Losing Battles

  “Banner Road is just plain beautiful,” said Jack. Then a puff of dust showed along the next ridge over, as though a match had been laid to a string in Freewill whose other end was here at Banner Top. “That’s him. He’s coming the long way round.”

  For a few minutes, a buzzard flying slow as a fence-walker along the rim of trees seemed to be in a bigger hurry. Then the dust was a growing cloud. Presently there came a sound from the road itself, thin as that of a veil being parted.

  “He’s passing the supervisor’s house. I hear the gravel,” said Aycock. Thoughts seemed to chase one another up and down his forehead, rippling it like a squirrel’s tail.

  “Is it fair for me to warn him?” Etoyle called.

  “Want me to send you back to help Mama?” shouted Jack. “Keep count of the Dry Creek bridges, and when it’s six, holler! Gloria! Hold our baby high out of the dust! Aycock! At the last minute you’re hanging onto my britches!”

  “Not everybody goes rushing into trouble as headlong as you, Jack!”

  “Man alive, let go of my britches! Want me to come away and leave ’em?” Jack yelled. “We got to charge down fast and shoo him in! He ain’t going to wait on us!”

  “I changed my mind,” said Aycock.

  Jack’s pants gave a rip, Aycock let him go, and Gloria handed him his baby.

  “If you can’t be a better example to Lady May—hold her!” Gloria’s arm circled up in a teacher’s best gesture, and it threw her off balance. She staggered backwards, and as her skirt blew up at the edge of the bank, spread, shone like a pearl, she wheeled and her shoes started sliding with her down toward the road.

  Jack spun on Aycock. “Hold the baby!”

  “You hold it.”

  “You hold it! I got to catch Gloria!”

  “I don’t know how to hold no baby! I just got back from the pen a while ago—I’m like to drop it!”

  “Take hold of her and she takes hold of you!”

  “Six!” sang Etoyle from the tree.

  Jack held out the baby to Aycock, he parried with his guitar. Lady May gave a shriek. She turned herself around and plastered herself to Jack’s chest, legs like a frog’s. Binding him around the neck with her arms, ramming her head into his croaking throat, she pumped out soft, anticipatory cries on her own little bellows.

  Jack’s eyes bulged. His toes suddenly turned unnaturally outwards.

  “Stop, Jack, stop, Jack, S-T-O-P stop!” Gloria’s voice called from below, fading while it spelled. “Lady May hates downhill!”

  A mockingbird threw down two or three hard notes on him like a blacksmith driving in nails, and he went rigid. Hugging Lady May to him, taking short, frantic steps as though he’d been caught naked, he hopped over the edge into Gloria’s dust and went down, rigid and upright, first at a zigzag and then, shuddering on his heels, straight down a washboard of clay. He yelled, but the baby now made no sound at all except for clapping together the soles of her bare feet just above his belt-buckle. At the skin of his chest her little mouth nibbled—it might have been everything feminine laughing at him. He landed in a bed of yellow cosmos. On his face a wide, frantic smile of paternity flashed on and off again, as he raised the baby in his arms like a bunch of flowers for Gloria.

  She had not been able to stop until she went down on both knees into the ditch at the foot of the mailbox, with her arms around it.

  Lady May’s hot little foot slammed Jack across the windpipe. She slid down him, left him with his breath cut off and both feet ploughed out in front of him, while she set forth across the road. Each bare foot hopped from the heat of the dust. She had the crow of a tattletale. She hooked onto her mother, made sounds at her ear, then started back, hopping for Jack. This was the moment the car came thundering for the top of the hill, a sunset of red dust fanning into high air, bank to bank.

  Jack staggered to his feet. Gloria sprang to hers, ran after the baby, collided with Jack, who was spun around so hard that he fell backwards into his own ditch this time, and she captured the baby by throwing herself down on top of her, and lay flat there in the middle of Banner Road as if she waited in the path of a cyclone.

  The car took the only way left open and charged up Banner Top in a bombardment of pink clods like thrown roses. Aycock appeared in its train of dust. He was running after it, waving his guitar. He caught hold and was borne on up as if by some large, not local, bird. The car never stopped. The dogs streaked with it, barking it further off the road. Dust solid as a waterfall poured over the bank along whose roof the car rolled on, tossing a fence post, mowing down plum bushes. There was a shriek out of Etoyle, a blow, a scraping sound, a crack, then silence, even from the dogs.

