Losing Battles

“And winding along the edge of everywhere is the old Bywy. Right now it’s low as sin and you can’t see it. If this was bare winter, you could look right through yonder and see Grandpa’s church pointing up its finger at you.”

  Both the baby’s hands pulled gently at the tufts of Jack’s hair as he turned with her, a little at a time, showing her the world.

  “You can’t see dear old Banner from here. By the road it’s five miles away, at the bottom of the ridge. But it’s right—where—I’m pointing,” Jack told her. “Like a biddie under a wing. You just follow the road.”

  He reached for Gloria’s arm and steered her, taking them back across the Top to where it hung over Banner Road. It ran deep between its banks that were bright as a melon at that instant split open. It came over its hill, rushed to the bottom, and disappeared around a claybank.

  “Right here in the world is where I call it plain beautiful,” said Jack. “That way is Banner.” He pointed. “And that’s the other way. Your guess is as good as your daddy’s which end of the road that old booger’s on now.”

  Lady May pointed her finger straight forward.

  “Why, that’s Grandpa’s chimney again,” Jack told her.

  Back on the other side, it stood drinking up the light, red like the claybanks, the same clay.

  “Oh, Grandpa Vaughn! I come listening for his voice all the way up to the house this morning. And believed when he kissed me good-bye he’d live to be a hundred,” said Jack.

  “Showing how much more you count on everybody than I do,” said Gloria. “Get back from this edge.”

  Jack squeezed Lady May’s thin leg a little. “And listen to me: that was the strictest mortal that ever breathed. He’s asleep in the ground now, and don’t have us to pray over any longer. And I miss him! I miss his frowning presence just as I get myself ready to perform something.”

  “If you’re wishing for somebody who’s hard to please and wouldn’t too well like what you’re planning on now, there’s one standing over your shoulder and alive this minute,” said Gloria. “Now, haven’t we had enough of Lover’s Leap?” she cried.

  “That’s what they call Banner Top if they weren’t born here,” Jack told Lady May, smiling. “Gloria, there’s just one word I want to tell you about where they had me for a year and a half: it was flat.”

  The baby complained, and Jack whispered to her, “Getting homesick? Then I can show you right back where we started. That new tin giving us the signal from away across yonder”—he pointed far—“is the roof of our house.” He pointed to the farm track, red as a strand of mitten-yarn, where it showed along the curving ridge, draping it, to fall in easy stages till the last minute, when it cut through the claybank and dropped twelve feet into Banner Road, with the ditch across its foot. “And that’s our road. It comes out right under our feet. Who’s that holding up the mailbox?” And he told her, “Uncle Sam.”

  The wooden figure stood at the foot of the farm track like a paper doll made out of a plank, weatherbeaten but recognizable by its pink-tinted stripes and the shape of its overlarge hat. It held out the mailbox on a single plank arm.

  “I brought you here by the short-cut,” said Jack.

  “Now explain to your baby what we’re all here for,” Gloria challenged him.

  “Family duty,” Jack told Lady May. “And it won’t take longer than a snap of your own little finger to get Judge Moody tucked away in a ditch like he was in, long enough to learn his lesson. To save precious time, I’m going to see to it that the ditch he goes in now is one he can get himself out of, for a change.”

  “And what easy ditch do you know of?” asked Gloria.

  “Ours. You just jumped it.”

  He trotted with the baby along the edge to where the bank stood steepest over the road. In the thin fold of the clay wall at the top, a round peephole had in some past time been leisurely carved. It gave a view of the road around the turn, toward Banner.

  “Now look through that and tell me if you see anybody coming.” Jack let Lady May peep, she smiled, and then he peeped and cried, “You do! You see Brother Bethune! He’s coming up the road on foot and the least bit weaving!”

  “That’s who has to take Grandpa Vaughn’s place,” said Gloria. “He’s in Damascus pulpit on Second Sundays. And today he’s taking Grandpa’s place at the reunion.”

  “Giving us the family history?” cried Jack. “He’s licked to start with!”

  “He’s heard our voices. Now look who you’re bringing right up here,” said Gloria.

