Читать книгу The Reivers - William Faulkner - Страница 4

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That was Saturday. Ludus was back at work Monday morning. On the next Friday my grandfather—the other one, Mother’s father, your great-grandmother’s father—died in Bay St. Louis.

Boon didn’t actually belong to us. I mean, not solely to us, the Priests. Or rather I mean the McCaslins and Edmondses, of whom we Priests are what might be called the cadet branch. Boon had three proprietors: not only us, as represented by Grandfather and Father and Cousin Ike McCaslin and our other cousin, Zachary Edmonds, to whose father, McCaslin Edmonds, Cousin Ike on his twenty-first birthday had abdicated the McCaslin plantation—he belonged not just to us but to Major de Spain and General Compson too until he died. Boon was a corporation, a holding company in which the three of us—McCaslins, De Spain, and General Compson—had mutually equal but completely undefined shares of responsibility, the one and only corporation rule being that whoever was nearest at the crises would leap immediately into whatever breach Boon had this time created or committed or simply fallen heir to; he (Boon) was a mutual benevolent protective benefit association, of which the benefits were all Boon’s and the mutuality and the benevolence and the protecting all ours.

His grandmother had been the daughter of one of old Issetibbeha’s Chickasaws who married a white whiskey trader; at times, depending on the depth of his cups, Boon would declare himself to be at least ninety-nine one-hundredths Chickasaw and in fact a lineal royal descendant of old Issetibbeha himself; the next time he would offer to fight any man who dared even intimate that he had one drop of Indian blood in his veins.

He was tough, faithful, brave and completely unreliable; he was six feet four inches tall and weighed two hundred and forty pounds and had the mentality of a child; over a year ago Father had already begun to say that at any moment now I would outgrow him.

In fact, although he was obviously a perfectly normal flesh-and-blood biological result (vide the moments in his cups when he was not merely ready and willing but even eager to fight any man or men either pro or con, depending on how the drink had taken him, for the right to ancestry) and hence he had to have been somewhere during those first nine or ten or eleven years, it was as if Boon had been created whole and already nine or ten or eleven years old, by the three of us, McCaslin-De Spain-Compson, as a solution to a dilemma one day at Major de Spain’s hunting camp.

That’s right, the same camp which you will probably continue to call McCaslin’s camp for a few years after your Cousin Ike is gone, just as we—your fathers—continued to call it De Spain’s camp for years after Major de Spain was gone. But in the time of my fathers, when Major de Spain bought or borrowed or leased the land (however men managed to acquire valid titles in Mississippi between 1865 and ’70) and built the lodge and stables and kennels, it was his camp: who culled and selected the men he considered worthy to hunt the game he decreed to be hunted, and so in that sense not only owned who hunted it but where they hunted and even what: the bear and deer, and wolves and panthers also ranged it then, less than twenty miles from Jefferson—the four or five sections of river bottom jungle which had been a portion of old Thomas Sutpen’s vast kingly dream which in the end had destroyed not only itself but Sutpen too, which in those days was a sort of eastern gateway to the still almost virgin wilderness of swamp and jungle which stretched westward from the hills to the towns and plantations along the Mississippi.

It was only twenty miles then; our fathers could leave Jefferson at midnight in buggies and wagons (a man on a horse did it even quicker) on the fifteenth of November and be on a deer-or bear-stand by daybreak. Even in 1905 the wilderness had retreated only twenty more miles; the wagons bearing the guns and food and bedding had merely to start at sundown; and now a northern lumber company had built a narrow-gauge railroad for hauling logs, which connected with the main line, passing within a mile of Major de Spain’s new camp, with a courtesy stop to let Major de Spain and his guests off, to be met by the wagons which had gone in the day before. Though by 1925 we could already see the doom. Major de Spain and the rest of that old group, save your Cousin Ike and Boon, were gone now and (there was gravel now all the way from Jefferson to De Spain’s flag stop) their inheritors switched off their automobile engines to the sound of axes and saws where a year ago there had been only the voices of the running hounds. Because Manfred de Spain was a banker, not a hunter like his father; he sold lease, land and timber and by 1940 (it was McCaslin’s camp now) they—we—would load everything into pickup trucks and drive two hundred miles over paved highways to find enough wilderness to pitch tents in; though by 1980 the automobile will be as obsolete to reach wilderness with as the automobile will have made the wilderness it seeks. But perhaps they—you—will find wilderness on the back side of Mars or the moon, with maybe even bear and deer to run it.

