“Be ready for the shock if that engine catches, Curly!” hollered Jack. “We’re gonna level out in a minute!”
The claybanks flew up behind them, the smell of the river came forward in their place. Honeysuckle and trumpet vines whipped out at the school bus, at the Buick, the truck. A little crossroad peeped up for a minute. “The blind crossing!” Judge Moody cried, warning, while the children ail sang the louder, “Beyond compare! Beyond compare!” and they rushed upon the railroad track and were bounced in quick turn over it, while old circus posters on the side of a store went by like a flurry of snow in their faces, and they rushed on to where the road widened at a water tank and just as quickly narrowed again to meet the bridge, and just before the bridge they swung off to the right into the open level of a school yard and around it in a pounding circle, taking the shocks of humping tree roots, and seemed to be running straight into the schoolhouse—it pressed close like a face against a windowpane—while the children yelled to finish the song,
“We rally to thee!
To the purple and gold!”
and the truck engine suddenly caught and fired off and braked them from behind as the bus came up against the basketball goal post and stopped to its tired crack.
“Oh, Jack. It was like it used to be,” Gloria sighed. She had been sprung over his chair from behind him, into his lap.
“I ain’t lost my touch?” he asked tenderly.
“Hardly any.”
“You can sit up and look, Mrs. Moody!” Jack called. “You’re in Banner!”
“Praise Allah,” she said.
Only Mr. Willy Trimble, with hat lifted, had kept going straight ahead, taking mules and wagon on the jump onto the old cable bridge that ran unsupported as an old black tongue put out by Banner at the other side. The noise was like forty anvils making a chorus.
“Run for it!” Jack cried, throwing open the bus door. The laughing children poured out, jumped the puddles to the school-house step, and shoved their way inside.
“All right, Vaughn! Cut a-loose!” said Jack. “We don’t need you any longer!”
Immediately the mules, unshackled, ran past the school and then, one with neck laid over the other’s neck, turned back the way they’d come.
Vaughn stood on the bus step. “Sister Gloria, would you please to find me my books? They’re where I was going to sit on ’em to reach up to my steering wheel.”
“Rise up, Jack. They’re still as good as new,” Gloria lied, placing the warm books in Vaughn’s arms.
“You can drive it home,” said Jack. “Don’t forget all you learned on the way down, and remember it’s the opposite.”
“He’s drenched,” Gloria said to Jack. “That green teacher ought to excuse him from sitting three in a seat until he dries out in the cloakroom.”
“No’m, it just feels good to my skin,” said Vaughn. “You can’t be the teacher any longer.”
Painted in another year, the schoolhouse had the ghostly whiteness of a bottle from which all the milk had just been poured. A line of crayoned and scissored bonnety daffodils, pasted on the window-pane before the break-up of school for spring planting, was still there. Now the window filled from behind with laughing faces. The teacher Vaughn was so ready to worship appeared in the doorway. The jonquil smell of new pencils ground to a point for the first day, smells of rainy hair and flattened crumbs, flowed out of the school-house around her as she held out her hand.
Holding his books circled close to his ribs, Vaughn cleared the mud puddle and the mountain stone both in one leap and landed almost in the teacher’s arms.
“Vaughn’s big brother he’s been to the pen,” some children’s voices began to chant as he got inside.
Jack plunged out of the bus and jumped Gloria to the ground. He raced to the truck, pulled Curly bodily out of it, then leaped into the driver’s seat himself.
He ran both arms under the steering wheel and embraced it. Butting the Buick ahead, he drove the truck at thirty miles an hour, while it roared back at him, swinging it under the sycamore boughs to bring off a wide left turn out of the school yard, straddling the mud puddle as he crossed the road, roaring past the giant sunflowers lined up all the way to the store like a row of targets, with Miss Ora sliding from Mrs. Moody’s lap onto Judge Moody’s and back again, and stopped with the Buick’s nose an inch short of the telephone pole. He unhitched the two machines and drove the truck to the other side of the yard and evened it with the Buick so that they stood matched.