  The old man came right on up Banner Top, climbing the path like a rickety ladder of his dreams. It was when he got to the top that he stumbled and fell. He kept hold of his gun, but everything else on him pitched to the ground. Jack and Gloria raised him to his feet and straightened him up between them.

  “Don’t tell me where I am,” the old man warned them, as Gloria beat his hat for him and put it on his head and Jack beat the dust out of his black serge pants, dropped the tuning fork back into his shirt pocket, and scooped up his Bible, and the baby stood and watched and put her finger into her mouth. “Or where you think I’m headed. I want to tell you. It’ll all come back to me in good time.”

  Brother Bethune’s Bible, bound in thin black leather skinned to the red of a school eraser, looked as if it had come to his door every Sunday by being thrown at it, rolled up like the Ludlow Sunday newspaper. Its pages, with rain-stained pink edges, looked as loose and fragilely layered as the feathers of a shot bird as Jack picked it out of a plum bush and blew on it to fly the dust.

  “That looks like mine,” said Brother Bethune, reaching for his Bible and rolling it up to go back in his pocket. “Just stand still. I want you folks to keep me company right here till I can tell you who you are.”

  “Jack, I wonder if this means everybody in Banner has forgotten you?” whispered Gloria.

  “I hope not. And I’d be pretty quick to remind ’em!” he exclaimed. Then he cautioned her in a low voice, “But don’t tell him. You got to let him do it his own way, he’s old and a preacher.”

  “He may be with us all day.”

  “Suppose Judge Moody come spinning in sight before Brother Bethune knows it’s me?” Jack whispered. “And I’d just have to hold my mouth shut?”

  “You should have thought of that before you started.”

  “Vaughn!” Jack shouted, and made the sound of the name like a tree falling.

  “Now you can’t catch me. Vaughns is all gone, I know that much—played out and gone to mouldering,” said Brother Bethune, his face beginning to light up.

  Jack shouted, “If you want to start learning to be a Good Samaritan, we need a buggy ride from the mailbox!” Then he bent to Brother Bethune. “I’m just going to whisper you one thing, sir: your gun is loaded.”

  Brother Bethune looked back at him in a fixed way. The skin on his bony, motionless face looked like the skin on chicken gravy when it has been allowed to cool, even to the little flecks and spots of brown trapped in it. “I know good and well I’m supposed to be carrying comfort and solace to somebody,” he said.

  “Not today!” Jack warned him. “You can take my word for it, you’re headed where you can just lend your presence in the absence of somebody mightier, eat your share, and offer a few kind words in return for hospitality.”

  “No death in the family, sudden or otherwise?” Brother Bethune argued. He looked from Jack to Gloria to the baby. “Now who in the world is that!” He tried to poke his finger into the baby’s mouth, his own mouth stretching in delight.

  The trotting of hooves and the creaking of an axle sounded, as if approaching from down under, and stopped in the road just below them. They ran to peer down over. The dust climbed to their level in clouds like boxcars. As the red faded, then turned transparent, the first thing they could see was mule ears scissoring. Then they saw a bonnety hat, stationary, at the low point of the settling dust.

  “Met your mule! She’s headed for the cemetery. Want to ri
de home with me?” called the driver.

  “You don’t want to go with him, sir,” said Jack to Brother Bethune. “I’ll just tell you one thing more—it’s Mr. Willy Trimble.”

  “The biggest old joker in Christendom!” said Brother Bethune, looking pleased as at a favorite game. “No sir, can’t catch me! No, I ain’t ready yet to ride in your old wagon, not till I’m ready for King dom Come! Ha! Ha! Ha!” Brother Bethune shouted laughter into the dust rising again as the team started on its way. Then he asked a bit quaveringly, “Am I all that far from some cold water?”

  Jack went, and the well-pulley gave its squeal. He came back bringing the jelly glass full, all its faces stained tea-color from the beady Banner water.

  “It’s warm as pee,” pondered Brother Bethune, then gave a cry. “The water give it away! It’s Banner! Today is First Sunday! And I’m good old Brother Bethune!”

  “So far, he’s remembering everything in one grand rush,” said Jack.

  Brother Bethune pivoted on his gun and fixed him with his loving, gimlet eye. “It’s the Prodigal Son.”

