathering of eggs let carelessly roll from an apron.

They came out through the dinner grounds and on around the church. Damascus was a firm-cornered, narrow church resting on four snowy limestone rocks. It stood even with the bank to face Better Friendship Methodist Church across Banner Road. This morning the rained-on wooden face of Damascus had a darkness soft as a pansy’s. The narrow stoop was sheltered by two new-looking boards at a right-angle; under this, like an eye beneath an eyebrow, a single electric light bulb was screwed into the wall. Its filaments showed a little color, like weak veins—somebody had turned on the current and it was working. Two wires bored into the wall, and a meter box hung by the closed door, bright as a watch. Up above, the steeple was wrapped around and around up to its point in tin, like an iris bud in its gray spring sheath.

“Jack, the last time we stood together on the steps of Damascus, we were just starting out! Getting up the courage to walk inside and down the aisle where Grandpa Vaughn was waiting at the foot, ready to marry us,” said Gloria.

“Too late!” said Brother Bethune, coming out. “I waited and nobody came. ‘Where’s my bride and groom?’ I kept asking. ‘Where’s my crowd?’ It’s a shame the way you all treat me. I wasn’t even sure your floor was going to hold me. And I drawed my finger ’cross the lid of your Bible, and if I could’ve thought of my name right quick, I had enough dust right there to write it in. And look at me teeter! Porch like this could pitch a hungry preacher right out on his head. Pitch him clean to the road! You’re letting ’em undermine your church, clawing up here with that road, and what’s fixing to cave in the hind end—your river? Front and back, you’re being eat out of here.” Brother Bethune inched down the steps, leaving the door wide open behind him. He pointed back up with his gun. “Why don’t you paint it?” he asked. “It’s going to rot! There’s only one thing I feel like is going to save this church at all—I just know it’s Baptist. The same as I know I am. And why don’t you try getting married on a Sunday? That’s what Sunday’s for.”

“If Grandpa was back on earth to hear him, he’d bore a hole right through him now with his eyes,” whispered Jack, as Brother Bethune tramped over the irises down to the road. “Grandpa Vaughn
built
Damascus.”

“One ordinary look should have told even Brother Bethune we were married,” said Gloria.

His mule walked out of the hitching grounds and trotted down to the road after him, while Bet stood waiting her turn in the shade.

“He’s climbing on,” said Jack. “As long as his mule knows him, he’s safe. He’ll get carried to the right place.”

The sun came out as if for good. All at once they were standing again in a red world. Their skin took the sharp sting of heat. At the foot of the road, on which Brother Bethune was trotting down to Banner, the shadow of the bridge on the river floor looked more solid than the bridge, every plank of its uneven floor laid down black, like an old men’s game of dominoes left lying on a sunny table in a courthouse yard at dinner time. Along the bank of the river, the sycamore trees in the school yard were tinged on top with yellow, as though acid had been spilled on them from some travelling spoon.
The gas pump in front of Curly’s store stood fading there like a little old lady in a blue sunbonnet who had nowhere to go.

“Between ’em all, they’ve taken away everything you’ve got, Jack,” said Gloria.

“There’s been just about a clean sweep,” he agreed.

“Everybody’s done their worst now—everybody and then some,” she said. “They can’t do any more now.”

He set his lips on hers. “They can’t take away what no human can take away. My family,” he said. “My wife and girl baby and all of ’em at home. And I’ve got my strength. I may not have all the time I used to have—but I can provide. Don’t you ever fear.”

“I’ll just keep right on thinking about the future, Jack.”

He interrupted her with a shout. Down on the dim, steamy pasture between Curly Stovall’s back shed and the river, something white was moving, erratic as a kite in a windy sky.

“Dan!” he shouted. “I’m looking straight at Dan!”

The horse ran lightly as a blown thistledown out of the open pasture gate, around Curly’s house and store, over the road, across the school yard and once around the school, down the railroad track to the water tank and around it and back, running on his shadow. He ran all over Banner in those few bright minutes. He ended up in the school yard, and paced deliberately up to the basketball goal post, his old hitching post, which leaned over him with its battered ring of sunlit rust. He stood as if listening for his name.

“Dan!”

The horse lifted on his hind legs and turned around on his shadow. He came down in a red splash that shot up man-high and fell behind him. He came a graceful step or two up Banner Road, and there was nobody out to see him, tossing his mane and tail, while Jack laughed until tears popped out on both cheeks.

“Dan, you’re alive. You lived through it!” He stood in the road and threw open his arms.

The horse came a little way farther, close enough to show he was still white, though his coat was rough. His mane and tail had been combed only by the rain. Jack gave his sweet, warbling whistle. But the horse with a wayward toss of his head turned around in the road and trotted back down again, his tail streaming bright as frost behind.

“He’s fickle,” Gloria told Jack. “Dan is fickle. And now he’s
Curly’s horse and he’s let you know it. Oh, Jack, I know you’d rather he was rendered!”

“No, I rather he’s alive and fickle than all mine and sold for his hide and tallow,” said Jack. He still stood in the road with his arms out. “Why hasn’t Curly already pranced out on his back in front of me then? What’s he saving the last for?—There’s just one answer. He’s waiting till he can catch him.” Gloria slowly nodded. He went on, “And I expect this morning Captain Billy Bangs let him out of the pasture. We all went off and left Captain Billy with nothing else to do—he can’t vote till tomorrow.” He cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled, “All right, Curly! I saw him! I’ll be down to get him when the time’s good and ripe!”

“That’s what Prentiss Stovall wants you to do,” said Gloria. “He’ll be justice of the peace by day after tomorrow. Oh, Jack, does this mean it’ll all happen over again?”

“It’s a start,” said Jack. Then he swung around. “But for right now, Gloria, there’s a lot of doing I got to catch up with at home. We got to eat! That’s the surest thing I know. But I still got my strength.”

Bet came down into the road.

“The surest thing I know is I’ll never let you out of my sight again. Never,” Gloria swore. “I never will let you escape from me, Jack Renfro. Remember it.”