Losing Battles

by Eudora Welty

  “Here I come!” Aycock suddenly piped in falsetto.

  Jack jumped backwards and one foot slipped off the edge. He saved himself. One hollow root, broken off short, was trained onto space like the barrel of a cannon, and he grabbed it. One leg thrashed for a place on another root that plunged downward like a mermaid’s tail. He fought his way back over the top.

  “Hey, Aycock,” he said, “I bet if you and me could be down on the Bywy fishing, this Buick’d look like a peanut balanced on the end of a nose!”

  Gloria clasped Jack and pressed her dizzy head against his throbbing shoulder. “Jack, I’ve come just in time to put a limit on you.”

  “What’s that you say, Possum?”

  “I’ll let you be a Good Samaritan one last time. But providing you use some of my common sense. I’m not letting you to the steering wheel!” she cried.

  “But honey,” he said, “who knows better than you what a good driver I am?”

  “That’s driving the school bus down Banner Road with me sitting right at your back,” she said. “That’s not backing Judge and Mrs. Moody’s polished Buick sedan down Lover’s Leap with me watching—and breaking your neck!”

  He stared. “I reckon you know that means find a slow way, Possum,” he brought out.

  “The slower the better,” she said. She took one step toward the car. Aycock, at the side window, sat in profile, leaning back. Because of the way it grew, his hair looked like a sofa pillow with small tassels at the corners, worn pitched low on the forehead.

  “Aycock Comfort, don’t you holler ‘Here I come’ once more till you’ve got solid ground in front of you. I’ll be listening,” she said.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Jack handed Gloria down to the road, looking fondly as ever in all directions over the tall red lumps of clay and the yellow-fringed clambering road and the ditch that kept up with it, and the flower-hugged syrup stand and the Uncle Sam mailbox and the home track, falling between its own rosy banks and buckled like a little hearth in firelight.

  “Never mind, Lady May! Nothing about it’s got your daddy licked, not as long as he can tackle it on home grounds,” he said.

  “Young man, have you been made to understand to keep hands off of that car?” Judge Moody asked.

  “Yes sir,” Jack said. “My wife’s done passed a law.”

  “Not any too soon. You almost went over all by yourself,” said Mrs. Moody. “You’ve started looking to me like the kind who might scratch the finish. That car’s been mighty lovingly cared for. I don’t want to see it getting in any more trouble today than it’s in already.”

  “Trouble!” Jack cried. “That’s one thing I never look for. Ask my wife!” He turned to the Judge. “But if it suits your wife and my wife any better, I’ll go up real easy behind the Buick, hitch to the spare with the best puller I can find, and pull her down, hind-end foremost. Mrs. Judge didn’t let you start out without rope and tackle, did she, sir?”

  “The rope and tackle, and all the tools,” intoned the Judge, “are inside the car, safely stowed under the back seat.”

  “Aycock, hear what you’re setting on?” Jack called, and then said, “Never mind, Mrs. Judge. I never seen the fix yet there wasn’t some way out of.”

  “But I want to hear it first,” said Judge Moody.

  “My system is be ready for what comes to me in a good strong flash!” said Jack.

  Judge Moody said, “But the way I prefer to do it is calling up my own garageman, even if we have to wait a little longer on him.”

  “Seek an outsider?” cried Jack. He gave Gloria and the baby a stricken look.

  “Now there ought to be a store, reasonably there’s some little store at a crossroads nearby with a telephone in it,” Judge Moody said.

  Up on Banner Top, Aycock laughed.

  “You mean Banner! Curly Stovall closes up on Sunday, sir,” Jack told Judge Moody.

  “Get your storekeeper to open up, if that’s the only phone there is,” said Judge Moody.

  “Yes, you could pull him out of church,” agreed Mrs. Moody. “I’m sure he’s no more than a Baptist.”

  “Old Curly uses Sunday to go fishing,” said Jack. “He’s floating down the Bywy, no question about it. But his store’s shut just as tight as if he’s a Christian in good standing. The old bench is pulled just as solid across the door.”

  “Who’s got a phone in the house?” asked Judge Moody. “The nearest.”

  “Miss Pet Hanks.”

  “Where does the lady live?”