But then, when Boon materialized at the camp one day, full panoplied and already ten or eleven or twelve years old, there were only twenty miles for Major de Spain and General Compson and McCaslin Edmonds and Walter Ewell and old Bob Legate and the half-dozen others who would come and go, to travel. But General Compson, although he had commanded troops not too unsuccessfully as a colonel at Shiloh, and again not too unsuccessfully as a brigadier during Johnston’s retreat on Atlanta, was a little short in terrain, topography, and would promptly get lost ten minutes after he left camp (the mule he preferred to ride would have brought him back at any time but, not only a paroled Confederate general but a Compson too, he declined to accept counsel or advice from a mule), so as soon as the last hunter was in from the morning’s drive, everyone would take turns blowing a horn until General Compson at last got in. Which was satisfactory, anyway served, until General Compson’s hearing began to fail too. Until finally one afternoon Walter Ewell and Sam Fathers, who was half Negro and half Chickasaw Indian, had to track him down and camp in the woods with him all night, facing Major de Spain with the alternative of either forbidding him to leave the tent or expelling him from the club, when lo, there was Boon Hogganbeck, already a giant, even at ten or eleven already bigger than General Compson, whose nurse he became—a waif, who seemed to have nothing and know nothing but his name; even Cousin Ike is not sure whether it was McCaslin Edmonds or Major de Spain who found Boon first where whoever bore him had abandoned him. All Ike knows—remembers—is that Boon was already there, about twelve years old, out at old Carothers McCaslin’s place, where McCaslin Edmonds was already raising Ike as if he was his father and now and without breaking stride took over Boon too as though he had been Boon’s father also, though at that time McCaslin Edmonds himself was only thirty.

Anyway, as soon as Major de Spain realised that he must either expel General Compson from the club, which would be difficult, or forbid him to leave the camp, which would be impossible, and hence he must equip General Compson with something resembling a Boon Hogganbeck, there was the Boon Hogganbeck, produced either by McCaslin Edmonds or perhaps by both, of them—Edmonds and De Spain himself—in simultaneous crisis. Ike could remember that: the loading of the bedding and guns and food into the wagon on the fourteenth of November, with Tennie’s Jim (grandfather of this Bobo Beauchamp of whom you will hear presently) and Sam Fathers and Boon (he, Ike, was only five or six then; another four or five years before he would be ten and could make one also) and McCaslin himself riding ahead on the horse, to the camp where each morning Boon would follow General Compson on a second mule until by simple force probably, since at twelve Boon was already bigger than his charge, Boon would compel him to the right direction in time to reach camp before dark.

Thus General Compson made a woodsman of Boon despite himself, you might say, in simple self-defense. But even eating at the same table and ranging the same woods and sleeping in the same rain even with Walter Ewell never made a marksman of him; one of the camp’s favorite stories was about Boon’s shooting, told by Walter Ewell: of being on a stand where he had left Boon (old General Compson had gone to his fathers at last—or to whatever bivouac old soldiers of that war, blue or gray either, probably insisted on going to since probably no place would suit them for anything resembling a permanent stay—and now Boon was a regular hunter like anybody else) and of hearing the hounds and realising that the deer was going to cross at Boon’s stand, then of hearing the five shots from Boon’s ramshackle pump gun (General Compson had bequeathed it to him; it had never been in the best condition while Compson owned it and Walter said his real surprise was that the gun had fired even twice without jamming, let alone five times) and then Boon’s voice across the woods between them: “God damn! Yonder he goes! Head him! Head him!” And how he—Walter—hurried across to Boon’s stand and found the five exploded shells on the ground and not ten paces away the prints of the running buck which Boon had not even touched.

