Losing Battles

by Eudora Welty

  “The thing to remember is they change,” said Aunt Cleo, with a nod toward Granny. “And you and me will do the same, I hate to tell you.”

  From the moving swing above them, El vie pointed to far away, to the edge of what they could see. There stood the moon, like somebody at the door. One lop-side showing first, the way a rose opens, the moon was pushing up through the rose-dye of dust. The dust they’d breathed all day and tasted with every breath and bite and kiss was being partly taken from them by the rising of the full, freighted moon.

  “When I first went to Miss Julia, I loved her more than Mr. Hugg, now I love Mr. Hugg more than her—wish I was back with him now! These are his socks,” Miss Lexie said, cocking her ankle for them. “I’m still busy wearing out some of his socks for him.”

  A thrush was singing. As they all fell quiet, except for Miss Lexie dragging her own chair back to the table, its evening song was heard.

  Granny heard that out too. Then she whispered, and Miss Beulah put her head down.

  “I’m ready to go home now.”

  Miss Beulah put her arms around her. Granny, as well as she was able, kept from being held. “Granny, you are home,” said Miss Beulah, gazing into her grandmother’s face.

  “What’s she getting scared of?” asked Aunt Birdie.

  “Granny’s not scared of anything.”

  “Afraid we’ll all go off and leave her?” asked Aunt Beck.

  “Please saddle my horse,” Granny said. “I’d like you to fetch my whip.”

  “Granny, you’re home now.” Miss Beulah knelt down, not letting the old lady with her feeble little movements escape out of her arms. “Granny, it’s the reunion! You’re having your birthday Sunday, and we’re all around you, celebrating it with you just like always.”

  “Then,” said Granny, “I think I’d be right ready to accept a birthday present from somebody.”

  Miss Beulah moved a step back from Granny’s chair, and there she sat where everybody could see her. Her lap was holding a new white cup and saucer, and on the ground around her rested everything else she had untied from its strings and unshucked from its wrappings, all their presents—a pillow of new goose feathers, a pint of fresh garden sass, a soda-box full of sage, a foot-tub full of fresh-dug, blooming-size hyacinth bulbs, three worked pincushions, an envelope full of blood-red Indian peach seeds, a prayer-plant that had by now folded its leaves, a Joseph’s-coat, a double touch-me-not, a speckled geranium, and an Improved Boston fern wrapped in bread paper, a piece of cut-glass from the mail order house given by Uncle Noah Webster, a new apron, the owl lamp, and, chewing a hambone, the nine-month-old, already treeing, long-eared Blue-tick coonhound pup that any of her great-grandchildren would come and take out hunting for her any time she was ready. And there behind her, spread over her chair and ready to cloak her, was “The Delectable Mountains.”

  “You’ve had your presents, Granny. You’ve already had every single one,” said Miss Beulah softly.

  Granny covered her eyes. Her fingers trembled, the backs of her hands showed their blotches like pansy faces pressed into the papery skin.

  “Just look around you,” said Miss Beulah. “And you’ve thanked everybody, too.”

  Then Granny dropped her hands, and she and Miss Beulah looked at each other, each face as grief-stricken as the other.

  By now, the girls’ and boys’ softball game had gone on, it seemed, for hours. But now the teams trailed in, Ella Fay Renfro in front tossing a sweat-fraught pitcher’s glove. Children too tired to sing or speak could still blow soap-bubbles through empty sewing spools, or hold out their arms and cry. Little boys raised a ring of dust around them too, galloping on cornstalk horses and firing a last round of shots from imaginary pistols over their heads. A hummingbird moved down the last colored thing, the wall of montbretias, as though it were writing on it in words.

  At that moment the distant reports stopped. There was a sound like a woodpecker at work: Uncle Curtis snoring in his chair. In the school chair, Judge Moody sat very still too, with his hand over his eyes.

  “I believe your husband’s reached the Land of Nod, with my husband,” Aunt Beck told Mrs. Moody. “Is that chair where he’s going to sleep tonight?”

  “And still I’d know him for a judge,” said Miss Beulah, slowly turning around to her company again. “Look at that dewlap. I suppose a man like him goes right on judging in his sleep.”

