The Reivers (19 page)

"Who was Aunt Fittie?" I said.

"I dont know," he said. "Folks just called her Aunt Fit-tie. She might have been kin to some of us, but I dont know. Lived by herself in a house on the edge of town until she taken Bee in after Bee's maw died and soon as Bee got big enough, which never taken long because Bee was already a big girl even before she got to be ten or eleven or twelve or whenever it was and got started—"

"Started at what?" I said. You see? I had to. I had gone too far to stop now, like in Jefferson yesterday—or was it yesterday? last year: another time: another life: another Lucius Priest. "What is pugnuckling?"

He told me, with some of contempt but mostly a sort of incredulous, almost awed, almost respectful amazement. "That's where I had the peephole—a knothole in the back wall with a tin slide over it that never nobody but me knowed how to work, while Aunt Fittie was out in front collecting the money and watching out. Folks your size would have to stand on a box and I would charge a nickel until Aunt Fittie found out I was letting grown men watch for a dime that otherwise might have went inside for fifty cents, and started hollering like a wildcat—"

Standing now, I was hitting him, so much to his surprise (mine too) that I had had to stoop and take hold of him and jerk him up within reach. I knew nothing about boxing and not too much about fighting. But I knew exactly what I wanted to do: not just hurt him but destroy him; I remember a second perhaps during which I regretted (from what ancient playing-fields-of-Eton avatar) that he was not nearer my size. But not longer than a second; I was hitting, clawing, kicking not at one wizened ten-year-old boy, but at Otis and the procuress both: the demon child who debased her privacy and the witch who debauched her innocence—one flesh to bruise and burst, one set of nerves to wrench and anguish; more: not just those two, but all who had participated in her debasement: not only the two panders, but the insensitive blackguard children and the brutal and shameless men who paid their pennies to watch her defenseless and undefended and unavenged degradation. He had plunged sprawling across the mattress, on his hands and knees now, scrabbling at his discarded trousers; I didn't know why (nor care), not even when his hand came out and up. Only then did I see the blade of the pocketknife in his fist, nor did I care about that either; that made us in a way the same size; that was my
carte blanche.
I took the knife away from him. I dont know how; I never felt the blade at all; when I flung the knife away and hit him again, the blood I saw on his face I thought was his.

Then Boon was holding me clear of the floor, struggling and crying now. He was barefoot, wearing only his pants. Miss Corrie was there too, in a kimono, with her hair down; it reached further than her waist. Otis was scrunched back against the wall, not crying but cursing like he had cursed at Ned. "What the damned hell," Boon said.

"His hand," Miss Corrie said. She paused long enough to look back at Otis. "Go to my room," she said. "Go on." He went out. Boon put me down. "Let me see it," she said. That was the first I knew where the blood came from —a neat cut across the cushions of all four fingers; I must have grasped the blade just as Otis tried to snatch it away.

It was still bleeding. That is, it bled again when Miss Cor-rie opened my hand.

"What the hell were you fighting about?" Boon said.

"Nothing," I said. I drew my hand back.

"Keep it closed till I get back," Miss Corrie said. She went out and came back with a basia of water and a towel and a bottle of something and what looked like a scrap of a man's shirt. She washed the blood off and uncorked the bottle. "It's going to sting," she said. It did. She tore a strip from the shirt and bound my hand.

"He still wont tell what they were fighting about," Boon said. "At least I hope he started it: not half your size even if he is a year older. No wonder he pulled a knife—"

"He aint even as old," I said. "He's ten."

"He told me he was twelve," Boon said. Then I found out what was wrong about Otis.

"Twelve?" Miss Corrie said. "He'll be fifteen years old next Monday." She was looking at me. "Do you want—"

"Just keep him out of here," I said. "I'm tired. I want to go to sleep."

"Don't worry about Otis," she said. "He's going back home this morning. There's a train that leaves at nine oclock. I'm going to send Minnie to the depot with him and tell her to watch him get on it and stand where she can see his face through the window until the train moves."

"Sure," Boon said. "And he can have my grip to carry the refinement and culture back in. Bringing him over here to spend a week in a Memphis—"

"You hush," Miss Corrie said.