Then Grandfather bought that automobile and Boon found his soul’s mate. By this time he was officially (by mutual McCaslin-Edmonds-Priest consent, even McCaslin Edmonds having given up or seen the light at last when Boon failed the third grade for the second time too—or maybe the real light McCaslin saw was that Boon would never stay on any farm long enough to learn to be a farmer) a member of the livery stable staff. At first the jobs were mostly still the odd ones—feeding, cleaning harness and buggies. But I told you he had a way with horses and mules, and soon he was a regular driver of hired vehicles—hacks and cabs which met the daytime trains, and the buggies and surreys and light wagons in which the drummers made the rounds of the country stores. He lived in town now, except when McCaslin and Zachary both were away at night and Boon would sleep in the house to protect the women and children. I mean, he lived in Jefferson. I mean, he actually had a home—a single rented room in what in my grandfather’s time was the Commercial Hotel, established in hopeful rivalry of the Holston House but never making the grade in that rivalry. But solid enough: where juries were lodged and fed during court terms and where country litigants and horse-and mule-traders felt more at ease than among the carpets and brass cuspidors and leather chairs and linen tablecloths across town; then in my time the Snopes Hotel with both hand-painted esses upside down when Mr Flem Snopes (the banker, murdered ten or twelve years ago by the mad kinsman who perhaps didn’t believe his cousin had actually sent him to the penitentiary but at least could have kept him out or anyway tried to) began to lead his tribe out of the wilderness behind Frenchman’s Bend, into town; then for a brief time in the mid-thirties leased by a brassy-haired gentlewoman who came briefly from nowhere and went briefly back, known to your father and the police as Little Chicago; and which you know, those glories but memories now, as Mrs Rouncewell’s boarding house. But in Boon’s time it was still the Commercial Hotel; in the intervals between sleeping on the floor of some Compson or Edmonds or Priest kitchen, he was living there when my grandfather bought the automobile.

My grandfather didn’t want an automobile at all; he was forced to buy one. A banker, president of the older Bank of Jefferson, the first bank in Yoknapatawpha County, he believed then and right on to his death many years afterward, by which time everybody else even in Yoknapatawpha County had realised that the automobile had come to stay, that the motor vehicle was an insolvent phenomenon like last night’s toadstool and, like the fungus, would vanish with tomorrow’s sun. But Colonel Sartoris, president of the newer, the mushroom Merchants and Farmers Bank, forced him to buy one. Or rather, another insolvent, a dreamy myopic gentian-eyed mechanical wizard named Buffaloe, compelled him to. Because my grandfather’s car wasn’t even the first one in Jefferson. (I dont count Manfred de Spain’s red E.M.F. racer. Although De Spain owned it and drove it daily through Jefferson streets for several years, it had no more place in the decorous uxorious pattern of a community than Manfred himself did, both of them being incorrigible and bachelor, not in the town but on it and up to no good like one prolonged unbroken Saturday night even while Manfred was actually mayor, its very scarlet color being not even a scornful defiance of the town but rather a kind of almost inattentive disavowal.)

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 his 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 the 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 surprises 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 Buffaloe’s hands and the owner of it out of town; so that, Boon naturally thought, Mr Buffaloe 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 Buffaloe 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 train 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 his 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 shout 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.

“I’ll 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, Delphine 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 Callie 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 Yoknapatawpha County for this money.”

“There aint any two-hundred-dollar horse in Yoknapatawpha 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 your 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.

“Boon!” 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.

“No,” she said. “We must wait for Mister Priest.” Maybe it wasn’t a victory, but anyway our side—Boon—had not only discovered the weak point in the enemy’s (Grandfather’s) front, by suppertime that night the enemy himself would discover it too.

