Losing Battles

  “They didn’t hesitate to wash my face in their sticky watermelon juice!”

  “And you let ’em? What’s happened to your old fight since morning?” he teased under his breath.

  “They washed out my mouth with it! And I called ‘Jack! Jack!’ and you didn’t come. They found the tear in my dress and Aunt Lexie sewed it right up on me in front of all, sticking her needle and scissors into my tender side. They all banded together against me!”

  “Anyway, they’ve quit making company out of you, Possum,” he said softly. “You’re one of the family now.”

  “Oh, Jack,” she said, all the more despairingly, “they say I’m your own cousin.”

  “Well, the sky hasn’t fallen,” he said, and smiled at her.

  “May yet,” said both Miss Lexie and Uncle Percy.

  “They say Sam Dale Beecham’s my daddy though he had no business being,” Gloria rushed on.

  “Uncle Sam Dale? Why, bless his mighty heart!” Jack cried, turning toward Granny. But she sat silent, looking straight ahead.

  “And my mother was Rachel Sojourner, who never taught a day. They never had time to get married, they both of them died, all apart from each other, and here I am now. One way or the other, I’m kin to everybody in Banner,” she said in a voice of despair.

  “They’ll be proud to hear it,” Jack told her, and he stood back to hold her at arm’s length as though never had she been more radiant.

  “And my baby is kin to everybody,” she mourned.

  “This makes my welcome even better this time than it was this morning!” he cried.

  “I might as well never have burned Miss Julia Mortimer’s letter!”

  “You got one too?” cried Aunt Nanny. “Glad it’s gone!”

  “It’s still in words of fire on my brain. It said if I was going to marry who I threatened to marry, to stop right there. And come to see her—there were still things I needed to know,” said Gloria. “She said she’d been delving into her own mind, and was still delving.”

  “Just to see what she could find?” cried Aunt Birdie.

  “I was praying against her!” cried Gloria.

  “What’s delving?” Aunt Beck asked miserably, and Aunt Nanny asked, “Gloria, what did you do?”

  “Tore up that letter. Put the pieces in the stove. Never answered. Never went. I got married!”

  “Decided to fly in her face and go ahead with it anyway. Without telling no more than Jack himself, I bet a pretty penny, without telling the Beechams, without telling the Renfros, or Granny, or Grandpa, or the Man in the Moon. Pretty brave,” said Aunt Birdie. “Or else pretty sneaky.”

  “I just try to mind my own business,” said Gloria. “It hasn’t been easy!” she cried to Mrs. Moody.

  “Didn’t you realize, young lady?” Judge Moody asked her. “Do you ever realize your danger?”

  “But I didn’t have to believe her just because she’s Miss Julia!” Gloria said. “I had eyes of my own. And if I was an unmarried Banner girl’s child, like she’d have me believe, all I had to do was take one look around the church at my own wedding, and see the whole population gathered, to know what family I was safe with. There was just one unmarried lady.” Gloria turned and faced Miss Lexie. Shouts of appreciation rose up for a moment.

  Gloria hushed them all with her pleading hand. “Miss Julia didn’t tell me it was my father to be scared of. Or that my mother even had to be dead.”

  “She’d been saving the worst till she got you there,” said Aunt Beck, shaking her head over at where she thought Alliance lay.

  “I’d still like to know what Miss Julia Mortimer was so busy warning you for, Gloria!” cried Miss Beulah. “You did the only safe thing in the world—married your own cousin and found a home.”

  “Not safe,” said Judge Moody. He spoke from his same school chair but it was closer to them now, and his voice louder. “Not safe if that’s what has happened, and supposing the State has any way to prove it.”

  “We proved it, right yonder at the table,” said Miss Beulah.

  “I don’t think much of your proof—I listened, without being able to help myself,” the Judge said, while the chair creaked under his weight. “In fact, there’s not a particle of it I’d accept as evidence. Fishing back in old memories. Postcard from the dead. Wise sayings.”

  “But we settled it,” cried Aunt Nanny from among the exclaiming aunts.

  “By a watermelon fight. In court we settle problems a little differently.”

