Losing Battles (64 page)

Judge Moody pointed suddenly across the two ladies. “I believe there’s my ditch. There it is, Maud Eva! Take a look.”

“Horrors, you made me see a snake in it about nine feet long,” said Mrs. Moody. “Dead, I devoutly trust.”

“Yes sir, along here gets to be a fairly good-size dreen,” said Miss Ora. “Don’t it, Brother? Panther Creek gets in a hurry sometimes to get to the old Bywy.”

“Brakes!” called Jack.

“My opinion is we’re going to bang together so hard next time we stop that I’m going to spill somebody,” Mrs. Moody warned.

“But Mrs. Judge, we got to gather up all these children regardless!” Jack called. “They’ve got one in every cranny, waiting in the rain, with nothing to their poor shaved little heads but a Schoolbook
or two. You wouldn’t want ’em left behind and missing a day of school.”

A sled, with a front guard like the foot of a little bed, stood hitched to a gray mule, waiting where there was no mailbox but only a clearing in the cut-over woods to let a track through. A little boy jumped off the sled from behind his father who stood to drive.

“Patient as Job,” said Jack, throwing open the door to let the little boy in.

“Now let that be enough,” Mrs. Moody prayed to the dripping sky.

Judge Moody pointed again. “No,
that’s
my ditch! There it is, Maud Eva. This is the right one.”

“You’ve already forgotten,” she said. “Well, that one’s got some kind of a warning planted down in there, plain to see. Take a look yourself.”

It was a new sign, its paint shining wet in long black fishtails.

“Where Will YOU Spend Eternity?’ ” Miss Ora read off for them. “I can tell you without a bit of trouble who to thank for that.”

“I’m not going in again,” said Judge Moody.

“Old Nathan Beecham. He’s a crank. He comes this way once a year and you never see the last of it,” Miss Ora told him. “I’ll tell you who else lives on that road, Mr. Willy Trimble. He’s a bachelor. Down yonder’s his chimney.” It was of mud, lumpy as an old stocking on an old leg. “He’s a pretty old fixture of this community.”

“Well, just keep on twisting and winding,” said Mrs. Moody to her own car going in front of them. “I suppose we’ve got to get past everything there is before we’re there.”

On top of the bank could be seen a roof and, higher than that, gourds hanging in rows, strung on lines between thin poles, like notes on a staff of music, each painted skull-white with a black opening.

“All right, that’s Brother Bethune’s house,” said Miss Ora. “He’s a Baptist preacher and a moonshiner, and that’s his bluebird houses.”

Now, election posters for races past and still to come embraced the bigger tree trunks. There were the faces of losers and winners, the forgotten and the remembered, still there together and looking like members of the same family. Every time there was Curly Stovall on a tree there was Uncle Homer on the next one, but only Uncle
Homer’s qualifications were listed in indentation like a poem on a tombstone:

EXPERIENCED
    COURTEOUS
LIFELONG BAPTIST
    MARRIED
RELIABLE
    JUST LEAVE IT TO HOMER.

“It ain’t far now! We’re coming to Aycock’s house,” said Jack.

Against the sides of the road bank, like the two halves of a puzzle, lay a parted bedstead, every iron curlycue of it a flower of rust.

“Look what little Mis’ Comfort is trying to wish off on the public now,” said Jack. “I believe that’s Aycock’s own bed.”

“No,” said Gloria. “That’s been rusting even longer than you and Aycock have been gone. It’s Mr. Comfort’s.”

“If he ever is planning on coming home, he’s got one of the poorest welcomes I ever saw waiting on man. I almost hope he’s dead,” said Jack. “Brakes!”

“What are we stopping for now?” protested Mrs. Moody, as they slowed down under a big blackjack oak that a little path climbed up under.

“Aycock!” Jack hollered. “Where’s the teacher?”

Over their heads was a house perched even with the edge of the bank, on struts. Aycock was visible sitting on the porch floor with his knees crossed and legs hanging over; he was crouched over his guitar. Without interrupting the rise and fall of his hand, he called, “She hoofed it. I told her the school bus wasn’t anything to count on.”

“He’s happy right where he is. He’ll sit there serenading himself till he’s seen the train go by,” said Jack as the procession leaped forward.

“The train?” repeated Mrs. Moody.

“You know, Maud Eva, it’s due in Ludlow at ten fifteen,” said Judge Moody, looking at his watch.

“Banner’s on the crossing,” said Miss Ora. “They call it a blind crossing.”

“The train better stop for it,” said Mrs. Moody.

“
We’d
better stop. The Nashville Rocket doesn’t know Banner’s
on the map,” said Judge Moody. “Any more than you did yesterday.”

“They know now!” Jack sang out. “Ever since he got stopped by my truck, Mr. Dampeer always blows for Banner about forty times! Don’t worry, Mrs. Judge, he won’t hit my truck a second time!”

“On the last dip, I bet you a nickel we’re going to give ’em a free show, Brother,” said Miss Ora.

“I swear you Bob we’ve risked life and limb every inch of the way since we left home, Oscar,” Mrs. Moody said. “And going on a mercy errand!”

“Listen, now somebody’s coming up behind us,” Curly Stovall said.

“Who?” objected Miss Ora.

“I can hear ’em. It’s another horse or mule back yonder, crowding the two we got,” said Curly.

Miss Ora stuck her head out. “I’ll tell you who it is, it’s old Mr. Willy Trimble,” she said, and yelled, “
Willy Trimble?—Hope not!
What’re you coming after us for?—He’s pulling a load of flowers in his old wagon,” she told Judge Moody. “He’s funeral-crazy. I can tell you where he’s going.”

“I know already,” he told her.

“Well, excuse
me
,” Miss Ora exclaimed. “Excuse me for living.”

For a straight strip downhill the road ran between equally high carved banks shining wet on either side and too close for comfort, like the Red Sea in the act of parting as pictured in the Bible. Two wooden churches hung over them from opposite sides of the road, as if each stood there to outwait the other and see which would fall first.

“Methodist—Baptist,” said Miss Ora Stovall with a wag of her head. She asked Mrs. Moody, “I’m Methodist, which are you?”

“I’m neither one, and gladder of it every minute.”

Jack was waving his hand out of the school bus. Brother Bethune stood on the Baptist porch watching them go by, in a coat from which the pocket flaps stood out like stove lids, a sheltering dog under each drumming palm.

“Looks like I’ve been stood up!” he called back. “Where’s my crowd?”

Mrs. Moody gave a little shriek and, even under the weight of Miss Ora on her lap, she drew up her legs and held her feet. They
were looking down a gap between banks red as live coals onto a streak of river with a bridge across it.

“Brakes!” Judge Moody said loudly.

“School bus goes down this hill every morning and crawls back up every evening!” Jack called as down they plunged. “If anything ever happens to put a stop to that, it’s going to be about twice as hard to get an education!”

“It’s running away with us,” whispered Mrs. Moody. “With all of us!”

“Now I can see it! Almost under my nose!” Jack called. “The blessed water tank that spells out Banner.” He let out a shout. “Brakes, Vaughn! Whip ’em just as hard as you can labor—in the direction of home!”

“Oh, Jack!” said Gloria.

“Blow my horn, Curly, if you’re coming that close behind!” yelled Jack.

“Pray!” cried Mrs. Moody.

And the children all with one accord began to sing,

“
O hail to thee, Banner School so fair,
The fairest school in the land!
”

“I’m going to put it all in the
Vindicator
. Watch out, Freewill! Banner’s going to beat you this week! You won’t have as much as we have to toot your horn about,” bragged Miss Ora Stovall.

“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.