An old man sat on the bench on the store porch above them, feet planted and wide apart, hands gripping the seat.
“Well, if it’s not Captain Billy Bangs, gathering up strength to vote tomorrow!” cried Jack.
“Today is election day,” said the old man. “Ain’t it?”
“No sir, you’re going to have to wait for tomorrow to get here,” said Jack, and he leaped onto the porch to shake the old man’s hand. “Captain Billy, I want you to know Judge Moody and Mrs. Judge Moody from Ludlow—they spent last night in my bed and they just had a ride from Banner Top in my truck.”
“Train’s late,” Captain Billy told them. “Life ain’t what it used to be.” There was still some red in his beard.
“Well, all I hope is when they read about it in the Vindicator they’ll appreciate what I went through,” said Miss Ora Stovall. “Give me a strong pull out of here, Brother.”
When she was out of the truck, Judge Moody helped his wife slide off the horse blanket to get her feet on the ground, where rivulets the orange of inner tubes played over the clay-packed gravel in front of the store.
Banner School and Stovall’s store sat facing each other out of worn old squares of land from which the fences had long ago been pulled down, as if in the course of continuing battle. The water tank was shimmering there above the railroad track like a bathing pigeon in the fine rain. Around its side, under the word BANNER, letters that stretched so wide as to appear holding hands spelled “Jack + Imogene.” Beyond that, there were two ancient, discolored sawdust piles standing in a field of broomsedge like the Monitor and the Merrimac in the history book, ready to fight again. A beckoning fringe of old willows grew all around their bases.
Once through Banner, the road climbed steep as a stepladder onto the bridge that was suspended narrow and dark as an interior hallway between the banks of the Bywy, somewhere down there out of sight.
“Why, we’re right back in mortal sight of that!” Mrs. Moody’s face, looking at the way they’d come, became mapped in pink. “For all we’ve travelled!”
“It’s never been any secret that on Banner Top they’ve almost got Banner in their laps,” said Gloria. “I’m glad it’s further than it looks, or nobody’d ever be out of everybody else’s call.”
“And is that the road we just came down?” Mrs. Moody demanded.
“The thing that looks like a sliding board is. That’s the straight part,” said Jack.
“Those same two churches!” protested Mrs. Moody.
“And here is Curly’s store, where you can ask for anything you want,” said Jack.
As he spoke, a busy-walking little person switched out of the store and down the steps. She popped her eyes and put out her tongue at Gloria.
“Hi, Imogene,” said Jack.
“Jack Renfro, listen-a-here, the first thing you do, I want you to climb up and scrub your name off that water tank where you wrote it up there with mine,” she said. “You can leave my name up there all by itself. I evermore mean it.”
“Just as cute and bowlegged as ever,” Jack said to Gloria as Imogene Broadwee wagged herself away. “And the very one for Curly here to marry. I’m going to tell him a good way to go about it.”
“I’m going to use the telephone,” Judge Moody interrupted. “Better late than never.” He climbed the steps of the store. Nailed one to a post across the front were posters, each with its picture of Curly wearing a hat, and coming out from the crown on rays were the different words “Courte
ous,” “Banner-Born,” “Methodist,” “Deserving,” and “Easy to Find.” A hide was stretched and nailed on the wall over the doorway, where it appeared to hover, like a partly opened black umbrella not too unlike Miss Ora’s. Judge Moody stumbled over the scales as he found his way in.
The smells of coal oil, harness, cracker dust, cloth dye, and pickles clung about the doorway. Judge Moody could be only dimly seen where he stood at the telephone; among the boots and halters hanging from the beam above his head, shirt-tails of every description, old and new, were visible like so many fading banners of welcome.
“Hey, Curly, today is here at last!” Ella Fay Renfro cried.
There where the sawmill spur came out of the bushes into the railroad track, she and Etoyle and Elvie stepped off into Banner. Ella Fay piled her books on the little sisters and sent them dragging themselves inside the school. With a skip she came running across the road.
A fatuous look spread over Curly’s face and he said, “Well, look who they’re sending to pay the store!”
Jack punched him in the nose.