  “I didn’t say I’d ever believe it! No matter how many tried to make me,” Gloria said. “I go by what I feel in my heart of hearts.”

  “Feelings!” added Judge Moody.

  “And what’s your feelings now, Miss Gloria?” cried Miss Beulah.

  “They don’t change! That I’m one to myself, and nobody’s kin, and my own boss, and nobody knows the one I am or where I came from,” she said. “And all that counts in life is up ahead.”

  “You’re an idiot,” Judge Moody told her, not unkindly. “The fact is, you could be almost anybody and have sprung up almost anywhere.”

  “Why, Oscar,” said Mrs. Moody. “That’s strong words.”

  “I’m ready for ’em.”

  Jack grabbed hold of Gloria and drew her back and put himself in front of her.

  But Gloria came around Jack and on toward the Judge. She told him with a musing face, “Why, at the first warning she gave—I thought I might even be hers.”

  “Miss Julia’s?” There were gaping mouths all the way around the bright porch.

  “My lands,” said Aunt Birdie. “That’s what I call using the unbridled imagination.”

  “Why else would I have ever thought I could be a teacher?” Gloria put it to them, and this time a louder groan rose out of Judge Moody. “That would have explained everything. If once she’d made a mistake—and had me.”

  “No hope. No, she’s never made a mistake, on purpose or otherwise,” said Miss Beulah. “And I think if she had, she’d stuck right to her guns, Gloria, and brought you up for the world to see and brag on. She wouldn’t make a mystery out of you. Had no use for a mystery.”

  “And it takes two!” cried Aunt Nanny.

  “But she saved me from the orphanage—even if it was just to enter me up at Normal,” argued Gloria. “She encouraged me, she wanted me to rise.”

  “I don’t suppose for a minute Miss Julia saw the danger ahead. I think she had all the blindness of a born schoolteacher,” said Aunt Beck, a little pleadingly.

  “What Miss Julia didn’t figure out like she ought was a nameless orphan can turn out to be a raving beauty,” said Aunt Birdie. “More than likely will.”

  “Judge Moody, you ain’t got fault to find with anybody here but me, have you?” Jack asked.

  Squinting and scowling in the light that beat down, the Judge looked at him. “Jack,” he said, calling him by name for the first time, “the thing that strikes me strongest is that you didn’t know you were marrying your cousin—if you were marrying your cousin.”

  “No sir,” Jack stammered, “I wasn’t worrying about who she used to be before I married her!”

  “Jack, you didn’t know?” Aunt Birdie asked.

  “Jack? Jack know?” they chorused at her all around, as Miss Beulah gave a short laugh.

  “No, but she did. She had knowledge,” Miss Beulah said. “You didn’t warn Jack away from you, even a word, did you, Miss Gloria?”

  “But Judge Moody!” said Gloria. “Then Miss Julia let fly at me a second letter! She wrote and told me the wedding would be scratched off the books and Jack would have to go to the pen—”

  “Well, Jack did!” Uncle Noah Webster said. “In his own way he managed it!”

  “What came over her? What did she have against these two sweethearts?” Aunt Birdie cried. “What was the woman thinking of?”

  Judge Moody said, “The innocent. She thought of the child.”

  Gloria slowly bowed her head.

/>   “Miss Julia was able to conjure up Lady May without even seeing her? Just laying over there in Alliance?” cried Aunt Nanny.

  With one accord, everybody turned to Miss Lexie, who stared them down.

  “That baby was never on my lips. Not with all I had to contend with! All I ever told Miss Julia Mortimer was I supposed Gloria had forgotten her, the same as everybody else had,” Miss Lexie vowed.

  “Did she ask you straight to your face, Lexie?” asked Auntie Fay.

  “By the time that baby’d arrived in the world, I was making her right sure she didn’t know anything but what went on inside her own head,” said Miss Lexie.

  Granny’s little black shoulder started to tremble again. The baby in her lap never stirred but slept with her face turned up bared to the light, her lips parted.

  “ ‘Baby’? Is that what her letter said, Gloria?” asked Aunt Beck. “The naked word?”

  “The letter said a baby, if one was to get here, might be deaf and dumb.”

  They laughed all around but hushed on the instant.

