The Reivers (33 page)

"Yes," I said.

"That's what I figgered. Likely she knows as good as I do it's gonter be a long time before Memphis sees me or Boon Hogganbeck either again. And if Boon's back in jail again, I dont reckon Jefferson, Missippi's gonter see us tonight neither."

I didn't know either; and suddenly I knew that I didn't want to know; I not only didn't want to have to make any more choices, decisions, I didn't even want to know the ones being made for me until I had to face the results. Then McWillie's father came to the door behind us, in a white coat; he was the houseman too. Though I hadn't heard any bell. I had already washed (changed my clothes too; Grandfather had brought a grip for me, and even my other shoes), so the houseman showed me the way to the dining room and I stood there; Grandfather and Mr van Tosch and Colonel Linscomb came in. the old fat Llewel-lin setter walking at Colonel Linscomb's hand, and we all stood while Colonel Linscomb said grace. Then we sat down, the old setter beside Colonel Linscomb's chair, and ate, with not just McWillie's father but a uniformed maid too to change the plates. Because I had quit; I wasn't making choices and decisions any more. I almost went to sleep in my plate, into the dessert, when Grandfather said:

"Well, gentlemen,,shall the guard fire first?"

"We'll go to the office," Colonel Linscomb said. It was the best room I ever saw. I wished Grandfather had one like it. Colonel Linscomb was a lawyer too, so there were cases of law books, but there were farm- and horse-papers too and a glass case of jointed fishing rods and guns, and chairs and a sofa and a special rug for the old setter to lie on in front of the fireplace, and pictures of horses and jockeys on the walls, with the rose wreaths and the dates they won, and a bronze figure of Manassas (I didn't know until then that Colonel Linscomb was the one who had owned Manassas) on the mantel, and a special table for the big book which was his stud book, and another table with a box of cigars and a decanter and water pitcher and sugar bowl and glasses already on it, and a French window that opened onto the gallery above the rose garden so that you could smell the roses even in the house, and honeysuckle too and a mockingbird somewhere outside.

Then the houseman came back with Ned and set a chair at the corner of the hearth for him, and they—we—sat down—Colonel Linscomb in a white linen suit and Mr van Tosch in the sort of clothes they wore in Chicago (which was where he came from until he visited Memphis and liked it and bought a place to breed and raise and train race horses too, and gave Bobo Beauchamp a job on it five or six years ago) and Grandfather in the Confederate-gray pigeon-tailed suit that he inherited (I mean, inherited not the suit but the Confederate gray because he hadn't been a soldier himself; he was only fourteen in Carolina, the only child, so he had to stay with his mother while his father was a color sergeant of Wade Hampton's until a picket of Fitz-John Porter's shot him out of his saddle at one of the Chickahominy crossings the morning after Gaines's Mill, and Grandfather stayed with his mother until she died in 1864, and still stayed until General Sherman finally eliminated him completely from Carolina in 1865 and he came to Mississippi hunting for the descendants of a distant kinsman named McCaslin—he and the kinsman even had the same baptismal -names: Lucius Quintus Carothers—and found one in the person of a great-granddaughter named Sarah Edmonds and in 1869 married her).

"Now," Grandfather told Ned, "begin at the beginning."

"Wait," Colonel Linscomb said. He leaned and poured whiskey into a glass and held it out toward Ned. "Here," he said.

"Thank you kindly," Ned said. But he didn't drink it. He set the glass on the mantel and sat down again. He had never looked at Grandfather and he didn't now: he just waited.

"Now," Grandfather said.

"Drink it," Colonel Linscomb said. "You may need it." So Ned took the drink and swallowed it at one gulp and sat holding the empty glass, still not looking at Grandfather.

"Now," Grandfather said. "Begin—"

"Wait," Mr van Tosch said. "How did you make that horse run?"

Ned sat perfectly still, the empty glass motionless in his hand while we watched him, waiting. Then he said, addressing Grandfather for the first time: "Will these white gentlemen excuse me to speak to you private?"

"What about?" Grandfather said.

"You will know," Ned said. "If you thinks they ought to know too, you can tell them."

Grandfather rose. "Will you excuse us?" he said. He started toward the door to the hall.

"Why not the gallery?" Colonel Linscomb said. "It's dark there; better for conspiracy or confession either." So we went that way. I mean, I was already up too. Grandfather paused again. He said to Ned:

"What about Lucius?"