  “He’s not asleep,” said Mrs. Moody. “Far from it.”

  “Oh, come—come—come—come,” the bass voice of Uncle Noah Webster started off, and they came in with him, “Come to the church in the wild wood, oh come to the church in the dell.” After that, Miss Beulah, with a churning fist, led them through “Will there be any stars, any stars in my crown when at evening the sun goeth down?”

  Mr. Willy Trimble, who didn’t sing, got to his feet and waited on them to finish.

  “Well, I’ll tell you a little something I know they don’t know about,” said Mr. Willy. “Goes clear back to early morning, when I carried Miss Julia up to her house and safe inside. Laying spang in the middle of the kitchen table, instead of a spoon-holder or a piece of flypaper or a nice pie, was this.” He reached for his back pants pocket and brought out a narrow, stiff, blue-backed book, handling it like a little paddle.

  “I’d know that a mile away,” said Miss Beulah, coming and taking it out of his hands, then immediately thrusting it back. “It’s the speller. Oh, how I could beat the world spelling! I could spell everybody in this reunion down right now,” she offered. “Give me a word.”

  “Can’t think of any,” several immediately said.

  “Extraordinary,” said Miss Beulah. “E-x, ex, t-r-a, tra, extra, o-r, or, extraor, d-i, di, extraordi, n-a-r-y, nary, extraordinary. Does any of my sisters-in-law here present remember that spelling match?”

  “You got it spelled but wet your britches,” Aunt Nanny said, pointing a finger at her.

  “Laugh, then! I spelled you all down with that word like a row of tin soldiers.”

  “One thing I can tell you: she kept that book by her and it’s all she did keep by her, after she got like she was. Now what was it doing out on the kitchen table?” demanded Miss Lexie. “It lived under her pillow, with her hand over it. Once she had it, try and prize it loose. Finger by finger! You couldn’t.”

  “Well, under her pillow’s where it was,” said Mr. Willy, sounding apologetic. “I didn’t like to say where, but it was. I laid her down and trying to ease her fiery head, I jerked out what was so ungiving beneath it. She didn’t say ‘Put it back,’ didn’t say not to. She was past it.”

  Miss Lexie peeked, on tiptoe, over Mr. Willy’s shoulder. “Look at the cover-boards,” she said with an odd look of pride. “After I got her pencil hid, she did that work with a straight pin.”

  The white gouges in the dark blue, with faint-hyphenated scratches frailly joining them together, Miss Beulah followed from point to point with a slow-moving finger. “M-Y-W-I-L-L,” she spelled out.

  Judge Moody, sitting crammed in the school chair, lifted a face strained around the eyes, filling now with a martyred look, as though he might be sitting in Ludlow, back home in the courthouse again. “I’ll take charge of that speller, if you please,” he said. “I think there may be a document preserved inside it that was meant to be delivered to me.”

  Hands passed him the speller through the dumbfounded silence. Judge Moody lifted the speller and shook it. Nothing dropped out of the pages, though birds came down low into the althea bush behind him, as silent as petals shedding from a dark rose.

  He laid the book down on the desk-arm and opened it, letting the pages riffle by, back to front. When he came to the flyleaf at the beginning, he sat back, drew with care from his breast pocket his spectacle case, and hooked the horn-rim spectacles on. They watched him study that narrow page. There was handwriting on both sides of it. Then, without raising his head, he began pounding with the flat of his hand on the desk-arm of hi
s chair.

  “Judge Moody.” Miss Beulah ventured close. “I’ve heard you more than a time or two try to put a word in edgewise. Are you about to tell us you come into this story too?”

  Judge Moody pulled himself out of the chair and climbed, heavy and rumpled-looking, to his feet.

  “Mama,” patiently asked the same child’s voice that had asked it before, “is that the Booger?”

  “I’m an old friend,” he said. “Now this is written in her own hand, and my name is on it.” He offered the open book to their unwilling gaze, exposed it there for a moment. Then he took it back under study. He began to frown, turning slowly ahead in the book, shifting its angle this way and that. “It’s written right on the spelling pages,” he muttered. “And the pencil’s a little hard to read. Now, will you listen, please? This concerns you all.”

  Exclamations of dismay rose from the whole crowd.

