“And who got it?” asked Aunt Cleo.
Miss Beulah’s warning hand came up and fixed itself in the air. The skin on her fingers was swollen and silvered until it was like loose, iridescent scales. Her own wedding band would never come off unless and until she lay helpless in her turn, for it was too deeply buried in the flesh.
“It went in Granny’s Bible,” whispered Aunt Beck, shaking her head.
“I thought it right to bury the ring with my daughter.” Granny spoke, and their voices hushed for hers. “I thought it seeming. It was callers to the house saw fit to meddle. With Ellen in her coffin, they came circling round and stripped the ring from her finger. I never saw a one of ’em’s face before.”
Aunt Nanny winked once at the other aunts.
“That’s it. That’s the way of it, Granny,” Aunt Beck said, and the women rose, came around Granny and said, “So often the way. The world outside don’t respect your feelings, even to the last.”
“And it’s the ring Ella Fay carried to school that morning? Are we back around to that?” Aunt Cleo asked.
“It’s the same gold ring, and all the one sad story,” Miss Beulah said, patting Granny’s shoulder, smoothing out the lace collar. “You didn’t hear but the Renfro part this morning.”
“Sit patient,” Mr. Renfro said. “That’s all you had to do.”
“Oh, yes, it takes Ella Fay one day of school to come home crying without it. It’d take her a mighty long year to learn the way to scrub and hoe and milk and slop the pigs and the rest of it wearing a wedding band of her own and not lose it!” Miss Beulah laid her own ringed hand on the table. Aunt Beck and Aunt Birdie raced to lay their hands down with it and Aunt Nanny slapped hers down on top, and suddenly they all laughed through their tears.
“So to finish the story, Granny just tied on her apron, dusted off her cradle, and started in all over again with another set of children,” Uncle Percy said.
“Yes, then it was our blessed little Granny that licked us all into shape,” said Uncle Curtis. “With Grandpa towering nearby to pray over our failings. We would have been a poor sort today if we’d had to raise ourselves, wouldn’t we, Granny?”
“We didn’t believe in letting anybody go orphans in our family,” said Miss Beulah.
“They might have even tried to separate us!” cried Uncle Noah Webster.
“That was surely acting a Christian twice in a lifetime!” Aunt Beck called to Granny. “Bringing all these up!”
“We was all fairly good children,” said Miss Beulah. “Sam Dale was the best of all, being the baby.”
“All except curly-headed Nathan,” said Uncle Percy. “I can hear Grandpa saying it to Granny now, behind closed doors. ‘Conquer that child! Stand over him, whip him till he’s conquered!’ Didn’t he, Granny?”
“Come around from behind me,” Granny said, “you who I’m guarding back there.”
“This forty-pound melon is so good and sweet I believe even you could be tempted, this go-round, Brother Nathan,” said Mr. Renfro. He stood offering him the heart on a fork.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Nathan dear,” said Miss Beulah. “You’re here only one day and night in the year—all of us wish you wouldn’t spend every minute of it standing up and not taking a bite at all.”
Uncle Nathan put up his hand and said, “No, Brother Ralph, I’d be much obliged if you’d give it to one of the children.”
“Hey!” Aunt Cleo cried. “Ain’t that a play hand?”
Uncle Nathan’s still uplifted right hand was lineless and smooth, pink as talcum. It had no articulation but looked caught forever in a pose of picking up a sugar lump out of the bowl. On its fourth, most elevated finger was a seal ring.
“How far up does it go?” asked Aunt Cleo.
“It’s just exactly as far as what you see that ain’t real,” said Miss Beulah. “That hand come as a present from all his brothers, and his sister supplied him the ring for it. Both of ’em takes off together. Satisfied?”
“For now,” Aunt Cleo said, as they all went back to their seats.
“I’ve just been to wake Sam Dale,” said Granny. “He’ll be along in a little bit.”
Their faces were stilled for a moment, as though the big old bell standing over them in the yard had laid a stroke on the air.
“Who’s Sam Dale?” asked Aunt Cleo.
“Jack’s the nearest thing to Sam Dale we’ve got today,” Miss Beulah said in a voice of urgent warning.