  “Medley. That’s five miles going the other way—you passed her house coming. She’s who rings two longs and a short in Curly’s store when somebody wants to talk to Banner.”

  “You might just as well go back to Ludlow,” Mrs. Moody told her husband. “And use the one in your den.”

  “Then the store at the next benighted crossroads!” Judge Moody cried.

  “Everywhere it’s the same story, Judge; shut tight,” Jack said. “Everything but the Foxtown icehouse is keeping Sunday.”

  “Where’s that singing?” Mrs. Moody sharply inquired.

  “When the wind veers just a little bit to the west, and it’s First Sunday, you’ll hear the Methodists letting off from Banner,” said Jack.

  “ ‘Throw out the life line! Throw out the life line!’ ” sang the Methodists. “ ‘Someone is sinking today.’ ”

  “Then what are we supposed to do?” Mrs. Moody asked. “Stand here together and wait for the first person to come along?”

  “Mrs. Judge, generally the first ones to come along the road ain’t exactly the ones you’d have picked,” said Jack. “Now, all I need to do is holler. There’s a hundred up there just waiting.” Taking in a barrelful of air, he squared his mouth to holler. But Gloria shook her head at him, and he swallowed it.

  “I thought till today I knew any cranny of the county you might try to show me,” said the Judge to his wife. “But where’s any hundred people along this road?”

  “It’s the gathering of his family,” Gloria told the Moodys. “I don’t think it’s more than fifty, but that’s the way they count.” She told Jack, “The way your family loves to tell stories, they wouldn’t hear the Crack of Doom by this time. You’ll have to send up there and pull one of ’em loose by the hand.”

  “All right, Etoyle,” said Jack.

  “Hooray!” she yelled.

  “Without doing the St. Vitus Dance, just tell ’em I miscalculated a shaving on what I’d be running into,” said Jack. “You might give ’em the idea I could use a rope. And some of their strength.”

  “But don’t embroider!” Gloria called after the whooping child.

  “ ‘Miscalculated’ will tell my family all they need to know,” Jack said. “So don’t be downhearted, Mrs. Judge! Help’ll come fast. All I need ’em to bring is the equal of your car to pull with. Uncle Homer’s up there with a pretty good answer,”

  “Uncle Homer!” Gloria exclaimed.

  “Well, some day he can be expected to improve—he’s been married into the family for a good long while,” said Jack. “Why wouldn’t this be the day? Judge and Mrs. Judge, there’s seats right behind you where you can fit right into the shade.”

  Straddling the ditch in the shade of a mulberry tree, some planks were nailed between two-by-fours to make Jack’s roadside stand. The dust was on each plank like a runner of figured pink velvet.

  “I’ll stay right here on my own two feet. I’m not going to make myself comfortable till I see what happens to my car, thank you,” Mrs. Moody said. “And that goes for my husband too.”

  Footing the bank along the ditch now there was a carpet-runner of shadow. Judge Moody walked it, to stare up the farm track that came cutting down through the bank, its clay walls, like its floor, scarred as if by battle. Dust lay in the old winter-made ruts, deep as ashes on an unraked hearth; it was dust sifted times over, quiescent now. At the foot of the track, where the wooden Uncle Sam stood as high as the Judge’s
waist, Judge Moody reached inside his coat to his breast pocket, as if to make sure that what he carried himself was comparatively safe.

  “This is not where I come from,” Gloria assured Mrs. Moody as the two of them stood together under the mulberry tree. “When I started out as a teacher, they handed me Banner School.”

  “A teacher? Well, you’re just talking to another one,” said Mrs. Moody, her eyes not leaving her car. “I taught nine years before Judge Moody came galloping along. I don’t suppose there’s a Mississippi girl alive that hasn’t taken her turn teaching some lonesome school—but that serves as no excuse to me for jumping out of the bushes unannounced, dressed like a country bride, and scaring people that have cars off the road.”

  On Banner Top, Jack stood guard by the Buick, his arms folded and his legs crossed. The tree’s shadow draped him there like a piece of sacking with holes through it. Everywhere else, the light drenched all that side of the road from top to bottom.

  “Well, here we are,” said Aycock. “I reckon Sir Poison Ivy is wishing him and his car was a mile away from here.”