Discover in fact that his flank had been turned. The next afternoon (Saturday) after the bank closed, and each succeeding Saturday afternoon, and then when summer came, every afternoon except when rain was actually falling, Grandfather in front beside Boon and the rest of us in rotation—Grandmother, Mother, me and my three brothers and Aunt Callie that nursed us in turn, including Father, and Delphine and our various connections and neighbors and Grandmother’s close friends in their ordered rote—in the linen dusters and goggles, would drive through Jefferson and the adjacent countryside; Aunt Callie and Delphine in their turns, but not Ned. He rode in it once: that one minute while it backed slowly out of the garage, and the two minutes while it turned and moved slowly forward across the lot until Grandmother lost her nerve and said No to the open gate and the public world, but not again. By the second Saturday he had realised, accepted—anyway become convinced—that even if Grandfather had ever intended to make him the official operator and custodian of the automobile, he could have approached it only over Boon’s dead body. But although he declined to recognise that the automobile existed on the place, he and Grandfather had met on some unspoken gentlemen’s ground regarding it: Ned never to speak in scorn or derogation of its ownership and presence, Grandfather never to order Ned to wash and polish it as he used to do the carriage—which Grandfather and Ned both knew Ned would have refused to do, even if Boon had let him: by which Grandfather visited on Ned his only punishment for his apostasy: he refused to give Ned the public chance to refuse to wash the automobile before Boon might have had a public chance to refuse to let him do it.

Because that was when Boon transferred—was transferred by mutual and instantaneous consent—from the day shift at the stable to the night shift. Otherwise, the livery business would have known him no more. That part of our Jefferson leisure class, friends or acquaintances of Father’s or maybe just friends of horses, who could have used the stable as a permanent business address—if they had had any business or expected any mail—were less strangers there than Boon. If—when—you, meaning Father, wanted Boon now, you sent me to Grandfather’s lot, where he would be washing and polishing the automobile—this, even during those first weeks when it had not left the lot since last Saturday and would not leave it again until the next one, backing it out of the shed and washing it again each morning, with tender absorption, right down to the last spoke and nut, then sitting guard over it while it dried.

“He’s going to soak all the paint off of it,” Mr Ballott said. “Does Boss know he’s running the hose on that automobile four or five hours every day?”

“What if he did?” Father said. “Boon would still sit there in the lot all day looking at it.”

“Put him on the night shift,” Mr Ballott said. “Then he could do whatever he wants to with his daylight and John Powell could go home and sleep in a bed every night for a change.”

“I already have,” Father said. “As soon as I can find somebody to go to that lot and tell him.”

There was a shuck mattress in the harness room on which until now John Powell or one of the other drivers or hostlers under his command always spent the night, mainly as night watchmen against fire. Now Father installed a cot and mattress in the office itself, where Boon could get some sleep, which he needed, since now he could spend all day with complete immunity in Grandfather’s lot either washing the automobile or just looking at it.

So now every afternoon, as many of us as the back seat would hold in our ordered turns would drive through the Square and into the country; Grandfather had already installed the extraneous emergency gear to be as much and inseparable a part of the automobile’s equipment as the engine which moved it.

But always through the Square first. You would have thought that as soon as he bought the automobile, Grandfather would have done what you would have done, having bought the automobile for that end: lain in wait for Colonel Sartoris and his carriage and ambushed, bushwhacked him and really taught him how to pass ordinances restricting others’ rights and privileges without consulting his betters first. But Grandfather didn’t do this. We finally realised that he wasn’t interested in Colonel Sartoris: he was interested in teams, vehicles. Because I told you he was a far-sighted man, a man capable of vision: Grandmother sitting tense and rigid and gripping the top stanchion and not even calling Grandfather Mister Priest now, as she had done as long as we had known her, but calling him by his given name as though she were no kin to him, the horse or team we were approaching reined back and braced to shy and sometimes even rearing and Grandmother saying, “Lucius! Lucius!” and Grandfather (if a man was driving and there were no women or children in the buggy or wagon) saying quietly to Boon:

“Dont stop. Keep going. But slow now.” Or, when a woman had the lines, telling Boon to stop and himself getting out, talking quietly and steadily to the spooked horse until he could get hold of the bit and lead the vehicle past and remove his hat to the ladies in the buggy and come back and get back into the front seat and only then answer Grandmother: “We must get them used to it. Who knows? there may be another automobile in Jefferson in the next ten or fifteen years.”