“Though Sam Dale left us before he ever got himself sent to the pen for something, I’ll tell you that!” Aunt Birdie said in a voice helplessly gay. “If I hadn’t married Dolphus, I’d married Sam Dale! I believe he was sweet on me.”
“Yes, he was sweet on a plenty, but not as many as was sweet on him,” said Miss Beulah. “Every girl in Banner was setting her cap for Sam Dale Beecham, and Jack went through the same hard experience.”
“Sam Dale got out of marrying any of ’em—the hard way, though,” said Mr. Renfro.
Then suddenly Miss Beulah folded her arms and said in a flat voice, “In all our number we didn’t have but one with the looks to put your eyes right out, and that was our baby brother Sam Dale.”
“Uh-oh,” said Aunt Cleo. “Something happened to him, I bet.”
“Will you try not to pull it out of us?” Miss Beulah cried, still standing with folded arms.
Aunt Beck said, “His is one story I wish we never had to tell.”
“Handsome! Handsomer than Dolphus ever was, sunnier than Noah Webster, smarter than Percy, more home-loving than Curtis, more quiet-spoken than Nathan, and could let you have a tune quicker and truer than all the rest put together,” said Miss Beulah.
“He sounds like he’s dead,” said Aunt Cleo.
The shade was deep and widespread now. The old bell hanging from its yoke on the locust post was the only thing in the yard still beyond shade’s reach. The wisteria that grew there with it looked nearly as old as the bell; its trunk was like an old, folded, gray quilt packed up against the post, and the eaves made a feathery bonnet around the black, still, iron shape.
“He’d better come to the table in a hurry now, or miss his treat,” Granny said, her finger trembling above the cake plate. “A fool for sweets ever since I put the drop of honey on his tongue to hush his first cry.”
Uncle Noah Webster offered Aunt Cleo the dripping heart of his melon, and she took it in bites from the point of his knife, but still she said, “Are you all going to humor her? Just because she’s old?”
Miss Beulah threw open her arms and brought her hands fast together in a clap. “Come, children!” she yelled.
Then an avalanche of the waiting children came down on Granny. “I’m not a baby,” she said, putting out her little hands. One hand closed around a bag of red-hot-poker seed, and in the other was set a teacup quaking in its saucer. At the same time she was asked to unwrap a can of talcum powder.
“There’s something you can make live through the winter!” “And that’s something will bloom for you before you know it!” They all encouraged her.
Elvie came with the speckled puppy carried high to her cheek, his rump filling the cup of one careful hand, and with a sigh she gave him up, sank him into Granny’s lap. “He’ll run anything with fur on it. He’ll retrieve anything with feathers on it,” she said in the gruff voice of Uncle Dolphus. The puppy yawned into Granny’s face. In the open pan of his muzzle a good-sized acorn would have fitted closely. “He’ll do it all.”
“Now what’s that? It’s that Christmas cactus coming around again,” said Granny. “If there’s one thing I’m ever tired of!”
“Then ain’t these beautiful? And when Old Man Winter’s at your door, how you’ll love to eat on ’em,” said Uncle Percy, coming himself to bring her a bottle of his own hot peppers steeping in vinegar and turned blue, red, and high purple. “Pretty as chicken gizzards to me.”
The Champions’ present, wrapped up like an owl, was an o
wl—in brown china, big as a churn, with potbelly, sunflower-yellow feet, and eyes wired to flash on and off.
“Like I didn’t have enough of those outside without bringing one inside. Believe I’ll like the next present better. I know what this is,” Granny told them, as she took a box covered in yellowing holly paper from four children and clawed it open on her knee. She shook out the new piece-quilt. A hum of pleasure rose from every man’s and woman’s throat.
When the mire of the roads had permitted, the aunts and girl cousins had visited two and three together and pieced it on winter afternoons. It was in the pattern of “The Delectable Mountains” and measured eight feet square, the slanty red and white pieces running in to the eight-pointed star in the middle, with the called-for number of sheep spaced upon it. Then Aunt Beck had quilted it on her lap with her bent needle.
