Losing Battles (50 page)

“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.

“There ain’t no end, it looks like, to what you can lose and still go on living,” Uncle Curtis pointed out.

“Why, it would put an end to the reunion,” Jack said. Gloria, at the sight of his face, pressed herself and the baby close to him.

“There’s the answer to your wish. Didn’t it come in a hurry!” cried Aunt Nanny. “Ain’t that what you been wishing for, Gloria, a good way to leave us?”

“Not by being driven!”

“So Miss Julia Mortimer couldn’t stop you from marrying
Jack by fair means or foul,” Aunt Birdie said to Gloria. “Just couldn’t prevent you.”

“And I wish I could let her know now,” said Gloria softly.

Women’s voices echoed peacefully around her. “Let her know what?”

“How wrong she was. How right I was. She only needed to see my baby. And I was going to carry her over there!” said Gloria. “I was only waiting till she could talk.”