Losing Battles

  “She’s a scrapper, all right.” Granny was nodding her head. “Knew it the minute I got my first look at the girl, teaching her elders.”

  “She put up her fists next?” asked Aunt Cleo.

  “If I got to the door and locked it first, she’d try to get out of her own house,” Miss Lexie said. “Shake—she’d shake that big oak door! You ever see a spider shake his web when you lay a pine-straw in it just for meanness? She could shake her door like a web was all it was. I felt sometimes like just everything, not only her house but me in it, was about to go flying, and me no more’n a pine-straw myself, something in her way.”

  “I’m ready for you to stop,” whispered Gloria.

  “I tied her, that was the upshoot,” said Miss Lexie. “Tied her in bed. I didn’t want to, but anybody you’d ask would tell you the same: you may have to.” Gloria tried to move, but Miss Lexie gripped her that moment by the ankle and said, “Don’t shift your weight.”

  “If Lexie can find something to do the hard way, she’ll do it,” said Miss Beulah. “Setting a patch in that skirt, now, with the girl inside it!” She paced around them.

  “It’s a matter of being equal to circumstances,” Miss Lexie asserted. “Every day, Miss Julia there in her bed called me to bring her her book. ‘Which book?’ I ask her. She said just bring her her book. I couldn’t do that, I told her, ‘because I don’t know which book you mean. Which book do you mean?’ Because she had more books than anything. I couldn’t make her tell me which book she meant. So she didn’t get any.”

  “Book! It looks like of all things she’d have been glad she was through with and thankful not to have brought her!” exclaimed Aunt Birdie.

  “Bet Gloria could have picked one out,” teased Aunt Nanny.

  “Gloria, I think it was really you that must have disappointed her the most,” said Aunt Beck, as though she offered a compliment. “She hoped so hard for something out of you.”

  Gloria cried out.

  “Elvie, bring me a row of pins!—But no, you never came to see your old teacher, all the time she lay getting worse,” said Miss Lexie. “She was peeping out for you, right straight along. First she’d say, ‘Gloria Short will be here soon now. She knows it’s for her own good to get here on time.’ Even in bed, she’d lean close to her window, press her face to the glass even on rainy mornings, not to miss the first sight of Gloria coming.”

  “Where was you hiding, girl?” Aunt Cleo cried with a laugh.

  “Hiding? I was having a baby,” Gloria broke out. “That’s what I was doing, and you can die from that.”

  “You can die from anything if you try good and hard,” said Miss Beulah.

  “I said, ‘Oh, she’s just forgotten you, Julia, like everybody else has,’ ” said Miss Lexie.

  Granny had begun to look from one face to the next, her breath coming a little fast. Miss Beulah saw, and went to stand beside her.

  “So the next thing, didn’t she ask me for her bell. She wanted the school bell!” said Miss Lexie.

  “Why, that’s a heavy old thing,” said Uncle Curtis. “Solid brass and a long handle—”

  “She couldn’t have raised it. Never at all. Never again in her life. And I told her so. ‘And no matter if you could,’ I reminded her, ‘you haven’t got the school bell. Banner School’s got it! It doesn’t belong to you,’ I said. ‘Banner School’s got the bell and you’ve been put out to pasture—they’re through with you.’ I thought that would finish the subject. But ‘Give me back my bell,’ she’d say. And look at me, with living dread in her face.”

  “Dread?” scoffed Miss Beulah, staunch beside Granny.

  “You’re hurting me,” whispered Gloria.

  “It’s not me, it’s my scissors. I’d say, ‘Julia’—I’d got to the point where I didn’t call her anything but Julia—‘what is it you want that bell for? Give me a good reason, then maybe I’ll get it for you. You want to bring ’em, make ’em come? Or is this the way you’re going to drive ’em off if they try? Make up your poor mind if the world is welcome or unwelcome. The world isn’t going to let you have a thing both ways.’ ”

  “You can’t always easily fool ’em,” said Aunt Cleo. “I’m a real nurse, used to all that, used to going in other people’s houses, and just like today becoming one of the family. I’ve had a worlds of experience, now, just a worlds. And I could tell you tales, now.”

