The Reivers (8 page)

"Maybe we're wasting something, just spending it on a automobile trip," he said. "Maybe I ought to use you for something that's got money in it."

"Just get on," I said. Because how could I tell him, how say it to him?
I'm sick and tired of lying, of having to lie.
Because I knew, realised now that it had only begun; there would be no end to it, not only no end to the lies I would continue to have to tell merely to protect the ones I had already told, but that I would never be free of the old worn-out ones I had already used and exhausted.

We went back to town. We went fast this time; if there was scenery now, nobody in that automobile used any of it. It was going on five oclock now. Boon spoke, tense and urgent but quite composed: "We got to let it cool awhile. They saw me drive out of town taking you folks out to McCaslin; they'll see me come back with just you and me alone; they'll expect to see me put the car back in Boss's carriage house. They got to see me and you, but separate, just walking around like it wasn't nothing going on." But how could I say that either?
No. Let's go now. If I've got to tett more lies, at least let it be to strangers.
He was still talking: "—car. What was that he said about were we coming back through town before we left?"

"What? Who said?"

"Ned. Back there just before we left town."

"I dont remember," I said. "What about the car?"

"Where to leave it. While I take a santer 'around the Square and you go home and get a clean shirt or whatever you'll need. I had to unload all the stuff out at McCaslin, remember. Yours too. I mean, just in case some meddling busybody is hanging around just on the happen-chance." We both knew who he meant.

"Why cant you lock it in the carriage house?"

"I aint got the key," he said. "All I got is the lock. Boss took the key away from me this morning and unlocked the lock and give the key to Mr Ballott to keep until he gets back. I'm supposed to run the car in as soon as I get back from McCaslin and lock the lock shut and Boss will telegraph Mr Ballott what train to unlock the door so I can meet them."

"Then we'll just have to risk it," I said.

"Yes, we'll have to risk it. Maybe with Boss and Miss Sarah gone, even Delphine aint going to see him again until Monday morning." So we risked it Boon drove into the carriage house and got his grip and coat down from where he had hidden them in the loft and reached up again and dragged down a folded tarpaulin and put his grip and coat in on the floor of the back seat. The gasoline can was all ready: a brand-new five-gallon can which Grandfather had had the tinsmith who made the toolbox more or less rebuild until it was smell-tight, since Grandmother already didn't like the smell of gasoline, which we had never used yet because the automobile had never been this far before; the funnel and the chamois strainer were already in the toolbox with the tire tools and jack and wrenches that came with the car, and the lantern and axe and shovel and coil of barbed wire and the block and tackle which Grandfather had added, along with the tin bucket to fill the radiator when we passed creeks or barrow pits. He put the can (it was full; maybe that was what took him that extra tune before he came for us) in the back and opened the tarpaulin, not spreading it but tumbling it into the back until everything was concealed to just look like a jumbled mass of tarpaulin. "We'll shove yours under the same way," he said. "Then it wont look like nothing but a wad of tarpollyon somebody was too lazy to fold up. What you better do is to go home and get your clean shirt and come straight back here and wait. I wont be long: just santer around the Square in case Ike wants to start asking questions too. Then we'll be gone."

We closed the door. Boon started to hang the open padlock back in the staple. "No," I said; I couldn't even have said why, so fast I had progressed in evil. "Put it in your pocket."

But he knew why; he told me. "You damn right," he said. "We done gone tihrough too much to have somebody happen-chance by and snap it shut because they thought I forgot to."

I went home. It was just across the street. A filling station is there now, and what was Grandfather's house is now chopped into apartments, precarious of tenure. The house was empty, unlocked of course, since nobody in Jefferson locked mere homes in those innocent days. It was only a little after five, nowhere near sundown, yet the day was finished, done for; the empty silent house was not vacant at all but filled with presences like held breath; and suddenly I wanted my mother; I wanted no more of this, no more of free will; I wanted to return, relinquish, be secure, safe from the sort of decisions and deciding whose foster twin was this having to steal an automobile. But it was too late now; I had already chosen, elected; if I had sold my soul to Satan for a mess of pottage, at least I would damn well collect the pottage and eat it too: hadn't Booa himself just reminded me, almost as if he had foreseen this moment of weakness and vacillation in the empty house, and forewarned me: "We have gone through too much to let nothing stop us now."

