Losing Battles Read Online Free PDF

looked the other way, she’s across the road and into the store after it.”
    “And shame once more on a big girl like that,” said Miss Lexie.
    “Well, wouldn’t you have liked the same?” Uncle Noah Webster teased. “A little something sweet to hold in your cheek, Lexie?”
    “Not I.”
    Aunt Nanny winked at the porchful. “The first day I had to go back to Banner School, I’d get a gnawing and a craving for the same thing!”
    “And been switched for it!” they cheered. “By a good strong right arm!”
    “It didn’t take Ella Fay but one good jump across a dry mud-hole to the store. And old Curly Stovall’s just waiting.”
    “Stovall? Wait a minute, slow down, halt,” interrupted Aunt Cleo.
    “You’re a Stovall,” several guessed.
    “Wrong. I was married to one, the first time round,” she said. “My first husband’s folks comes from Sandy. It’s a big roaring horde of ’em still there.”
    “The first Stovalls around here walked into Banner barefooted—three of ’em, and one of ’em’s wife. I don’t know what description of hog-wallow they come from,” said Mr. Renfro, passing by in the yard, “but the storekeeper then alive put the one in long pants to work for him. Stovalls is with us and bury with us.”
    “Visit their graves,” Aunt Beck invited Aunt Cleo. “They need attention.”
    “Don’t you-all care for the Stovalls?” she asked, and Uncle Noah Webster slapped a hand on her leg and gave a shout, as though watching her find this out was one of the things he’d married her for.
    “If I was any kind of a Stovall at all, I’d keep a little bit quiet for the rest of this story,” came the bell-like voice of Miss Beulah up the passage out of the kitchen.
    “Well, Ella Fay didn’t much more than get herself inside the store than she had to start running for it,” said Uncle Percy.
    “What had she done?” Aunt Cleo challenged them.
    “Not a thing in the world that we know of but grow a little during the summer,” Uncle Percy went on mildly. “ ‘Well,’ says Curly, ‘look who they’re sending to pay the store.’ ‘I didn’t bring you anything, I come after a wineball,’ she says, as polite as you are. ‘Oh, you did?’ ” To speak the words of rascals, Uncle Percy pitched his poor voice as high as it would go into the confidential-falsetto. “ ‘And it’ll be another wineball tomorrow,’ he says, ‘and another one the tomorrow after that, every school morning till planting time next spring—I can’t afford it. Not another year o’ you!’ Jumps up. ‘When am I ever going to get something back on all that candy-eating?’ says he to her. And she starts to running.”
    “Tell what he’s like, quick,” said Aunt Birdie.
    “He’s great big and has little bitty eyes!” came the voice of Ella Fay from where she was pulling honeysuckle off the cow shed. “Baseball cap and sideburns!”
    “She’s got it! Feel like I can see him coming right this minute,” said Aunt Nanny, hitching forward in her rocker.
    “ ‘Don’t you come a-near me,’ Ella Fay says. She trots in frontof Curly around the store fast as she can, threading her way—you know how Banner Store ain’t quite as bright as day.”
    “Pretty as she can be!” exclaimed the aunts.
    “If only she didn’t have the tread of an elephant,” said Miss Beulah in the kitchen.
    “Girls of his own church will run from him on occasion, so I’m told. Better Friendship Methodist is where he worships, and at protracted meetings, or so I’m told, every girl younger’n forty-five runs from him,” said Uncle Percy primly.
    “Every bit of that is pure Baptist thinking,” said Aunt Beck. “I’d like you to remember there’s plenty of other reasons, just as good, to keep out of that storekeeper’s way, and my sympathies go out to his sister. She can’t even bring him to church.”
    “Well, he’s coming behind Ella Fay and says, ‘Your folks been owing me for seed and feed since