'I'll steer it, if that's all you needs,' Ned said. 'I been what you calls steering horses and mules and oxen all my life and I reckon gee and haw with that steering wheel aint no different from gee and haw with a pair of lines or a goad.' Then to me: 'Jump out, boy, and help Mr Boon. Better take your shoes and stockings—'
'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.'
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 star- tiingly 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 middle-buster—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 middle-buster?' 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 mud-hole.'
'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 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