  Jack picked up his family. He stood holding Gloria’s face between his hands, while Lady May stood spread-eagled against his legs, then he gathered the baby up fast and hugged her and Gloria together.

  What looked like big Buicks of dust hung stalled in the air until they slowly turned pink and then gauzy. The cedar tree with Etoyle standing at the top emerged first. Then the car emerged; it was still there, standing still, in a position right beyond the tree. It couldn’t be anywhere but on the jumping-off place. Then the dogs came to life and tried to bark it on over as fast as possible.

  Jack lunged to go.

  “Jack! Don’t desert me!” Gloria cried.

  “He saved my wife and baby!” he yelled, as she grabbed him.

  “Stay with ’em!”

  “But I got to be quick if I’m in time to catch him!”

  “I see his face!” called Etoyle.

  The driver’s door had opened, and Judge Oscar Moody climbed out of the car. He stood coated, hulking in seersucker, a middle-aged man in a little sea of plum bushes. In a voice hoarse from dust he called, “Young lady!”

  “We’re still living! You still living?” hollered Jack.

  Then the door on the passenger side of the car opened, and somebody else got out. Judge Moody came around the tree to get to the other side of the car, and then came leading forward a middle-aged lady. Through the scarves of dust she appeared dressed for church. She was all in white, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, carrying a purse the size of a plum bucket. Judge Moody took her arm and they came, wobbling a little, across Banner Top.

  “Here Judge Moody comes,” said Etoyle, hunkering down and sliding down the face of the bank into the road. “And his mother with him.”

  “His wife,” Gloria cried.

  Jack said, “His what? I never had a notion there was a Mrs. Judge Moody! What’s she doing along?”

  Judge Moody set his foot on the bottom wire of the fence where it was still standing, and the lady came through headfirst, like a novice.

  “Jack, try to make up your mind there’s a wife for everybody,” said Gloria in a voice that trembled.

  “Sister Gloria, you scraped one knee,” said Etoyle. “It’s losing blood. But what if they’d aimed a little sharper at my tree?”

  Gloria let out a short scream. Jack squatted, kissed the blood off her knee, and brushed her skirt in modest places until the pink dust re-formed and put up a gauze screen around them for a minute. He rose, put his lips to her ear, and whispered, “Face ’em, from now on. Your dress is tore behind.”

  Gloria took the handkerchief from her pocket, cleared away a coating of dust and tears from the baby’s face, set her on her feet, and then cleared her own face. “And my baby’s lost her little new shoes!”

  “He saved you! And I reckon his wife was sitting there to help him,” said Jack and more resolutely still she worked on his face.

  “And now here they both come to eat us up,” said Gloria.

  The Moodys reached the road and started for them. Judge Moody had tied a handkerchief over his mouth and nose, and Mrs. Moody carried his Panama hat along with her purse.

  Judge Moody in a strong, slow voice called through his handkerchief the same words. “Young lady!”

  “That’s you, Gloria,” said Etoyle. “Maybe he’ll march y
ou to jail.”

  “You were right in front of my wheels. I might have run over you and killed you. Are you harmed?” called Judge Moody.

  “No sir, only bleeding a little,” answered Gloria.

  “We could have run right smack dab into you! And that one was blocking off that other little road, the only way we could turn,” said Mrs. Moody, pointing her finger at Jack. “And there was another one, scooting through the bushes—brandishing something! Everywhere you looked there was another one.”

  “And there was one in the tree,” said Etoyle. “I wasn’t scared.”

  “I saw you first, girl.” Mrs. Moody pointed at Gloria. “Clinging to that mailbox like Rock of Ages. And the next minute you were streaking across the road! Yes, you think nobody lives on a lonesome road like this,” she complained, “and then out of the middle of nowhere some little somebody jumps out at you, runs you off the road before you know it—”

  “Little somebody? That’s my wife you saved!” cried Jack, his face glowing at the Moodys.