"He used it too," Ned said. "Anybody got a right to know what his benefits is." We went out onto the gallery, into the darkness and the smell of the roses and the honeysuckle too, and besides the mockingbird which was in a tree not far away, we could hear two whippoorwills and, as always at night in Mississippi and so Tennessee wasn't too different, a dog barking. "It was a sour dean," Ned said quietly.

"Dont lie to me," Grandfather said. "Horses dont eat sardines."

"This one do," Ned said. "You was there and saw it. Me and Lucius tried him out beforehand. But I didn't even need to try him first. As soon as I laid eyes on him last Sunday, I knowed he had the same kind of sense my mule had."

"Ah," Grandfather said. "So that's what you and Maury used to do to that mule."

"No sir," Ned said. "Mr Maury never knowed it neither. Nobody knowed it but me and that mule. This horse was just the same. When he run that last lap this evening, I had the sour dean waiting for him and he knowed it."

We went back inside. They were already looking at us. "Yes," Grandfather said. "But it's a family secret. I wont withhold it if it becomes necessary. But will you let me be the judge, under that stipulation? Of course, Van Tosch has the first claim on it."

"In that Case, I'll either have to buy Ned or_sell you Coppermine," Mr van Tosch said. "But shouldn't all this wait until your man Hogganbeck is here too?"

"You dont know my man Hogganbeck," Grandfather said. "He drove my automobile to Memphis. When I take him put of jail tomorrow, he will drive it back to Jefferson. Between those two points in time, his presence would have been missed no more than his absence is." Only this time he didn't have to even start to tell Ned to begin.

"Bobo got mixed up with a white man," Ned said. And this time it was Mr van Tosch who said Ah. And that was how we began to learn it: from Ned and Mr van Tosch both. Because Mr van Tosch was an alien, a foreigner, who hadn't lived in our country long enough yet to know the kind of white blackguard a young country-bred Negro who had never been away from home before, come to a big city to get more money and fun for the work he intended to do, would get involved with. It was probably gambling, or it began with gambling; that would be their simplest mutual meeting ground. But by this time, it was more than just gambling; even Ned didn't seem to know exactly what it was—unless maybe Ned did know exactly what it was, but it was in a white man's world. Anyway, according to Ned, it was by now so bad—the money sum involved was a hundred and twenty-eight dollars—that the white man had convinced Bobo that, if the law found out about it, merely being fired from his job with Mr van Tosch would be the least of Bobo's troubles; in fact, he had Bobo believing that his real trouble wouldn't even start until after he no longer had a white man to front for him. Until at last, the situation, crisis, so desperate and the threat so great, Bobo went to Mr van Tosch and asked for a hundred and twenty-eight dollars, getting the answer whichvhe had probably expected from the man who was not only a white man and a foreigner, but settled too, past the age when he could remember a young man's passions and predicaments, which was No. That was last fall—

"I remember that," Mr van Tosch said. "I ordered the man never to come on my place again. I thought he was gone." You see what I mean. He—Mr van Tosch—was a good man. But he was a foreigner. —Then Bobo, abandoned by that last hope, which he had never really believed in anyway, "got up" as he put it (Ned didn't know how either or perhaps he did know or perhaps the way in which Bobo "got it up" was such that he wouldn't even tell a member of his own race who was his kinsman too) fifteen dollars and gave it to the man, and bought with it just what you might expect and what Bobo himself probably expected. But what else could he do, where else turn? only more threat and pressure, having just proved that he could get money when driven hard enough— "But why didn't he come to me?" Mr van Tosch said.

"He did," Ned said. "You told him No." They sat quite still. "You're a white man," Ned said gently. "Bobo was a nigger boy."

"Then why didn't he come to me," Grandfather said. "Back where he should never have left in the first place, instead of stealing a horse?"

"What would you a done?" Ned said. "If he had come in already out of breath from Memphis and told you, Dont ask me no questions: just hand me a hundred and a few extra dollars and I'll go back to Memphis and start paying you back the first Saturday I gets around to it?"

"He could have told me why," Grandfather said, "I'm a McCaslin too."

"You're a white man too," Ned said.

"Go on," Grandfather said. —So Bobo discovered that the fifteen dollars which he had thought might save him, had actually ruined him. Now, according to Ned, Bobo's demon gave him no rest at all. Or perhaps the white man began to fear Bobo—that a mere dribble, a few dollars at a time, would take too long; or perhaps that Bobo, because of his own alarm and desperation, plus what the white man doubtless considered the natural ineptitude of Bobo's race, would commit some error or even crime which would blow everything up. Anyway, this was when he—the white man—began to work on Bobo to try for a one-stroke killing which would rid him of the debt, creditor, worry and all. His first idea was to have Bobo rifle Mr van Tosch's tack room, load into the buggy or wagon or whatever it would be, as many saddles and bridles and driving harnesses as it would carry, and clear out; Bobo of course would be suspected at once, but the white man would be safely away by then; and if Bobo moved fast enough, which even he should have the sense to do, he had all the United States to flee into and find another job. But (Ned said) even the white man abandoned this one; he would not only have a buggy- or wagon-load of horseless horse gear and daylight coming, it would have taken days to dispose of it piecemeal, even if he had had days to do it in.

