Losing Battles Read Online Free Page A

Aunt Cleo called, as Miss Lexie exchanged short greetings with the Beechams all around her and refused a seat on a nail keg.
    “Well, let’s say I know what to do just about as well as the next fella,” said Miss Lexie.
    “You’ve run up on the real thing now, sister,” Aunt Cleo said. “And I could tell you tales—!”
    Vaughn, having led the mule out of the yard, lifted out of the wagon bed the cedar buckets and milk buckets full of water drawn from Grandpa Vaughn’s old well, the only one that hadn’t run dry. He lugged them to the house, replenished the drinking bucket on the porch, lugged the rest to the kitchen. Then he let Mr. Renfro take an end of each of the tables he had brought up from the dinner grounds at Damascus Church in Banner, along with one or two of their better benches, and help him get them down out of the wagon.
    “Vaughn! Hurry up, and get your other clothes on! Don’t entertain the reunion looking like that!” called Miss Beulah.

    Now there was family everywhere, front gallery and back, tracking in and out of the company room, filling the bedrooms and kitchen, breasting the passage. The passageway itself was creaking; sometimes it swayed under the step and sometimes it seemed to tremble of itself, as the suspension bridge over the river at Banner had the reputation of doing. With chairs, beds, windowsills, steps, boxes,kegs, and buckets all taken up and little room left on the floor, they overflowed into the yard, and the men squatted down in the shade. Over in the pasture a baseball game had started up. The girls had the swing.
    “Been coming too thick and fast for you?” Aunt Birdie asked Aunt Cleo.
    “Everywheres I look is Beecham Beecham Beecham,” she said.
    “Beulah’s brothers. Except for one, that circle is still unbroken,” said Miss Lexie Renfro. “Renfros come a bit more scarce.”
    “Where they all get here from?” cried Aunt Cleo, looking full circle around her.
    “Everywhere. Everywhere you ever heard of in Boone County—I can see faces from Banner, Peerless, Wisdom, Upright, Morning Star, Harmony, and Deepstep with no trouble at all.”
    “And this is Banner. The very heart,” said Miss Beulah, calling from the kitchen.
    “Never heard of any of it,” said Aunt Cleo. “Except Banner. Banner is all Noah Webster knows how to talk about. I hail from Piney.”
    “I at present call Alliance my home,” said Miss Lexie. “That puts me across the river from everybody I see.” She went to put her hat away and came struggling backwards up the passage to them dragging something.
    Miss Beulah shrieked, “Vaughn! Come get that away from your Aunt Lexie!” She was running behind it—a cactus growing in a wooden tub. “Little bantie you, pulling a forty-pound load of century plant, just to show us!”
    “I’ve pulled a heavier load than this. And the company can just have that to march around,” Miss Lexie said. “Give ’em one thing more to do today besides eat and hear ’emselves talk.”
    The cactus was tied up onto a broomstick but grew down in long reaches as if trying to clamber out of the tub. It was wan in color as sage or mistletoe.
    “It’s threatening to bloom, Mother,” Mr. Renfro warned Miss Beulah.
    “I see those buds as well as you do. And it’s high time, say I. Bloom! Bloom!” she cried at it gaily. “Yes, it’s making up its mind to bloom tonight—about time for ’em all to go home, if it knows what’s good for it.”
    “Can’t tell a century plant what to do,” said Granny.
    “Now, let that be enough out of you, Lexie. Set,” said Miss Beulah. “And help us look for Jack.”
    “Jack Renfro? He won’t come. He hasn’t been in there long enough yet, by my reckoning,” said Miss Lexie. She had a gray, tired-looking face, gray-speckled hair cut Buster Brown with her own sewing scissors that were swinging wide on the ribbon tied around her neck as she walked around looking for something to do. “Better start thinking what