第 10 页

“Are you going to get out, or do I pick you up with one hand and snatch this automobile out from under you with the other?” Boon said. Ned moved then, fast enough when he finally accepted the fact that he had to, only grunting a little as he took off his shoes and rolled up his pants and removed his coat. When I looked back at Boon, he was already dragging two poles, sapling-sized tree trunks, out of the weeds and briers.

“Aint you going to use the block and tackle yet?” I said.

“Hell no,” Boon said. “When the time comes for that, you wont need to ask nobody’s permission about it. You’ll already know it.” So it’s the bridge I thought. Maybe there’s not even a bridge at all and that’s what’s wrong. And Boon read my mind there too. “Don’t worry about the bridge. We aint even come to the bridge yet.”

I would learn what he meant by that too, but not now. Ned lowered one foot gingerly into the water. “This water got dirt in it,” he said. “If there’s one thing I hates, it’s dirt betwixt my nekkid toes.”

“That’s because your circulation aint warmed up yet,” Boon said. “Take a-holt of this pole. You said you aint acquainted with automobiles yet. That’s one complaint you wont never have to make again for the rest of your life. All right”—to me—“ease her ahead now and whenever she bites, keep her going.” Which we did, Boon and Ned levering their poles forward under the back axle, pinching us forward for another lurch of two or three or sometimes five feet, until the car hung spinning again, the whirling back wheels coating them both from knee to crown as if they had been swung at with one of the spray nozzles which house painters use now. “See what I mean?” Boon said, spitting, giving another terrific wrench and heave which sent us lurching forward, “about getting acquainted with automobiles? Exactly like horses and mules: dont never stand directly behind one that’s got one hind foot already lifted.”

Then I saw the bridge. We had come up onto a patch of earth so (comparatively) dry that Boon and Ned, almost indistinguishable now with mud, had to trot with their poles and even then couldn’t keep up, Boon hollering, panting, “Go on! Keep going!” until I saw the bridge a hundred yards ahead and then saw what was still between us and the bridge and I knew what he meant. I stopped the car. The road (the passage, whatever you would call it now) in front of us had not altered so much as it had transmogrified, exchanged mediums, elements. It now resembled a big receptacle of milk-infused coffee from which protruded here and there a few forlorn impotent hopeless odds and ends of sticks and brush and logs and an occasional hump of actual earth which looked startlingly like it had been deliberately thrown up by a plow. Then I saw something else, and understood what Boon had been telling me by indirection about Hell Creek bottom for over a year now, and what he had been reiterating with a kind of haunted bemused obsession ever since we left Jefferson yesterday. Standing hitched to a tree just off the road (canal) were two mules in plow gear—that is, in bridles and collars and hames, the trace chains looped over the hames and the plowlines coiled into neat hanks and hanging from the hames also; leaning against another tree nearby was a heavy double-winged plow—a middlebuster—caked, wings shank and the beam itself, with more of the same mud which was rapidly encasing Boon and Ned, a doubletree, likewise mud-caked, leaning against the plow; and in the immediate background a new two-room paintless shotgun cabin on the gallery of which a man sat tilted in a splint chair, barefoot, his galluses down about his waist and his (likewise muddy) brogan shoes against the wall beside the chair. And I knew that this, and not Hurricane Creek, was where (Boon said) he and Mr Wordwin had had to borrow the shovel last year, which (Boon said) Mr Wordwin had forgot to return, and which (the shovel) Mr Wordwin might as well have forgot to borrow also for all the good it did them.

Ned had seen it too. He had already had one hard look at the mudhole. Now he looked at the already geared-up mules standing there swishing and slapping at mosquitoes while they waited for us. “Now, that’s what I calls convenient—” he said.

“Shut up,” Boon said in a fierce murmur. “Not a word. Dont make a sound.” He spoke in a tense controlled fury, propping his muddy pole against the car and hauling out the block and tackle and the barbed wire and the axe and spade. He said Son of a bitch three times. Then he said to me: “You too.”

“Me?” I said.

“But look at them mules,” Ned said. “He even got a log chain already hooked to that doubletree—”

“Didn’t you hear me say shut up?” Boon said in that fierce, quite courteous murmur. “If I didn’t speak plain enough, excuse me. What I’m trying to say is, shut up.”