  “No. More than that. There’s a worse danger than that,” Judge Moody said, scowling down at Gloria.

  “And my baby would go without a name,” she said, not raising her head.

  “With a name like Lady May?” Jack cried, looking aghast.

  Even at the sound of her name, the baby didn’t wake or stir.

  “And what’s wrong with a family any way you can get one?” cried Aunt Nanny.

  “And all the while, when I was waiting on my husband, sitting apart from the others on my cedar log, quieting my baby, singing to her, all I could think of were the two words I’m scaredest of, null and void,” Gloria cried out. “In Miss Julia’s handwriting!”

  “And the pen? Watch out, Jack, they could come after you again,” said Uncle Curtis. “And run you back in for getting married.”

  “For marrying Gloria?” he cried.

  “Catch him, Gloria, don’t let him topple over on you!” cried Aunt Nanny.

  But Jack had turned around to Judge Moody. “If I’ve done something wrong, I’d kind of like to be told about it, sir. I’d like to hear the reasoning, Judge Moody—hear it from you,” he said. “Now it looks to me like the law’d do better to run me in if I hadn’t.”

  “No. It was wrong to get married,” Judge Moody said. “If you two young people are related within the prohibited degree, then you ran head-on into a piece of Mississippi legislation—I think they passed it about ten years ago. And I reckon they’d be in their rights if they arrested you for it. You could be tried—”

  “Tried?” screamed Miss Beulah.

  “And if convicted—”

  “I’d be convicted all right! When I married Gloria I married her on purpose!” Jack cried. “All right. If they want two more years of my life for that, it’s worth it. Here I am, sir.”

  “And if convicted,” Judge Moody went on in spite of women’s cries, “you’d get a fine or a ten-year sentence in the penitentiary—”

  Gloria sank to the floor and wrapped her arms around one of Jack’s legs, screaming “No!”

  “—or both, and the marriage would be declared void. That’s now State law.”

  “And Miss Julia Mortimer was the one who dug that up,” Aunt Birdie marveled.

  “And before this ever happened may have helped get the law passed,” said Judge Moody briefly.

  “Young people have ’em a hard time starting out always,” pleaded Aunt Beck. “They’re going to overcome this, aren’t they?”

  “This is different from me and you, Beck,” said Miss Beulah. “All the time Jack took, all the load he shouldered, and all the trouble he went to, even blackening his name going to Parchman, was in order to marry his own cousin and have Judge Moody come back and open the door so Curly Stovall could walk in the house and arrest him all over again.”

  “I’d welcome Curly to try it!” Jack said, with some of his color returning. He lifted Gloria to her feet and they stood with their arms wrapped around each other’s waists.

  “I still think it’s the sweetest thing in the world,” said Aunt Beck.

  “But Mississippi law is bound and determined it ain’t going to let you drink or marry your own cousin!” shouted Uncle Noah Webster. “It’s too pleasurable!”

  Mrs. Moody said to Gloria, “You broke the law worse than that boy did.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Look what you made of that baby—”

  “My baby!” Gloria ran a step, took the limp child into her arms. “She’s speckless!” Then under the bright lights she saw the first freckle lying in the hollow of the baby’s throat, like a spilled drop of honey.

  “—and knowing! And knowing! Then, when this baby grows up and starts finding out a thing or two for herself—” Mrs. Moody shook her head at her.

  “Couldn’t she find it in her heart to forgive her own mother?” cried Gloria. “I did!”

  Judge Moody in his melancholy voice remarked, “Forgiving seems the besetting sin of this house.”

  “With good reason!” said Mrs. Moody. “Though I wouldn’t know any more about cousins marrying being wrong than they did,” she confessed. “Somehow, I always thought it was the thing to do.”

  “Well, then we’re lucky it wasn’t what you did,” Judge Moody told her.

  “And now, lo, it’s a sin!” said Mrs. Moody.

  “Oh, I suppose it just aggravates whatever’s already there, in human nature—the best and the worst, the strength and the weakness,” Judge Moody said to his wife. “And of course human nature is dynamite to start with.”

