Losing Battles

  “When I came home to practice, and pretty soon was made district attorney, she climbed the stairs to my office one day to say she was proud of me.”

  “She was claiming you,” said Miss Lexie. “Taking the credit for you.”

  Judge Moody was still.

  “He don’t know her the way we did,” said Aunt Birdie. “See if you can tell us her horse’s name,” she challenged him.

  “When she left Ludlow for good, to track across the county and give her life to Banner School, she was driving an automobile. A Ford coupe, a thank-you present from Senator Jarvis the year he went to Washington. I remember her style of backing out: she set the throttle, fixed her eyes straight ahead on the back wall of the garage, and erected a perpendicular on it,” said Judge Moody. “She was teaching herself to drive. I used to wonder how many innocent bystanders she scattered without knowing it.” He took out his handkerchief and wiped it over his face.

  “So there was a time when you laughed at her too,” Mrs. Moody told him.

  “I don’t suppose even a Ford could get over these roads, not in winter,” he said.

  “Was that good-bye?” asked Mr. Renfro.

  “A little later on, at her request, I sold the house for her, the old Mortimer house,” he said.

  “That means she wrote to you before. She had the habit of writing to you,” said Mrs. Moody.

  “I handled things, acted for her once or twice,” he sighed. “That little inheritance. Taxes.”

  “So you wrote to her.”

  “Yes,” he said. “On occasion.”

  “So not only was she writing letters. She was getting ’em,” said Aunt Beck mournfully.

  “What did you do with the letters that came for her, Lexie?” asked Miss Beulah. “Throw ’em in the pig pen?”

  “I don’t care to say,” said Miss Lexie.

  “That’s what you threw in the pig pen.”

  “Who was the best judge! She was too sick and bad off to be bothered with something she would have to give her mind to.”

  “Oscar, you’re rocking on your feet,” said Mrs. Moody. “Sit down, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, standing up.”

  “And then this morning,” said Judge Moody, reaching again inside his coat and bringing out another rumpled envelope, “in my box I found this. The envelope is one of my own, used over again. No letter inside, only a map she’d drawn me, showing how to get from Ludlow to Alliance and where she lived. That’s when I gave up and started.”

  “I mailed it when I could, and not before!” cried Miss Lexie.

  “And it’s a maze,” he said, squinting down at the old bill on which a web of lines radiated from some cross-mark ploughed into the center. “Just a maze. There wasn’t much right about her thinking any longer. I didn’t try to go by it—but I lost my own way on Boone County roads for the first time I can remember. I could almost believe I’d been maneuvered here,” he said in grieved, almost hopeless tones. “To the root of it all, like the roots of a bad tooth. The very pocket of ignorance.” He raised his head suddenly. “What have I been thinking of? I came here and stood up and read her letter to you. And you,” he turned and said to his wife. “I’ve broken her confidence.”

  “I think that was unlawyerlike,” she told him.

  Judge Moody was struggling to get the map and the letter back inside their envelopes. “All the same, in my judgment, this bunch had it coming,” he said.

  “I’d just like to hear now, Oscar,” said Mrs. Moody, “what you were doing getting letters like that at the office, and I didn’t even know about it.”

  “Maud Eva,” he said. “Why, she felt free—”

  “It irks the fire out of me!” Mrs. Moody exclaimed.

  “Both of us wrote, occasionally,” he said.

  “You and a poor, lonesome, old maid schoolteacher?” asked Mrs. Moody.

  “Not always—” He stared down at her. “Why, every young blade in Ludlow was wild about Miss Julia Mortimer at one time.”

  “When she was young?”

  “When all of us were young.”

  “A country schoolteacher? Why, that’s no more than I was,” said Mrs. Moody, eyebrows very high. She asked, “And you did your full share of courting her?”

  “Oh, no. There were plenty without me, from Ludlow and all around. Herman Dearman, even, from this neck of the woods and crude as they come—even he aspired to her, knowing no better. She didn’t discourage him enough—perhaps didn’t know how,” said Judge Moody. “Perhaps was able to even see something in him.”

  “Aspired!” said Mrs. Moody.