So that was when they thought of a horse: to condense the wagon- or buggy-load of uncohered fragments of leather into one entity which could be sold in a lump, and —if the white man worked fast enough and didn't haggle over base dollars—without too much delay. That is, the white man, not Bobo, believed that Bobo was going to steal a horse for him. Only, Bobo knew, if he didn't steal the horse, he could see the end of everything—job, liberty, all—when next Monday morning (the crisis had reached its crux last Saturday, the same day Boon and I—and Ned —left Jefferson in the automobile) came. And the reason for the crisis at this particular moment, what made it so desperate, was that there was a horse of Mr van Tosch's so available for safe stealing that it might almost have been planted for that purpose. This of course was Lightning (I mean, Coppermine) himself, who at the moment was in a sales stable less than half a mile away, where, as Mr van Tosch's known groom (it was Bobo who had delivered the horse to the sales stable in the first place) Bobo could go and get him at any time for no more trouble than putting a halter on him and leading him away. Which by itself might have been tolerable. The trouble was, the white man knew it—a horse bred and trained for running, but which would not run, and which in consequence was in such bad repute with Mr van Tosch and Mr Clapp, the trainer, that it was at the sales stable waiting for the first to come along who would make an offer for it; in further consequence of which, Bobo could go and remove it and it would very likely not even be reported to Mr van Tosch unless he happened to inquire; in still further consequence of which, Bobo had until tomorrow morning (Monday) to do something about it, or else.

That was the situation when Ned left us in front of Miss Reba's Sunday afternoon and walked around the corner to Beale Street and entered the first blind tiger he came to and found Bobo trying to outface his doom through the bottom of a whiskey bottle. Grandfather said: "So that's what it was. Now I'm beginning to understand. A nigger Saturday night. Bobo already drunk, and your tongue hanging out all the way from Jefferson to get to the first saloon you could reach—" and stopped and said, pounced almost: "Wait. That's wrong. It wasn't even Saturday. You got to Memphis Sunday evening," and Ned sitting there, quite still, the empty glass in his hand. He said,

"With my people, Saturday night runs over into Sunday."

"And into Monday morning too," Colonel Linscomb said. "You wake up Monday morning, sick, with a hangover, filthy in a filthy jail, and lie there until some white man comes and pays your fine and takes you straight back to the cotton field or whatever it is and puts you back to work without even giving you time to eat breakfast. And you sweat it out there, and maybe by sundown you feel you are not really going to die; and the next day, and the day after that, and after that, until it's Saturday again and you can put down the plow or the hoe and go back as fast as you can to that stinking jail cell on Monday morning. Why do you do it? I dont know."

"You cant know," Ned said. "You're the wrong color. If you could just be a nigger one Saturday night, you wouldn't never want to be a white man again as long as you live."

"All right," Grandfather said. "Go on." —So Bobo told Ned of his predicament: the horse less than half a mile away, practically asking to be stolen; and the white man who knew it and who had given Bobo an ultimatum measurable now in mere hours—"All right," Grandfather said. "Now get to my automobile."

"We're already to it," Ned said. They—he and Bobo— went to the stable to look at the horse. "And soon as I laid eyes on him, I minded that mule I used to own." And Bobo, like me, was too young actually to remember the mule; but, also like me, he had grown up with its legend. "So we decided to go to that white man and tell him something had happened and Bobo couldn't get that horse outen that stable for him like Bobo thought he could, but we could get him a automobile in place of it. —Now wait," he told Grandfather quickly. "We knowed as good as you that that automobile would be safe at least long enough for us to finish. Maybe in thirty or forty years you can stand on a Jefferson street corner and count a dozen automobiles before sundown, but you cant yet. Maybe then you can steal a automobile and find somebody to buy it that wont worry you with a lot of how-come and who and why. But you cant now. So for a man that looked like I imagined he looked (I hadn't never seen him yet) to travel around trying to sell a automobile quick and private, would be about as hard as selling a elephant quick and private. You never had no trouble locating where it was at and getting your hand on it, once you and Mr van Tosch got started, did you?"