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“Go with him,” Gabe told Luster. “He might need somebody to run for him. And latch that gate.”

So the three of us went up the alley toward the Square, me trotting now to keep up, not really trying to overtake Boon so much as to stay between Boon and the pistol and John Powell. Because, as John himself had said, nobody needed to study Ludus. Because we all knew Boon’s marksmanship, and with Boon shooting at Ludus, Ludus himself was safe. He (Ludus) had been one of our drivers too until last Tuesday morning. This is what happened, as reconstructed from Boon and Mr Ballott and John Powell and a little from Ludus himself. A week or two before, Ludus had found a new girl, daughter (or wife: we didn’t know which) of a tenant on a farm six miles from town. On Monday evening, when Boon came in to relieve Mr Ballott for the night shift, all the teams and wagons and drivers were in except Ludus. Mr Ballott told Boon to telephone him when Ludus came in, and went home. That was Mr Ballott’s testimony. This was Boon’s, corroborated in part by John Powell (Father himself had gone home some time before): Mr Ballott was barely out the front door when Ludus came in the back way, on foot. Ludus told Boon that the tire on one of his wheels had loosened and he had stopped at our house and seen Father, who had told him to drive the wagon into the pond in the pasture where the wood of the wheel would swell back to the tire, and stable and feed the mules in our lot and come and get them in the morning. Which you could have expected even Boon to believe, as John Powell immediately did not, since anyone who knew either would have known that, whatever disposition he made of the wagon for the night, Father would have sent Ludus to lead the team back to their stalls in the livery stable where they could be cleaned and fed properly. But that’s what Boon said he was told, which he said was why he didn’t interrupt Mr Ballott’s evening meal to notify him, since Father knew where the mules and wagon were, and it was Father, not Mr Ballott, who owned them.

Now John Powell telling it: but reluctantly; he would likely never have told it at all if Boon had not made his (John’s) silence about the truth a larger moral issue than his loyalty to his race. Once he saw Ludus walk empty-handed into the back door of the stable at the next coincident moment to Mr Ballott’s departure by the front one, leaving only Boon in charge, John didn’t even bother to listen to what tale Ludus would tell. He simply went back through the hallway and across the lot into the alley and on to the end of the alley and was actually standing beside the wagon when Ludus returned to it. It now contained a sack of flour, a gallon jug of coal oil and (John said) a nickel sack of peppermint candy. This is about what happened, because although John’s word about any horse or mule while inside the stable was law, inviolable, even beyond Boon, right up to Mr Ballott or Father himself, out here in no man’s land he was just another wage hand in Maury Priest’s livery stable and he and Ludus both knew it. Maybe Ludus even reminded him of this, but I doubt it. Because all Ludus needed to say was something like: “If word gets back to Maury Priest about how I borried this wagon and team tonight, maybe the same word gonter get back to him about what’s sewed up in that jumper you wears.”

And I dont think he said that either because he and John both knew that too, just as they both knew that if Ludus waited for John to report to Father what Ludus called the “borrying” of the wagon and team, Father would never know it, and if John waited for Ludus (or any other Negro in the stable or Jefferson either) to tell Father about that pistol, Father would never know that either. So Ludus probably said nothing at all, and John only said, “All right. But if them mules aint back in their stalls, without one sweat or whip mark on them and not even looking sleepy, a good solid hour before Mr Ballott gets here tomorrow morning” (you will have already noticed how both of them had completely dismissed Boon from the affair: neither Ludus to say, “Mr Boon knows these mules wont be in tonight; aint he the boss until Mr Ballott comes back in the morning?” nor John to say, “Anybody that would believe the tale you brought in here tonight in place of them mules, aint competent to be the boss of nothing. And I aint even good convinced yet that his name is Boon Hogganbeck”) “Mr Maury aint just gonter know where that team and wagon wasn’t last night, he’s gonter know where they was.”

But John didn’t say it. And sure enough, although Ludus’s mules had been back in their stalls a good hour before daylight, fifteen minutes after Mr Ballott reached the stable at six the next morning, he sent for Ludus and told him he was fired. “Mr Boon knowed my team was out,” Ludus said. “He sent me himself to get him a jug of whiskey. I brung it back to him about four this morning.”

“I didn’t send you anywhere,” Boon said. “When he come in here last night with that cock-and-bull story about them mules being in Mr Maury’s lot, I never even listened. I didn’t even bother to ask him where that wagon actually was, let alone why he was in such a sweating need of a wagon and team last night. What I told him was, before he brought that wagon back this morning I would expect him to go by Mack Winbush’s and bring me back a gallon of Uncle Cal Bookwright’s whiskey. I give him the money for it—two dollars.”

“And I brung you the whiskey,” Ludus said. “I dont know what you done with it.”

“You brought me a half a jug of rotgut, mainly lye and red pepper,” Boon said. “I dont know what Mr Maury’s going to do to you about keeping them mules out all night but it aint a circumstance to what Calvin Bookwright will do to you when I show him that whiskey and tell him you claim he made it.”

“Mr Winbush stays a solid eight miles from town,” Ludus said. “It would a been midnight before I could get back to—” and stopped.

“So that’s why you needed a wagon,” Boon said. “You finally tomcatted yourself clean out of Jefferson and now you got to ramshack the country to locate another back window you can crawl in. Well, you’ll have plenty of time now; the only trouble is, you’ll have to walk—”

“You tole me a jug of whiskey,” Ludus said sullenly. “I brung you a jug—”

“It wasn’t even half full,” Boon said. Then to Mr Ballott: “Hell fire, you wont even have to give him a week’s pay now.” (The weekly pay of drivers was two dollars; this was 1905, remember.) “He already owes me that for that whiskey. What you waiting for? for Mr Maury to come in his-self and fire him?”

