The Reivers

'Where to leave it. While I take a santer 'around the Square and you go home and get a clean shirt or whatever you'll need. I had to unload all the stuff out at McCaslin, remember. Yours too. I mean, just in case some meddling busybody is hanging around just on the happen-chance.' We both knew who he meant.

'Why cant you lock it in the carriage house?'

'I aint got the key,' he said. 'All I got is the lock. Boss took the key away from me this morning and unlocked the lock and give the key to Mr Ballott to keep until he gets back. I'm supposed to run the car in as soon as I get back from McCaslin and lock the lock shut and Boss will telegraph Mr Ballott what train to unlock the door so I can meet them.'

'Then we'll just have to risk it,' I said.

'Yes, we'll have to risk it. Maybe with Boss and Miss Sarah gone, even Delphine aint going to see him again until Monday morning.' So we risked it Boon drove into the carriage house and got his grip and coat down from where he had hidden them in the loft and reached up again and dragged down a folded tarpaulin and put his grip and coat in on the floor of the back seat. The gasoline can was all ready: a brand-new five-gallon can which Grandfather had had the tinsmith who made the toolbox more or less rebuild until it was smell-tight, since Grandmother already didn't like the smell of gasoline, which we had never used yet because the automobile had never been this far before; the funnel and the chamois strainer were already in the toolbox with the tire tools and jack and wrenches that came with the car, and the lantern and axe and shovel and coil of barbed wire and the block and tackle which Grandfather had added, along with the tin bucket to fill the radiator when we passed creeks or barrow pits. He put the can (it was full; maybe that was what took him that extra tune before he came for us) in the back and opened the tarpaulin, not spreading it but tumbling it into the back until everything was concealed to just look like a jumbled mass of tarpaulin. 'We'll shove yours under the same way,' he said. 'Then it wont look like nothing but a wad of tarpollyon somebody was too lazy to fold up. What you better do is to go home and get your clean shirt and come straight back here and wait. I wont be long: just santer around the Square in case Ike wants to start asking questions too. Then we'll be gone.'

We closed the door. Boon started to hang the open padlock back in the staple. 'No,' I said; I couldn't even have said why, so fast I had progressed in evil. 'Put it in your pocket.'

But he knew why; he told me. 'You damn right,' he said. 'We done gone tihrough too much to have somebody happen-chance by and snap it shut because they thought I forgot to.'

I went home. It was just across the street. A filling station is there now, and what was Grandfather's house is now chopped into apartments, precarious of tenure. The house was empty, unlocked of course, since nobody in Jefferson locked mere homes in those innocent days. It was only a little after five, nowhere near sundown, yet the day was finished, done for; the empty silent house was not vacant at all but filled with presences like held breath; and suddenly I wanted my mother; I wanted no more of this, no more of free will; I wanted to return, relinquish, be secure, safe from the sort of decisions and deciding whose foster twin was this having to steal an automobile. But it was too late now; I had already chosen, elected; if I had sold my soul to Satan for a mess of pottage, at least I would damn well collect the pottage and eat it too: hadn't Booa himself just reminded me, almost as if he had foreseen this moment of weakness and vacillation in the empty house, and forewarned me: 'We have gone through too much to let nothing stop us now.'

My clothes—fresh blouses, pants, stockings, my toothbrush—were out at McCaslin now. I had more in my drawer of course, except the toothbrush, which in Mother's absence it was a fair gamble that neither Aunt Gallic nor Cousin Louisa would remember about. But I took no clothes, nothing; not that I forgot to but probably because I had never intended to. I just entered the house and stood inside the door long enough to prove to myself that of Boon and me it wouldn't be me who failed us, and went back across the street and across Grandfather's back yard to the lot. Nor was Boon the one who would fail us; I heard the engine running quietly before I reached the carriage house. Boon was already behind the wheel; I think the automobile was even already in gear. 'Where's your clean shirt?' he said. 'Never mind, I'll buy you one in Memphis. Come on. We can move now.' He backed the car out. The open lock was once more hanging in the staple. 'Come on,' he said. 'Dont stop to lock it. It's too late now.'

'No,' I said. I couldn't have said then Why either: with the padlock snapped through the staple and hasp of the closed door, it would look like the automobile was safely inside. And so it would be: the whole thing no more than a dream from which I could wake tomorrow, perhaps now, the next moment, and be safe, saved. So I closed the door and locked the padlock and opened the lot gate for Boon to drive out and closed that t6o and got in, the car already in motion—if in fact it had ever completely stopped. 'If we go the back way, we can dodge the Square,' I said. And again he said:

'It's too late now. All they can do now is holler.' But none hollered. But even with the Square behind, it still was not too late. That irrevocable decision was still a mile ahead, where the road to McCaslin forked away from the Memphis road, where I could say Stop. Let me out and he would do it. More: I could say I've changed my mind. Take me back to McCaslin and I knew he would do that too. Then suddenly I knew that if I said Turn around. I will get that key from Mr Ballott and we will lock this automobile up in the carnage house where Boss believes it already is at this moment and he would do that. And more: that he wanted me to do that, was silently begging me to do that; he and I both aghast not at his individual temerity but at our mutual, our confederated recklessness, and that Boon knew he had not the strength to resist his and so must cast himself on my strength and rectitude. You see? What I told you about Non-virtue? If things had been reversed and I had silently pled with Boon to turn back, I could have depended on his virtue and pity, where he to whom Boon had pled had neither.

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