第 28 页

“Get in,” Uncle Parsham said. “We’ll go home and wait for Lycurgus.”

“Lycurgus,” I said as though I had never heard the name before even.

“He rode on to town on the mule. He will find out what all this is about and come back and tell us. He’s going to find out what time a train goes to Jefferson tonight.”

“To Jefferson?” I said.

“So you can go home.” He didn’t quite look at me. “If you want to.”

“I cant go home yet,” I said. “I got to wait for Boon.”

“I said if you want to,” Uncle Parsham said. “Get in.” I got in. He drove across the pasture, into the road. “Close the gate,” Uncle Parsham said. “It’s about time somebody remembered to.” I closed the gate and got back in the buggy. “You ever drive a mule to a buggy?”

“No sir,” I said. He handed me the lines. “I dont know how,” I said.

“Then you can learn now. A mule aint like a horse. When a horse gets a wrong notion in his head, all you got to do is swap him another one for it. Most anything will do—a whip or spur or just scare him by hollering at him. A mule is different. He can hold two notions at the same time and the way to change one of them is to act like you believe he thought of changing it first. He’ll know different, because mules have got sense. But a mule is a gentleman too, and when you act courteous and respectful at him without trying to buy him or scare him, he’ll act courteous and respectful back at you—as long as you dont overstep him. That’s why you dont pet a mule like you do a horse: he knows you dont love him: you’re just trying to fool him into doing something he already dont aim to do, and it insults him. Handle him like that. He knows the way home, and he will know it aint me holding the lines. So all you need to do is tell him with the lines that you know the way too but he lives here and you’re just a boy so you want him to go in front.”

We went on, at a fair clip now, the mule neat and nimble, raising barely half as much dust as a horse would; already I could feel what Uncle Parsham meant; there came back to me through the lines not just power, but intelligence, sagacity; not just the capacity but the willingness to choose when necessary between two alternatives and to make the right decision without hesitation. “What do you do at home?” Uncle Parsham said.

“I work on Saturdays,” I said.

“Then you going to save some of the money. What are you going to buy with it?” And so suddenly I was talking, telling him: about the beagles: how I wanted to be a fox hunter like Cousin Zack and how Cousin Zack said the way to learn was with a pack of beagles on rabbits; and how Father paid me ten cents each Saturday at the livery stable and Father would match whatever I saved of it until I could buy the first couple to start my pack, which would cost twelve dollars and I already had eight dollars and ten cents; and then, all of a sudden too, I was crying, bawling: I was tired, not from riding a mile race because I had ridden more than that at one time before, even though it wasn’t real racing; but maybe from being up early and chasing back and forth across the country without any dinner but a piece of corn bread. Maybe that was it: I was just hungry. But anyway, there I sat, bawling like a baby, worse than Alexander and even Maury, against Uncle Parsham’s shirt while he held me with one arm and took the lines from me with his other hand, not saying anything at all, until he said, “Now you can quit. We’re almost home; you’ll have just time to wash your face at the trough before we go in the house. You dont want womenfolks to see it like that.”

Which I did. That is, we unhitched the mule first and watered him and hung the harness up and wiped him down and stalled and fed him and pushed the buggy back under its shed and then I smeared my face with water at the trough and dried it (after a fashion) with the riding-sock and we went into the house. And the evening meal—supper—was ready although it was barely five oclock, as country people, farmers, ate; and we sat down: Uncle Parsham and his daughter and me since Lycurgus was not yet back from town, and Uncle Parsham said, “You gives thanks at your house too,” and I said,

“Yes sir,” and he said,

“Bow your head,” and we did so and he said grace, briefly, courteously but with dignity, without abasement or cringing: one man of decency and intelligence to another: notifying Heaven that we were about to eat and thanking It for the privilege, but at the same time reminding It that It had had some help too; that if someone named Hood or Briggins (so that was Lycurgus’s and his mother’s name) hadn’t sweated some, the acknowledgment would have graced mainly empty dishes, and said Amen and unfolded his napkin and stuck the corner in his collar exactly as Grandfather did, and we ate: the dishes of cold vegetables which should have been eaten hot at the country hour of eleven oclock, but there were hot biscuits and three kinds of preserves, and buttermilk. And still it wasn’t even sundown: the long twilight and even after that, still the long evening, the long night and I didn’t even know where I was going to sleep nor even on what, Uncle Parsham sitting there picking his teeth with a gold toothpick just like Grandfather’s and reading my mind like it was a magic-lantern slide: “Do you like to go fishing?” I didn’t really like it. I couldn’t seem to learn to want—or maybe want to learn—to be still that long. I said quickly:

“Yes sir.”

