The Reivers (11 page)

"You means the Christmas middle," Ned said. "Maybe I do," the man said. "What is it?" Ned told him. "It's how we done at McCaslin back before the Surrender when old L.Q.C. was alive, and how the Edmonds boy still does. Every spring a middle is streaked off in the best ground on the place, and every stalk of cotton betwixt that middle and the edge of the field belongs to the Christmas fund, not for the boss but for every McCaslin nigger to have a Christmas share of it. That's what a Christmas middle is. Likely you mud-farming folks up here never heard of it." The man looked at Ned awhile. After a while Ned said, "Hee hee hee."

"That's better," the man said. "I thought for a minute me and you was about to misunderstand one another." He said to Boon: "Maybe somebody better guide it."

"Yes," Boon said. "All right," he told me. So I got under the wheel, mud and all. But we didn't move yet. The man said, "I forgot to mention it, so maybe I better. Prices have doubled around here since last year."

"Why?" Boon said. "It's the same car, the same mud-hole; be damned if I dont believe it's even the same mud."

"That was last year. There's more business now. So much more that I cant afford not to go up."

"All right, goddammit," Boon said. "Go on." So we moved, ignominious, at the pace of the mules, on, into the next mudhole without stopping, on and out again. The bridge was just ahead now; beyond it, we could see the road all the way to the edge of the bottom and safety.

"You're all right now," the man said. "Until you come back." Boon was unhooking the log chain while Ned freed the traces and handed the doubletree back up to the man on the mule.

"We aint coming back this way," Boon said.

"I wouldn't neither," the man said. Boon went back to the last puddle and washed some of the mud from his hands and came back and took four dollars from his wallet. The man didn't move.

"It's six dollars," he said.

"Last year it was two dollars," Boon said. "You said it's double now. Double two is four. All right. Here's four dollars."

"I charge a dollar a passenger," the man said. "There was two of you last year. That was two dollars. The price is doubled now. There's three of you. That's six dollars. Maybe you'd rather walk back to Jefferson than pay two dollars, but maybe that boy and that nigger wouldn't."

"And maybe I aint gone up neither," Boon said. "Suppose I dont pay you six dollars. Suppose in fact I dont pay you nothing."

"You can do that too," the man said. "These mules has had a hard day, but I reckon there's still enough git in them to drag that thing back where they got it from."

But Boon had already quit, given up, surrendered. "God damn it," he said, "this boy aint nothing but a child! Sholy for just a little child—"

"Walking back to Jefferson might be lighter for him," the man said, "but it wont be no shorter."

"All right," Boon said, "but look at the other one! When he gets that mud washed off, he aint even white!"

The man looked at distance awhile. Then he looked at Boon. "Son," he said, "both these mules is color-blind."

Chapter 5

Boon had told Ned and me that, once we had conquered Hell Creek bottom, we would be in civilisation; he drew a picture of all the roads from there on cluttered thick as fleas with automobiles. Though maybe it was necessary first to put Hell Creek as far behind us as limbo, or forget-fulness, or at least out of sight; maybe we would not be worthy of civilisation until we had got the Hell Creek mud off. Anyway, nothing happened yet. The man took his sk dollars and went away with his mules and doubletree; I noticed in fact that he didn't return to his little house but went on back through the swamp and vanished, as if the day were over; so did Ned notice it. "He aint a hog," Ned said. "He dont need to be. He's done already made six dollars and it aint even dinnertime yet."

"It is as far as I'm concerned," Boon said. "Bring the lunch too." So we took the lunch box Miss Ballenbaugh had packed for us and the block and tackle and axe and shovel and our shoes and stockings and my pants (we couldn't do anything about the automobile, besides being a waste of work until we could reach Memphis, where surely—at least we hoped—there wouldn't be any more mud-holes) and went back down to the creek and washed the tools off and coiled down the block and tackle. And there wasn't much to be done about Boon's and Ned's clothes either, though Boon got bodily into the water, clothes and all, and washed himself off and tried to persuade Ned to follow suit since he—Boon—had a change of clothes in his grip. But all Ned would do was to remove his shirt and put his coat back on. I think I told you about his attache case, which he didn't so much carry when abroad as he wore it, as diplomats wear theirs, carrying (I mean Ned'! Bible and the two tablespoonfuls of—probably—Grandfather's best whiskey) I suspect at times even less in them.

