The Reivers Read online

  Grandfather’s was not even the first automobile to see Jefferson or vice versa. It was not even the first one to inhabit Jefferson. Two years before, one had driven all the way down from Memphis, making the eighty-mile trip in less than three days. Then it rained, and the car stayed in Jefferson two weeks, during which time we almost had no electric lights at all; nor, if the livery stable had depended solely on Boon, no public transportation either. Because Mr Buffaloe was the man—the one man, the sole human being nearer than Memphis who knew how to—who kept the steam-driven electric plant running; and from the moment the automobile indicated that it was not going any further, at least today, Mr Buffaloe and Boon were inseparable from it like two shadows, a big one and a little one—the hulking giant smelling of ammonia and harness oil, and the little grease-covered soot-colored man with eyes like two bluebird feathers moulted onto a small lump of coal, who would barely have tipped a hundred pounds with all his (the city’s too) tools in Ms pockets—the one motionless, staring at the car with a kind of incredulous yearning, like a fixed bull; the other dreaming at it, gentle, tender, his grimed hand gentle as a woman’s as he touched it, stroked it, caressed it, then the next moment plunged to the hips under the raised bonnet.

  Then it rained all that night and was still raining the next morning. The owner of tihe car was told, assured—by Mr Buffaloe, it appeared; a little strange since nobody had ever known him to be far enough away from the light plant or the little shop in his back yard, to have ever used roads enough to prophesy their condition—that the roads would be impassable for at least a week, maybe ten days. So the owner went back to Memphis by train, leaving the automobile to be stored in what, in anybody else’s back yard but Mr Buffaloe’s, would have been a horse- or cow-barn. Nor could we figure this: how Mr Buffaloe, a meek mild almost inarticulate little man in a constant condition of unworldly grease-coated dreamlike somnambulism— how, by what means, what mesmeric and hypnotic gifts which until now even he could not have known he possessed, he had persuaded the complete stranger to abandon his expensive toy into Mr Buffaloe’s charge.

  But he did, and went back to Memphis; and now when electric trouble occurred in Jefferson, someone had to go by foot or horse or bicycle out to Mr Buffaloe’s home on the edge of town, whereupon Mr Buffaloe would appear, vague and dreaming and without haste and still wiping his hands, around the corner of his house from his back yard; and by the third day Father finally found out where Boon would be (had been) during the time when he—Boon— should have been in the livery stable. Because on that day Boon himself revealed the secret, spilled the beans, with frantic and raging urgency. He and Mr Buffaloe had come to what would have been physical battle, had not Mr Buffaloe—that apparently inexhaustible reservoir of surprases and capabilities—drawn a greasy and soot-grimed but perfectly efficient pistol on Boon.

  That was how Boon told it. He and Mr Buffaloe had been not merely in complete, but instantaneous, accord and understanding in the whole process of getting the automobile into Mr Buftaloe’s hands and the owner of it out of town; so that, Boon naturally thought, Mr Buftaloe would quickly solve the mystery of how to operate it and they would slip it out after dark and ride in it. But to Boon’s shocked and outraged amazement, all Mr Buffaloe wanted was to find out why it ran. “He’s ruined it!” Boon said. “He’s done took it all to pieces just to see what was inside! He wont never get it all back together again!”

  But Buftaloe did. He stood, mild and grease-stained and gently dreaming, when two weeks later the owner returned and cranked it up and drove away; and a year later Buffaloe had made one of his own, engine, gears and all, into a rubber-tired buggy; that afternoon, stinking noisily and sedately and not at all fast across the Square, he frightened Colonel Sartoris’s matched carriage horses into bolting with the luckily empty surrey and more or less destroying it; by the next night there was formally recorded into the archives of Jefferson a city ordinance against the operation of any mechanically propelled vehicle inside the corporate limits. So, as president of the older, the senior bank in Yoknapatawpha County, my grandfather was forced to buy one or else be dictated to by the president of the junior one. You see what I mean? not senior and junior in the social hierarchy of the town, least of all rivals in it, but bankers, dedicated priests in the impenetrable and ineluctable mysteries of Finance; it was as though, despite his life-long ramrod-stiff and unyielding opposition to, refusal even to acknowledge, the machine age, Grandfather had been vouchsafed somewhere in the beginning a sort of—to him—nightmare vision of our nation’s vast and boundless future in which the basic unit of its economy and prosperity would be a small mass-produced cubicle containing four wheels and an engine.