My clothes—fresh blouses, pants, stockings, my toothbrush—were out at McCaslin now. I had more in my drawer of course, except the toothbrush, which in Mother's absence it was a fair gamble that neither Aunt Gallic nor Cousin Louisa would remember about. But I took no clothes, nothing; not that I forgot to but probably because I had never intended to. I just entered the house and stood inside the door long enough to prove to myself that of Boon and me it wouldn't be me who failed us, and went back across the street and across Grandfather's back yard to the lot. Nor was Boon the one who would fail us; I heard the engine running quietly before I reached the carriage house. Boon was already behind the wheel; I think the automobile was even already in gear. "Where's your clean shirt?" he said. "Never mind, I'll buy you one in Memphis. Come on. We can move now." He backed the car out. The open lock was once more hanging in the staple. "Come on," he said. "Dont stop to lock it. It's too late now."

"No," I said. I couldn't have said then Why either: with the padlock snapped through the staple and hasp of the closed door, it would look like the automobile was safely inside. And so it would be: the whole thing no more than a dream from which I could wake tomorrow, perhaps now, the next moment, and be safe, saved. So I closed the door and locked the padlock and opened the lot gate for Boon to drive out and closed that t6o and got in, the car already in motion—if in fact it had ever completely stopped. "If we go the back way, we can dodge the Square," I said. And again he said:

"It's too late now. All they can do now is holler." But none hollered. But even with the Square behind, it still was not too late. That irrevocable decision was still a mile ahead, where the road to McCaslin forked away from the Memphis road, where I could say
Stop. Let me out
and he would do it. More: I could say
I've changed my mind. Take me back to McCaslin
and I knew he would do that too. Then suddenly I knew that if I said
Turn around. I will get that key from Mr Ballott and we will lock this automobile up in the carnage house where Boss believes it already is at this moment
and he would do that. And more: that he wanted me to do that, was silently begging me to do that; he and I both aghast not at his individual temerity but at our mutual, our confederated recklessness, and that Boon knew he had not the strength to resist his and so must cast himself on my strength and rectitude. You see? What I told you about Non-virtue? If things had been reversed and I had silently pled with Boon to turn back, I could have depended on his virtue and pity, where he to whom Boon had pled had neither.

So I said nothing; the fork, the last frail impotent hand reached down to save me, flew up and passed and fled, was gone, irrevocable; I said
All right then. Here I come.
Maybe Boon heard it, since I was still boss. Anyway, he put Jefferson behind
vis;
Satan would at least defend his faithful from the first one or two tomorrows; he said: "We aint really got anything to worry about but Hell Creek bottom tomorrow. Harrykin Creek aint anything."

"Who said it was?" I said. Hurricane Creek is four miles from town; you have passed over it so fast all your life you probably dont even know its name. But people who crossed it then knew it. There was a wooden bridge over the creek itself, but even in the top of summer the approaches to it were a series of mudholes.

"That's what I'm telling you," Boon said. "It aint anything. Me and Mr Wordwin got through it that day last year without even using the block and tackle; just a shovel and axe Mr Wordwin borrowed from a house about a half a mile away, that now you mention it I dont believe he took back. Likely though the fellow come and got them the next day."

He was almost right. We got through the first mudhole and even across the bridge. But the other mudhole stopped us. The automobile lurched once, twice, tilted and hiing spinning. Boon didn't waste any time, already removing his shoes (I forgot to say he had had them shined too), and rolled up his pants legs and stepped out into the mud. "Move over," he said. "Put it in low gear and start when I tell you. Come on. You know how to do it; you learned how this morning." I got under the wheel. He didn't even stop for the block and tackle. "I dont need it. It'll take too much time getting it out and putting it back and we aint got time." He didn't need it. There was a snake fence beside the road; he had already wrenched the top rail off and, himself knee-deep in mud and water, wedged the end under the back axle and said, "Now. Pour the coal to her," and lifted the automobile bodily and shot it forward lurching and heaving, by main strength up onto dry ground again, shouting at me: "Shut it off! Shut it off!" which I did, managed to, and he came and shoved me over and got in under the wheel; he didn't even stop to roll his muddy pants down.