“Come on then. By that time Lycurgus will be back.” There were three cane poles, with lines floats sinkers hooks and all, on two nails in the wall of the back gallery. He took down two of them. “Come on,” he said. In the tool shed there was a tin bucket with nail holes punched through the lid. “Lycurgus’s cricket bucket,” he said. “I like worms myself.” They were in a shallow earth-filled wooden tray; he—no: I; I said,

“Lemme do it,” and took the broken fork from him and dug the long frantic worms out of the dirt, into a tin can.

“Come on,” he said, shouldering his pole, passing the stable but turning sharp away and down toward the creek bottom, not far; there was a good worn path among the blackberry thickets and then the willows, then the creek, the water seeming to gather gently the fading light and then as gently return it; there was even a log to sit on. “This is where my daughter fishes,” he said, “We call it Mary’s hole. But you can use it now. I’ll be on down the bank.” Then he was gone. The light was going fast now; it would be night before long. I sat on the log, in a gentle whine of mosquitoes. It wouldn’t be too difficult; all I would have to do would just be to say I wont think whenever it was necessary. After a while I thought about putting the hook into the water, then I could watch how long it would take the float to disappear into darkness when night finally came. Then I even thought about putting one of Lycurgus’s crickets on the hook, but crickets were not always easy to catch and Lycurgus lived by a creek and would have more time to fish and would need them. So I just thought I wont think; I could see the float plainer than ever, now that it was on the water; it would probably be the last of all to vanish into the darkness, since the water itself would be next to last; I couldn’t see or hear Uncle Parsham at all, I didn’t know how much further he called on down the bank and now was the perfect time, chance to act like a baby, only what’s the good of acting like a baby, of wasting it with nobody there to know it or offer sympathy—if anybody ever wants sympathy or even in fact really to be back home because what you really want is just a familiar soft bed to sleep in for a change again, to go to sleep in; there were whippoorwills now and back somewhere beyond the creek an owl too, a big one by his voice; maybe there were big woods there and if Lycurgus’s (or maybe they were Uncle Parsham’s) hounds were all that good on Otis last night, they sure ought to be able to handle rabbits or coons or possums. So I asked him. It was full night now for some time. He said quietly behind me; I hadn’t even heard him until then:

“Had a bite yet?”

“I aint much of a fisherman,” I said. “How do your hounds hunt?”

“Good,” he said. He didn’t even raise his voice: “Pappy.” Uncle Parsham’s white shirt held light too, up to us where Lycurgus took the two poles and we followed, up the path again where the two hounds met us, on into the house again, into the lamplight, a plate of supper with a cloth over it ready for Lycurgus.

“Sit down,” Uncle Parsham said. “You can talk while you eat.” Lycurgus sat down.

“They’re still there,” he said.

“They aint took them to Hardwick yet?” Uncle Parsham said. “Possum hasn’t got a jail,” he told me. “They lock them in the woodshed behind the schoolhouse until they can take them to the jail at Hardwick. Men, that is. They aint had women before.”

“No sir,” Lycurgus said. “The ladies is still in the hotel, with a guard at the door. Just Mr Hogganbeck is in the woodshed. Mr Caldwell went back to Memphis on Number Thirty-one. He taken that boy with him.”

“Otis?” I said. “Did they get the tooth back?”

“They never said,” Lycurgus said, eating; he glanced briefly at me. “And the horse is all right too. I went and seen him. He’s in the hotel stable. Before he left, Mr Caldwell made a bond for Mr McCaslin so he can watch the horse.” He ate. “A train leaves for Jefferson at nine-forty. We could make it all right if we hurry.” Uncle Parsham took a vast silver watch from his pocket and looked at it. “We could make it,” Lycurgus said.

“I cant,” I said. “I got to wait.” Uncle Parsham put the watch back. He rose. He said, not loud:

“Mary.” She was in the front room; I hadn’t heard a sound. She came to the door.

“I already did it,” she said. She said to Lycurgus: “Your pallet’s ready in the hall.” Then to me: “You sleep in Lycurgus’s bed where you was yestiddy.”

“I dont need to take Lycurgus’s bed,” I said. “I can sleep with Uncle Parsham. I wont mind.” They looked at me, quite still, quite identical. “I sleep with Boss a lot of times,” I said. “He snores too. I dont mind.”

“Boss?” Uncle Parsham said.

