“They didn’t have many pretty ones,” Aunt Cleo said, her finger still moving slowly across the picture, across Miss Lexie’s face, then stopping. “I’d have to give the prize to that one.”
“Pull back your finger!” said Miss Beulah, pulling it back for her. “That’s not Vaughn, not Beecham, not even Renfro, that’s no kin to anybody here, and to my mind hadn’t much business here at my wedding. Grandpa and Granny Vaughn was boarding her here at the time of the big occasion. Now who’s the answer?”
She was standing the last one on the back row, her head turned away from the crowd and ignoring the camera, looking off from this porch here as from her own promontory to survey the world. The full throat, firm long cheek, long-focused eye, the tall sweep of black hair laid with a rosebud that looked like a small diploma tied up in its ribbon, the very way the head was held, all said that the prospect was serious.
“Miss Julia Percival Mortimer,” Judge Moody said, standing with them, looking down.
“She’ll never git it all on one tombstone,” said Aunt Cleo. “Just what I’ve been telling Noah Webster Beecham.”
Mrs. Moody remarked, “It doesn’t sound to me like she’s even very sure of a grave.”
“Where was I?” Elvie asked, her eyes still fixed on the photograph.
“Lucky for you, you was nowhere on earth yet!” said Miss Beulah. “Now that you’re here, put this picture back where it belongs. Granny dear, don’t you want to see it? Just one more time before it goes?”
Granny waved it away. Elvie skipped.
“Look-a-there! Look at our light!” cried Etoyle, and some of the aunts involuntarily shielded their eyes.
Within the opening of the passage, the bright bulb on its cord rose up toward the ceiling, slowly, then dropped in fits and starts, then zoomed up with the speed of a moth. Close to the ceiling, into which its cord disappeared, the bulb clung for a minute, then dropped and danced to a standstill.
“Well, now you’re haunted,” said Miss Lexie.
“It’s starting afresh!” said Elvie.
“Jack!” yelled Miss Beulah, as the cord moved like a fishing line with a bite on it.
“I think now that whoever said ghosts is right, not that I ever held with ghosts. I’m a pretty good Presbyterian, back home,” Mrs. Moody said.
“Jack! Jack! Ever out of sight when most needed. Vaughn, you climb a piece of the way up under the roof, take a poker, and just poke for a second at what’s doing that,” said Miss Beulah. “Come back and tell us what we’ve got there. I bet you a pretty it’s alive, now.”
“Who’s going to wait on me like that when I get old?” crowed Miss Lexie, as Vaughn slowly went. “Not a soul, not a blessed soul!”
“You’ll have to go to the poor farm,” Aunt Cleo told her without taking her eyes from the ceiling. “If they still got room for you.”
“I’ll come wait on you, Aunt Lexie,” cried Elvie, jumping up and down to watch the ceiling. “As long as I ain’t too busy school-teaching. And if I don’t get married or have children before I know it. Look!”
“Ha ha ha!” Etoyle cawed out. Now the light was being let down on its cord, jerky as a school flag down its mast.
Then all the lights went out. It seemed a midnight moment before the moonlight gathered its wave and rolled back in.
“Well, that’s one more system that today’s put out of commission,” said Uncle Curtis, as if with favor.
In a moment they heard Vaughn come running up the passage, and now they made him out—he came cradling something alive. AH around, the dogs put up a clamor.
“Here’s who it was, Mama. Playing with us all from over our heads.”
“Uh-huh,” said Miss Beulah. “What did I tell you!”
“Horrors,” said Mrs. Moody. “Is that a monkey?”
“Don’t try to put him in my lap,” said Aunt Cleo. “I mean it.”
“Hey, Coony!” cried the little girls.
“He was just tantalizing you, Mama,” said Vaughn pleadingly.
“Eternal, everlasting mischief!” stormed Miss Beulah. “There’s always that you can count on! I said I wasn’t going to have coon or possum under my roof and I’m not,” she went on, with repeated pokes testing the coon’s needly teeth on her finger. “Yes sir, and you’re one little scrap of mischief I mean to send right back where it started from.”