  “Yes sir, looks like I’m just about to make it,” said Jack. He blushed. On his skin shone the crystal tracks, like snail tracks at sunup, of Lady May’s confidences and kisses up to now.

  “Hi, Ladybug,” the old man said gaily, coming to try Lady May again. “There now. Churning my finger to pieces with your little tongue? Can’t talk yet? When they going to carry you to church?” He gazed at Gloria; he didn’t look as sure about her. “Mother still living?” he asked in the tones of a compliment.

  “I’m an orphan, sir,” she said.

  He made a shaming sound back at her.

  “And Banner is not my home.”

  Brother Bethune struck a sudden attitude and fixed his eye on the jumping-off place. A small head protruded over it with the motion of a hen’s. Like a long black stocking being rolled out through the wringer, all of it came up over the edge and moved on into the open over the flag-red ground and the milk-white limestone in the direction of Banner Road. Brother Bethune showed an incredulous face, on which the old nose, dark as a fig in its withering days, dangled over a mouth as wide-open as a man’s who was hearing this told in a story. An instant later he’d brought his heels together and fired his gun. Glistening, the snake appeared for a moment at the heart of the dust that played like a whirly-wind at their feet, and kept playing.

  Rocketing hooves seemed to cover all the countryside at the same time, and the figure of Vaughn appeared as if flying upright above the top of the bank opposite. He was standing up in the wagon and driving Bet as if all their lives depended on it. He whipped the mule down the farm track and jumped her and the rocking wagon over the ditch and only brought them to a halt halfway down the hill on Banner Road.

  Brother Bethune, his finger and thumb both rainbow-colored with tobacco stain, pared away at the well-toothed brim of his hat. He reloaded. “Now bring on the next one,” he told Lady May. “You know they ranges in pairs.”

  Lady May had not shut her wide-open mouth. She sat on Gloria’s arm staring at him.

  Here came Vaughn running straight to the snake. “I’ll carry that man back with me to show to Granny!” he shouted, plunging his arm in and holding up the running, perhaps headless, coils.

  “It’s an old story to Granny,” said Jack. “No call for you to go carrying ’em home anything but Brother Bethune by himself.”

  “Didn’t first catch on he’s a rattler, sir!” Vaughn shouted.

  Brother Bethune laid on his shoulder a hand that appeared weighty enough to sink him. “All poisonous snakes you can tell ’em because they crawls waverly, son. If a snake ain’t coming with the idea to kill you, he crawls straight.”

  “In my judgment, you all ought to see the rattlesnakes at Parchman before you jump to a verdict,” said Jack. “Throw that thing clear away from here, Vaughn. Anywhere but our ditch.”

  Vaughn squatted down, picked up the snake afresh with both hands under it, as if it were a fainting woman, and bore it slowly to the jumping-off place and threw it over the drop.

  “Banner Top looks very natural,” observed Brother Bethune. He pivoted. “And round, Baptist faces even more so. Many another one waiting on my words at your reunion.”

  “What lost you your bearings, sir?” asked Jack kindly.

  “I’d like to tell you,” said Brother Bethune. “A great big pleasure car in a cloud of dust and pine cones like to hit me right in the middle of the road, and that’s what spooked my mule. Stranger asked me what road could he take to get him to Alliance and not have to cross the river on Banner bridge. He talked a little uncomplimentary about it.”

  “Brother Bethune, I’d love to know what answer you had for him,” Jack said.

  “Told him to turn around the first chance he got and go back to Halfway Forks and try it all over. ‘Don’t waver,’ I told him, ‘just keep to the straight and narrow, every opportunity comes along,’ I told him, ‘and you’ll get to Grinders Mill in a little while, and see a bridge. Or there used to be one when I was taken there as a boy.’ He didn’t look too well pleased. But listen, Tiny—he spooked my mule,” said Brother Bethune into Lady May’s still horrified gaze. “Oh, what a day for upsets, Baby Child! I’ll tell you where I hope my mule’s gone—home.”

  “Thank you, Brother Bethune,” said Jack.

  “You’re welcome, Prodigal Son.”

  “Now Vaughn,” said Jack, “if you’re cleaned off good, carry Brother Bethune on up to the reunion. Why didn’t you bring Grandpa’s buggy?”

