Under the red dust that coated them the uppers were worn nearly through. Their soles were split. The strings hung heavy with dust and weeds and their own extra knots. They were the shoes he had left home in. Elvie bore them off to the company room, while Jack lifted a crock from the table and drank off the top of the milk.
“And here’s who’s been doing the most of that barking,” cried Aunt Nanny.
Sid ran in panting, a festive-looking little dog with a long coat, black and white with a marking down his breast like a flowing polka-dot tie. He was like a tiny shepherd. Jack gathered him onto his knee, raised the moulting cat to his shoulder, and rocked the two together.
“What would we have done if you hadn’t got here and wasn’t sitting right now in that chair?” Miss Beulah screamed at him.
“Well, Mama, I believe I’m right on time,” he said with milky mouth.
“Jack Renfro, you’re home early, by my reckoning,” Miss Lexie Renfro now marched up and said with the bang of her own kiss. “Now how’d you get rewarded like that?”
“Aunt Lexie, what they told me it was for was my behavior.”
“Surprised they’d know good behavior when they saw it!” snorted his mother, and forced a saved-up square of gingerbread whole into his mouth.
Chewing softly, he kept his eyes on Gloria, and now in a wreath of steam she came toward him. She bent to his ear and whispered her first private word.
“Jack, there’s precious little water in this house, but I saved you back some and I’ve got it to boiling.”
“Whose is it?” he whispered back.
“Lady May’s.”
The whole round circle of blue showed in his eyes.
“There’s a foot tub waiting in you and Vaughn’s old room. Scrub. Then you can shave those whiskers so they won’t scare somebody else.” She put into his groping hand the lump of sweet-soap, gave him a towel she had ready, stiff as pasteboard from the clothesline and hot too, and walked ahead of him carrying from the stove the boiler of slightly milky, steam-breathing water.
“I’ve been in the river already,” he said humbly there at her heels.
“Like I couldn’t help but know!”
The front porch that he had emptied of all company by going back to the kitchen was for the moment still deserted. It was only draped with their coats, set about with their packed buckets and bundles, and its floor was bulging as if pressed up from below by Mr. Renfro’s melons underneath.
Jack came leaping over a banjo laid on a folded coat, and straddling a bucket of zinnias he planted himself before the mirror. She pointed out to him where all this time they’d kept his shaving brush in the dish. Then she put into his hand the razor she’d stropped.
“Don’t just look at me,” she said.
The mirror was mottled like a bird egg. He filled it with his urgent face.
“She’s being a real little wife, she’s making him earn his surprise,” said Aunt Birdie. A circle had re-formed on the porch.
“Now that cheek looks more like you. It would take more’n the whole wide world to change you, Jack,” said Aunt Beck.
“Don’t let those fingers slip! I bet he’s already lost a gallon of sweat just proving how glad he is to see us,” said Aunt Birdie.
Aunt Cleo pushed in front of the others, leaned over Jack’s shoulders, and got into the mirror with him.
“Who you think this is?” she asked.
He almost cut his cheek. Everybody laughed but Gloria, Granny Vaughn, Miss Beulah, and Aunt Cleo.
“Her story is,” said Aunt Nanny, “your Uncle Noah Webster gave the Market Bulletin a free ad for a settled white Christian lady with no home ties and drawing a pension to come keep house for him.”
“Wasn’t that just the same as handing Aunt Lexie an invitation?” he asked, shaving his perplexed jaw.
“You know I’d be turned down,” Miss Lexie said.
“The bus halted at Foxtown store,” said Aunt Nanny. “And when she climbed off it was Cleo. ‘Well, now that I’ve seen your house,’ she says to Noah Webster when she’s ready to go, Suppose you ride back with me and I’ll show you mine.’ Well, he climbed on.”
“I ended up my ad, ‘Don’t care if you drink, dip, cuss, flirt or philander, just so you can wield a broom and enjoy the banjo,’ “ said Uncle Noah Webster.
“I started not to even come,” Aunt Cleo said.
“I got a pretty fair little set of answers altogether,” said Uncle Noah Webster.