  So he bought the automobile, and Boon found his soul’s lily maid, the virgin’s love of his rough and innocent heart. It was a Winton Flyer. (This was the first one he—we— owned, before the White Steamer which Grandfather traded it for when Grandmother finally decided two years later that she couldn’t bear the smell of gasoline at all.) You cranked it by hand while standing in front of it, with no more risk (provided you had remembered to take it out of gear) than a bone or two in your forearm; it had kerosene lamps for night driving and when rain threatened five or six people could readily put up the top and curtains in ten or fifteen minutes, and Grandfather himself equipped it with a kerosene lantern, a new axe and a small coil of barbed wire attached to a light block and tackle for driving beyond the town limits. With which equipment it could—and did once, of which I shall speak presently—go as far as Memphis. Also, all of us, grandparents, parents, aunts, cousins and children, had special costumes for riding in it, consisting of veils, caps, goggles, gauntlet gloves and long shapeless throat-close neutral-colored garments called dusters, of which I shall also speak later.

  By this time Mr Buffaloe had long since taught Boon to operate his homemade one. They couldn’t use the streets of Jefferson of course—in fact never again did it cross the line of Mr. Buffaloe’s front fence—but there was an area of open land behind his house which in time Mr Buffaloe and Boon had beaten down and (relatively) smoothed into a fair motordrome. So by the time Boon and Mr Wordwin, the cashier in Grandfather’s bank (he was a bachelor, one of our most prominent clubmen or men about town; in ten years he had been a groomsman in thirteen weddings), went to Memphis by tram and brought the automobile back (in less than two days this time; a record), Boon was already destined to be the dean of Jefferson motor-car drivers.

  Then, as far as Boon’s dream was concerned, my grandfather abolished that automobile. He merely bought it, paid what Boon called a sizable chunk of hard valuable cash for it, looked at it thoroughly and inscrutably once and then eliminated it from circulation. He—Grandfather —couldn’t do that completely of course; there was that arrogant decree of Colonel Sartoris’s which he—Grandfather—being the senior, could not permit himself to allow to stand, no matter what his own opinion of motor vehicles was. In fact, in this opinion he and Colonel Sartoris were absolutely eye-to-eye; until their deaths (by which time all Yoknapatawpha County’s daytime air was odorous with gasoline fumes and its nights, Saturdays especially, filled with the clash of colliding fenders and the squeal of brakes) neither of them would lend a penny to any man they merely suspected was going to buy an automobile with it. Colonel Sartoris’s crime was simply in having taken the pas of his senior in a move which they both approved—officially banning automobiles from Jefferson even before they got there. You see? Grandfather bought the automobile not as a defiance of Colonel Sartoris’s decree. It was simply a calm and deliberately considered abrogation of it, even if only by weekly token.

  Even before Colonel Sartoris’s decree, Grandfather had had Ms carriage and horses moved from his back yard to the livery stable, where they were actually more accessible to Grandmother’s telephone call than to her shouts from an upstairs back window, because somebody always answered the telephone at the livery stable. Which Ned, in the kitchen or stable or wherever he happened to be
(or was supposed to happen to be when Grandmother wanted him), didn’t always. In fact, he was more often nowhere in range of any voice from Grandmother’s house since one of them was his wife’s. So now we come to Ned. He was Grandfather’s coachman. His wife (the one he had then; he had four) was Delphine, Grandmother’s cook. At that time he was “Uncle” Ned only to Mother. I mean, she was the one who insisted that all us children—three of us, that is, because Alexander couldn’t call anybody anything yet —call him Uncle Ned. Nobody else cared whether we did or not, not even Grandmother, who was a McCaslin too, and certainly not Ned himself, who hadn’t earned it even by just living long enough for the fringe of hair embracing his bald skull to begin to turn gray, let alone white (it never did. I mean, his hair: turn white nor even gray. When he died at seventy-four, except for having run through four wives he hadn’t changed at all), and who indeed may not have wanted to be called Uncle; none of these but only Mother, who in the McCaslin sense was not even kin to us, insisted on it. Because he—Ned—was a McCaslin, born in the McCaslin back yard in 1860. He was our family skeleton; we inherited him in turn, with his legend (which had no firmer supporter than Ned himself) that his mother had been the natural daughter of old Lucius Quintus Carothers himself and a Negro slave; never did Ned let any of us forget that he, along with Cousin Isaac, was an actual grandson to old time-honored Lancaster where we moiling Edmondses and Priests, even though three of us—you, me and my grandfather—were named for him, were mere diminishing connections and hangers-on.