Granny’s eyes tried to see into theirs while she shimmered it at them. She turned and held it the other way to show the sky-blue lining. Peering at them, she put it next to her cheek.
“Finished it last night. Took me just about all night,” she said. “Pricked my finger a time or two.”
“She’ll be buried under that,” said Aunt Beck softly.
“I’m going to be buried under ‘Seek No Further,’ ” said Granny. “I’ve got more than one quilt to my name that’ll bear close inspection.”
The network of wrinkles in her face shifted a little, and deep within it for a moment her eyes shone blue as theirs. She bored her eyes into the nearest one there—it was Lady May.
“Look who’s standing there for her!” said Aunt Nanny. “Don’t she look like a little firecracker about to go off?”
The baby had come as close as she dared to all the presents, without having risked yet putting her hand on the puppy.
“What have you got for Granny, Lady May?” cried Aunt Birdie.
“I want a kiss,” said Granny, leaning toward the baby. “I want lovingkindness.”
Lady May bolted.
Miss Beulah threw back her head and in an unwavering note gave them the pitch. All their voices rose as one, with Uncle Noah Webster trailing his echoes in the bass.
“Gathering home! Gathering home!
Never to sorrow more, never to roam!
Gathering home! Gathering home!
God’s children are gathering home.”
As they sang, the tree over them, Billy Vaughn’s Switch, with its ever-spinning leaves all light-points at this hour, looked bright as a river, and the tables might have been a little train of barges it was carrying with it, moving slowly downstream. Brother Bethune’s gun, still resting against the trunk, was travelling too, and nothing at all was unmovable, or empowered to hold the scene still fixed or stake the reunion there.
Part 4
They sang for a while longer, still in their chairs but settled back, some of them singing with their eyes closed. On the tables before them there were only the scraps and the bones, the boats of the eaten-out watermelons; yet still, now and again, a white chicken feather floated down from the sky and did a brief spin on the grass, or a curl of down landed on one of the tables.
“Why does she sing so old-timey?” Aunt Cleo asked. Granny was a jump ahead of everybody else with her fa-so-la, on up to the Amen of “Blessed Assurance.”
“She sings it that way because that’s the way she likes to hear it,” Miss Beulah told her. “If that ain’t the way you want it, my little granny’s going to go you one better than you want.”
By now the girls’ and boys’ baseball game had started again in the pasture. There was a board laid across the cedar trunk and little girls were seesawing.
“There’s Gloria’s perch those children are making free with,” observed Miss Lexie.
“I don’t need it any more, thank you,” Gloria said.
She was coming out of the house now at Jack’s shoulder; he was carrying a syrup bucket stuffed to the top.
“After Aycock gets his satisfaction out of this, I’ll carry word to little Mis’ Comfort where he is, so she can give up and go to bed,” Jack told Granny’s table.
“Is he going to eat it like a horse?” cried Miss Beulah.
“Promise me. Promise me when you get up there you won’t try anything single-handed, young fellow,” said Mrs. Moody.
“Yes, I’d like to have your word on that too,” said Judge Moody.
“Single-handed—that ain’t the way we do it around Banner,” Jack told them. “And I already promised Curly the same thing. We’re saving the Buick till in the morning.”
He bounced kisses on Gloria’s and his mother’s cheeks and on Granny’s chin, and walked away. There was nothing of the world to see any longer below their gate, only the low roof of dust lying over the road, fine-stretched and unbroken as skin, and Jack went down through that and out of sight.
“Don’t like the way they keep sneaking in and out on me,” said Granny.
“Never you fear,” Miss Beulah said to her quickly. “He’ll be back when we want him, he’s not one to fail us.”