  “He came to a sorry end, I believe.”

  “Sorry is right,” said Uncle Curtis.

  “There, that’s enough,” said Miss Beulah.

  “So did Gerard Carruthers,” said Judge Moody.

  “So did he what?” asked his wife.

  “Aspire. He trotted off and worked himself to the bone in Pennsylvania Medical School to come home and set up a country practice, you know,” said Judge Moody. “He had a fond allegiance to her. And he kept coming, didn’t he, attending her?”

  “He was a liquorite, now that was his trouble,” Miss Lexie replied. “He came. But in the end she dismissed him, and he went.”

  Judge Moody persisted. “She’s made her a Superior Court judge, the best eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Kansas City, and a history professor somewhere—they’re all scattered wide, of course. She could get them started, lick ’em into shape, but she couldn’t get ’em to stay!”

  “You stayed,” said Mrs. Moody.

  He sat down hard in the protesting chair.

  “That irks the fire out of me,” Mrs. Moody said again. “There’s still something from way back somewhere that you haven’t told me. I can tell by looking at the way your hair’s all standing on end. What did you do, propose to her? To have her turn you down?” she pressed.

  He put his hand over his eyes. “That’s not it.”

  “Well, did she propose to you?” cried Aunt Nanny with a daring grin.

  “Like you did to Percy?” a chorus called.

  “It was owing to her I made the decision I did. That’s right. She expressed her satisfaction that I hadn’t chased off somewhere but was staying here, working with my own. In consequence, I never moved out of the state, or to a better part of the state.”

  “Oh, my! To think if only you had left!” Miss Beulah sighed.

  “I had chances, you know, Maud Eva. I’m where I am today because she talked me into staying, doing what I could here at home, through the Boone County Courts.” After a pause he said, “Well, and I never fully forgave her.”

  “Who did you take it out on?” Miss Beulah asked with a sage face.

  Judge Moody turned again to his wife and seemed to repeat the question to her silently. As the company looked at him they could see his lined face glisten. He said, “Well, it’s owing to her we’re both here.”

  “Here? Right here?” asked Miss Beulah.

  “Where I am on earth. Yes ma’am, here in the middle of you all right now. She’s still the reason,” Judge Moody said. “Mrs. Moody was shrewd—I wasn’t anxious enough at all to see Miss Julia today, find out what had happened to her—I admit that, Maud Eva. I suffered an attack of cowardice, there on the road.”

  “I don’t know why you keep addressing these complaints to me,” said Mrs. Moody. “I made a six-egg cake, and piled on that icing, and skipped Sunday School too on account of your conscience, and I rode up front with you. I’ve been trying to get you there all day.”

  “I was already too late when I started,” he said. “She said come and she meant now.”

  “She wouldn’t have known you by the time you got there anyway,” Mrs. Moody all at once told him. “Might not have known who she was herself, after you made the trip.” She threw up her hands.

  He struck at the breast pocket of his coat where the letters were. “She knew exactly who she was. And what she was. What she d
idn’t know till she got to it was what would happen to what she was. Any more than any of us here know,” he said. As she stared at him he added, “It could make you cry.”

  “All I know is we’re all put into this world to serve a purpose,” said Mrs. Moody.

  “It could make a stone cry,” said Judge Moody.

  Around them the white tablecloths, clotted with shadows, still held the light, and so did old men’s white shirts, and Sunday dresses with their skirts spread round or in points on the evening hill. The tables in their line appeared strung and hinged like the Big Dipper in the night sky, and the diamonds of the other cloths seemed to repeat themselves for a space far out on the deep blue of dust that now reached to Heaven. Now and then a flying child, calling a name, still streaked through everybody, and some of the die-hards turned themselves round and round or rolled themselves over and over down the long front hill, time after time, toward an exhaustion of joy.

  Mrs. Moody still leaned toward her hubsand. “Yet you vow it was all platonic?”

  Silence that was all one big question opened like a tunnel, long enough for all the birds in Boone County to have flown through in one long line going to roost.

  “Don’t try to read any secrets into this, Maud Eva,” said Judge Moody then.