  “What’s the substance of it?” Uncle Curtis asked. “Could you just give us that?”

  Judge Moody took his eyes from the page and told them. “The substance? Yes. You’re all mourners.”

  Miss Beulah even laid a hand behind her ear, as the groans gave way to a straining hush over all the reunion.

  “You are every one going to attend her burial,” Judge Moody said.

  They cried out.

  “We’re invited, sir?” asked Mr. Renfro.

  “Not invited. Told. You’d all just better good and well be there,” said the Judge, reading on ahead to himself.

  “The whole reunion? Is she counting me?” asked Aunt Cleo. “Well! I’m famous!”

  “The reunion is still not quite everybody. She says everybody. I gather from her words if you ever went to school to Miss Julia Mortimer, you are now constituted her mourner,” said Judge Moody.

  “What’s constituted?” the aunts asked one another, while some of the uncles rose to their feet.

  “Whoa! Slow down a minute for us,” said Uncle Noah Webster, trying to laugh.

  “ ‘A plain coffin, no fuss … Father Stephen McRaven, if he remembers how hard I tried to teach him algebra, can try praying me into Eternity. St. Louis, Missouri, will find him …’ Here,” said Judge Moody. “ ‘The Banner School roll call is instructed to assemble in a body inside the school yard. The old, the blind, the crippled and ailing, and the congenital complainers may assemble inside the schoolhouse itself, so far as room may be found on the benches at the back. For the children, there is positively to be no holiday declared.’ ”

  “Why do we have to go back to school? We’ve done with all that,” said Uncle Curtis.

  “And at the signal, we all go marching over the bridge in a long, long line to Alliance?” cried Uncle Dolphus. “She’s not asking much!”

  “May I have quiet restored?” said Judge Moody. “You won’t need to go to her. She’s coming to you.”

  “Whoa!” called Uncle Noah Webster again, and Uncle Curtis asked, “Judge Moody, are you certain-sure you know what that book’s saying?”

  The Judge’s mouth had drawn down. He continued, “ ‘The mourners will keep good order among themselves and wait till I reach the schoolhouse. Good behavior is requested and advised on the part of one and all as I am lowered into my grave—’ ” He looked at what was coming and for a full minute stopped reading aloud. Then he went on—“ ‘already to have been dug beneath the mountain stone which constitutes the doorstep of Banner School. The stone is to be replaced at once after the grave is filled, so the children will be presented with no excuse for staying home from school. In case of rain, the order of events will proceed unchanged.’ ” Judge Moody closed the book with the sound of a crack of thunder, then gave them the last words. “ ‘And then, you fools—mourn me.’ ” He lifted to them a face that was long and lined.

  “ ‘Whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire!’ ” said Brother Bethune, as he came and joined the table again. He sat down, giving off a smell of steaming Bible and gunpowder smoke.

  “If this ain’t keeping after us!” Uncle Dolphus cried. “Following us to our graves.”

  “You’re following her,” said Judge Moody.

  “Well,” said Miss Beulah, “she may be dead and waiting in her coffin, but she hasn’t given up yet, I see that. Trying to regiment the reunion into being part of her funeral!”

  “Well, you can’t make people come to see you buried just by trying the same tricks you used on ’em when you was alive,” said Aunt Nanny.

  “Who’s going to not mind her, and stay home? I’m just not too sure I can be in her parade. I’m going to have to ask Miss Julia’s ghost to excuse me,” said Aunt Birdie in a childlike voice, beginning to giggle.

  “I’ve been in a heap of your dust today already,” said Auntie Fay.

  “How’s she going to get us back home?” Uncle Noah Webster inquired. “She’s burying herself and just leaving us standing in the school yard. I live in South Mississippi now!”

  “As for me, I’m not a child,” said Uncle Percy, whittling. “To be told.”

  “I’m not a child either,” said Aunt Nanny.

  “I’m a child,” said Etoyle, hopping up among them. “And I like funerals.”

  “Well, listen to me. I ain’t a-going,” said Uncle Dolphus. “Now what’s she going to do about it?”

  “I might have gone back and pitched in today, if anybody’d asked or sent for me. But they didn’t,” said Miss Lexie. “And now, I’m not real sure I’ll even go and swell their number to see her buried. I might ask myself first, who’ll mourn me?”