  So when Boon and Mr Wordwin arrived with the car, the carriage house was all ready for it: new-floored and-doored, with a brand-new padlock already in Grandfather’s hand while he walked slowly around the car, looking at it exactly as he would have examined the plow or reaper or wagon (the client too for that matter) on which a would-be patron of the bank was offering to borrow money. Then he motioned Boon to drive it on into the garage (oh yes, we already knew that was the name of an automobile shed, even in 1904, even in Mississippi).

  “What?” Boon said.

  “Drive it in,” Grandfather said.

  “You aint even going to try it?” Boon said.

  “No,” Grandfather said. Boon drove it into the garage and (just Boon) came out again. There had been astonishment in his face; now there was shock, divination, something like terror. “Has it got a key?” Grandfather said.

  “What?” Boon said.

  “A catch. A pin. A hook. Something you start it with.” Slowly Boon took something from his pocket and put it into Grandfather’s hand. “Shut the doors,” Grandfather said, and himself walked up and snapped the new padlock through the hasp and put that key into his pocket also. Now Boon was fighting a battle with himself. He was in crisis; the matter was desperate. I—we, Mr Wordwin, Grandmother, Ned, Delphine and everybody else white and black who had happened along the street when the automobile came up—watched him win it, or that initial engagement of pickets anyway.

  “Ill come back after dinner, so Miss Sarah” (that was Grandmother) “can try it. About one oclock. I can come sooner if that’ll be too late.”

  “I’ll send word to the stable,” Grandfather said. Because it was a full-scale action: no mere squabbling of outposts. It was all out, win or lose; logistics came into it, and terrain; feint thrust and parry, deception; but most of all, patience, the long view. It lasted the remaining three days until Saturday. Boon returned to the livery stable; all that afternoon he was never very far from the telephone, though not ostensibly, obviously so, revealing nothing; he even did his work—or so they thought, until Father discovered that Boon on his own authority had deputised Luster to meet with the hack the afternoon train whose arrival (unless it was late) always coincided with the time, moment when Grandfather left the bank for the day. But although the battle was still a holding action requiring— nay, demanding—constant alertness and vigilance instead of a drive capable of carrying itself with its own momentum, Boon was still confident, still on top: “Sure. I sent Luster. The way this town is growing, we will need two hacks at them trains any day now, and I been had my eye on Luster for the second driver a good while now. Dont worry; I’m going to watch him.”

  But no telephone. By six oclock, even Boon admitted that today there would be none. But it was a holding action; nothing was lost yet, and in the dark he could even shift his forces a little. The next morning about ten he— we—entered the bank as though by passing afterthought. “Lemme have the keys,” he told Grandfather. “All that Missippi dust and mud, let alone the Tennessee mud and dust already under it. I’ll take the hose with me from the stable in case Ned has mislaid yours out of sight somewhere.”

  Grandfather was looking at Boon, just looking at him with no hurry, like Boon really was the one with the wagon or hay baler offering to borrow fifteen dollars. “I dont want the inside of the carriage house wet,” Grandfather said. But Boon matched him, as detached and even more indifferent, with even more time to spare, use.

  “Sure, sure. Remember, the man said the engine ought to be run every day. Not to go nowhere: just to keep the spark plugs and magneto from rusting and costing you twenty, twenty-five dollars for a new one all the way from Memphis or somewhere, maybe all the way back to the factory. I dont blame you; all I know is what he told you; I’d just have to take his word too. But then you can afford it. You own the automobile; if you want to rust it up, it aint nobody else’s business. A horse would a been different. Even if you hadn’t even paid a hundred dollars for a horse you’d a had me out there at daylight lunging him on a rope just to keep his guts working.” Because Grandfather was a good banker and Boon knew it: that Grandfather not only knew when to foreclose, but when to compound and cancel too. He reached into his pocket and handed Boon the two keys—the one to the padlock and the thing that turned the automobile on. “Come on,” Boon told me, already turning.