  “Your real secrets are the ones you don’t know you’ve got,” said his wife, as if she’d been irked into knowing that, and she still waited on his answer.

  “I’m not kin to her, was only once living nearby, only counted as a summer pupil, didn’t try to propose to her, didn’t do all my duty by her, she gave me advice I took and cherished against her, and when at the last she sent for me, I failed to get there: I was her friend, and she was mine.”

  “Well, she was older than you, you fool,” said Mrs. Moody.

  “Ten years,” he said, staring as if aghast into the purple of first-dark.

  “Then what’s got wrong with you, after all this time?”

  In a voice so still and so stubborn that he might have been speaking to himself alone, Judge Moody said, “Nothing wrong. Only I don’t care quite the same about living as I did this morning.”

  “I feel like we’ve been to her wake,” Mrs. Moody accused him.

  “Watch out, everybody!” Elvie sang.

  “Look! Granny’s rising up out of her chair,” said Uncle Percy hoarsely.

  With the cup, the saucer, the pincushions tumbling, the quilt sliding down behind her, the little puppy sleepily following a few steps, Granny walked by herself into the middle and stood before them, at the height of a boy cousin. She lifted both little weightless hands. Miss Beulah started on the run toward her, then arrested herself.

  Shoulders high, hands stiff but indicating the least little movement from side to side, Granny stood gathering herself, and then, in a quick, drumbeat voice just holding its own against the steady, directionless sound of crickets, she began to sing. Uncle Noah Webster rose, put his foot on the seat of a chair, and raised his banjo to his knee. Picking lightly, he fell in with her.

  “Is it ‘Frog Went A-Courting’ or ‘Wondrous Love’?” Aunt Birdie whispered. “Sounds like a little of both.”

  She knew ®very verse and was not sparing them one. When the verses were all sung, Granny, giving them calculating looks, kept on patting her foot. Uncle Noah Webster kept up with her, the banjo beat on, and as her left hand folded itself small as Elvie’s against her hip, she gave a pat with her right foot and was lifted bodily straight up—Uncle Curtis was ready for her—to the top of her own table and set down carefully among the platters and what was left of everything. Uncle Noah Webster’s hand came down sharp on the strings, and under its long skirt her foot, her whole leg, was lifted inches high to paddle the table in time to another chorus. The little black sliding-slipper with the silk-fuzz pompon on the toe must have been a dozen years old, though it was as good as new.

  “With that little patting foot, she comes in right on time,” said Uncle Dolphus. “Something she never showed us before.”

  “Just so we ain’t seeing the last of Granny!” mourned Aunt Beck.

  She danced in their faces.

  “Mama, tell her it’s Sunday,” Elvie whispered.

  “You got the brain of a bird? She’s got track of what day this is better than you have, better than anybody here,” said Miss Beulah fiercely, leaning forward and ready to spring. “Her own birthday.”

  Then Granny’s old black hem began to trail and catch itself across the dishes behind her as she started to walk off the table.

  “Catch-her-Vaughn!” screamed Miss Beulah in panic.

  Electrified, the little boy opened his arms but like everybody else stood rooted where he was. It was Jack, racing in at that moment and flinging aside his empty bucket that rolled clang-clanging down the hill behind him, who got there and did the catching.

  “Well. I’ve been calling ye times enough.” In Granny’s eyes gathered the helpless tears of the rescued. As he held her, she put up her arms to him. Her sleeves fell back. Moving like wands, her two little arms showed bare, strung and knotted with dark veins like long velvet Bible markers. Her hands reached for Jack’s face. Then a faint cry came, and her face, right in his, broke all to pieces. “But you’re not Sam Dale!”

  Miss Beulah spread the birthday quilt over the chair and Jack carefully set her down within it.

  “Granny, you just slipped back a generation there for a little,” said Uncle Noah Webster fondly, bending over her.

  “Put the blame right on Brother Bethune,” urged Aunt Beck, fanning her.

  “She’s all right, Granny’s all right,” said Miss Beulah in a desperate voice.

