The Reivers Page 6
Only, nothing happened. Boon got out, without any coat. Ned was already loading our grips and baskets and bundles into the car. He said grimly: “Hee hee hee.” He said, “Come on, get started so you can break down and still have time to fix it and get back to town before dark.” So he was talking to Boon now. He said, “Are you coming back to town before you leaves?”
Then Boon said: “Leave for where?”
“Leave to eat supper,” Ned said. “Where does anybody with good sense leave to do at sundown?”
“Oh,” Boon said. “You worry about your supper. That’s the only supper you got to worry about eating.”
We got in and started, me in front with Boon and the rest of them in the back. We crossed the Square crowded with Saturday afternoon, and then we were out of town. But there we were, I mean, we were no forrader. We would come presently to the fork of the road which led to Cousin Zack’s, and we would even be going in the wrong direction. And even if it had been the right direction, we still would not be free; as long as we still had Aunt Callie and Lessep and Maury and Alexander in the back seat, we were only free of Ned 1>eing where nobody in the world had expected him to be, saying Hee hee hee and Are you coming back to town before. Boon had never once looked at me, not I at him. Nor had he spoken to me either; possibly he sensed that he had frightened me with his clean shirt and collar and necktie and the shave in the middle of the day and all the rest of the give-away aura of travel, departure, separation, severance; sensed that I was not only frightened but angry that I had been vulnerable to fright; going on, the sunny early afternoon road stretching on ahead for the seventeen miles during which something would have to be decided, agreed upon; on across the bright May land, our dust spurting and coiling behind us unless we had to slow down for a bridge or a sandy stretch which required the low gears; the seventeen miles which would not last forever even though there were seventeen of them, the mileposts diminishing much too rapidly while something had to be done, decided sooner and sooner and nearer and nearer and I didn’t know what yet; or maybe just something said, a voice, noise, a human sound, since no matter what bitter forfeit Non-virtue may afterward wrench and wring from you, loneliness, solitude, silence should not be part of it. But at least Boon tried. Or maybe with him it was just the silence too and any un-silence were better, no matter how foolish nor long-ago pre-doomed. No, it was more than that; we had less than half the distance left now and something had to be done, started, fused-off:
“The roads are sure fine now, everywhere, even further than Yoknapatawpha County. A man couldn’t want better roads for a long trip like a automobile funeral or something than they are now. How far do you reckon this car could go between now and sundown?” You see? addressed to nobody, like the drowning man thrusting one desperate hand above the surface hoping there might be a straw there. He found none:
“I dont know,” Aunt Callie said from the back seat, holding Alexander, who had been asleep since we left town and didn’t deserve a car ride of one mile, let alone seventeen. “And you aint gonter know neither, unlessen you studies it out setting in that front seat locked up in that shed in Boss’s back yard tonight.”
Now we were almost there. “So you want—” Boon said, out of the side of his mouth, just exactly loud enough for me to hear, aimed exactly at my right ear like a gun or an arrow or maybe a handful of sand at a closed window.
“Shut up,” I said, exactly like him. The simple and cowardly thing would be to tell him suddenly to stop and as he did so, leap from the car, already running, presenting to Aunt Callie the split-second alternative either to abandon Alexander to Boon and try to run me down in the bushes, or stick with Alexander and pursue me with simple yelling. I mean, have Boon drive on and leave them at the house and I to spring out from the roadside and leap back aboard as he passed going back to town or any direction opposite from all who would miss me and have authority over me; the cowardly way, so why didn’t I take it, who was already a lost liar, already damned by deceit; why didn’t I go the whole hog and be a coward too; be irrevocable and irremediable like Faustus became? glory in baseness, make, compel my new Master to respect me for my completeness even if he did scorn my size? Only I didn’t. It wouldn’t have worked, one of us anyway had to be practical; granted that Boon and I would be well on our way before Cousin Louisa could send someone to the field where Cousin Zack would be at three oclock in the afternoon during planting time, and granted that Cousin ‘ Zack couldn’t possibly have overtaken us on his saddle horse: he wouldn’t have tried to: he would have ridden straight to town and after one minute each with Ned and Cousin Ike, he would have known exactly what to do and would have done it, using the telephone and the police.