“You’re still gettin’ ’em. Bulletin never did know how to quit running an ad,” said Uncle Dolphus. “Mailman says if you don’t want ’em, he does.”
“But Jack,” said Uncle Noah Webster, “it was when I spotted the name Stovall peeping out of Cleo’s answer that I saw the first familiar thing. I’d found my pick!”
“And guess what she is,” they cried. “A Stovall’s widow.”
Gloria had to take the razor or it would have fallen out of his hand.
“Not Curly!” the circle, all except smiling Aunt Cleo, cried into his boiled, well-alarmed face.
“For a minute you had me thinking somebody had fell for Curly, married him, and the shock had killed him,” Jack told Aunt Cleo. He beat his hands and face with Gloria’s towel, and put his welcome on Cleo’s cheek.
“And she keeps house for him fine except they’re married and living in hers, and it’s clear down away from us all in South Mississippi,” Aunt Birdie said.
“He thinks we’ve forgiven him for it,” called Miss Beulah.
Gloria took hold of Jack’s still undried wrist, and led him straight from the porch to the door of the company room, then stopped him.
“You can’t come any farther till the reunion’s over—the company room is chock-full,” she told him. She pushed open the door upon thick hot air as palpable as a wedge of watermelon. “Take your nose back,” she warned him, and pressed the door against his naked toes, leaving only a crack.
Inside a ring of ladies’ hats and tied-up presents, the width of the bed was filled with babies, as many as a dozen, all of them asleep, tumbled on top of or burrowed into one another. Gloria hovered for a minute over the baby whose eyelids were not quite sealed, and whose girl-hair streamed soft as a breath against a mother’s palm. As if to show she remembered the way she’d looked when she first came, Lady May buried her face away from the light, and down the nape of her neck lay the same little trigger of hair, nasturtium pink.
Then Gloria pulled her valise from under the bed and took something out. When she slipped into the passage again, she was holding it up—a store shirt, never worn.
“Somebody that’s never seen you before wants to see you a little better adorned,” she whispered. “Curly Stovall traded me this for black walnuts, Jack. I picked ’em all up between here and the store, just keeping to my way. A barrel full.”
“The hog,” he said hoarsely.
Without ever taking his eyes from her, and without moving to get the old shirt off till she peeled it from his back, he punched one arm down the stiffened sleeve. She helped him. He drove in the other fist. It seemed to require their double strength to crack the starch she’d ironed into it, to get his wet body inside. She began to button him down, as his arms cranked down to a resting place and cocked themselves there. The smell of the cloth flooded over them, like a bottle of school ink spilled—the color was blue, a shade that after a few boilings in the pot would match her sky-blue sash.
By the time she stood with her back against the door to get the last button through the buttonhole, he was leaning like the side of a house against her. His cheek came down against hers like a hoarse voice speaking too loud.
Then the voices of others, that tread which was only just a little lighter than feet, ran over them. Somebody else was arriving.
“Uncle Homer and Auntie Fay and the ice has made it in. And Uncle Homer says for Jack to come hopping, Sister Gloria.” There was Elvie’s little announcing face. She was holding a present tied up in t
he shape of an owl and another hat for the bed.
Jack still had his weight against Gloria. She straightened him up and led him back into the midst of them.
With only two newcomers, the porch now looked crammed so full that the standing room seemed to reach even beyond the floor’s edge. The only thing that held the reunion from falling off appeared to be the double row of cannas that ran around it.
Aunt Nanny gave a boy’s whistle as Jack walked in again, Gloria at his shoulder. “Whoo-ee! Who you dressed up for?” “Now he looks ready!” came welcoming cries. “Where’d you get that shirt? Who had that waiting for you, how’d she get that paid for?” “Ask her whereabouts is your big surprise!”
Auntie Fay, a little woman twice as frail as Miss Lexie and Mr. Renfro, but wearing pink in her cheeks, grabbed Jack with a shriek and with a second shriek let him go as though she’d grabbed the hot stove by mistake.
Uncle Homer Champion clicked across the floor in western boots. He carried his black alpaca coat hanging from his thumb down over the back of his shoulder. He hung it up on the antlers and then took his hat off too and hung it on top. When he turned around, a necktie with green bluejays on it was blazing down his front.