"—house hunting refinement and culture. Maybe he found it; he might a hunted for years through Arkansas cat-cribs and still not found nobody near enough his size to draw that pocketknife on—"

"Stop it! Stop it!" Miss Corrie said. "Sure sure," Boon said. "But after all, Lucius has got to know the name of where he's at in order to brag about where he's been." Then they turned the light out and were gone. Or so I thought. It was Boon this time, turning the light on again. "Maybe you better tell me what it was," he said.

"Nothing," I said. He looked down at me, huge, naked to the waist, his hand on the light to turn it out again.

"Eleven years old," he said, "and already knife-cut in a whorehouse brawl." He looked at me. "I wish I had knowed you thirty years ago. With you to learn me when I was eleven years old, maybe by this time I'd a had some sense too. Good night."

"Good night," I said. He turned off the light. Then I had been asleep, it was Miss Corrie this time, kneeling beside the mattress; I could see the shape of her face and the moon through her hair. She was the one crying this time—a big girl, too big to know how to cry daintily: only quietly.

"I made him tell me," she said. "You fought because of me. I've had people—drunks—fighting over me, but you're the first one ever fought for me. I aint used to it, you see. That's why I dont know what to do about it. Except one thing. I can do that. I want to make you a promise. Back there in Arkansas it was my fault. But it wont be my fault any more." You see? You have to learn too fast; you have to leap in the dark and hope that Something—It —They—will place your foot right. So maybe there are after all other things besides just Poverty and Non-virtue who look after their own.

"It wasn't your fault then," I said.

"Yes it was. You can choose. You can decide. You can say No. You can find a job and work. But it wont be my fault any more. That's the promise I want to make you. For me to keep like you kept that one you told Mr Bin-ford about before supper tonight. You'll have to take it. Will you take it?"

"All right," I said.

"But you'll have to say you'll take it. You'll have to say it out loud."

"Yes," I said. "I'll take it."

"Now try to get back to sleep," she said. "I've brought a chair and I'm going to sit here where I'll be ready to wake you in time to go to the depot."

"You go back to bed too," I said.

"I aint sleepy," she said. "I'll just sit here. You go on back to sleep." And this time, Boon again. The moon-shaped square of window had shifted, so I had slept this time, his voice trying at least for whisper or anyway monotone, looming still naked from the waist up over the kitchen chair where Everbe (I mean Miss Corrie) sat, his hand grasping the backward-straining of her arm:

"Come on now. We aint got but a hour left."

"Let me go." She whispered too. "It's too late now. Let me go, Boon." Then his rasping murmur, still trying for, calling itself whisper:

"What the hell do you think I came all the way for, waited all this long for, all this working and saving up and waiting for—" Then the shape of the mooned window had moved still more and I could hear a rooster 'somewhere and my cut hand was partly tinder me and hurting, which was maybe what waked me. So I couldn't tell if this was the same time or he had gone and then come back: only the voices, still trying for whisper and if a rooster was crowing, it was time to get up. And oh yes, she was crying again.

"I wont! I wont! Let me alone!"

"All right, all right. But tonight is just tonight; tomorrow night, when we're settled down in Possum—"

"No! Not tomorrow either! I cantl I cant! Let me alone! Please, Boon. Please!"

Chapter 8

We—Everbe and Boon 'and I—were at the depot in plenty of time—or so we thought. The first person we saw was Ned, waiting for us in front of it. He had on a clean white shirt—either a new one, or he had managed somehow to get the other one washed. But almost at once things began to go too fast for anyone to learn yet that the new shirt was one of Sam's. Ned didn't even give Boon time to open his mouth. "Calm yourself," he said. "Mr Sam is keeping Lightning whilst I finishes the outside arrangements. The boxcar has done already been picked up and switched onto the train waiting behind the depot right now for you all to get on. When Mr Sam Caldwell runs a railroad, it's run, mon. We done already named him too—Forkid Lightning." Then he saw my bandage. He almost pounced. "What you done to it?"

"I cut it," I said. "It's all right."

"How bad?" he said.