  “Oh, when I’d thought, for a minute, that with Beecham blood on both sides the world would turn out all right!” Miss Beulah cried out, her imploring voice still going toward Granny, who sat fixed and silent.

  “You ain’t too well-schooled along the highways and byways of Mississippi law, Mother, that’s all,” said Mr. Renfro kindly. “But Judge Moody is, and he’s setting right here to aim it at us.”

  “And I thought when I came to Banner to teach my first school, I was going forth into the world,” said Gloria.

  “Instead, you was coming right back to where you started from,” said Aunt Birdie. “Just as dangerous as a little walking stick of dynamite.”

  “That’s right! You come here danger personified,” said Aunt Beck.

  “Living danger. You come here and started waving your little red flag at Jack,” teased Aunt Nanny.

  “Waving a red flag? I was trying to save him!” Gloria cried. “I’ve been trying to save him since the day I saw him first. Protecting his poor head!”

  “From what?” Miss Beulah demanded, both hands on hips.

  “This mighty family! And you can’t make me give up!” Gloria threw back her hair, and a few dried watermelon seeds flew out from it. “We’ll live to ourselves one day yet, and do wonders. And raise all our children to be both good and smart—”

  “And what is it you think I’ve done, right here?” Miss Beulah interrupted in a voice of astonishment.

  “What are you trying to say, girl?” Aunt Birdie cried.

  “I’m going to take Jack and Lady May and we’re going to get clear away from everybody, move to ourselves.”

  “Where to? To the far ends of the earth?” cried Aunt Beck, as Jack stifled a sound in his throat.

  “Carry me with you,” begged Etoyle, jumping up.

  “Carry me,” begged Elvie.

  “Carry me, carry me!” cried a chorus of sadly teasing uncles and one or two distant voices joining in.

  “And just how do you think you’re going?” Miss Beulah demanded to know.

  “That’s still for the future to say.” And she looked out to see the distance, but beyond the bright porch she couldn’t see anything at all.

  “Poor Gloria,” said Aunt Beck. “Given fair warning, she was. She knew she was risking Jack too. Honey, why did you marry our boy? I think you can tell it to us now.”

  There in
blinding light Gloria cried out, “It’s because I love him worse than any boy I’d ever seen in my life, much less taught!”

  Jack turned the color of a cockscomb flower as he stood rigid by her side.

  “There. That was tore out of her,” said Miss Beulah.

  “I didn’t have to believe Miss Julia Mortimer if I didn’t want to,” Gloria repeated. Then she came headlong at Judge Moody, holding her baby bucketed, and Lady May’s little legs stuck out pointed at his head like two guns even though she was asleep. “Is that what’s at the end of your Sunday errand, sir? Did you come all the way to Banner to make Jack’s baby and mine null and void, and take Jack away from me again?”

  “My errand could be in no way so interpreted,” he said drily.

  “If you could just turn around, go back to Ludlow again and not do anything more to me and Jack. If you could just see your way. If you could just be that yielding, sir,” said Gloria softly. “Then I’d forgive even her. Miss Julia.”

  “Forgive!” He did look ready to shake her. “You, whose fault it all is! You and your everlasting baby’s!”

  “Well, I would forgive her.”

  “It’s just as wrong now as it was then, when she found out about what she was doing, isn’t it, Oscar?” Mrs. Moody prodded her husband. “If they were first cousins on their wedding day, they’ll be first cousins again in the morning.”

  “Yes. If,” he said.

  “Are they going to be hounded till they die?” Mr. Renfro asked Judge Moody, and Miss Beulah whirled on Mr. Renfro to say, “And I thought you knew what you was doing when you hammered a new roof on the house!”

  “No, before that happens, they could pack up and take this infant with them and go live in Alabama,” said Judge Moody.

  “Alabama!” cried Jack, a chorus of horrified cries behind him. “Cross the state line? That’s what Uncle Nathan’s done!”

  “It’s not over a few dozen miles. Cousins may freely marry across the Alabama line and their offsprings are recognized,” Judge Moody said.

  “You want me and Gloria and Lady May to leave all we hold dear and all that holds us dear? Leave Granny and everybody else that’s not getting any younger?” Jack’s eyes raked across all their faces.