“Jack Renfro! What do you mean by showing up the Sunday before election day?”
“You’ve still got till Tuesday, Uncle Homer,” Jack said, shaking hands. “I just had till today.” His voice still croaked. “Please bring me a swallow,” he told Gloria, and with his starched arm reached for the gourd she carried to him, drank, and handed it back.
“Sit down!” Uncle Homer said.
The whole company, as far as could, sat. Only the school chair was left vacant; Jack sat down in that. Gloria perched just above him on the writing-arm, where she could look down on his face.
“In all this great and sovereign State of Mississippi, how far out of your way did you have to travel today to find you trouble?” Uncle Homer began.
“I thought I was coming in a pretty straight line, sir,” said Jack. When he listened to Uncle Homer it was the same as when he listened to all his family—he leaned forward with his clear eyes fixed on the speaker as though what was now being said would never be said again or repeated by anybody else.
“But you found you a car in the ditch, didn’t you—while you was still a good mile from Banner?”
“Put shoulder to wheel and upped him out,” said Jack. “Is that Buick back in again?”
Auntie Fay drew breath and shrieked, “Willy Trimble, trust him, saw you do it! And declared it to Homer!”
“Just tell, Jack. Who was it at the throttle of that Buick?” asked Uncle Homer. “They might all like to hear it.”
“A stranger for sure. He’d never tumbled in a Boone County ditch before, to judge by the slang it drove him into using,” said Jack. “An old fellow, that couldn’t climb out very fast.”
“Homer, won’t you set and butter you a biscuit?” cried Miss Beulah. She faced him with a plate full.
“Beulah, you’d stop the very preacher about to deliver your own funeral oration to see if you couldn’t make him feel more at home,” said Uncle Homer. He took a biscuit but remained on his feet. “Jack, I’d be more careful before I called that man old. You could call that man more in the prime of life, about like you’d call me. Jack! Did you just get out of the pen today so’s to shoulder the very man that sent you there up out of the ditch?” he cried, and slapped butter on his biscuit.
Jack leaped up. He nearly fell backwards, recoiling, over a basket of dishes and a pillowcase stuffed with knives and spoons. Children ran up and grabbed him.
“It was the Judge?” yelled Etoyle. “O glory.”
“Jack Jordan Renfro,” came a chorus of aunts, as he slowly sat down again under Gloria’s eyes.
“Judge Oscar Moody in the flesh,” said Uncle Homer, and bit in. “That’s exactly who you stopped and acted the Good Samaritan to before you’d so much as got home.”
“Now you better think up a good one,” said Aunt Cleo.
“All my children is too quick,” Miss Beulah said. “Just too quick.”
“Gloria, I think he needs another surprise fast,” said Aunt Beck. But Gloria stayed where she was, peering into Jack’s face.
“Speak, Jack!” cried Uncle Homer.
“All I need to tell is a Buick pleasure car only about five years old was spinning nice and pretty towards Banner crossroads, and Mr. Willy Trimble entered the story,” said Jack.
“So Mr. Willy turned right across its path,” said Uncle Curtis.
“Who is Willy Trimble?” asked Aunt Cleo.
“He’s such an old bachelor that the way he cleans out his fireplace is to carry the ashes through the house, shovel-load at a time, and dump ’em out through the front door,” said Miss Lexie Renfro. “That answer your question?”
“His ditch is pretty well all cinders,” said Jack. “And that’s the one that Buick went in.”
“And when the fella saw where he was put—” Uncle Percy prompted.
“The same as any mortal that fell in the ditch, he hollers get-me-out, and the same as any Good Samaritan alive, Jack done it,” cried Miss Beulah. “He can’t help it. We make no secret of it.”
“How did a man of Judge Moody’s reputation find help so quick? To be right particular, how did he find Jack?” asked Uncle Curtis.
“You was riding on his tire,” Vaughn said.
“I don’t know how a little schoolboy like you would know that,” cried Jack. “We was, though. Me and Aycock had caught on behind that Buick between Peerless and Harmony. It was heading right for Banner.”