  Miss Lexie said, “And she looks me back in the face trying to think of an answer, and all she can think of to say, and she said it loud and clear, was ‘Ding dong! Ding dong bell!’ ”

  “But where was her mind?” cried Miss Beulah.

  “I asked her, plenty of times,” said Miss Lexie.

  “But why wasn’t Miss Julia content with her lot?” asked Aunt Beck in a low voice. “Like an ordinary Christian?”

  “An ordinary Christian wouldn’t want to wear her red sweater and keep her shoes on in bed,” said Miss Lexie. “And if she didn’t know what she was doing, any better than that, bed was right where she belonged. And I wasn’t to touch her fingernails, either. They grew a mile long. She said she wanted to be ready for me.”

  “She must have put up some battle, for somebody that’s part-paralyzed,” said Aunt Birdie.

  “She wasn’t paralyzed anywhere. That would have made it easier.”

  “But I happen to know about a lady who wouldn’t cut her own toenails,” Aunt Cleo said. “And she wasn’t paralyzed, either. Until they crossed each other over all her toes and weaved back and forth over her feet sharp as knives, and she finally had to go with ’em to the hospital. The doctors said they’d met with a lot before, but not that. Her funeral was held with a sealed coffin.”

  “They could never have paralyzed Miss Julia Mortimer,” said Miss Lexie. “I’d say, ‘Why don’t you quit fighting kind hands?’ She’d say, ‘Only way to keep myself alive!’ Knocks my arm back with her weak little fist. ‘I love you,’ I says. ‘You used to be my inspiration.’ ‘You get out of my house, old woman. Go home! If you’ve got a home,’ she says.”

  “She hit the nail on the head when she said you didn’t have elsewhere to go,” said Miss Beulah. “Not unless you went back to Mr. Hugg, took care of him again.” She patted Granny’s bent shoulder.

  “Then she quoted some poetry at me. I don’t mean Scripture,” said Miss Lexie.

  “Sure-enough, Lexie, we didn’t mean to ask you all that,” said Aunt Birdie.

  “Old Lexie’s truly been stirring up the bottom,” said Aunt Nanny.

  “Lexie, you’d take all night long to sew up a little hole in your stockin’!” cried Miss Beulah.

  “I take pains with all I do and I want my results to show it.”

  “You’ve got coming night to contend with now. I warned you,” Miss Beulah said.

  “Oh, I’m used to putting out my eyes! Here’s where you climb up and stand on a chair for me,” said Miss Lexie to Gloria. “I’m tacking your fresh hem in. Oh, she never forgot she had something to tell you.”

  Mr. Willy Trimble hopped to bring Miss Lexie up her own chair, and she took it and shooed him back. She drew a needle from her collar with a thread that was never seen, lost like the outlines of Gloria’s dress now in the glow of evening that was all around them. She went to work on Gloria where she stood with arms slowly lifting, legs ladylike, feet one in front of the other on the rush seat.

  “If it’d been me doing it, I wouldn’t have used my scissors and cut my thread behind me. I’d have it now to put in over again,” said Auntie Fay.

  “Sissie, do you forget I’m the one taught you to sew?”

  “How late in the game was it, Lexie, when Miss Julia took it in she’d met her match?” asked Aunt Nanny.

  “If the news ever sunk in, she kept it a pretty good secret,” said Miss Lexie. “I reckon what it amounted to was the two of us settling down finally to see which would be first to wear the other one out.”

  “There you give a perfect little picture of the battle
of nursing,” said Aunt Cleo.

  “But it was only if I’d hold out her pencil to her that she’d come quiet.”

  “A pencil?” cried Aunt Birdie. “A common pencil?”

  Gloria drew breath. She was turned to face the deep blush of distance, out of which the cows were coming in now, the three in a line. Their slow steps were not quite in time to the tinkling, as though their thin-worn bells rang for what was behind them, down the reach of their long, back-flung shadows, back over Vaughn’s shoulder and his shadow as he drove them home.

  “Yes’m, pencil! And you want to see the way she wrote?” asked Miss Lexie, and she showed them, while her hands went on sewing.

  “Wrote with her tongue spreading out?”

  Miss Lexie smacked her lips at them. “Like words, just words, was getting to be something good enough to eat. And nothing else was!”