Then we ate lunch—the ham and fried chicken and biscuits and homemade pear preserves and cake and the jug of buttermilk—and put back the emergency mud-defying gear (which in the end had been not a defiance but an inglorious brag) and measured the gasoline tank—a gesture not to distance but to time—and went on. Because the die was indeed cast now; we looked not back to remorse or regret or might-have-been; if we crossed Rubicon when we crossed the Iron Bridge into another county, when we conquered Hell Creek we locked the portcullis and set the bridge on fire. And it did seem as though we had won to reprieve as a reward for invincible determination, or refusal to recognise defeat when we faced it or it faced us. Or maybe it was just Virtue who had given up, relinquished us to Non-virtue to cherish and nurture and coddle in the style whose right we had won with the now irrevocable barter of our souls.

The very land itself seemed to have changed. The farms were bigger, more prosperous, with tighter fences and painted houses and even barns; the very air was urban. We came at last to a broad highway running string-straight into distance and heavily marked with wheel prints; Boon said, with a kind of triumph, as if we had doubted him or as if he had invented it to disprove us, created it, cleared and graded and smoothed it with his own hands (and perhaps even added the wheel marks): "What did I tell you? The highway to Memphis." We could see for miles; much closer than that was a rapid and mounting cloud of dust like a portent, a promise. It was indubitable, travelling that fast and that much of it; we were not even surprised when it contained an automobile; we passed each other, commingling our dust into one giant cloud like a pillar, a signpost raised and set to cover the land with the adumbration of the future: the antlike to and fro, the incurable down-payment itch-foot; the mechanised, the mobilised, the inescapable destiny of America.

And now, gray with dust from toes to eyelids (particularly Boon's still-damp clothes), we could make time, even if, for a while, not speed; without switching off the engine Boon got out and walked briskly around the car to my side, saying briskly to me: "All right. Slide over. You know how. Just dont get the idea you're a forty-mile-a-hour railroad engine." So I drove, on across the sunny May afternoon. I couldn't look at it though, I was too busy, too concentrated (all right, too nervous and proud): the Sabbath afternoon, workless, the cotton and corn growing unvexed now, the mules themselves Sabbatical and idle in the pastures, the people still in their Sunday clothes on galleries and in shady yards with glasses of lemonade or saucers of the ice cream left from dinner. Then we made speed too; Boon said, "We're coming to some towns now. I better take it." We went on. Civilisation was now constant: single country stores and crossroads hamlets; we were barely free of one before here was another, commerce was rife about us, the air was indeed urban, the very dust itself which we raised and moved in had a metropolitan taste to tongue and nostrils; even the Aittle children and the dogs no longer ran to the gates and fences to watch us and the three other automobiles we had passed in the last thirteen miles.

Then the country itself was gone. There were no longer intervals between the houses and shops and stores; suddenly before us was a wide tree-bordered and ordered boulevard with car tracks in the middle; and sure enough, there was the streetcar itself, the conductor and motorman just lowering the back trolley and raising the front one to turn it around and go back to Main Street. "Two minutes to five oclock," Boon said. "Twenty-three and a half hours ago we were in Jefferson, Missippi, eighty miles away. A record." I had been in Memphis before (so had Ned. This morning he had told us so; thirty minutes from now he would prove it) but always by train, never like this: to watch Memphis grow, increase; to assimilate it deliberately like a spoonful of ice cream in the mouth. I had never thought about it other than to assume we would go to the Gayoso Hotel as we—I anyway—always had. So I dont know what mind Boon read this time. "We're going to a kind a boarding house I know," he said. "You'll like it. I had a letter last week from one of the g— ladies staying there that she's got her nephew visiting her so you'll even have somebody to play with. The cook can locate a place for Ned to sleep too."

"Hee hee hee," Ned said. Besides the streetcars there were buggies and surreys—phaetons, traps, stanhopes, at least one victoria, the horses a little white-eyed at us but still collected; evidently Memphis horses were already used to automobiles—so Boon couldn't turn his head to look at Ned. But he could turn one eye.

"Just what do you mean by that?" he said. "Nothing," Ned said. "Mind where you're going and nemmine me. Nemmine me nohow. I got friends here too. You just show me where this automobile gonter be at to-! morrow morning and I'll be there too."