“Only, what in the world do he want with the middlebuster?” Ned said. “And it muddy clean up to the handles too. Like he been—You mean to say he gets in here with that team and works this place like a patch just to keep it boggy?” Boon had the spade, axe and block and tackle all three in his hands. For a second I thought he would strike Ned with any one or maybe all three of them. I said quickly:

“What do you want me—”

“Yes,” Boon said. “It will take all of us. I—me and Mr Wordwin had a little trouble with him here last year; we got to get through this time—”

“How much did you have to pay him last year to get drug out?” Ned said.

“Two dollars,” Boon said. “—so you better take off your whole pants, take off your shirt too; it’ll be all right here—”

“Two dollars?” Ned said. “This sho beats cotton. He can farm right here setting in the shade without even moving. What I wants Boss to get me is a well-travelled mudhole.”

“Fine,” Boon said. “You can learn how on this one.” He gave Ned the block and tackle and the piece of barbed wire. “Take it yonder to that willow, the big one, and get a good holt with it.” Ned payed out the rope and carried the head block to the tree. I took off my pants and shoes and stepped down into the mud. It felt good, cool. Maybe it felt that way to Boon too. Or maybe his—Ned’s too—was just release, freedom from having to waste any time now trying not to get muddy. Anyway, from now on he simply ignored the mud, squatting in it, saying Son of a bitch quietly and steadily while he fumbled the other piece of barbed wire into a loop on the front of the car to hook the block in. “Here,” he told me, “you be dragging up some of that brush over yonder,” reading my mind again too: “I dont know where it came from neither. Maybe he stacks it up there himself to keep handy for folks so they can find out good how bad they owe him two dollars.”

So I dragged up the brush—branches, tops—into the mud in front of the car, while Boon and Ned took up the slack in the tackle and got ready, Ned and I on the take-up rope of the tackle, Boon at the back of the car with his prize pole again. “You got the easy job,” he told us. “All you got to do is grab and hold when I heave. All right,” he said, “Let’s go.”

There was something dreamlike about it. Not nightmarish: just dreamlike—the peaceful, quiet, remote, sylvan, almost primeval setting of ooze and slime and jungle growth and heat in which the very mules themselves, peacefully swishing and stamping at the teeming infinitesimal invisible myriad life which was the actual air we moved and breathed in, were not only unalien but in fact curiously appropriate, being themselves biological dead ends and hence already obsolete before they were born; the automobile: the expensive useless mechanical toy rated in power and strength by the dozens of horses, yet held helpless and impotent in the almost infantile clutch of a few inches of the temporary confederation of two mild and pacific elements—earth and water—which the frailest integers and units of motion as produced by the ancient unmechanical methods, had coped with for countless generations without really having noticed it; the three of us, three forked identical and now unrecognisable mud-colored creatures engaged in a life-and-death struggle with it, the progress—if any—of which had to be computed in dreadful and glacier-like inches. And all the while, the man sat in his tilted chair on the gallery watching us while Ned and I strained for every inch we could get on the rope which by now was too slippery with mud to grip with the hands, and at the rear of the car Boon strove like a demon, titanic, ramming his pole beneath the automobile and lifting and heaving it forward; at one time he dropped, flung away the pole and, stooping, grasped the car with his hands and actually ran it forward for a foot or two as though it were a wheelbarrow. No man could stand it. No man should ever have to. I said so at last. I stopped pulling, I said, panted: “No. We cant do it. We just cant.” And Boon, in an expiring voice as faint and gentle as the whisper of love:

“Then get out of the way or I’ll run it over you.”

“No,” I said. I stumbled, slipping and plunging, back to him. “No,” I said. “You’ll kill yourself.”

“I aint tired,” Boon said in that light dry voice. “I’m just getting started good. But you and Ned can take a rest. While you’re getting your breath, suppose you drag up some more of that brush—”

“No,” I said, “no! Here he comes! Do you want him to see it?” Because we could see him as well as hear—the suck and plop of the mules’ feet as they picked their delicate way along the edge of the mudhole, the almost musical jangle of the looped chains, the man riding one and leading the other, his shoes tied together by the laces looped over one of the hames, the doubletree balanced in front of him as the old buffalo hunters in the pictures carried their guns—a gaunt man, older than we—I anyway—had assumed.

“Morning, boys,” he said. “Looks like you’re about ready for me now. Howdy, Jefferson,” he said to Boon. “Looks like you did get through last summer, after all.”

“Looks like it,” Boon said. He had changed, instantaneous and complete, like a turned page: the poker player who has just seen the second deuce fall to a hand across the table. “We might a got through this time too if you folks didn’t raise such heavy mud up here.”