  Lady May lifted one foot and wailed.

  “Good Lord! And where did that infant come from?” asked Judge Moody, as Jack scooped her triumphantly into his arms.

  “Yes sir, here is our first,” Jack said, holding up Lady May with a grip around her knees. She swayed, wandlike.

  “Didn’t you see her, Oscar? That baby just streaked across!” said Mrs. Moody. “And then this girl came from right yonder and threw herself down on her like one possessed. Spang in the middle of the road.”

  “I’m going to tell a lot of people on you,” Etoyle told Gloria.

  “Is that infant harmed?” asked Judge Moody.

  “No sir, I was right on top of her,” said Gloria.

  Judge Moody groaned.

  “But you saved ’em both!” cried Jack.

  Gloria put her hand on his sleeve. “I don’t want my husband too quickly blamed for the way he let his baby slide out of his grasp,” she told Judge Moody. “This is the first time he’s ever been anywhere in her company in his life, or hers, your honor.”

  “Girl, how in the world do you know who we are?” Mrs. Moody exclaimed.

  “We are still within my circuit, Maud Eva. I suppose I’m pretty well known wherever I go,” said Judge Moody.

  “Well, thank goodness for small favors,” she said. “I’m glad somebody knows you, because I certainly don’t even know where I am.”

  “Where you are now,” came the slow voice of Aycock, and everybody hushed—only his dogs barked with him, “is called Banner Top around here. Others call it Lover’s Leap. It’s the highest known spot in the Banner community.”

  “Aycock beat all of you. He got in the car,” said Etoyle.

  “The car! Look at the car!” yelled Jack, and he hurled himself straight up the clay wall.

  Out on the shelf of clay that was the jumping-off place, the five-passenger sedan sat shining in its original paint, all but one fender still undented, its windshield and back window still unstarred, its back bumper flashing dusty light at them from below the spare tire. The tree was behind it. The Buick had skinned past the trunk, the tree had creaked back into place as if after a gust of wind, and now the old cedar stood guard just behind the left rear fender.

  Jack pounded toward it.

  “Buick ended up better than the way you first had it figured, Jack.” Aycock was sitting up in the middle of the back seat.

  “I got to figure again pretty fast,” said Jack.

  “It’s like I told you. A ditch for the second time in a row wouldn’t have made us popular at all.”

  “Shut up, Pete! Shut up, Queenie and Slider!”

  This time when the dogs stopped barking, everybody cried out, Aycock along with the rest. The sound that made itself heard was unmistakable, though soft as a teakettle singing beyond the boil: the Moodys had climbed out and gone off and left the Buick with its engine running.

  Aycock’s foot, shorn of its shoe now and arched as if in fastidiousness, appeared over the rear door.

  “Keep your foot!” shouted Jack. “Stay where you are till you hear from me! Aycock! This Buick couldn’t be in a much sweeter fix had you been the driver!” He put out his hand and laid it with care against the side of the hood. “Like she’s wondering if she can go ahead and fly,” he said, looking respectful. “Well, she’s going to find out in another two shakes, if she ain’t real careful.”

  “Young man!” Judge Moody called through his dust protector. “I don’t think that car needs much more encouragement before it’ll go over—stand back!” He put out a foot.

  All Aycock’s dogs rushed down the bank and started barking at him. Mrs. Moody was already saying, “Oscar Moody, come back here. You’re fifty-five years old, had a warning about your blood pressure, suffer from dust and hay fever, and insisted on wearing your best seersucker today, You stay put—you hear me? You can give those boys directions—”

  “Stand back!” called Judge Moody. “Away from that car!”

  “Grab it!” shrieked Mrs. Moody.

  Jack bent his head studiously toward the hood, put his ear next to it. “Nothing to worry about here!” he called. “It’s her own original sweet-singing engine this Buick’s travelling on, and not much hotter than I am.”

  Wrapping his new shirt-tail over his hand, he reached for the radiator cap. The Buick responded by rocking back to front, as if the back and the front end were on the two pans of a balance scale.

  “Show that car a trifle more respect!” Mrs. Moody protested.

  When Jack took a step back from it, it kept rocking.