"Yes," Everbe said. "It's cut across all four fingers. He ought not to move it even." Nor did Ned waste any more time there either. He looked quickly about us. "Where's that other one?" he said. "That other what?" Boon said.

"Whistle-britches," Ned said. "That money-mouthed runt boy that was with us last night. I may need two hands on that horse. Who do you think is gonter ride that race? me and you that's even twice as heavy as me? Lucius was going to, but being as we already got that other one, we dont need to risk it. He's even less weight than Lucius and even if he aint got as much sense as Lucius, he's at least old enough in meanness to ride a horse race, and wrapped up enough in money to want to win it, and likely too much of a coward to turn loose and fall off. Which is all we needs. Where is he?"

"Gone back to Arkansas," Boon said. "How old do you think he is?"

"What he looks like," Ned said. "About fifteen, aint he? Gone to Arkansaw? Then somebody better go get him quick."

"Yes," Everbe said. "I'll bring him. There wont be time to go back and get him now. So I'll stay and bring him on the next train this afternoon."

"Now you talking." Ned said. "That's Mr Sam's train. Just turn Whistle-britches over to Mr Sam; he'll handle him."

"Sure," Boon said to Everbe. "That'll give you a whole hour free to practise that No on Sam. Maybe he's a better man than me and wont take it." But she just looked at him.

"Then why dont you wait and bring Otis on and well meet you in Parsham tonight," I said. Now Boon looked at me.

"Well well," he said. "What's that Mr Binford said last night? If here aint still another fresh hog in this wallow. Except that this one's still just a shoat yet. That is, I thought it was."

"Please, Boon," Everbe said. Like that: "Please, Boon."

"Take him too and the both of you get to hell back to that slaughterhouse that maybe you ought not to left in the first place," Boon said. She didn't say anything this time. She just stood there, looking down a little: a big girl that stillness suited too. Then she turned, already walking.

"Maybe I will," I said. "Right on back home. Ned's got somebody else to ride the horse and you dont seem to know what to do with none of the folks trying to help us."

He looked, glared at me: a second maybe. "All right," he said. He strode past me until he overtook her. "I said, all right," he said. "Is it all right?"

"All right," she said.

"I'll meet the first train today. If you aint on it, I'll keep on meeting them. All right?"

"All right," she said. She went on.

"I bet aint none of you thought to bring my grip," Ned said.

"What?" Boon said.

"Where is it?" I said.

"Right there in the kitchen where I set it," Ned said. "That gold-tooth high-brown seen it."

"Miss Corrie'll bring it tonight," I said. "Come on." We went into the depot. Boon bought our tickets and we went out to where the train was waiting, with people already getting on it. Up ahead we could see the boxcar. Sam and the conductor and two other men were standing by the open door; one of them must have been the engineer. You see? not just one casual off-duty flagman, but a functioning train crew.

"You going to run him today?" the conductor said.

"Tomorrow," Boon said.

"Well, we got to get him there first," the conductor said, looking at his watch. "Who's going to ride with him?"

"Me," Ned said. "Soon as I can find a box or something to climb up on."

"Gimme your foot," Sam said. Ned cocked his knee and Sam threw him up into the car. "See you in Parsham tomorrow," he said.

"I thought you went all the way to Washington," Boon said.

"Who, me?" Sam said. "That's just the train. I'm going to double back from Chattanooga tonight on Two-O-Nine. Ill be back in Parsham at seven oclock tomorrow morning. I'd go with you now and pick up Two-O-Eight in Parsham tonight, only I got to get some sleep. Besides, you wont need me anyhow. You can depend on Ned until then."

So did Boon and I. I mean, need sleep. We got some, until the conductor waked us and we stood on the cinders at Parsham in the first light and watched the engine (there was a cattle-loading chute here) spot the boxcar, properly this time, and take its train again and go on, clicking car by car across the other tracks which went south to Jefferson. Then the three of us dismantled the stall and Ned led the horse out; and of course, naturally, materialised from nowhere, a pleasant-looking Negro youth of about nineteen, standing at the bottom of the chute, said, "Howdy, Mr McCaslin."

