The Reivers Page 7

  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.

  But Memphis was nearer than Vicksburg even by mule team, so they built a road as straight from Jefferson to the south bend of Wyott’s ferryboat as they could run it, and as straight from the north end of the ferry-boat to Memphis as they could run that. So the cotton and freight began to come and go that way, mule- or ox-drawn; whereupon there appeared immediately from nowhere an ancestryless giant calling himself Ballenbaugh; some said he actually bought from Wyott the small dim heretofore peaceful one-room combined residence and store, including whatever claim he (Wyott) considered he had in the old Chickasaw crossing; others said that Ballenbaugh simply suggested to Wyott that he (Wyott) had been there long enough now and the time had come for him to move four miles back from the river and become a farmer.

  Anyway, that’s what Wyott did. And then his little wilderness-cradled hermitage became a roaring place indeed: it became dormitory, grubbing station and saloon for the transient freighters and the fixed crews of hard-mouthed hard-souled mule skinners who met the wagons at both edges of the bottom, with two and three and (when necessary) four span of already geared-up mules, to curse the heavy wagons in to the ferry on one side of the river, and from the ferry to high ground once more on the other. A roaring place; who faced it were anyway men. But just tough men then, no m
ore, until Colonel Sartoris (I don’t mean the banker with his courtesy title acquired partly by inheritance and partly by propinquity, who was responsible for Boon and me being where we at this moment were; I mean his father, the actual colonel, C.S.A.—soldier, statesman, politician, duelist; the collateral descending nephews and cousins of one twenty-year-old Yoknapatawpha County youth say, murderer) built his railroad in the mid-seventies and destroyed it

  But not Ballenbaugh’s, let alone Ballenbaugh. The wagon trains came and drove the boats from the river and changed the name of Wyott’s Crossing to Ballenbaugh’s Ferry; the railroads came and removed the cotton bales from the wagons and therefore the ferry from Ballenbaugh’s, but that was all; forty years before, in the modest case of the trader, Wyott, Ballenbaugh snowed himself perfectly capable of anticipating the wave of the future and riding it; now, in the person of his son, mother giant who in 1865, returned with (it was said) his coat lined with uncut United States bank notes, from (he said) Arkansas, where (he said) he had served and been honorably discharged from a troop of partisan rangers, the name of whose commander he was never subsequently able to recall, he showed that he had lost none of his old deftness and skill and omniscience. Formerly, people passed through Ballenbaugh’s, pausing for the night; now they travelled to Ballenbaugh’s, always at night and often rapidly, to give Ballenbaugh as much time as possible to get the horse or cow concealed in the swamp before the law or the owner arrived. Because, in addition to gangs of angry farmers following the nonreturning prints of horses and cattle, and sheriffs following those of actual murderers into Ballenbaugh’s, at least one federal revenue agent left a set of nonreturning footprints. Because where Ballenbaugh senior merely sold whiskey, this one made it too; he was now the patron of what is covered by the euphemistic blanket-term of dance hall, and by the mid-eighties Ballenbaugh’s was a byword miles around for horror and indignation; ministers and old ladies tried to nominate sheriffs whose entire platform would be running Ballenbaugh and his drunks and fiddlers and gamblers and girls out of Yoknapatawpha County and Mississippi too if possible. But Ballenbaugh and his entourage—stable, pleasuredome, whatever you want to call it—never bothered us outsiders: they never came out of their fastness and there was no law compelling anyone to go there; also, seemingly his new avocation (avatar) was so rewarding that word went round that anyone with sights and ambition no higher than one spavined horse or dry heifer was no longer welcome there. So sensible people simply let Ballen-baugh’s alone. Which certainly included sheriffs, who were not only sensible but family men too, and who had the example of the federal revenuer who had vanished in that direction not so long ago>.

  That is, until the summer of 1886, when a Baptist minister named Hiram Hightower—also a giant of a man, as tall and almost as big as Ballenbaugh himself, who on Sunday from 1861 to 1865 had been one of Forrest’s company chaplains and on the other six days one of his hardest and most courageous troopers—rode into Ballen-baugh’s armed with a Bible and his bare hands and converted the entire settlement with his fists, one at a time when he could, two or three at a time when he had to. So when Boon and Ned and I approached it in this May dusk of 1905, Ballenbaugh was accomplishing his third avatar in the person of a fifty-year-old maiden: his only child: a prim fleshless severe iron-gray woman who farmed a quarter section of good bottom cotton- and corn-land and conducted a small store with a loft above it containing a row of shuck mattresses each with its neat perfectly clean sheets and pillow cases and blankets for the accommodation of fox- and coon-hunters and fishermen, who (it was said) returned the second time not for the hunting and fishing but for the table Miss Ballenbaugh set.

  She heard us too. Nor were we the first; she told us that we were the thirteenth automobile to pass there in the last two years, five of them in the last forty days; she had already lost two hens and would probably have to begin keeping everything penned up, even the hounds. She and the cook and a Negro man were already on the front gallery, shading their eyes against the ghostly flicker of our headlights as we drove up. She not only knew Boon of old, she recognised the automobile first; already, even after only thirteen of them, her eye for individual cars was that good.

  “So you really did make it to Jefferson, after all,” she said.