Because the sun was almost down now; it would be nearly dark by the time we reached Ballenbaugh's, where we would spend the night; we went as fast as we dared now and soon we were passing Mr Wyott's—a family friend of ours; Father took me bird hunting there that Christmas—which was eight miles from Jefferson and still four miles from the river, with the sun just setting behind the house. We went on; there would be a moon after a while, because our oil headlights were better to show someone else you were coming rather than to light you where you were going; but suddenly Boon said, "What's that smell? Was it you?" But before I could deny it he had jerked the automobile to a stop, sat for an instant, then turned and reached back and flung back the lumped and jumbled mass of the tarpaulin which had filled the back of the car. Ned sat up from the floor. He had on the black suit and hat and the white shirt with the gold collar stud without either collar or tie, which he wore on Sunday; he even had the small battered hand grip (you would call it a brief or attache case now) which had belonged to old Lucius McCaslin before even Father was born; I dont know what else he might have carried in it at other times. All I ever saw in it was the Bible (likewise from Great-great-grandmofher McCaslin), which he couldn't read, and a pint flask containing maybe a good double table-spoonful of whiskey. "I'll be a son of a bitch," Boon said. "I wants a trip too," Ned said. "Hee hee hee."

Chapter 4

"I got just as much right to a trip as you and Lucius," Ned said. "I got more. This automobile belongs to Boss and Lucius aint nothing but his grandboy and you aint no kin to him a-tall."

"All right, all right," Boon said. "What I'm talking about, you laid there under that tarpollyon all the time and let me get out in the mud and lift this whole car out single-handed by main strength."

"And hot under there too, mon," Ned said. "I dont see how I stood it. Not to mention having to hold off this here sheet-iron churn from knocking my brains out every time you bounced, let alone waiting for that gasoline or whatever you calls it to get all joogled up to where it would decide to blow up too. What did you aim for me to do? That was just four miles from town. You'd make me walk back home."

"This is ten miles now," Boon said. "What makes you think you aint going to walk them back home?"

I said, rapidly, quickly: "Have you forgot? That was Wyott's about two miles back. We might just as well be two miles from Bay St Louis."

"That's right," Ned said pleasantly. "The walking aint near so fur from here." Boon didn't look at him long.

"Get out and fold up that tarpollyon where it wont take up no more room than it has to," he told Ned. "And air it off some too if we got to ride with it."

"It was all that bumping and jolting you done," Ned said. "You talk like I broke my manners just on purpose to get caught."

Also, Boon lit the headlights while we were stopped, and now he wiped his feet and legs off on a corner of the tarpaulin and put his socks and shoes on and rolled his pants back down; they were already drying. The sun was gone now; already you could see the moonlight. It would be full night when we reached Ballenbaugh's.

I understand that Ballenbaugh's is now a fishing camp run by an off-and-on Italian bootlegger—off I mean during the one or two weeks it takes each new sheriff every four years to discover the true will of the people he thought voted for him; all that stretch of river bottom which was a part of Thomas Sutpen's doomed baronial dreaim and the site of Major de Spain's hunting camp is now a drainage district; the wilderness where Boon himself in his youth hunted (or anyway was present while his betters did) bear and deer and panther, is tame with cotton and corn now and even Wyott's Crossing is only a name.

Even in 1905 there was still vestigial wilderness, though most of the deer and all the bears and panthers (also Major de Spain and his hunters) were gone; the ferry also; and now we called Wyott's Crossing the Iron Bridge, THE Iron Bridge since it was the first iron bridge and for several years yet the only one we in Yoknapatawpha County had or knew of. But back in the old days, in the time of our own petty Chickasaw kings, IssetibbeJha and Moke-tubbe and the regicide-usurper who called himself Doom, and the first Wyott came along and the Indians showed him the crossing and he built his store and ferry-boat and named it after himself, this was not only the only crossing within miles but the head of navigation too; boats (in the high water of winter, even a small steamboat) came as it were right to Wyott's front door, bringing the whiskey and plows and coal oil and peppermint candy up from Vicks-burg and carrying the cotton and furs back.