"That you, son?" Ned said. "Whichaway?" So we left Boon for that time; his was the Motion role now, the doing: to find a place for all of us to live, not just him and me, but Otis and Everbe when they came tonight: to locate a man whose name Ned didn't even know, whom nobody but Ned said owned a horse, and then persuade him to run it, race it—one figment of Ned's imagination to race another figment—in a hypothetical race which was in the future and therefore didn't exist, against a horse it had already beaten twice: (this likewise according only to Ned, or Figment Three), as a result of which Ned intended to recover Grandfather's automobile; all this Boon must do while still keeping clear of being challenged about who really did own the horse. We—Ned and the youth and me —were walking now, already out of town, which didn't take long in those days—a hamlet, two or three stores where the two railroads crossed, the depot and loading chute and freight shed and a platform for cotton bales. Though some of it has not changed: the big rambling mul-tigalleried multistoried steamboatgothic hotel where the overalled aficionados and the professionals who trained the fine bird dogs and the northern millionaires who owned them (one night in the lounge in 1933, his Ohio business with everybody else's under the Damocles sword of the federally closed banks, I myself heard Horace Lytle refuse five thousand dollars for Mary Montrose) gathered for two weeks each February; Paul Rainey also, who liked our country enough—or anyway our bear and deer and panther enough—to use some of the Wall Street money to own enough Mississippi land for him and his friends to hunt them in: a hound man primarily, who took his pack of bear hounds to Africa to see what they would do on lion or vice versa.

"This white boy's going to sleep walking," the youth said. "Aint you got no saddle?" But I wasn't going to sleep yet. I had to find out, to ask:

"I didn't even know you knew anybody here, let alone getting word ahead to them."

Ned walked on as if I had not even spoken. After a while he said over his shoulder: "So you wants to know how, do you?" He walked on. He said: "Me and that boy's grandpappy are Masons."

"Why are you whispering?" I said. "Boss is a Mason too but I never heard him whisper about it."

"I didn't know I was," Ned said. "But suppose I was. What do you want to belong to a lodge for, unless it's so secret cant hardly nobody else get in it? And how are you gonter keep it secret unless you treat it like one?"

"But how did you get word to him?" I said. "Let me tell you something," Ned said. "If you ever need to get something done, not just done but done quick and quiet and so you can depend on it and not no blabbing and gabbling around about it neither, you hunt around until you finds somebody like Mr. Sam Caldwell, and turn it over to him. You member that. Folks around Jefferson could use some of him. They could use a heap of Sam Caldwells."

Then we were there. The sun was well up now. It was a dog-trot house, paintless but quite sound and quite neat among locust and chinaberry trees, in a swept yard inside a fence which had all its palings too and a hinged gate that worked, with chickens in the dust and a cow and a pair of mules in the stable lot behind it, and two pretty good hounds which had already recognised the youth with us, and an old man at the top of the gallery steps above them—an old man very dark in a white shirt and galluses and a planter's hat, with perfectly white moustaches and an imperial, coming down the steps now and across the yard to look at the horse. Because he knew, remembered the horse, and so one at least of Ned's figment's vanished. "You all buy him?" he said. "We got him," Ned said. "Long enough to run him?"

"Once, anyway," Ned said. He said to me: "Make your manners to Uncle Possum Hood." I did so.

"Rest yourself," Uncle Parsham said. "You all about ready for breakfast, aint you?" I could already smell it— the ham.

"All I want is to go to sleep," I said. "He's been up all night," Ned said. "Both of us. Only he had to spend his in a house full of women hollering why and how much whilst all I had was just a quiet empty boxcar with a horse." But I was still going to help stable and feed Lightning. They wouldn't let me. "You go with Ly-curgus and get some sleep," Ned said. "I'm gonter need you soon, before it gets too hot. We got to find out about this horse, and the sooner we starts, the sooner it will be." I followed Lycurgus. It was a lean-to room, a bed with a bright perfectly clean harlequin-patched quilt; it seemed to me I was asleep before I even lay down, and that Ned was shaking me before I had ever slept. He had a clean heavy wool sock and a piece of string. I was hungry now. "You can eat your breakfast afterwards," Ned said. "You can learn a horse better on a empty stomach. Here—" holding the sock open. "Whistle-britches aint showed up yet. It might be better if he dont a-tall. He the sort that no matter how bad you think you need him, you find out afterward you was better off. Hold out your hand." He meant the bandaged one. He slipped the sock over it, bandage and all, and tied it around my wrist with the string. "You can still use your thumb, but this'll keep you from forgetting and trying to open your hand and bust them cuts again."