  The old lady still looked at Jack in a fixed manner. Dust as if from a long journey twinkled back at the moon from the high plush crown of her hat. “Who are you?” she asked finally.

  He dropped to his knees there beside her and whispered to her the only answer there was. “It’s Jack Jordan Renfro, Granny. Getting himself back home.”

  Part 5

  The substance fine as dust that began to sift down upon the world, to pick out the new roof, the running ghost of a dog, the metal bell, was moonlight.

  “Nightfall!” said Aunt Birdie. “When did that happen!”

  “And they’ve started back to biting,” said Aunt Nanny, spanking at her own arms and legs and at the invisible cloud of mosquitoes around her head.

  “Let’s get Granny’s little soles off this ground!” cried Miss Beulah. “We don’t want the dew to catch her!”

  By Jack alone the old lady was lifted up in her chair and carried through the crowd back to the porch and to her old place at the head of the steps. The others began to follow more slowly. Groaning, carrying their chairs, they moved away from the tables and through the yard back again to the house. Those who could found the same places for their chairs that they had marked out this morning. As many others, who sat on the ground or lay with their heads in somebody’s lap, elected to stay right where they were, not to move until they had to.

  At Granny’s back, with his wild gypsy hair pale in the moonlight, Uncle Nathan again took up his post with his hand on her chair. Judge Moody brought up his wife’s chair and seated her, and when he brought the school chair up he placed it within the radius of Granny’s rocker, where her small black figure in its little black hat waited perfectly still. He sat down there beside her.

  “And we’re sitting here in the dark, ain’t we?” said somebody.

  “If a stranger was to come along and find us like this, how could he tell who’s the prettiest?” teased Aunt Birdie.

  “Turn on them lights, then, Vaughn!” Uncle Dolphus called. “Why did you let ’em snake in here and hook you up to current for? For mercy’s sakes let’s shine!”

  Suddenly the moonlit world was doused; lights hard as pickaxe blows drove down from every ceiling and the roof of the passage, cutting the house and all in it away, leaving them an island now on black earth, afloat in night, and nowhere, with onl
y each other. In that first moment every face, white-lit but with its caves of mouth and eyes opened wide, black with the lonesomeness and hilarity of survival, showed its kinship to Uncle Nathan’s, the face that floated over theirs. For the first time, all talk was cut off, and no baby offered to cry. Silence came travelling in on solid, man-made light.

  “Now that’s better,” Mrs. Moody said. “Seems like we’re back in civilization for the time being.”

  “Gloria!” Jack cried. “Where is our baby girl?”

  He leaped back into the dark. They watched until they saw him come walking up out of it, carrying the baby. One of Lady May’s arms hung over his shoulder, swinging lightly as a strand of hair.

  “She had her a nest all made in the grass,” Jack said as he came up the steps. He stopped before Granny in her chair and then rocked the baby downwards into the old lap. The baby was gone in sleep, where any nest is the same.

  “Jack, I called and called you and you didn’t come. Mr. Willy Trimble invited himself here and told the whole reunion on Miss Julia, how she died by herself and let him find her,” cried Gloria. “Miss Julia and Judge Moody were two old cronies!”

  He stopped her, his face struggling. “I was listening. I was standing to the back. I heard that teacher’s life.” Then he broke out, “That sounds about like the equal of getting put in the Hole! Kept in the dark, on bread and water, and nobody coming to get you out!”

  “Jack—oh, don’t let it spoil your welcome!” Miss Beulah said wildly.

  “And she ain’t calling you. They quit calling you after they’re dead, son,” said Uncle Dolphus.

  “I’d rather have ploughed Parchman,” said Jack to Judge Moody. Then he placed his hands on Gloria’s shoulders. “I’m thankful I come along in time to save my wife from a life like hers.”

  “But were you here to see what your family did to me?” Gloria cried. “That’s when I wanted you! That’s when I called you. Listen to me—they pulled me down on dusty ground and got me in a watermelon fight!”

  “I know you proved equal to that,” Jack said, his voice soft again for her. They stood right under the naked light where it blazed the strongest, facing close; he was patting her on the shoulder.