While the boy cousins tried to keep back a battery of hounds, two enormous yellow globes moved out of the passage. Etoyle had gone for the oil lamps, even while Miss Beulah was calling over the frenzied barking of the held-back, straining dogs, “Bring the lamps! Don’t leave your great-grandmother sitting in the dark!” Etoyle brought the lamps to the coon.
The coon, circular-eyed, lamp-eyed itself, fluffed up and drew one long breath, hoarse and male.
Then it got itself thrust into the lap of Ella Fay, who hollered, “Jack!”
“Hold him, Ella Fay, hold him!” shouted the uncles. “That’s not the way! He’s scrambling!”
“Don’t let him run off with anything belonging to me,” said Aunt Cleo. “Oh, they’re great for thieving.”
“Oscar, I want to go home,” said Mrs. Moody piteously.
Held up by Elvie, Lady May was shaken awake again to see the coon. When she saw it, her eyes went three-cornered and her cheeks went plump as two Duchess roses on a stem.
“Look at that smile. There it comes! And it’s her mother’s. And looks like you’re going to have to work just as hard to get it,” Aunt Birdie said.
“Mama, I believe he knows you’re the cook,” pleaded Vaughn. “See how he wants to follow you. Let’s keep him, let’s keep him! When I get him chained up and you bring him some food in a saucer, he’ll quit his monkeying. I want to name him Parchman.”
“He’ll go!” said Miss Beulah. “And I don’t want to have any coon-and-dog battle on the premises. Boys! Tighten up on those visiting dogs! Come here to me, Sid.”
Little Sid, to their laughter, ran at even draw with the head of the pack as the coon streaked straight to meet them. In the moonlight Sid showed his teeth like a row of lace.
“I give the coon fifty-fifty and the dogs fifty-fifty,” said Uncle Curtis in leisurely tones.
“There’s a little more racket out there than I like to hear,” moaned Miss Beulah.
The dogs’ tails, white and moonlit and all beating at once, disappeared last, speeding down the hill towards joy. But a boy cousin came plodding back into view to tell them, “He got away. Coony got away. It looked like he was heading for Banner Top.”
“That coon didn’t put up the fight those dogs expected of him,”
said Uncle Dolphus. “He’d been suffocating under that roof too long, that might have been his trouble. Better luck next time!”
The moon shone now at full power. The front gallery seemed to spread away and take the surrounding hills and gullies all into its apron. Banner Top seemed right in their laps. Banner itself all but showed itself over the rim, as though the only reason why anything on earth was still invisible tonight was that it had taken the right steps to make itself so.
“You know, I can hear that thing running from here,” said Aunt Beck. “Mrs. Judge, your motor sounds to me like the old courthouse clock trying to strike again, and not making it.”
“You sure are stranded here,” said Mrs. Moody. “Mercy, what a long way off from everything!”
“Long way off? They’re right in the thick,” cried Aunt Birdie. “This is where I wish I was when I get hungry to see something happen.”
“In my young days,” said Brother Bethune, “I incurred the wrath of the law-abiding, one sweet summer’s night.”
“Brother Bethune!” the aunts turned slightly in their chairs to exclaim. “Never dreamed that,” said one.
“Are you trying to tell us you got yourself marched off to jail?” Miss Beulah asked.
“I’m trying to tell you I incurred the wrath of the law-abiding. There was at one time a little whiskey-maki
ng going on in and around these peaceful moonlight hills. And I supplied ’em the sugar.”
“Brother Bethune!”
“Every last one of us got caught. Yes, in my day revenuers roamed these moonlight roads as thick as thieves. But I was the only one arrested that they let run back in his house a minute. They said I could gather up my Bible.”
“They owed you at least that much!” hollered Uncle Noah Webster. “What happened to the makings? They drink it up then and there?”
“I went on out through the back window,” said Brother Bethune. “Into the moonlight.”
“Well, it done you good to come out and tell us, didn’t it?” said Aunt Birdie. “Now we know at least one thing you’re sorry for.”
“Brother Bethune, I think you might go back to it,” Miss Beulah broke out. “Go back to making your moonshine. There’s less chance of mistakes than there is in trying to preach the Lord’s Word. Grandpa’s turned in his grave more than once or twice today.”
“Beulah! Do you know what you’re saying?” Uncle Curtis asked her.