Uncle Parsham and Lycurgus were waiting with the horse. He was bridled now, under an old, used, but perfectly cared-for McClellan saddle. Ned looked at it. "We might run him bareback, unless they makes us. But leave it on. We can try him both ways and let him learn us which he likes best."

It was a small pasture beside the creek, flat and smooth, with good footing. Ned shortened the leathers, to suit not me so much as him, and threw me up. "You know what to do: the same as with them colts out at McCaslin. Let him worry about which hand he's on; likely all anybody ever tried to learn him is just to run as fast as the bit will let him, whichever way somebody points his head. Which is all we wants too. You dont need no switch yet. Besides, we dont want to learn a switch: we wants to learn him. Go on."

I moved him out, into the pasture, into a trot. He was nothing on the bit; a cobweb would have checked him. I said so. "I bet," Ned said. "I bet he got a heap more whip calluses on his behind than bit chafes in his jaw. Go on. Move him." but he wouldn't. I kicked, pounded my heels, but he just trotted, a little faster in the back stretch (I was riding a circular course like the one we had beaten out in Cousin Zack's paddock) until I realised suddenly that he was simply hurrying back to Ned. But still behind the bit; he had never once come into the bridle, his whole head bent around and tucked but with no weight whatever on the hand, as if the bit were a pork rind and he a Mohammedan (or a fish spine and he a Mississippi candidate for constable whose Baptist opposition had accused him of seeking the Catholic vote, or one of Mrs Roosevelt's autographed letters and a secretary of the Citizens Council, or Senator Goldwater's cigar butt and the youngest pledge to the A.D.A.), on until he reached Ned, and with a jerk I felt clean up to my shoulder, snatched his head free and began to nuzzle at Ned's shirt. "U-huh," Ned said. He had one hand behind him; I could see a peeled switch in it now. "Head him back." He said to the horse: "You got to learn, son, not to run back to me until I sends for you." Then to me: "He aint gonter stop this time. But you make like he is: just one stride ahead of where, if you was him, you would think about turning to come to me, reach back with your hand and whop him hard as you can. Now set tight," and stepped back and cut the horse quick and hard across the buttocks.

It leapt, sprang into full run: the motion (not our speed nor even our progress: just the horse's motion) seemed terrific: graceless of course, but still terrific. Because it was simple reflex from fright, and fright does not become horses. They are built wrong for it, being merely mass and symmetry, while fright demands fluidity and grace and bi-zarreness and the capacity to enchant and enthrall and even appall and aghast, like an impala or a giraffe or a snake; even as the fright faded I could feel, sense the motion become simply obedience, no more than an obedient hand gallop, on around the back turn and stretch and into what would be the home stretch, when I did as Ned ordered: one stride before the point at which he had turned to Ned before, I reached back and hit him as hard as I could with the flat of my sound hand; and again the leap, the spring, but only into willingness, obedience, alarm: not anger nor even eagerness. "That'll do," Ned said. "Bring him in." We came up and stopped. He was sweating a little, but that was all. "How do he feel?" Ned said.

I tried to tell him. "The front half of him dont want to run."

"He reached out all right when I touched him," Ned said.

I tried again. "I dont mean his front end. His legs feel all right. His head just dont want to go anywhere." - "U-huh," Ned said. He said to Uncle Parsham: "You seen one of them races. What happened?"

"I saw both of them," Uncle Parsham said. "Nothing happened. He was running good until all of a sudden he must have looked up and seen there wasn't nothing in front of him but empty track."

"U-huh," Ned said. "Jump down." I got down. He stripped off the saddle. "Hand me your foot."

