Losing Battles by Eudora Welty Page A

standing there gawking at her. ‘What is your name and grade?’
    “ ‘Aycock Comfort, and I thought I’d quit.’
    “ ‘I’m putting you to further use,’ says she.
    “ ‘Well, I’m not the one they generally calls on,’ says Aycock.
    “ ‘You’re more than tall enough to see over the steering wheel,’ she says. ‘I’ll let you carry this load of children as far as they live.’
    “ ‘If I can get it to crank, all right,’ says Aycock. ‘I rather drive a pleasure car, but slide in.’ The Comforts never says ‘Thank you’ for a favor. They say that’s because they’re fully as good as you are. But the teacher don’t slide in with him . ‘Just carry the children,’ she says. ‘I need to wait for the elected driver to get back here so I can give him his punishment. You are just the substitute.’
    “Put Aycock right back in the seventh grade. He’d been out of school four years, but Jack had had to give it up for five, so as to give the little ones a chance to start. And now, for the new teacher’s sake, he’s determined to do everybody’s work and let her teach him too. The whole five months of it out of the year.” Uncle Percy’s voice failed him for a minute.
    “Little did Jack know, when he started back to school that morning to try out the new teacher!” Aunt Nanny said with a wide smile.
    “Little did Gloria know!” Aunt Beck said. “With the tumult over, I reckon she just sat down in the school swing to wait for him.”
    “He had to ride her home on his horse, holding on behind him!” said Aunt Nanny.
    “Why, Nanny, he sat her up in the saddle, and come home leading him,” said Miss Beulah. “And the cows had been calling to him since sundown.”
    Gloria raised and let fall her shoulders in what looked like asigh. Out there with her flew the yellow butterflies of August—as wild and bright as people’s notions and dreams, but filled with a dream of their own; in one bright body, as though against a head-wind, they were flying toward the east.

    “All right, did the ring ever turn up?” asked Aunt Cleo.
    “Cleo, what in the name of goodness did you think we ever started this in order to tell? No’m!”
    “Sure enough? How hard you look for it?” she asked.
    “Listen! We all looked till the sun went down and we was putting our eyes out trying to see,” said Miss Beulah, coming to the head of the passage. “Combing the woods and pasture and that creek bank and the weeds and the briars! Here on this farm it was every hill of corn, every stick of beans—and Jack had those rows as clean as I keep this house, didn’t he? And this family knows how to look! If something’s trying to hide from us, we’ll find it! But the blessed ring fooled us.”
    “Ha ha,” Ella Fay spoke from the yard.
    “And I’ve got a good eye on you!” Miss Beulah called to her. “I want to see you twine Grandpa’s stand so thick with honeysuckle that Brother Bethune’ll have a hard time finding it .”
    “Well, if you didn’t see the ring anywhere, I hope you got all the money picked up,” said Aunt Cleo.
    “ What money? Curly’s money?” Uncle Noah Webster was asking through their shouts of laughter. “Have you heard of anybody yet that pays that billy goat cash?”
    “Will you tell me where on earth they elect to keep what they run the store on?” Aunt Cleo demanded to know. “They have to keep change.”
    “In Ora’s purse I think you’ll find the majority of it today the same as then. Though I’m not trying to tell you she ain’t got a sugar bin too, if you want to go knocking down the door and tromping in the house to make sure,” said Miss Beulah. “I don’t. I don’t go in their house.”
    “Sister Cleo,” Uncle Curtis said, “before Curly slapped in that gold ring, he’d put very little else in that safe worth taking out.”
    Aunt Birdie said, “Miss Ora kept a thing or two of hers inthere that she don’t consider it nobody’s business to go