“Dont hold that against us,” the man said. “Mud’s one of our best crops up thisaway.”

“At two dollars a mudhole, it ought to be your best,” Ned said. The man blinked at Ned a moment.

“I dont know but what you’re right,” he said. “Here. You take this doubletree; you look like a boy that knows which end of a mule to hook to.”

“Get down and do it yourself,” Boon said. “Why else are we paying you two dollars to be the hired expert? You done it last year.”

“That was last year,” the man said. “Dabbling around in this water hooking log chains to them things undermined my system to where I come down with rheumatism if I so much as spit on myself.” So he didn’t stir. He just brought the mules up and turned them side by side while Boon and Ned hooked the trace chains to the singletrees and then Boon squatted in the mud to make the log chain fast to the car.

“What do you want me to hook it to?” he said.

“I dont care myself,” the man said. “Hook up to any part of it you want out of this mudhole. If you want all of it to come out at the same time, I’d say hook to the axle. But first I’d put all them spades and ropes back in the automobile. You wont need them no more, at least here.” So Ned and I did that, and Boon hooked up and we all three stood clear and watched. He was an expert of course, but by now the mules were experts too, breaking the automobile free of the mud, keeping the strain balanced on the doubletree as delicately as wire walkers, getting the automobile into motion and keeping it there with no more guidance than a word now and then from the man who rode the near mule, and an occasional touch from the peeled switch he carried; on to where the ground was more earth than water.

“All right, Ned,” Boon said. “Unhook him.”

“Not yet,” the man said. “There’s another hole just this side of the bridge that I’m throwing in free. You aint been acquainted here for a year now.” He said to Ned: “What we call the reserve patch up thisaway.”

“You means the Christmas middle,” Ned said.

“Maybe I do,” the man said. “What is it?”

Ned told him. “It’s how we done at McCaslin back before the Surrender when old L.Q.C. was alive, and how the Edmonds boy still does. Every spring a middle is streaked off in the best ground on the place, and every stalk of cotton betwixt that middle and the edge of the field belongs to the Christmas fund, not for the boss but for every McCaslin nigger to have a Christmas share of it. That’s what a Christmas middle is. Likely you mud-farming folks up here never heard of it.” The man looked at Ned awhile. After a while Ned said, “Hee hee hee.”

“That’s better,” the man said. “I thought for a minute me and you was about to misunderstand one another.” He said to Boon: “Maybe somebody better guide it.”

“Yes,” Boon said. “All right,” he told me. So I got under the wheel, mud and all. But we didn’t move yet. The man said, “I forgot to mention it, so maybe I better. Prices have doubled around here since last year.”

“Why?” Boon said. “It’s the same car, the same mudhole; be damned if I dont believe it’s even the same mud.”

“That was last year. There’s more business now. So much more that I cant afford not to go up.”

“All right, goddammit,” Boon said. “Go on.” So we moved, ignominious, at the pace of the mules, on, into the next mudhole without stopping, on and out again. The bridge was just ahead now; beyond it, we could see the road all the way to the edge of the bottom and safety.

“You’re all right now,” the man said. “Until you come back.” Boon was unhooking the log chain while Ned freed the traces and handed the doubletree back up to the man on the mule.

“We aint coming back this way,” Boon said.

“I wouldn’t neither,” the man said. Boon went back to the last puddle and washed some of the mud from his hands and came back and took four dollars from his wallet. The man didn’t move.

“It’s six dollars,” he said.

“Last year it was two dollars,” Boon said. “You said it’s double now. Double two is four. All right. Here’s four dollars.”

“I charge a dollar a passenger,” the man said. “There was two of you last year. That was two dollars. The price is doubled now. There’s three of you. That’s six dollars. Maybe you’d rather walk back to Jefferson than pay two dollars, but maybe that boy and that nigger wouldn’t.”

“And maybe I aint gone up neither,” Boon said. “Suppose I dont pay you six dollars. Suppose in fact I dont pay you nothing.”

“You can do that too,” the man said. “These mides has had a hard day, but I reckon there’s still enough git in them to drag that thing back where they got it from.”

But Boon had already quit, given up, surrendered. “God damn it,” he said, “this boy aint nothing but a child! Sholy for just a little child—”

“Walking back to Jefferson might be lighter for him,” the man said, “but it wont be no shorter.”