  “In a year?” Boon said. “Lord, Miss Ballenbaugh, this automobile has been a hundred times farther than Jefferson since then. A thousand times. You might as well give you got to get used to automobiles like everybody else.” That was when she told us about the thirteen cars in two years, and the two hens.

  “At least they got a ride on an automobile for a little piece anyway,” she said. “Which is more than I can say.”

  “You mean to say you ain’t never rode in one?” Boon said. “Here, Ned,” he said, “jump out of there and get them grips out too. Loosh, let Miss Ballenbaugh set up in front where she can see out.”

  “Wait,” Miss Ballenbaugh said. “I must tell Alice about supper.”

  “Supper can wait,” Boon said. “I bet Alice aint never had a car ride neither. Come on, Alice. Who’s that with you? Your husband?”

  “I aint studying no husband,” the cook said. “And I wouldn’t be studying Ephum even if I was.”

  “Bring him on anyway,” Boon said. The cook and the man came and got in too, into the back seat with the gasoline can and the folded tarpaulin. Ned and I stood in the lamplight from the open door and watched the automobile, the red tail lamp, move on up the rokd, then stop and back and turn and come back past us, Boon blowing the horn now, Miss Ballenbaugh sitting erect and a little tense in the front seat, Alice and Ephum in the back seat waving to us as they passed.

  “Whooee, boy,” Ephum shouted at Ned. “Git a horse!”

  “Showing off,” Ned said; he meant Boon. “He better be sho proud Boss Priest aint standing here too. He’d show him off.” The car stopped and backed and turned again and came back to us and stopped. After a moment Miss Ballenbaugh said,

  “Well.” Then she moved; she said briskly: “All right, Alice.” So we have supper. And I knew why the hunters and fishermen came back. Then Ned went off with Ephum and I made my manners to Miss Ballenbaugh and, Boon carrying the lamp, we went upstairs to the loft above the store.

  “Didn’t you bring nothing?” Boon said. “Not even a clean handkerchief?”

  “I wont need anything,” I said.

  “Well, you cant sleep like that. Look at them clean sheets. At least take off your shoes and pants. And your maw would make you brush your teeth too.”

  “No she wouldn’t,” I said. “She couldn’t. I aint got anything to brush them with.”

  “That wouldn’t stop her, and you know it. If you couldn’t find something, you’d make something to do it with or know the reason why.”

  “All right,” I said. I was already on my mattress. “Good night.” He stood with his hand up to blow out the lamp.

  “You all right?” he said.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Say the word. We’ll go back home. Not now but in the morning.”

  “Did you wait this long to get scared?” I said. “Good night,” he said. He blew out the lamp and got on his mattress. Then there was all the spring darkness: the big bass-talking frogs from the sloughs, the sound that the woods makes, the big woods, the wilderness with the wild things: coons and rabbits and mink and mushrats and the big owls and the big snakes—moccasins and rattlers—and maybe even the trees breathing and the river itself breathing, not to mention the ghosts—the old Chickasaws who named the land before the white men ever saw it, and the white men afterward—Wyott and old Sutpen and Major de Spain’s hunters and the flatboats full of cotton and then the wagon trains and the brawling teamsters and the line of brigands and murderers which produced Miss Ballen-baugh; suddenly I realised what the noise was that Boon was making.

  “What are you laughing at?” I said. “I’m thinking about Hell Creek bottom. We’ll hit it about eleven oclock tomorrow morning.”


  “I thought you said we’ll have trouble there.”

  “You damn right we will,” Boon said. “It’ll take that axe and shovel and bob wire and block and tackle and all the fence rails and me and you and Ned all three. That’s who I’m laughing at: Ned. By the time we are through Hell Creek tomorrow, he’s going to wish he hadn’t busted what he calls his manners nor et nor done nothing else under that tarpollyon until he felt Memphis itself under them wheels.”

  Then he waked me early. And everybody else within a half mile, though it still took some time to get Ned up from where he had slept in Ephum’s house, to the kitchen to eat his breakfast (and even longer than that to get him out of the kitchen again with a woman in it). We ate breakfast—and after that breakfast if I had been a hunter or a fisherman I wouldn’t have felt like walking anywhere for a while—and Boon gave Miss Ballenbaugh another ride in the automobile, but without Alice and Ephum this time, though Ephum was on hand. Then we—Boon—filled the gasoline tank and the radiator, not because they needed it but I think because Miss Ballenbaugh and Ephum were there watching, and started. The sun was just rising as we crossed the Iron Bridge over the river (and the ghost of that steamboat too; I had forgot that last night) into foreign country, another county; by night it would even be another state, and Memphis.

  “Providing we get through Hell Creek,” Boon said. “Maybe if you’d just stop talking about it,” I said. “Sure,” Boon said. “Hell Creek bottom dont care whether you talk about it or not. It dont have to give a durn. You’ll see.” Then he said, “Well, there it is.” It was only a little after ten; we had made excellent time following the ridges, the roads dry and dusty between the sprouting fields, the land vacant and peaceful with Sunday, the people already in their Sunday clothes idle on the front galleries, the children and dogs already running toward the fence or road to watch us pass; then in the surreys and buggies and wagons and horse-and mule-back, anywhere from one to three on the horse but not on the mule (a little after nine we passed another automobile; Boon said it was a Ford; he had an eye for automobiles like Miss Ballenbaugh’s), on the way to the small white churches in the spring groves.