  “Well, you may wake up feeling more like charity in the morning, Sister Lexie,” Brother Bethune said heavily. “Me and you both. Take it from me, Sunday can get too crowded.”

  “Miss Julia didn’t stint herself when she called on everybody to be present!” said Aunt Nanny. “Greedy thing.”

  “But you go expecting too much out of other souls all your life and the day comes when you may have tried ’em too far,” Miss Beulah said. She cocked her head at Judge Moody. “Well, I can say this much to you, sir: all it’d take to keep the whole nation away would be for you to stand up like she wanted you to and let ’em know they’s whistled for.”

  “I wish she’d minded her own business and not ours,” said Aunt Birdie.

  “She never did that in her life. And so brag on her, brag on her all you want! But I’ll tell you this when you’ve finished,” Miss Beulah warned them all. “She never did learn how to please.”

  “No,” said Uncle Curtis, “she never. You’re right, Beulah, and you nearly always are.” Miss Beulah nodded. “Knowing the way to please and pacify the public and pour oil on the waters was entirely left out when they was making her pattern.”

  “Maybe that wasn’t what she was trying for,” Aunt Beck said. “Since she was going about the other thing just as hard as a steam engine.”

  “Beck is always in danger of getting sorry for the other side,” said Miss Beulah.

  “Didn’t even know how to please when she picked a day to die, to my notion!” cried Aunt Birdie loyally. “But she didn’t damage our spirits much—howsoever she might have liked to. Not ours!”

  “ ‘I am in school to learn.’ That was her cry. To this day I can see Earl Comfort being sent to the board to write it a hundred times. And every single line of it going right downhill,” said Uncle Dolphus.

  “And if she’s going in a grave down at the schoolhouse, it’s old Earl himself will be the one has to dig it for her,” said Uncle Noah Webster. “Don’t imagine he’s too pleased at her yet.”

  “And she couldn’t beat time when she marched us,” said Aunt Birdie. “She run ahead of us.”

  “No, she couldn’t beat good time. And I say give me a teacher who can do it all. Or else don’t let her even start trying,” said Uncle Percy. “It’s her fault, right now, we don’t know as much as we might. Stay poor as Job’s turkey all our lives. She ought to made us stay in school, and learn some profit.”

>   “Yes siree. If she was all that smart, why couldn’t she have done a little better work on you and I?” Uncle Curtis asked.

  “She read in the daytime.” Mr. Renfro’s lips were judicious as he looked at Judge Moody. “When she boarded with us, she did. And that was a thing surpassing strange for a well woman to do.”

  “Well, I expect what happened to her was she put a little more of her own heart in it than she knew. And tried to make her teaching all there was,” said Aunt Beck. “She was in love with Banner School.” Awe and compassion together were in her voice.

  “All she wanted was a teacher’s life,” Gloria said. “But it looked like past a certain point nobody was willing to let her have it.”

  “Well, it’s too late to change it now,” said Miss Beulah.

  “When she could be sitting at the foot of Judgment this minute? I reckon it is too late!” said Aunt Birdie.

  “She knows more than we do now,” Aunt Beck reproached them gently.

  “There was only one Miss Julia Mortimer, and I’m glad. But she didn’t spare herself for that reason. She once was needed, and could tell herself that,” Aunt Beck said. “She had that.”

  “Not in the end,” Miss Lexie claimed. “That failed her in the end.”

  “What did she finally get like? Drawing to the end?” asked Aunt Cleo.

  “She was getting a good deal like Mr. Hugg, or he’s getting like her, take your pick. Old men and old women, they lose that too,” said Miss Lexie, with what appeared to be contentment.

  “Sister and ladies, she’s dead and not even covered,” said Mr. Renfro then, so softly that his voice barely made its tunnel through theirs. “Let’s leave her lay. We’ve lived through it now.”

  “And Banner School makes just one more thing that’s happened to me,” Aunt Birdie confided to them. “It must’ve been pure poison while it lasted, but it didn’t leave me any scars. I was so young, and it was so far-fetched. And I’ve gone a long ways ahead of it now!” She blew a kiss at Gloria. “And you will too!”