  “And I’m going to do my best to get him started,” said Jack.

  “Let him stew a little while, Jack. I got me a seat in a pleasure car, riding here free, and I kind of hate to give it up.”

  “Aycock, you may not be in a hurry, but Judge Moody is. And it’s still his car. Or his wife’s, that’s the same thing. I’m going to get it back on the road for him if it’s the last thing I do,” said Jack. “That’s for saving my wife and baby like he did.”

  “He ain’t done nothing for me yet,” said Aycock. “Glad I don’t owe him nothing.”

  “I’m trying to count up how many Uncle Homer will come bringing,” said Jack. “For all I know, leaving the ladies out, it’ll be the whole reunion. And I couldn’t begrudge ’em if they want to help pull.” He shoved out an arm and tried it against the tree.

  “This here tree’s been hitched to and carved on and chased around and climbed up and shot at so many times already,” said Aycock, “if much more was to happen around this tree, it might not even stand for it.”

  “It’s been a good old tree,” said Jack. “And I aim to take care of it.”

  The cedar had suffered from the weather, and was set with the pegs of many lost branches; some of the stumps were onion-shaped, as though the branches had been twisted off by teasing boys whose names a good teacher could call right now. The upper trunk was punctured like a flute to give entry to woodpeckers or owls.

  “Old-timers hung a rascal from this tree, my grandmaw used to tell. Jack, it wouldn’t hold the rascal now,” said Aycock.

  “What I’m going to ask it to do is a little less than that,” said Jack. “All you got to do is lean back and wait.”

  “Shall We Gather at the River” rose and faded on the air, and the stitching sound of the Buick’s motor played on the midday silence. Then the distant sound of a pick-axe travelled to them, slow blows falling on dry ground somewhere below, spaced out with hollers of protest in between.

  “That digs like my Uncle Earl,” remarked Aycock. “On Sunday, too. Wonder who’s played a joke on him?”

  “I just want the world to know,” Mrs. Moody raised her voice and called to the surrounding hills, “I wouldn’t have budged from my cool house in Ludlow this morning except to go to Sunday School if I hadn’t had my husband’s conscience to contend with. And look where that’s brought me.”

  “Could we possibly get rid of these dogs?” asked Judge Moody. As he paced, Queenie, Pete, and Slider were weaving hot circles around him.

  “They won’t bite, sir,” said Jack. “They’re just asking you what you want with Aycock.”

  Mrs. Moody suddenly exclaimed, “Where did those people spring from?”

  A line of grown men and boys was coming over the crest of the road headed in the Banner direction. They kept the same distance apart from one another, and might have all been mounted on a single platform, some creeping flatcar, that moved them upgrade as a body by a pulley under them. They were all eating watermelon, their eyes raised to Banner Top.

  “They’re not bringing any help,” said Mrs. Moody.

  “The Broadwees are still living!” said Jack, and at his wave they made a rush for the roadside stand, where the first-comers took seats as if their names were on them.

  “Hey, Jack. Hey, Aycock. Where you been!” the various ones began in hooting voices.

  “Well, look whose car that is!” said the biggest Broadwee. “How about a good push, Jack? What you studying about?”

  “There’s a sample. There’s what’s wrong with this end of Boone County, right there,” said Mrs. Moody, pointing her finger along the double row of Broadwees.

  “Watch what you’re saying, boys,” Jack called. “There’s ladies present.”

  “Hey, Teacher,” cried one to Gloria. Then “Boo!” they all said at once to the baby, who had anticipated their greeting by starting to cry.

  “You all be careful around my baby, it’s a girl. She don’t take to seeing roughnecks or hearing slang language,” said Jack.

  “Boo! Boo! Boo!” the Broadwees called systematically and in unison at the baby, like some form of encouragement practiced in their family.

  “If you-all got nothing to do but sit and wait, start showing some manners!” Jack shouted. “And look out for your feet in front! Somebody may come out of my road in a bigger hurry than you are.”

  “A bite on the hook already, Jack,” called Aycock. “Somebody’s putting dust in your road.”

  “It’s Uncle Homer for sure! He’s yielding to the day!” Jack came scudding down the bank. “Judge Moody, here comes Uncle Homer and a load of helpers!”