"And you damn well better be," Boon said. "If you aim to go back to Jefferson in it. Me and Lucius never invited you on this trip so you aint none of mine and his responsibility. As far as me and Jefferson are concerned, I dont give a damn whether you come back or not."

"When we gets this automobile back in Jefferson and has to try to look Boss Priest and Mr Maury in the eye, aint none of us gonter have time to give a damn who is back and who aint," Ned said. But it was too late now, far too late to keep on bringing that up. So Boon just said,

"All right, all right. All I said was, if you want to be back in Jefferson when you start doing your not having time to give a damn, you better be where I can see you when I start back." We were getting close to Main Street now—the tall buildings, the stores, the hotels: the Gaston (gone now) and the Peabody (they have moved it since) and the Gayoso, to which all us McCaslins-Edmondses-Priests devoted our allegiance as to a family shrine because our remote uncle and cousin, Theophilus McCaslin, Cousin Ike's father, had been a member of the party of horsemen which legend said (that is, legend to some people maybe. To us it was historical fact) General Forrest's brother led at a gallop into the lobby itself and almost captured a Yankee general. We didn't go that far though. Boon turned into a side street, almost a back alley, with two saloons at the corner and lined with houses that didn't look old or new either, all very quiet, as quiet as Jefferson itself on Sunday afternoon. Boon in fact said so. "You ought to seen it last night, I bet. On any Saturday night. Or even on a week night when there's a fireman's or policeman's or a Elk or something convention in town."

"Maybe they've all gone to early prayer meeting," I said.

"No," Boon said. "I dont think so. Likely they're just resting."

"From what?" I said.

"Hee hee hee," Ned said in the back seat. Obviously, we were learning, Ned had been in Memphis before. Though probably even Grandfather, though he might have known when, didn't know how often. And you see, I was only eleven. This time, the street being empty, Boon did turn his head.

"Just one more out of you," he told Ned.

"One more which?" Ned said. "All I says is, point out where this thing gonter be at tomorrow morning, and I'll already be setting in it when it leaves." So Boon did. We were almost there: a house needing about the same amount of paint the others did, in a small grassless yard but with a sort of lattice vestibule like a well house at the front door. Boon stopped the car at the curb. Now he could turn and look at Ned.

"All right," he said. "I'm taking you at your word. And you better take me at mine. On the stroke of eight oclock tomorrow morning. And I mean the first stroke, not the last one. Because I aint even going to be here to hear it."

Ned was already getting out, carrying his little grip and his muddy shirt. "Aint you got enough troubles of your own on your mind, without trying to tote mine too?" he said. "If you can finish your business here by eight oclock tomorrow morning, how come you think I cant neither?" He walked on. Then he said, still walking on and not looking back: "Hee hee hee."

"Come on," Boon said. "Miss Reba'll let us wash up." We got out. Boon reached into the back and started to pick up his grip and said, "Oh yes," and reached to the dashboard and took the switch key out of the slot and put it in his pocket and started to pick up the grip and stopped and took the switch key out of his pocket and said, "Here. You keep it. I might lay it down somewhere and mislay it Put it in your pocket good so it wont fall out. You can wad your handkerchief on top of it." I took the key and he started to reach for the grip again and stopped again and looked quick over his shoulder at the boarding house and turned sideways a little and took his wallet out of his hind pocket and opened it close to him and took out a five-dollar bill and stopped and then took out a one-dollar bill also and closed the wallet and slid it toward me behind his body, saying, not quick so much as quiet: "Keep this too. I might forget it somewhere too. Whenever we need money out of it I'll tell you how much to give me." Because I had never been inside a boarding house either; and remember, I was just eleven. So I put the wallet into my pocket too and Boon took the grip and we went through the gate and up the walk and into the lattice vestibule, and there was the front door. Boon had barely touched the bell when we heard feet inside. "What did I tell you?" Boon said rapidly. "They probably are all peeping from behind the window curtains at that automobile." The door opened. It was a young Negro woman but before she could open her mouth a white woman pushed her aside— a young woman too, with a kind hard handsome face and hair that was too red, with two of the biggest yellowish-colored diamonds I ever saw in her ears.