In fact, that homemade dream which Mr Buffaloe had created single-handed in his back yard two years ago came within an ace of curing Grandfather of a habit which he had had since he was nineteen years old. He chewed tobacco. The first time he turned his head to spit out of the moving automobile, we in the back seat didn’t know what was going to happen until it was already too late. Because how could we? None of us had ever ridden in an automobile before farther than (this was the first trip) from the carriage house to the lot gate, let alone one going fifteen miles an hour (and this was something else: when we were going ten miles an hour Boon always said we were doing twenty; at twenty, he always said forty; we discovered a straight stretch about a half a mile long a few miles out of town where the automobile would get up to twenty-five, where I heard him tell a group of men on the Square that the automobile made sixty miles an hour; this was before he knew that we knew that the thing on the dashboard which looked like a steam gauge was a speedometer), so how could we be expected to? Besides, it didn’t make any difference to the rest of us; we all had our goggles and dusters and veils and even if the dusters were new, the spots and splashes were just brown spots and splashes and just because they were called dusters was no reason why they should not be called on to face anything else but dust. Maybe it was because Grandmother was sitting on the left side (in those days automobiles operated from the right side, like buggies; even Henry Ford, a man as long-visioned as Grandfather, had not yet divined that the steering wheel would be on the left) directly behind Grandfather. She said at once to Boon: “Stop the automobile,” and sat there, not mad so much as coldly and implacably outraged and shocked. She was just past fifty then (she was fifteen when she and Grandfather married) and in all those fifty years she had no more believed that a man, let alone her husband, would spit in her face than she could have believed that Boon for instance would approach a curve in the road without tooting the horn. She said, to nobody; she didn’t even raise her hand to wipe the spit away:

“Take me home.”

“Now, Sarah,” Grandfather said. “Now, Sarah.” He threw the chew away and took out the clean handkerchief from his other pocket, but Grandmother wouldn’t even take it. Boon had already started to get out and go to a house we could see and get a pan of water and soap and a towel, but Grandmother wouldn’t have that either.

“Dont touch me,” she said. “Drive on.” So we went on, Grandmother with the long drying brown splash across one of her goggles and down her cheek even though Mother kept on offering to spit on her handkerchief and wipe it off. “Let me alone, Alison,” Grandmother said.

But not Mother. She didn’t mind tobacco, not in the car. Maybe that was why. But more and more that summer it would be just Mother and us and Aunt Callie and one or two neighbor children in the back seat, Mother’s face flushed and bright and eager, like a girl’s. Because she had invented a kind of shield on a handle like a big fan, light enough for her to raise in front of us almost as fast as Grandfather could turn his head. So he could chew now, Mother always alert and ready with the screen; all of us were quick now in fact, so that almost before the instant when Grandfather knew he was going to turn his head to the left to spit, the screen had already come up and all of us in the back seat had leaned to the right like we were on the same wire, actually doing twenty and twenty-five miles an hour now because there were already two more automobiles in Jefferson that summer; it was as though the automobiles themselves were beating the roads smooth long before the money they represented would begin to compel smoother roads.

“Twenty-five years from now there wont be a road in the county you cant drive an automobile on in any weather,” Grandfather said.

“Wont that cost a lot of money, Papa?” Mother said.

“It will cost a great deal of money,” Grandfather said. “The road builders will issue bonds. The bank will buy them.”

“Our bank?” Mother said. “Buy bonds for automobiles?”

“Yes,” Grandfather said. “We will buy them.”

“But what about us?—I mean, Maury.”

“He will still be in the livery business,” Grandfather said. “He will just have a new name for it. Priest’s Garage maybe, or the Priest Motor Company. People will pay any price for motion. They will even work for it. Look at bicycles. Look at Boon. We dont know why.”

Then the next May came and my other grandfather, Mother’s father, died in Bay St Louis.