  Gloria caught him by the hand. “Uncle Homer’s never come to your help yet,” she said. “If he comes now, I’ll have to take back my opinion of him.”

  Dust like a flapping blanket appeared back among the trees. A wall of dust rose on the farm track and toppled downward, there was a bang at the ditch, and a light delivery van came into view struggling to get up into the road.

  “Am I to be towed by that?” asked Judge Moody.

  “And just as church would be letting out at home!” cried his wife.

  The van, as it pulled up its last wheel and turned toward Halfway Forks, showed its panel side painted with a big chicken dressed up in a straw hat, bow tie, and cane, while down over its head swung an axe of Pilgrim Father’s size. It skidded, something was thrown out, and it ripped past them all. So empty of a load was it that its rear half danced all the way down the road, dust rising like a series of camp tents going up on the zigzag behind it. Tied onto its back doors, like an apron on backwards, there’d been a strip of oilcloth lettered “Let Homer Do It. There Is No Substitute for Experience.”

  “Didn’t even wait to bring his own dog,” said Jack. “Something about the way he handles himself makes you believe he’d be part-willing to take the joy out of life. Well, there’s only one of Uncle Homer.”

  “I was right about him, anyway,” said Gloria.

  “Not a hundred percent,” said Jack. He picked up what Uncle Homer had thrown at them—a length of chain, a little shorter than the length of Jack’s arm. He held it up, to the Broadwees’ cackle.

  “Well, this means they know. That’s how I read this chain,” said Jack. “So help is still forthcoming, somewhere behind.”

  “They’re all up there just sitting and listening to ’emselves talk, Jack,” said Gloria.

  “Recounting for Granny some tale or another about me?” he wondered.

  “This is going to be another one if you aren’t careful.”

  “There’s another cloud of dust coming from the other way,” said Mrs. Moody.

  “And a whopper!” said Jack. “What that means is Better Friendship has turned ’em loose and a lot of hungry Methodists are headed home for dinner.”

  “Church people! Now they’ll be my answer,” said Mrs. Moody. “They’ll stop and help.�
�� She composed a long face and moved forward.

  “Watch out for your feet, Mrs. Judge,” cautioned Jack.

  Mrs. Moody raised Judge Moody’s hat and started to wave it at the line coming, buggies and some wagons and a clacking Ford coupe all in one cloud of dust.

  “What are your Methodists like?” Mrs. Moody cried, as one after the other they went driving past her.

  “Well, Aycock is one,” said Jack.

  “Why won’t they stop for a fellow worshipper, at least?” she cried, still waving Judge Moody’s Panama.

  “His attendance has been middling-poor,” Jack answered. “For the last year and a half it’s been down to nothing. His church may have forgotten what he looks like.”

  “I’d just like to see a bunch of Presbyterians try to get by me that fast!” said Mrs. Moody.

  “There went Preacher Dollarhide, I believe. He must have worked up a fairly decent appetite,” observed Jack, as the Ford coupe rushed the length of Jack’s ditch and got past a buggy.

  “Why, you didn’t even help me make ’em stop!” Mrs. Moody exclaimed. “I believe you waved ’em on by!”

  “It’s my wife and baby Judge Moody saved, Mrs. Judge,” Jack told her gravely. “And I feel right particular about my help.”

  “Now watch out—there’s something else coming down that funny little road,” warned Mrs. Moody.

  Something that resembled a fat moon drawn in pink chalk had popped up on the rise of the farm track. It just sat there for the moment, as if waiting to be believed. It was the Banner school bus with the dust of all summer on it. It looked empty. Then Elvie’s little face could be made out, framed in the lower half of the steering wheel.

  Judge Moody jabbed a finger. “That child going for help?”

  “It’s her opinion she is the help!” said Jack.

  “I object to being at the mercy of a school bus fully as much as my husband objects to a chicken wagon,” Mrs. Moody said, as it waited there above them, with its jawless face, every metal part below the headlight sockets gone. “Now that’s just not going to tow me.”

  “Not towed! Not with the Buick still trying so hard to go the other way!” cried Jack. “You’re about to be one end of the best tug-o’-war ever seen around Banner!”