Though if Mr Ballott (and Father) had really intended to fire Ludus for good, they would have given him his week’s pay. The very fact that they didn’t indicated (and Ludus knew it) that he was merely being docked a week’s pay (with vacation) for keeping a team out all night without proper authority; next Monday morning Ludus would appear with the other drivers at the regular time and John Powell would have his team ready for him as if nothing had happened. Only, Fate—Rumor—gossip, had to intervene.

So Father, Luster and I hurried up the alley toward the Square, me trotting now, and still too late. We hadn’t even reached the end of the alley when we heard the shots, all five of them: WHOW WHOW WHOW WHOW WHOW like that, then we were in the Square and (it wasn’t far: right at the corner in front of Cousin Isaac McCaslin’s hardware store) we could see it. There were plenty of them; Boon sure picked his day for witnesses; First Saturdays were trade days even then, even in May when you would think people would be too busy getting land planted. But not in Yoknapatawpha County. They were all there, black and white: one crowd where Mr Hampton (the grandfather of this same Little Hub who is sheriff now, or will be again next year) and two or three bystanders were wrestling with Boon, and another crowd where another deputy was holding Ludus about twenty feet away and still in the frozen attitude of running or frozen in the attitude of running or in the attitude of frozen running, whichever is right, and another crowd around the window of Cousin Ike’s store which one of Boon’s bullets (they never did find where the other four went) had shattered after creasing the buttock of a Negro girl who was now lying on the pavement screaming until Cousin Ike himself came jumping out of the store and drowned her voice with his, roaring with rage at Boon not for ruining his window but (Cousin Ike was young then but already the best woodsman and hunter this county ever had) for being unable to hit with five shots an object only twenty feet away.

It continued to go fast. Doctor Peabody’s office was just across the street, above Christian’s drugstore; with Mr Hampton carrying John Powell’s pistol and leading, Luster and another Negro man carried the girl, still screaming and bleeding like a stuck pig, up the stairs, Father following with Boon, then me and the deputy with Ludus, and as many more as could crowd onto the stairs until Mr Hampton stopped and turned and bellowed at them. Judge Stevens’s office was just down the gallery from Doctor Peabody’s; he was standing at the top of the steps as we came up. So we—I mean Father and me and Boon and Ludus and the deputy—went in there to wait for Mr Hampton to come back from Doctor Peabody’s office. It wasn’t long.

“All right,” Mr Hampton said. “It barely creased her. Buy her a new dress” (there wasn’t anything under it) “and a bag of candy and give her father ten dollars, and that’ll settle Boon with her. I aint quite decided yet what’ll settle him with me.” He breathed hard at Boon a moment: a big man with hard little gray eyes, as big as Boon in fact, though not as tall. “All right,” he told Boon.

“He insulted me,” Boon said. “He told Son Thomas I was a narrow-asted son of a bitch.”

Now Mr Hampton looked at Ludus. “All right,” he said.

“I never said he was norrer-asted,” Ludus said. “I said he was norrer-headed.”

“What?” Boon said.

“That’s worse,” Judge Stevens said.

“Of course it’s worse,” Boon said, cried. “Cant you see? And I aint even got any choice. Me, a white man, have got to stand here and let a damn mule-wrestling nigger either criticise my private tail, or state before five public witnesses that I aint got any sense. Cant you see? Because you cant take nothing back, not nothing. You cant even correct it because there aint nothing to correct neither one of them to.” He was almost crying now, his big ugly florid walnut-tough walnut-hard face wrung and twisted like a child’s. “Even if I managed to get another pistol somewhere to shoot Son Thomas with, I’d likely miss him too.”

Father got up, quickly and briskly. He was the only one sitting down; even Judge Stevens was standing spraddled on the hearth before the cold fireplace with his hands under his coattails exactly like it was winter and there was a fire burning. “I must get back to work,” Father said. “What does the old saw say about idle hands?” He said, not to anybody: “I want both of them, Boon and this boy, put under bond to keep the peace: say, a hundred dollars each; I will make the bond. Only, I want two mutual double-action bonds. I want two bonds, both of which will be abrogated, fall due, at the same moment that either one of them does anything that—that I—”

“That dont suit you,” Judge Stevens said.

“Much obliged,” Father said. “—the same second that either one of them breaks the peace. I dont know if that is legal or not.”

“I dont either,” Judge Stevens said. “We can try. If such a bond is not legal, it ought to be.”

“Much obliged,” Father said. We—Father and I and Boon—went toward the door.

“I could come back now, without waiting to Monday,” Ludus said. “Iffen you needs me.”

“No,” Father said. We—Father and I and Boon—went on down the stairs, to the street. It was still First Saturday and trade day, but that’s all it was now—that is, until somebody else named Boon Hogganbeck got hold of another pistol. We went on back along the street toward the stable, Father and I and Boon; he spoke now across the top of my head toward the back of Father’s:

“A dollar a week for two hundred dollars is a year and forty-eight weeks. That window of Ike’s will be another ten or fifteen I reckon, besides that girl that got in the way. Say two years and three months. I’ve got about forty dollars in money. If I gave you that as a cash down payment, I still dont reckon you’d put me and Ludus and Son Thomas in one of the empty stalls and lock the door for ten minutes. Would you?”

“No,” Father said.

2

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