  “That mule can’t learn Grandpa’s buggy,” said Vaughn. “She hitches to the wagon.”

  “See that Brother Bethune don’t spill another time,” said Jack. “And tell Mama to keep holding dinner—Brother Bethune’s sent Judge Moody to Grinders Mill for me.”

  “Is that who that was!” said Brother Bethune over his gun shoulder as Vaughn took him by the trigger finger and led him down the bank to the wagon. “I declare it to be a small world.” He set his foot in its high-topped shoe into Vaughn’s hands and took the boost onto the wagon seat. He drew into his lungs a sweet, suspiring smell.

  “I reckon you know you been breaking the Sabbath, son,” said the old man, with one long-legged maneuver transferring himself to the nest of new hay in the bed behind. As the wagon rattled up the home road, he raised his gun high, and Lady May broke her silence and let out a shriek at it.

  “Brother Bethune’s going to drive all the snakes out of this end of Boone County if he don’t slow down,” said Jack. “Poor old chicken snake—I reckon he lived around here pretty close and was just paying his ordinary call for a sip of water.”

  “Why can Judge Moody be trying to seek out Alliance?” wondered Gloria.

  “Well, he’ll never start across at Grinders,” said Jack. “Not if he knows anything about a bridge at all. And if he’s gone all the way to Grinders on that road, he’ll reason it out: any road that looks like it’s working that hard against nature, it must have somewhere better to go than Grinders. He’ll take the fork that brings him on around and back into Banner Road by keeping up with Panther Creek every switch of the way, if he’s smart. I’m as sure as I am of anything in this world, Gloria, he’ll roll right past here about forty miles further on from now.”

  Holding her hand, he had been leading her back toward the jumping-off place. Now he drew his finger down through the bow of her sash, and the whole dress stood away from her like a put-up tent. The sash itself slid down to her shoes. His arm went around her waist, and with her holding the baby they all sat down together.

  Here in the best patch of shade, an apron of old cedar roots, long exposed to the elements and rubbed smooth as horn, was spread out under them.

  Lady May had lost her hat, but she still had her little shoes on. “Carry Jack a secret,” said Gloria. She whispered into the baby’s ear and sent her tiptoeing. Lady May wrapped Jack’s head in her arms and made humming sounds into his ear.

/>   “I got it! Take Mama this’n from me!” he cried.

  But when Lady May came to blow in her ear, Gloria reached for her, took her on her lap, and opened her own bodice.

  Jack jumped to his feet, then suddenly crashed to the ground again as though the baby had tripped him.

  “Possum, that’s the last thing in the world I was picturing you doing,” he broke out.

  “Maybe it’ll do you good.”

  “She’s got teeth!”

  “That’s to show you how long you stayed gone. And let me tell you she’s proud of those little teeth, too, every single one.”

  “Holy Moses!” He propped up on one elbow and looked at Gloria’s sweetly lowered face. She raised her eyes and appraised him back.

  “Get used to being a father, please kindly.”

  “She could eat a plateful, the same as you and me. Why, she’s going to wear you out. She’s a little pig, ain’t she?”

  “When you got your first look at her this morning, you weren’t scared of a baby.”

  “Then, she made me feel right at home. She cannonballed in like a little version of Mama.”

  “And you stood on your head for her.”

  He couldn’t take his eyes away. “She’s such a sweet, helpful little thing, now ain’t she!” he exclaimed. Lady May set a sidelong gaze on him while she held Gloria’s breast in both hands, like a little horn blower whose hoots and peeps were given mainly with the eyes. “I reckon she can do everything in the world, next to talking.”

  “Don’t criticize her!” cried Gloria. “If she could talk now, she would tell you you can’t just prance back like this and take it for granted that all you have to do is come home—and life will go on like before, or even better.”

  “Trust your dad,” he told the baby.

  “The system you’re trying won’t work,” Gloria said. “I wouldn’t need to bring you down to earth if I wasn’t your wife.”

  He smiled at her.

  “I feel like you missed my last letter by coming home today,” Gloria said.

  “That’s all right—you already had all the other letter writers in the world licked.”