  “I’m humanly certain I pulled that emergency brake,” Judge Moody said. “If I’m not a complete ass, I pulled it.”

  “Judge Moody, you didn’t pull it. And she’s still in gear,” Jack now called back. “But no harm done—your wheels is a hundred percent off the ground.”

  “Come back, you heard me. I don’t want to lose you and the car! I don’t know where I am or how I’d get home,” Mrs. Moody cried to her husband, while the dogs barked in front of him.

  “She didn’t stop for the tree—what’s holding her?” Jack shouted. He dropped to the ground and rolled fast underneath the Buick. He rolled out again and scrambled to his feet. “Let’s all hope he’s planted that one there to stay. Judge Moody, you’re resting on top of the hickory sign my Uncle Nathan’s drove in the ground and donated to the passing public just in time—the paint’s still wet! Well, that was one way to stop!” He came trotting to face the road. “I’m ready with my verdict. Here it is. If one living soul adds on to the driving end of that car, or if another living soul is taken away from the hind end—” He raced back to the car, stuck his head in, and said, “Aycock, I got word for you: you can’t get out.”

  “Can I sit up to the wheel?” asked Aycock.

  “Ride where you are! Lean back!” Jack hollered.

  “But that leaves us hanging over nothing!” Mrs. Moody cried in her husband’s face.

  “Well,” said Judge Moody. “One thing sure. A good garage-man had better be sent for now, to bring that car down before something more happens to it.”

  “But you got a Good Samaritan right here!” Jack called.

  “I’m not asking for a Good Samaritan, I’m asking for a man with some know-how,” called Judge Moody. “And a good piece of road equipment.”

  “But you saved my wife and baby!” cried Jack, running to lean over the bank above him. “I can’t let some stranger shove his way in and help your car off Banner Top, not while I’m living, no sir!”

  “I want that car off of there,” said Judge Moody.

  “And in the road! In the road!” cried Mrs. Moody. “And listen! It’s my car, I’ll have you all know!”

  “It’s her car,” said Jack hoarsely to Aycock. He pleaded down to her, “Mrs. Judge, don’t have a fit. If you won’t, I’ll hop to the wheel and back this Buick off Banner Top like such a streak of lightning she won’t even know what’s grabbed her.” br />
  “Jack!” cried Gloria, but Mrs. Moody wildly cried over her, “All right! I don’t care who does it, just so you do it in time and don’t get a scratch on the finish! I only want to see that car down in the road!”

  “Headed which way?” asked Jack.

  “Young man!” said Judge Moody. “I’d like to point out something. There is a tree behind that car. It isn’t going to get up out of the ground and walk off for you.”

  “All I need is a inch—I can make a inch! Just to give myself one inch to cut the wheel! It’ll be over before you know it, Aycock,” said Jack, running to the Buick and setting his hand on the door.

  “I reckon I better go on up there and put the quietus on that boy,” Judge Moody said. “Young lady, you are not the only member of your family who’s too precipitous.” As he spoke through the handkerchief, the baby leaned from Gloria’s arms to watch it talk.

  “Oscar! If you won’t consider your blood pressure, consider mine. You stay down here where I’ve got you,” said Mrs. Moody. “Don’t set your foot an inch up that bank, or I’ll tell Dr. Carruthers on you the minute we get home.”

  “All it needs is one good push,” said Judge Moody, and the baby showed her mirth.

  “Girl, you go. Can’t you talk your husband out of trying to rescue my car, till my husband thinks of something better?” Mrs. Moody asked Gloria. “If you can’t, I’ll have to tie Judge Moody up.”

  “If you will kindly hold my baby, I’ll see how well I can discourage him,” Gloria said, and she went lightly up the diagonal toe-holds, the way she would have shown off the staircase in her own imaginary house.

  When she tripped to the car, Jack was wiping the dust off the windshield, using the sleeve of his shirt.

  “Jack, I don’t know which is worse,” said Gloria. “What you thought you were going to do, or what you’re ending up doing. For the sake of the reunion you were willing to run Judge Moody in the ditch. Now for his sake you are just as willing to break your neck.”

  “I’ll be all through in a minute—now that I can see out through the glass where I’m going.”