“But son, was that becoming?” cried Miss Beulah.
Jack told her, “Mama, we’d already covered ground with three preachers, and we’d sat up front and heard ’em out for miles, and been invited to three sermons and three Sunday dinners and one river baptizing, and then I reasoned we’d get home faster if we caught on with somebody with more of their mind on the road. And when we did, that’s the very fellow that before you could turn around twice was in the ditch.”
“But then what?” cried Aunt Birdie.
“He was glad to have help offered!” Jack cried.
“If Willy Trimble’s ditch is the ditch I’m thinking about, that Judge might’ve been glad to have help offered from Lucifer himself,” said Aunt Nanny.
“It didn’t take me but a minute to up him,” said Jack.
“And wasn’t you sorry then?” Aunt Birdie reproached him.
“I didn’t know who it was!” cried Jack.
“Willy Trimble must have spread it like only he knows how. Everybody knew it at the ice house. Laughed!” Uncle Homer said.
“And Homer didn’t dream, till he heard about that, that Jack would even get turned loose today!” Auntie Fay told them.
“Jack, you ought to be examined,” said Uncle Homer. Elvie, making a sorrowful face, brought him a glass of buttermilk with a piece of his own ice in it.
“Why didn’t that miserable Aycock warn you what you was doing? What was you carrying him along for?” Aunt Nanny cried.
“I believe when we hit the bottom of the ditch is right exactly when Aycock said ‘Good evening,’ Aunt Nanny, and struck off home to his mama,” said Jack. “He was just about as close home as he could get.”
“If we’d just been there, coming in the road behind you!” cried Uncle Dolphus.
“We’d hollered quick. ‘Watch out who you’re saving, Jack!’ ” cried Aunt Birdie.
“Beulah, that boy’s led a sheltered life,” said Uncle Homer in a heavy voice. “And it don’t seem to me now that he’s remedied that a great deal where he’s been.”
“Some day it’ll happen,” Aunt Nanny cried. “He’ll have a jolt and an awakening.”
“Why can’t Jack ever look and see where he’s headed?” Uncle Homer pointed a buttery finger at Jack. “Couldn’t you even spare a glance through the window into that car to see who might be driving?”
??
?We was riding back there with most of the dust for company, Uncle Homer,” said Jack. “I did see as far as a cake I’m pretty sure was a chocolate, riding under a napkin in the back seat. I don’t know where it went when we hit. Mr. Willy’s team broke aloose and split up and they went on to Banner. The white one climbed to Better Friendship Church and the black one got all the way down under the bridge. I shouldered the Buick up onto the road. And on it went without me. Caught and brought both mules back and got Mr. Willy hitched up again. Then I come running on home and never thought about a one of ’em again.”
“Judge Moody might even have made you his passenger and rode you home for your trouble, put you out right here at your door, and let you thank him in front of the whole reunion, and you still wouldn’t have caught on!” Uncle Homer said. “That’s what I believe of you.”
“Yes, you’d have just thanked him for the ride,” said Aunt Beck sadly. “You’re the densest thing sometimes. Oh, I take that back!”
“Just let Moody dare to come up in my yard!” shrieked Miss Beulah. “Just let him show his Moody face at this reunion. He’ll hear me tell him who he is!”
“Mama, I saw his face when he climbed out of his car, to get a look at the damage. I don’t believe there was a whiff of the courthouse clinging to him,” said Jack.
“Well, who did he look like?”
“He looked more like a bank robber than any judge. He had a white handkerchief tied across his nose and hanging down over his chin,” said Jack.
“I guess he don’t care for your dust,” said Aunt Cleo.
“It was Judge Oscar Moody in the flesh, and you saved him,” Uncle Homer said. “Wait till the rest of the voters hears about it.”
“And they will,” said Auntie Fay. “I’ve learned that much just putting up with Homer.”
“Jack, you did Judge Moody a favor in return for him sending you to the pen. That’s what it adds up to,” Uncle Homer said.
“And it wasn’t even hard!” Jack said. “Ditch was powder dry! Looks to me like Banner ain’t had rain in a hundred years!”