“And there go Brother and Jack again, not looking a bit different or a day older since the last time they was at it. But you do, and I do,” Miss Ora Stovall remarked to Gloria. “Just don’t bring it in the store!” she yelled at them, as Captain Billy Bangs drummed his heels on the porch floor and gave a clap once or twice with his hands.
Jack drove his fist again and Curly, losing his baseball cap, staggered backward until he fell against the open door of the truck and slid to the ground. Some whimpers began coming out of his mouth like small, squeezed tears.
“Jack, that hurt!” Gloria cried. “I hope landing that blow was an accident, not something you learned at Parchman.”
Ella Fay squatted down, put both her little white hands around the ham of Curly’s arm, and said, “I was only coming to ask him for a dime’s worth of candy corn.”
“Haul up, little sister!” Jack told her. “Didn’t you learn you a lesson when he took Granny’s gold ring?”
“I should worry, I should care!” said Ella Fay. “I made him give me something!” With all the haste her wet fingers could manage, she unlaced the throat of Gloria’s sailor dress, turned back the collar, and displayed what she wore on a calendar cord tied around her neck: a pearl-handled pocketknife an inch long. Both little fingers extended, she rapidly undid the knot behind, and with a brief scream of pleasure showed it to them in turn, laid on her sweet, horny, greedy little palm. “So we’re evens. We exchanged,” she said, blushing at last.
“Why, you little sneak!” cried Gloria.
“But that’s all we did,” said Ella Fay back. “So what if the old ring did go down the mouse-hole? I know who’d get me a new one. Hear, Curly?”
Curly Stovall laughed and sat up. Re-tying her calendar cord, dropping the knife expertly down her front while she gave a brimming glance around her, Ella Fay told Gloria, “Watch and see! I can be a bride too. You can’t always be the one and only!” She turned and pounded splashing into the schoolhouse.
“Curly! You threatening to marry Ella Fay? Curly! That’s coming into my family!” Jack said.
“Jack, you’re turning red all over,” said Gloria. “You’re going to pop.”
“Curly! Our battles’ll be called off before they start! We’ll all be one happy family!” Jack cried. “I’ll have to bow you a welcome into my own house where I can’t lather you!” He pulled Curly to his feet and yelled in his face, “With Uncle Homer out of the running, we’ll even have to vote for you from now on!”
“And you all vote as a family. That’s a hundred votes right there,” said Curly. He put his baseball cap on again, visor to the back.
“Curly, I’d give you something. I’d almost give you the truck, like it stands, not to marry into us. Want it for a present?”
Curly stopped laughing and put out his jaw. “I ain’t going to take no present off of you.”
“I’d just as soon give it to you as look at it,” said Jack hotly.
“Jack!” screamed Gloria, running to stand beside it.
“It’s yours! It’s yours, Curly, take it! I dare you!” said Jack.
“I ain’t gonna!” shouted Curly.
“It’s yours on a silver platter. Take it right now! And get out of my family before you get in it.”
Curly’s fist landed under his jaw. Jack rose on his toes as if about to fly, then toppled, and the foot of the telephone post cracked him on the forehead. He rolled over and spread out on his back. His good, wide, blue eye was still fixed where he had just turned it—the blue was nearly out of sight in the corner, as if something might still be coming around the edge of his cheek.
“Jack! Jack!” said Gloria. “Can you see day?”
“Now gimme that shirt-tail, boy!” Curly shouted. He whipped out his big hunting knife, and rolled Jack over and cut his shirt-tail off.
“Oscar, aren’t you going to referee?” cried Mrs. Moody, as the Judge reappeared on the porch.
“Maud Eva, I am not a referee,” said Judge Moody.
“Well, I am! Listen here, Buster, Jack was down there on the ground lying helpless as a babe!” Mrs. Moody cried to Curly. He ran with the shirt-tail past her into his store. “And you big bully you, you cut his shirt-tail off!” she called after him. “That’s no fair!”
“I knew it would happen some day,” said Gloria. She had Jack’s head in her lap, and sank back against the telephone post that rose like the gnawed pith of a giant stalk of sugarcane behind her.
