Losing Battles Read Online Free PDF Page B

time was—and when’s your dad going to give me the next penny on it! You-all never did have anything and never will!’ And he’s just about to catch her. She turns around, reaches in, slides out in his face the most precious treasure there is, a gold ring! And that’s just the way her mind works,” said Aunt Nanny proudly.
    “She’s borrowed it out of Granny’s Bible for the first day of school,” said Aunt Birdie. “Yes sir, and had it tucked in where Granny tucks her silver snuffbox.”
    “Little devil,” said Aunt Nanny.
    “And he put out his great paw and taken it! Of course she right away asks him to please kindly give that back.”
    “And he wouldn’t give it back?” a chorus of cries came, as hilarious as if none of them here had ever heard. “And what excuse did he offer for such behavior?” said Aunt Birdie in sassy tones.
    “Oho, she didn’t give him time to resurrect one. Out of that store she flies! Not even his wineball would she take—spit it right out in the road. And put out her tongue at him, to remind him just who she was,” cried Aunt Nanny, hitching herself forward a little farther.
    “Pure gold?” Aunt Cleo asked.
    Uncle Noah Webster rumbled at her: “Our dead mother’s. Granny’s keeping it in her Bible. That’s your answer.”
    “What was a half-grown girl like that doing with it?” she asked.
    “Carrying it to school. She’d already shown it to the other girls,” Aunt Beck said with a sigh. “I don’t know yet how sheescaped having the teacher take it up, first thing.”
    “Teacher’s too young and green,” voices teased.
    Gloria sat on, before their eyes, with her back to them. Out beyond the gate, the heat flickered and danced, and devil’s whirlwinds skittered across the road.
    “Ella Fay Renfro’d go parading off in your hat if you didn’t stop her,” Miss Lexie Renfro said.
    “She’s over-hungry to be gauding herself up, living in the land o’ dreams,” said Aunt Nanny, winking. “Something like me, back when I was a schoolgirl.”
    “All right, then what does she do?” cried Aunt Cleo.
    “Planted herself right there in the road and bawls: ‘Big booger’s got Granny’s gold ring!’ Etoyle says that’s the swiftest she ever saw her brother Jack brought out of his desk.”
    “Oh, Jack is so dependable!” sighed Aunt Beck.
    “Is it always Jack?” asked Aunt Cleo.
    “Try hollering help yourself one time and see,” cried Miss Beulah from the kitchen.
    “Sprung over his desk like a blessed deer and tore out of the schoolhouse and in that store he prances. And in two shakes Jack Renfro and Curly Stovall’s yoked up in another fight.”
    “A schoolboy fighting an old man?” cried Aunt Cleo.
    “Listen, Curly Stovall ain’t old. He’s just mean!” Uncle Noah Webster told her.
    “And Jack wasn’t due to be a schoolboy much longer!” grinned Aunt Nanny. “He didn’t know it but his days were already numbered.”
    “Listen, Sister Cleo, here’s what Curly Stovall is: big and broad as the kitchen stove, red in the face as Tom Turkey, and ugly as sin all over. Old Curly Stovall ain’t old and I don’t think he’ll get old,” said Uncle Dolphus.
    “The Mr. Stovall I buried was old,” she said. “Creepin’!”
    “You can forget him.” Uncle Dolphus brought the front legs of his chair down hard. “Had they but saved it for Saturday!” he cried to his brothers. “It wasn’t only that we had to miss a good one. But fifteen or twenty more fellows at least would’ve been on hand, and ready and able to tell it afterwards, in Court or out, and help us give the world a little better picture of the way we do it in Banner.”
    “But like it was, everybody’s busy getting in the last of their peas,” said Uncle Percy. “Well, Curly skinned Jack’s ear, and Jackhad to skin Curly’s ear, and so on, and old Curly’s getting pretty fractious, and calling now for his pup to come and take a piece out of Jack’s britches. He comes,