  “Lexie, you’re about to ruin this reunion in spite of everything, giving out talk of death and disgrace around here,” exclaimed Miss Beulah. She cried to the others, “Take away her needle, if that’s what sewing brings on.”

  Granny’s eyes raced from one face to another, as though here at her table she had somehow got ringed around by strangers. She breathed in shallow gasps, striving hard to hear the voices.

  “I wouldn’t have wanted to be shut up with Miss Julia Mortimer too long, myself. She might have brought up with something I wasn’t inclined to hear,” said Aunt Birdie.

  “She was just doing harm to herself, wearing herself out like that,” said Aunt Beck.

  Miss Lexie cried out, “I didn’t think just writing letters could hurt her! But reckless? She’d tell ’em! Let ’em know she’s afraid of nothing! Speak out whatever’s the worst thing she can think of! Holler to the nurse for tablet and pencil! Lick and push! Lick and push! Fold it and cram it in the envelope till it won’t hold one word more! Bring up the stamp out of hiding! And say, ‘Mail it, fool!’ ”

  “Oh, were those real letters?” asked Aunt Beck.

  “Is there some other kind?” asked Judge Moody from his same school chair. The ladies paused at his voice, and Gloria’s hands let fall her handkerchief and reached up to her cheeks.

  “I’ve heard that licking an indelible pencil was one sure way to die,” Aunt Birdie said.

  “I’ve seen her wetting that pencil a hundred times a day—it wasn’t very sharp. Opened up that old Redbird school tablet and up would come her pencil and out would go her tongue and away she’d fly,” said Miss Lexie. “And send that old purple pencil racing, racing, racing.”

  “Didn’t you tell her it’d kill her?” asked Aunt Nanny.

  “For the thanks I’d get?” Miss Lexie dipped back to laugh.

  Gloria said over her head, “She wouldn’t have quit writing just for your satisfaction. I’ve known her to correct arithmetic papers with a broken arm. But I never knew her to lick a pencil before.”

  “What’d you do with those letters, Lexie? Throw ’em in the pig pen?” cried Miss Beulah.

  “I don’t want to say.”

  “You threw ’em in the pig pen. So I guess it didn’t make any difference who they was to.”

  “I said, ‘Listen, Julia. If you’ve got something this bad to say about human nature,’ I said, because I skimmed one or two of ’em over, ‘why don’t you go ahead and send it to the President of the United States? What do you want to waste it on us for?’ ”

  “And I’d believe it of her! My, she was vain! Was vain!” Miss Beulah cried, in a voice of reluctant admiration. “To the end, I should say?” she asked Lexie.

  Miss Lexie replied without a sound—only opened her mouth as for a big bite.

  “Yet, the littler you wish to see of some people, the plainer you may come to remember ’em,” said Miss Beulah, with some darkness. “Even against your will. I can’t tell you why, so don’t ask me. But I can see that old schoolteacher this minute plainer than I can see you, Lexie Renfro, after your back’s turned.”

  “In the long run, I got her pencil away from her,” said Miss Lexie, speaking faster. “I could pull harder than she could.”

  “What’d she do then?” asked a voice.

  “She just wrote with her finger.”

  “What’d she use for ink, a little licking?”

  “Yes’m, and wrote away on the bedsheet.”

  There was a stifled sound from Judge Moody. Aunt Beck said with a sigh, “I’m glad for you you couldn’t tell so well by then what she was saying.”

  “And I pulled off the hot sheet and she wrote on, in the palm of her hand.”

  “Wrote what?”

  “Fuss fuss fuss fuss fuss, I suppose,” Miss Lexie cried.

  The chorus of locusts came through the air in waves, in a beat like the brass school bell wielded with full long arm, all the way up to the yard, to the forgotten tables, to the house, to where the setting sun had spread its lap at that moment on the low barn roof.

  “Lexie, will you please quit going around on your knees and with your tongue hanging out?” asked Miss Beulah. “There’s some may not be able to appreciate that.”

  Even when it was Miss Beulah, Granny gave each speaker a bewildered look, her little head shaking as it turned from one to the other.

  “I was tacking in my hem,” said Miss Lexie, staggering to her feet.

  “Well, we’re all getting there, I suppose. And it won’t be long before the baby of us all—!” Aunt Beck murmured.