“I was young and untried,” said Brother Bethune. “Needing to be shown the way, that’s all.”
“Well, the Lord only knows how I’m going to get home, even if I live till morning,” Mrs. Moody said.
“Mrs. Judge, you and Judge Moody’s welcome to our company room,” Mr. Renfro said immediately. “Where’s my wife? Hear it polite from her.”
“My car sitting up on the edge of nowhere, with nobody but a booby in it,” Mrs. Moody went on. “I guess before morning he’ll find my chocolate cake, and just sink his teeth in it.”
“Well, sir, I’ll be looking in next week’s Boone County Vindicator to read what’s the outcome. Ora Stovall is the Banner correspondent, she’ll get it all in. If the worst should happen to your car, most readers will say it served Curly just about right,” said Uncle Dolphus.
“What about the way it’ll serve me?” asked Judge Moody.
“It won’t be that bad,” Uncle Noah Webster promised him.
“Mother, hurry to invite ’em,” said Mr. Renfro, looking about for her. “Or they’ll go!”
“If you still got no place to be till morning, Judge and Mrs. Moody,” said Miss Beulah finally, “we got our company room. I’ll just move Gloria and the baby out of it before Jack gets in it, and now that Jack’s home, I’ll move Elvie out of it too and put Elvie on Vaughn’s cot on the back porch, since Lexie’s in with the other two girls, and Vaughn can sleep where he’s inclined.”
“Well, if that’s not any trouble,” said Mrs. Moody, while Elvie cried.
“But you’ll have to wait on it,” Miss Beulah said. “You can’t even see your way in till some of this company starts saying goodnight and takes babies and hats and all away from the bed.”
All the women and nearly all the men sat with some child’s arm hanging a loop around them. Other children, still wide enough awake, ran stealthily behind the chairs, tickling their elders with hen feathers. Sleeping babies had been laid on the company bed long ago, there were sleepers on pallets in the passage, and others slept more companionably among the chair-legs and the human feet on the gallery floor, like rabbits in burrows, or they lay unbudging across laps.
“Well, you’re visiting an old part of the country here,” said Mr. Renfro. “If you was to go up Banner Top and hunt around, Judge Moody, you’d find little hollows here and there where the Bywy Indians used to pound their corn, and keep a signal fire going, and the rest of it. But there ain’t too much of their story left lying around. I’m afraid you could call them peace-loving.”
“Indian Leap,” said Granny.
“That’s the name my grandmother called it too. Blue Knob is another old-timey name for it,” said Aunt Beck.
“There’s nothing blue about Banner Top,” laughed Aunt Nanny. “It’s pure barefaced red.”
“You ever seen it in the evening from Mountain Creek?” asked Aunt Beck. “I was born in Mountain Creek. And from there Banner Top is as blue as that little throbbing vein in Granny’s forehead.”
“The Indians jumped off from there into the river and drowned ’emselves rather than leave their homes and go where they’d be more wanted. That’s Granny’s tale,” said Uncle Curtis.
“There’s a better name than any, and that’s the one it got christened by those that walked it here all the way from Carolina in early times and ought to knowed what they was talking about,” Mr. Renfro said to Judge Moody. “Renfros, that is. They called the whole parcel of it Long Hungry Ridge.”
“If tonight was as much as a hundred or more years ago,” Uncle Curtis said, addressing the Moodys, “you might not have had such an easy time finding us. There was just the thin little road, what you might call a trail, mighty faint, going along here through the standing forest. So dim and hard to find in the trees that they thought it would be the best judgment in the long run to ring a bell to let the travelers know where they was. Once an hour they had to remember to ring it, and regular, or the woods would have been full of lost travellers, stumbling on one another’s heels. That was back in the days when there was more travelling through here than lately—folks was in a greater hurry to get somewhere, you know, while the country’s new.”
“There it is,” said Miss Beulah. “Straight ahead of your noses.”
The black iron bell hung from its yoke mounted on a black locust post that stood to itself. The leaves of a wisteria climbing there made a feathery moonlit bonnet around the bell.
“I’ve read somewhere about a bell like that on the Old Grenada Trail,” Judge Moody said to his wife. “Doubt if that one still exists.”