  While we were still up the street we could already hear Grandmother hollering for Ned from the upstairs back window, though by the time we reached the gate she had quit. As we crossed the back yard to get the hose, Del-phine came out the kitchen door. “Where is Ned?” she said. “We been hollering for him all morning. Is he up there at the livery stable?”

  “Sure,” Boon said. “I’ll tell him too. Just dont expect him neither.” Ned was there. He and two of my brothers were like a row of stairsteps trying to see through the cracks in the garage door. I reckon Alexander would have been there too except he couldn’t walk yet; I dont know why Aunt Callie hadn’t thought of it yet. Then Alexander was there; Mother came across the street from our house carrying him. So maybe Aunt Callic was still washing diapers. “Morning, Miss Alison,” Boon said. “Morning, Miss Sarah,” he said, because now Grandmother was there too, with Delphine behind her. And now there were two more ladies, neighbors, still in their boudoir caps. Because maybe Boon wasn’t a banker nor even a very good trader either. But he was proving to be a pretty damned good guerrilla fighter. He went and unlocked the garage door and opened it. Ned was the first one inside.

  “Well,” Boon said to him, “you been here ever since daylight to peep at it through that crack. What do you think about it?”

  “I dont think nothing about it,” Ned said. “Boss Priest could a bought the best two-hundred-dollar horse in Yok-napatawpha County for this money.”

  “There aint any two-hundred-dollar horse in Yoknapa-tawpha County,” Boon said. “If there was, this automobile would buy ten of them. Go be hooking up that hose.”

  “Go be hooking up that hose, Lucius,” Ned said to me; he didn’t even look around. He went to the automobile door and opened it. It was the back seat. Front seats didn’t have doors in those days; you just walked up and got in. “Come on, Miss Sarah, you and Miss Alison,” Ned said. “Delphine can wait with the children for the next trip.”

  “You go hook up that hose like I told you,” Boon said. “I got to get it out of here before I can do anything to it.”

  “You aint gonter tote it out in yo
ur hand, is you?” Ned said. “I reckon we can ride that far. I reckon I’m gonter have to drive it so the sooner I starts, the quicker it will be.” He said: “Hee hee hee.” He said: “Come on, Miss Sarah.”

  “Will it be all right, Boon?” Grandmother said.

  “Yessum, Miss. Sarah,” Boon said. Grandmother and Mother got in. Before Boon could close the door, Ned was already in the front seat.

  “Get out of there,” Boon said.

  “Go ahead and tend to your business, if you knows how to,” Ned said. “I aint gonter touch nothing until I learns how, and just setting here aint gonter learn me. Go on and hook up, or whatever you does to it.”

  Boon went around to the driver’s side and set the switches and levers, and went to the front and jerked the crank. On the third pull, the engine roared.

  t”Bp°nI” Grandmother cried.

  “It’s all right, Miss Sarah!” Boon hollered above the noise, running back to the guiding wheel.

  “I dont care!” Grandmother said. “Get in quick! I’m nervous!” Boon got in and quieted the engine and shifted the levers; a moment, then the automobile moved quietly and slowly backward out of the shed, into the lot, the sunshine, and stopped.

  “Hee hee hee,” Ned said.

  “Be careful, Boon,” Grandmother said. I could see her hand gripping the stanchion of the top.

  “Yessum,” Boon said. The automobile moved again, backward, beginning to turn. Then it moved forward, still turning; Grandmother’s hand still gripped the stanchion. Mother’s face looked like a girl’s. The car went slowly and quietly across the lot until it was facing the gate to the lane, to the outside, to the world, and stopped. And Boon didn’t say anything: he just sat there behind the wheel, the engine running smooth and quiet, his head turned just enough for Grandmother to see his face. Oh yes, maybe he wasn’t a negotiable-paper wizard like Grandfather, and there were folks in Jefferson that would say he wasn’t much of anything else either, but for this skirmish anyway he was a skirmish fighter of consummate skill and grace. Grandmother sat for maybe a half a minute. Then she drew a long breath and expelled it.