  “Oh, I could tell it wouldn’t be long,” said Miss Lexie. “I hid her pencil, and she said, ‘Now I want to die.’ I said, ‘Well, why don’t you go ahead and die, then?’ She’d made me say it! And she said, ‘Because I want to die by myself, you everpresent, everlasting old fool!’ ”

  “She didn’t know what she was saying,” said Aunt Beck.

  “That’s just what she did know!” said Miss Lexie.

  “Take away her needle,” Miss Beulah commanded.

  “Some things you don’t let them make you say,” said Miss Lexie. “And I don’t care who they are.”

  “But does that mean it’s better to just come off and leave ’em?” asked Aunt Beck, and slowly one of her hands went in front of her face to shield it.

  “I had the reunion to come to, didn’t I?” Miss Lexie retorted.

  The barn was a gauzy pink, like a curtain just pulled across a window, and Vaughn was coming in now with the cows and the dogs. With the sun as low as where the cows swung their heads, the brass nubs on their horns sent a few last long rays flashing. Then all marched slowly into the folds of the curtain.

  “One thing I didn’t hear, if you told it,” Aunt Cleo said. “I’d like to know what disease was eating of her. Did anybody ever find out, or did they tell?”

  “Old age,” said Miss Lexie. “That do?”

  “Now are you satisfied, Lexie? Now will you set?” cried Miss Beulah.

  “You don’t get over it all that quick—what some of ’em make you do,” returned Miss Lexie. “But I’m through!” she said to Gloria, as though the girl had cried out. She dipped her head close to Gloria’s leg and bit off the thread. “It was nothing to hurt you, now was it?” She lifted the girl, roughly enough, and set her down on warm ground.

  “At least we know who it is, can see who you are now, Gloria,” said Aunt Birdie.

  “Look at those skinny little legs, everybody, like a sparrow’s,” said Aunt Nanny, coming to tie on her sash.

  “Petticoat shows now,” said Auntie Fay.

  “And remember from now on,” Aunt Beck said, “every little move you make, Gloria, is still bound to show on that sash. Every little drop you spill. Every time you get up or down, it’ll tell on you.”

  “Hey, Gloria,” said Aunt Cleo. “With all those scraps and without half trying”—she pointed to them, organdie scraps as pale as the scraps of tin that still lay around from the roofing, ready to cut open a foot—“you could make Lady May a little play wedding dress, just like yours.”

  “Where is my baby?
” Gloria cried.

  Aunt Nanny barred Lady May’s path with a big quick arm. She caught the child up and hugged her. “And you was a pretty good little secret yourself, wasn’t you?” she asked her.

  Lady May struggled, got free of her, ran from her and from her mother too, and vanished behind the althea bush with its hundreds of flowers already spindling, like messages already read and folded up.

  Miss Lexie gathered up the scraps and balled them, to drop into her own gingham pocket.

  “Last reunion, it was Mr. Hugg. And we had it all to hear about him,” said Auntie Fay.

  “I knew you’d say that, Sissie.”

  “Hugg? Thought he had the Ludlow jail,” said Aunt Cleo.

  “Jailer had a daddy, didn’t he? This is his daddy,” said Miss Lexie.

  “Isn’t he worse than her?”

  “I sit there and he lays there, Fay. When I see his eyes fly open, I get ready for him.”

  “Sister Cleo, Lexie first took care of an old man in the bed named Jonas Hugg, kept house for him, fed him and his frizzly hen. And the old man’d just as soon pitch the plate of grits back in her face if she tried to get him to eat it,” giggled Auntie Fay.

  “Looking back, I don’t mind Mr. Hugg one bit,” warned Aunt Lexie. “I don’t mind him any longer.”

  “And if she went for more grits, peed in the bed to pay her back for it.”

  “I’m above it,” sang Miss Lexie. “I’m above it. Him and his money belt too. He’s just exactly one hundred percent what he seems. Bad Boy.”

  “Why did you ever bother to leave him for her? They’re all the same,” Aunt Cleo told Miss Lexie.

  “No. Mr. Hugg cries. And the first day, he clapped his hands together just to see me coming!” said Miss Lexie. “He was glad to see me at first and didn’t hide it.”