“That’s the Wayfarer’s Bell,” said Miss Beulah. “And it was here before any of the rest, I reckon. Before Granny was born.”
“I rang it this morning, a little before sunup,” said Granny.
“Yes, Granny dear,” said Uncle Percy, his voice nearly as much of a whisper as hers.
She nodded to either side of her. “Brought you running, didn’t it?”
“You missed things,” called Auntie Fay serenely, as the Champions’ chicken van bounced into the yard and stopped under a moonstruck fall of dust. “Gloria’s born a Beecham, she’s Sam Dale’s child—that’s the best surprise that was brought us. She’s here tonight as one of the family twice over.—Oh no she isn’t!—Well, believe what you want to.”
“Well, chickens come home to roost,” said Uncle Homer, stumbling once on the steps, the bright hearth of moonlight.
“We got a little extra company as usual,” Auntie Fay kept on. “Two that turned up with no place to sleep.”
Uncle Homer came on into the lamplight. “Judge Moody! What’s that man doing in this house?”
“He’s spending the night,” said Auntie Fay. “Beulah’s just asked him in spite of herself.”
“Judge Moody, you was asked for over at Miss Julia Mortimer’s all evening long!” cried Uncle Homer. “Doc Carruthers was about to go hunting the roads to see. if you’d fell in somewhere. I had to rake up a dozen excuses for you.”
“You did? You’re the very fellow rode right by us this morning and left us to languish!” Mrs. Moody said. “And my car clinging to the edge of nowhere. If clinging it still is.”
“It is,” said Uncle Homer. “It evermore is, ma’am. Still clinging. I’m glad to be able to bring you the comforting word. I saw it again on my way back, just passed it.”
“Possum,” said Jack, low, “don’t tell Mama, but Uncle Homer’s back here the worse for wear. We ought to have been over yonder for the family in place of him. Paying respects is not Uncle Homer’s long suit.”
“I don’t suppose you heard anybody over there call my name, Homer Champion?” Miss Lexie said, coughing from her dry throat. “I don’t believe the splendid name of Renfro ever came up,” he said.
“I would have gone back and pitched in today, if anybody’d asked for me and sent after me. But they didn’t,” said Miss Lexie. “I listened hard to be
asked for and I wasn’t.”
“Lexie, are you working up for a crying spell at this late hour?” Miss Beulah asked.
Miss Lexie raised her voice. “I can get my feelings hurt, the same as anybody else!”
“When I cry, I go off somewhere and cry by myself,” Miss Beulah said, taking a step away from her high on tiptoe to show her, “and I don’t come back till I’m good and over it. But if her crowd adds up to more than we’ve got here, Homer Champion, I’ll eat that table out there—I promise you!”
“If she’s got a crowd now, they didn’t come paying her any attention while she’s sick, any more than this crowd here,” said Miss Lexie.
“Well, darlin’, maybe all of ’em was waiting for now,” Aunt Beck said in consoling tones.
“That whole house is busy filling up with big shots! They’re everywhere, with hardly room left for the homefolks to sit down,” Uncle Homer was saying. “It ain’t just Boone County that’s over there. I saw tags tonight on cars from three or four different counties, and that ain’t all—they’re here from Alabama, Georgia, Carolina, and even places up North!”
“Found their way all right,” said Mrs. Moody, with a glance toward her husband.
“A Willys-Knight from Missouri liked-to crowded me off my own road! And Father Somebody-Something, that’s who’s going to preach her funeral, and he wears a skirt. He’s a big shot from somewhere too, just don’t ask me where,” said Uncle Homer.
“That’s no Presbyterian!” flashed Mrs. Moody. “No Southern Presbyterian!”
“The nearest one he reminds me of is Judge Moody,” said Uncle Homer.
“What bridge were all these crossing on?” Judge Moody asked.
“Dear old Banner bridge is the one I use. And you know who sent a telegram he wishes he was coming to the funeral tomorrow? Governor Somebody from I forgot to listen where! Getting telegrams is pretty high style,” said Uncle Homer.
“All right for high style. But the way we’ve been told, Miss Julia herself is still going without a place to be buried,” said Auntie Fay.