Losing Battles by Eudora Welty

Author:Eudora Welty [Welty, Eudora]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-307-78798-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

As they sang, the tree over them, Billy Vaughn’s Switch, with its ever-spinning leaves all light-points at this hour, looked bright as a river, and the tables might have been a little train of barges it was carrying with it, moving slowly downstream. Brother Bethune’s gun, still resting against the trunk, was travelling too, and nothing at all was unmovable, or empowered to hold the scene still fixed or stake the reunion there.

Part 4

They sang for a while longer, still in their chairs but settled back, some of them singing with their eyes closed. On the tables before them there were only the scraps and the bones, the boats of the eaten-out watermelons; yet still, now and again, a white chicken feather floated down from the sky and did a brief spin on the grass, or a curl of down landed on one of the tables.

“Why does she sing so old-timey?” Aunt Cleo asked. Granny was a jump ahead of everybody else with her fa-so-la, on up to the Amen of “Blessed Assurance.”

“She sings it that way because that’s the way she likes to hear it,” Miss Beulah told her. “If that ain’t the way you want it, my little granny’s going to go you one better than you want.”

By now the girls’ and boys’ baseball game had started again in the pasture. There was a board laid across the cedar trunk and little girls were seesawing.

“There’s Gloria’s perch those children are making free with,” observed Miss Lexie.

“I don’t need it any more, thank you,” Gloria said.

She was coming out of the house now at Jack’s shoulder; he was carrying a syrup bucket stuffed to the top.

“After Aycock gets his satisfaction out of this, I’ll carry word to little Mis’ Comfort where he is, so she can give up and go to bed,” Jack told Granny’s table.

“Is he going to eat it like a horse?” cried Miss Beulah.

“Promise me. Promise me when you get up there you won’t try anything single-handed, young fellow,” said Mrs. Moody.

“Yes, I’d like to have your word on that too,” said Judge Moody.

“Single-handed—that ain’t the way we do it around Banner,” Jack told them. “And I already promised Curly the same thing. We’re saving the Buick till in the morning.”

He bounced kisses on Gloria’s and his mother’s cheeks and on Granny’s chin, and walked away. There was nothing of the world to see any longer below their gate, only the low roof of dust lying over the road, fine-stretched and unbroken as skin, and Jack went down through that and out of sight.

“Don’t like the way they keep sneaking in and out on me,” said Granny.

“Never you fear,” Miss Beulah said to her quickly. “He’ll be back when we want him, he’s not one to fail us.”

“Seems to me you’ve let an awful lot hinge on Aycock. I wonder if you know a great deal about his appetite,” Mr. Renfro said to Judge Moody. “I think of the time Jack got home from a little hunting and Aycock tagged along with him, and it was supper time.

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