"How do you know that horse has been ridden bareback before?" Uncle Parsham said.

"I dont," Ned said. "We gonter find out."

"This boy aint got but one hand," Uncle Parsham said. "Here, Lycurgus------"

But Ned already had my foot. "This boy learnt holding on riding Zack Edmonds's colts back in Missippi. I watched him at least one time when I didn't know what he was holding on with lessen it was his teeth." He threw me up. The horse did nothing: it squatted, flinched a moment, trembling a little; that was all. "U-huh," Ned said. "Let's go eat your breakfast. Whistle-britches will be here to work him this evening, then maybe Lightning will start having some fun outen this too."

Lycurgus's mother, Uncle Parsham's daughter, was cooking dinner now; the kitchen smelled of the boiling vegetables. But she had kept my breakfast warm—fried sidemeat, grits, hot biscuits and buttermilk or sweet milk or coffee; she untied my riding-glove from my hand so I could eat, a little surprised that I had never tasted coffee since Lycurgus had been having it on Sunday morning since he was two years old. And I thought I was just hungry until I went to sleep right there in the plate until Lycurgus half dragged, half carried me to his bed in the lean-to. And, as Ned said, Mr Sam Caldwell was some Sam Caldwell; Everbe and Otis got down from the caboose of a freight train which stopped that long at Par-sham a few minutes before noon. It was a through freight, not intended to stop until it reached Florence, Alabama, or some place like that. I dont know how much extra coal it took to pump up the air brakes to stop it dead still at Parsham and then fire the boiler enough to regain speed and make up the lost time. Some Sam Caldwell. Twenty-three skiddoo, as Otis said.

So when the loud unfamiliar voice waked me and Lycurgus's mother tied the riding-sock back on from where she had put it away when I went to sleep in my plate, and I went outside, there they all were: a surrey tied outside the gate and Uncle Parsham standing again at the top of his front steps, still wearing his hat, and Ned sitting on the next-to-bottom step and Lycurgus standing in the angle between steps and gallery as if the three of them were barricading the house; and in the yard facing them Everbe (yes, she brought it. I mean, Ned's grip) and Otis and Boon and the one who was doing the loud talking—a man almost as big as Boon and almost as ugly, with a red face and a badge and a bolstered pistol stuck in his hind pocket, standing between Boon and Everbe, who'was still trying to pull away from the hand which was holding her arm.

"Yep," he was saying, "I know old Possum Hood. And more than that, old Possum Hood knows me, dont you, boy?"

"We all knows you here, Mr Butch," Uncle Parsham said with no inflection whatever.

"If any dont, it's just a oversight and soon corrected," Butch said. "If your womenfolks are too busy dusting and sweeping to invite us in the house, tell them to bring some chairs out here so this young lady can set down. You, boy," he told Lycurgus, "hand down two of them chairs on the gallery there where me and you"—he was talking at Everbe now—"can set in the cool and get acquainted while Sugar Boy"—he meant Boon. I dont know how I knew it—"takes these boys down to look at that horse. Huh?" Still holding Everbe's elbow, he would tilt her gently away from him until she was almost off balance; then, a little faster though still not a real jerk, pull her back again, she still trying to get loose; now she used her other hand, pushing at his wrist. And now I was watching Boon. "You sure I aint seen you somewhere? at Birdie Watts's maybe? Where you been hiding, anyway? a good-looking gal like you?" Now Ned got up, not fast.

"Morning, Mr Boon," he said. "You and Mr Shurf want Lucius to bring the horse out?" Butch stopped tilting Everbe. He still held her though.

"Who's he?" he said. "As a general rule, we dont take to strange niggers around here. We don't object though, providing they notify themselves and then keep their mouths shut."

"Ned William McCaslin Jefferson Missippi," Ned said. "You got too much name," Butch said. "You want something quick and simple to answer to around here until you can raise a white mush-tash and goat whisker like old Possum there, and earn it. We dont care where you come from neither; all you'll need here is just somewhere to go back to. But you'll likely do all right; at least you got sense enough to recognise Law when you see it."