“That’s what we call Grandfather,” I said. “He snores too. I wont mind.”

“Let him,” Uncle Parsham said. We went to his room. His lamp had flowers painted on the china shade and there was a big gold-framed portrait on a gold easel in one corner: a woman, not very old but in old-timey clothes; the bed had a bright patchwork quilt on it like Lycurgus’s and even in May there was a smolder of fire on the hearth. There was a chair, a rocking chair too, but I didn’t sit down. I just stood there. Then he came in again. He wore a nightshirt now and was winding the silver watch. “Undress,” he said. I did so. “Does your mother let you sleep like that at home?”

“No sir,” I said.

“You aint got anything with you, have you?”

“No sir,” I said. He put the watch on the mantel and went to the door and said,

“Mary.” She answered. “Bring one of Lycurgus’s clean shirts.” After a while her hand held the shirt through the door crack. He took it. “Here,” he said. I came and put it on. “Do you say your Now I lay me in bed or kneeling down?”

“Kneeling down,” I said.

“Say them,” he said. I knelt beside the bed and said my prayers. The bed was already turned back. I got into it and he blew out the lamp and I heard the bed again and then—the moon would be late before it was very high tonight but there was already enough light—I could see him, all black and white against the white pillow and the white moustache and imperial, lying on his back, his hands folded on his breast. “Tomorrow morning I’ll take you to town and we’ll see Mr Hogganbeck. If he says you have done all you can do here and for you to go home, will you go then?”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Now go to sleep,” he said. Because even before he said it, I knew that that was exactly what I wanted, what I had been wanting probably ever since yesterday: to go home. I mean, nobody likes to be licked, but maybe there are times when nobody can help being; that all you can do about it is not quit. And Boon and Ned hadn’t quit, or they wouldn’t be where they were right now. And maybe they wouldn’t say that I had quit either, when it was them who told me to go home. Maybe I was just too little, too young; maybe I just wasn’t able to tote whatever my share was, and if they had had somebody else bigger or older or maybe just smarter, we wouldn’t have been licked. You see? like that: all specious and rational; unimpugnable even, when the simple truth was, I wanted to go home and just wasn’t brave enough to say so, let alone do it. So now, having admitted at last that I was not only a failure but a coward too, my mind should be peaceful and easy and I should go on to sleep like a baby: where Uncle Parsham already was, just barely snoring (who should hear Grandfather once). Not that that mattered either, since I would be home tomorrow with nothing—no stolen horses nor chastity-stricken prostitutes and errant pullman conductors and Ned and Boon Hogganbeck in his normal condition once he had slipped Father’s leash—to interfere with sleep, hearing the voice, the bawling two or three times before I struggled up and out, into daylight, sunlight; Uncle Parsham’s side of the bed was empty and now I could hear the bawling from outside the house:

“Hellaw. Hellaw. Lycurgus. Lycurgus,” and leapt, sprang from the bed, already running, across to the window where I could look out into the front yard. It was Ned. He had the horse.

12

So once again, at two oclock in the afternoon, McWillie and I sat our (his was anyway) skittering mounts—we had scared Mr Clapp enough yesterday to where we had drawn for pole position this time and McWillie won it—poised for the steward-starter’s (the bird-dog trainer-market hunter-homicidist’s) Go!

A few things came before that though. One of them was Ned. He looked bad. He looked terrible. It wasn’t just lack of sleep; we all had that lack. But Boon and I had at least spent the four nights in bed since we left Jefferson, where Ned had spent maybe two, one of the others in a boxcar with a horse and the other in a stable with him, both on hay if on anything. It was his clothes too. His shirt was filthy and his black pants were not much better. At least Everbe had washed some of mine night before last, but Ned hadn’t even had his off until now: sitting now in a clean faded suit of Uncle Parsham’s overalls and jumper while Mary was washing his shirt and doing what she could with his pants, at the kitchen table now, he and I eating our breakfast while Uncle Parsham sat and listened.

He said that a little before daylight one of the white men—it wasn’t Mr Poleymus, the constable—woke him where he was asleep on some bales of hay and told him to take the horse and get out of town with it—

“Just you and Lightning, and not Boon and the others?” I said. “Where are they?”

“Where them white folks put um,” Ned said. “So I said, Much oblige, Whitefolks, and took Lightning in my hand and—”

“Why?” I said.

“What do you care why? All we need to do now is be up behind that starting wire at two oclock this afternoon and win them two heats and get a holt of Boss’s automobile and get on back to Jefferson that we hadn’t ought to never left nohow—”