“Seems to me you’ve let an awful lot hinge on Aycock. I wonder if you know a great deal about his appetite,” Mr. Renfro said to Judge Moody. “I think of the time Jack got home from a little hunting and Aycock tagged along with him, and it was supper time.” He hitched his keg a little closer to Judge Moody, there at his elbow, “Well, to let Aycock have a sample of what hospitality means around here, Beulah fried up Jack’s squirrels along with the rest of supper, and she set those on a platter in front of Aycock’s plate while he’s eating. And remember, Mother, how one after the other he forked those over and et ’em all? Et fourteen squirrel? I counted, because that’s how many times he apologized, once for each squirrel, saying he hadn’t had a real solid meal since morning.” Mr. Renfro sat looking into Judge Moody’s face. “All them mouth-watering squirrels went into Aycock’s mouth one by one, while we mostly just set and felt sorry for him,” he said. “There don’t seem to be nothing there to tell him when he’s reached the point of enough.”
“Jack can handle Aycock,” said Miss Beulah.
“Then tomorrow there’s Curly Stovall, and that tree to get around,” said Mr. Renfro. “And it’s a pretty stubborn old tree.”
“Jack Renfro will find his own way,” said Miss Beulah. “He’s come along too splendid now to get himself licked in the morning.”
“What a fellow’s got to do is suit his strategy to the tree,” Mr. Renfro said to Judge Moody. “I think now of a tree that must’ve been forty foot up to the first good branch when I come up against it. A honey tree that was, a poplar. You could hear those bees just boiling inside—oh, they was working heavy. So the way I licked it, I went and got me a good augur—inch-and-a-half, I reckon. Bored me a hole in the trunk and drove me in a peg and climbed up and stood on that. Drove me in the next one. Well, sir, I pegged me a ladder all the forty foot up that tree trunk, winding my way around it two or three times, and when I pulled up to that hollow limb, was it ever a-roaring around my ears! I hadn’t climbed all that way without a saw at my belt. Sawed it through and let it down gentle on my rope, honey, bees, and all, the whole limb, until there, where she’s standing down on the ground waiting, was Beulah’s honey.”
“Oh, she was the one making you,” said Aunt Cleo.
“Beulah let it out some way—I managed to get it out of her—that however I could manage to reach it, she’d pretty dearly like to have it,” said Mr. Renfro. “Truth is she’d been heartbroken going without it. Like Mrs. Moody’d be without her car, if my guess is any good.”
“Can you see today where you went up, Papa?” asked Elvie from a branch of the bois d’arc.
“All healed over. Oh no, the tree’s grown all over that now,” he said. “If it’s standing at all, that is.”
“I wouldn’t mind having another sample of that very honey,” said Miss Beulah right behind him.
“I was a climbing fool,” said Mr. Renfro to Judge Moody.
“We’ve go
t more company,” called Etoyle up above Elvie. “Watch out, Gloria!”
The squeak of an axle cut through a song somewhere and the head of a white horse came swinging up through the dust, and its wagon with an old man driving it came past the seesawing children and tunnelled into the shade under the boughs. The dry yard, packed though it was with people, wagons, and cars, sounded hollow under the wheels like the floor of an empty barn.
“Willy Trimble, I’m always just on the point of forgetting about you!” Miss Beulah cried out like the best praise she had for him.
Mr. Willy saluted back by holding up his whip as if to crack it. Gloria jumped as if to get ready to run.
“What do you think you’re doing here, Willy Trimble?” asked Miss Beulah. “We’re holding our family reunion, or trying to, the best way we can.”
“Happy birthday,” Mr. Willy called down to Granny as he reined in.
“Go back where you came from,” she suggested.
Mr. Willy got down from the wagon, gave them all a nod. “How’re you, Lexie?”
“I’m livin’.” That was the most that question ever got out of her.
Mr. Willy cocked his head at her. “And who’s looking after your lady while you’re gallivanting?”
“A nurse. One that’s seven years old. I let him wear my Mother Hubbard tied up high around his neck. It’s a little boy that can’t know much,” she said. “Lives down the road. And he don’t know what Miss Julia Mortimer will do and Miss Julia Mortimer don’t know what he’ll do. So they’re evens.”
“And what are you going to have to give that little-old boy when you get back?” asked Aunt Cleo.
“A whipping if he breaks something!” cried Miss Lexie.
“Suppose she’s played us all a trick,” said Mr. Willy Trimble.
As Gloria’s breath came fast, Miss Lexie said, “Now that I’m not there to soldier her, you couldn’t surprise me with anything she’d try.”