We were there. I got out and opened the gate (the same posts of old Lucius Quintus Carothers’s time; your present Cousin Carothers has a cattle guard in it now so automobiles can cross, not owning hooves) and we went on up the locust drive toward the house (it is still there: the two-room mud-chinked log half domicile and half fort which old Lucius came with his slaves and foxhounds across the mountains from Carolina in 1813 and built; it is still there somewhere, bidden beneath the clapboards and Greek Revival and steamboat scroll-work which the women the successive Edmondses marry have added to it).
Cousin Louisa and everybody else on the place had already heard us approaching and (except probably the ones Cousin Zack could actually see from bis horse) were all on the front gallery and steps and the yard when we drove up and stopped.
“All right,” Boon said, again out of the side of his mouth, “do you want.” Because, as you say nowadays, this was it; no time any more, let alone privacy, to get some—any—inkling of what he now must desperately know. Because we—he and I—were so new at this, you
see. We were worse than amateurs: innocents, complete innocents at stealing automobiles even though neither of us would have called it stealing since we intended to return it unharmed; and even, if people, the world (Jefferson anyway) had just let us alone, unmissed. Even if I could have answered him if he had asked. Because it was even worse for me than for him; both of us were desperate but mine was the more urgent desperation since I had to do something, and quick, in a matter of seconds now, while all he had to do was sit in the car with at most his fingers crossed. I didn’t know what to do now; I had already told more lies than I had believed myself capable of inventing, and had had them believed or at least accepted with a consistency which had left me spellbound if not already appalled; I was in the position of the old Negro who said, “Here I is, Lord. If You wants me saved, You got the best chance You ever seen standing right here looking at You.” I had shot my bow, Boon’s too. If Non-virtue still wanted either of us, it was now her move.
Which she did. She was dressed as Cousin Zachary Edmonds. He came out the front door at that moment and at the same moment I saw that a Negro boy in the yard was holding the reins of his saddle horse. You see what I mean? Zachary Edmonds, whom Jefferson never saw on a weekday between the first ground-breaking in March and lay-ing-by in July, had been in town this morning (something urgent about the grist mill) and had stopped in Cousin Ike’s store barely minutes after I had done so myself; which, dovetailed neatly and exactly with the hour and more Non-virtue had required to shave Boon and change his shirt, had given Cousin Zack the exact time necessary to ride home and be getting off his horse at his doorstep when they heard us coming. He said—to me: “What are you doing out here? Ike told me you were going to stay in town tonight and he is going to take you fishing tomorrow.”
So of course Aunt Callie began yelling then so I didn’t need to say anything at all even if I had known anything to say. “Fishing?” she hollered. “On Sunday? If his paw could hear that, he would jump off that train this minute without even waiting to telegraph! His maw too! Miss Alison aint told him to stay in town with no Mister Ike nor anybody else! She told him to come on out here with me and these other chillen and if he dont behave his-self, Mister Zack would make him!”
“Sir?” I said. “Yes sir. I mean, no sir.”
“Well, which? Are you going to stay out here, or are you going back with Boon?”
“Yes sir,” I said. “I’m going back. Cousin Ike told me to ask you if I could.” And Aunt Callie yelled again (she had never really stopped except for maybe that one long breath when Cousin Zack told her to) but that was all: she still yelling and Cousin Zack saying,
“Stop it, stop it, stop it. I cant hear my ears. If Ike dont bring him out tomorrow, I’ll send in for him Monday.” I went back to the car; Boon had the engine already running.
“Well I’ll be damned,” he said, not loud but with complete respect, even awe a little.
“Come on,” I said. “Get away from here.” We went on, smoothly but quick, faster, back down the drive toward the gate.
“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 sile
ntly 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.