“It’ll learn him! Trying to give me his truck! What’s he trying to call himself? Rich?” cried Curly, hammering the shirt-tail to the cross-beam with all the other shirt-tails.
“I can’t even get hold of the operator,” said Judge Moody through the blows.
“If anybody’s dead, she’s at the funeral,” said Miss Ora Stovall. “Gets her a crowd and goes. Try her about dinner time.”
“Just lie there,” said Gloria, stroking Jack’s brow. “You don’t know a thing that’s going on.”
“We’re stranded. Worse than yesterday. Stranded,” said Judge Moody to his wife. He pointed. “And what’s the boy doing down on the ground?”
“Didn’t you hear the crack to his head?” Mrs. Moody asked. “I don’t see why his wife doesn’t simply shake him.”
“Completely stranded,” Judge Moody said, and over the river a church bell rang. In the rainy air it was no more resonant than a bird call. Now, on this side of the river, from up the road, a car descended into Banner and ran through it onto the bridge.
The air rang as though anvils were being struck for a mile around. Before the bridge had stopped swaying, another car followed the first one down Banner Road, and two more, travelling close together as if keeping each other company, ploughed splashing up out of the crossroad coming from Foxtown, streaked and red-wheeled with mud, all of them. They all went the same way, onto the bridge, under the old tin sign saying cross at own risk. Miss Ora Stovall had already put her finger out and started counting them.
“These people don’t know it, but they’re lucky not to be meeting that funeral,” shouted Mrs. Moody over the racket. “It’s nothing but a one-way bridge.”
“They’re going to the funeral, I should say,” said Judge Moody, looking at his watch again.
“Oh, Jack,” Gloria said under the clanging, “you don’t even hear our bridge. When we were young we used to chase each other on it, back and forth, like running through a cat’s-cradle.”
Another car bounded past. “Not one soul looks this way. You’d think they’d inquire if there’d been an accident,” shouted Mrs. Moody.
“They’re from Ludlow,” said the Judge.
“Then I should be thankful they’re not looking.”
“They’re driving like they’re mad,” said Miss Ora Stovall, looking satisfied.
“I expect they’ve already tried every other road they can find,” said Mrs. Moody.
Finally there
was only the barking of the dogs and the chirping of the truck in their ears. The truck motor, all by itself, still ran, having never been cut off. Mud still poured from it as it shook, thick drops like persimmons being steadily rolled out of buckets.
“Well, you only had to wait,” said Mrs. Moody, still speaking loudly. “It comes without being called, Judge. Here’s your wrecker.”
“Now that’s something new,” said Miss Ora.
A wrecker clattered up out of the crossroad and over the rail-road track into Banner. It had had a coat of red paint, but the black hieroglyphics of a more recent soldering job overlaid the paint on most of the body parts. Rocking and splashing through the puddles, it made its way past the Buick and went straight for the truck. It backed up in front of it. On the driver’s door was lettered in black, as if by a burning poker, “Red’s Got It.”
The driver got out, hopped a puddle, landed in front of Curly Stovall, and said, “How much did you bet you’d never see me again?”
“Mr. Comfort!” said Curly.
“And look there. Who give him that souvenir?”
“He bumped his own head to make that rising. And his eye just got a kick from a dear little baby,” Gloria retorted. She held Jack’s head in her lap. His good eye was still rolled as if to see around the corner of her knee.
“You give us a shock, Mr. Comfort!” cried Curly. “Who’s letting you run around loose in that wrecker?”
“Started working for old Red this morning. First job he give me was come over to Banner and haul him in this truck.”
“Come back and see me day after tomorrow, Mr. Comfort. Better make it Saturday,” said Curly urgently.
“I may not have to work on Saturday,” said Mr. Comfort. “Hope not.”
“Oscar, aren’t you going to speak to him?” cried Mrs. Moody. “He’ll go off without my car if you don’t speak to him. He’s shifty-eyed.”
“Just a minute, there. Mister, do you see this Buick?” asked Judge Moody.