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 mules 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.'
'All right,' Boon said, 'but look at the other one! When he gets that mud washed off, he aint even white!'
The man looked at distance awhile. Then he looked at Boon. 'Son,' he said, 'both these mules is color- blind.'
Chapter 5
Boon had told Ned and me that, once we had conquered Hell Creek bottom, we would be in civilisation; he drew a picture of all the roads from there on cluttered thick as fleas with automobiles. Though maybe it was necessary first to put Hell Creek as far behind us as limbo, or forget-fulness, or at least out of sight; maybe we would not be worthy of civilisation until we had got the Hell Creek mud off. Anyway, nothing happened yet. The man took his sk dollars and went away with his mules and doubletree; I noticed in fact that he didn't return to his little house but went on back through the swamp and vanished, as if the day were over; so did Ned notice it. 'He aint a hog,' Ned said. 'He dont need to be. He's done already made six dollars and it aint even dinnertime yet.'
'It is as far as I'm concerned,' Boon said. 'Bring the lunch too.' So we took the lunch box Miss Ballenbaugh had packed for us and the block and tackle and axe and shovel and our shoes and stockings and my pants (we couldn't do anything about the automobile, besides being a waste of work until we could reach Memphis, where surely—at least we hoped—there wouldn't be any more mud-holes) and went back down to the creek and washed the tools off and coiled down the block and tackle. And there wasn't much to be done about Boon's and Ned's clothes either, though Boon got bodily into the water, clothes and all, and washed himself off and tried to persuade Ned to follow suit since he—Boon—had a change of clothes in his grip. But all Ned would do was to remove his shirt and put his coat back on. I think I told you about his attache case, which he didn't so much carry when abroad as he wore it, as diplomats wear theirs, carrying (I mean Ned'! Bible and the two tablespoonfuls of—probably—Grandfather's best whiskey) I suspect at times even less in them.
Then we ate lunch—the ham and fried chicken and biscuits and homemade pear preserves and cake and the jug of buttermilk—and put back the emergency mud-defying gear (which in the end had been not a defiance but an inglorious brag) and measured the gasoline tank—a gesture not to distance but to time—and went on. Because the die was indeed cast now; we looked not back to remorse or regret or might-have-been; if we crossed Rubicon when we crossed the Iron Bridge into another county, when we conquered Hell Creek we locked the portcullis and set the bridge on fire. And it did seem as though we had won to reprieve as a reward for invincible determination, or refusal to recognise defeat when we faced it or it faced us. Or maybe it was just Virtue who had given up, relinquished us to Non-virtue to cherish and nurture and coddle in the style whose right we had won with the now irrevocable barter of our souls.
The very land itself seemed to have changed. The farms were bigger, more prosperous, with tighter fences and painted houses and even barns; the very air was urban. We came at last to a broad highway running string-straight into distance and heavily marked with wheel prints; Boon said, with a kind of triumph, as if we had doubted him or as if he had invented it to disprove us, created it, cleared and graded and smoothed it with his own hands (and perhaps even added the wheel marks): 'What did I tell you? The highway to Memphis.' We could see for miles; much closer than that was a rapid and mounting cloud of dust like a portent, a promise. It was indubitable, travelling that fast and that much of it; we were not even surprised when it contained an automobile; we passed each other, commingling our dust into one giant cloud like a pillar, a signpost raised and set to cover the land with the adumbration of the future: the antlike to and fro, the incurable down-payment itch-foot; the mechanised, the mobilised, the inescapable destiny of America.
And now, gray with dust from toes to eyelids (particularly Boon's still-damp clothes), we could make time, even if, for a while, not speed; without switching off the engine Boon got out and walked briskly around the car to my side, saying briskly to me: 'All right. Slide over. You know how. Just dont get the idea you're a forty-mile-a-hour railroad engine.' So I drove, on across the sunny May afternoon. I couldn't look at it though, I was too busy, too concentrated (all right, too nervous and proud): the Sabbath afternoon, workless, the cotton and corn growing unvexed now, the mules themselves Sabbatical and idle in the pastures, the people still in their Sunday clothes on galleries and in shady yards with glasses of lemonade or saucers of the ice cream left from dinner. Then we made speed too; Boon said, 'We're coming to some towns now. I better take it.' We went on. Civilisation was now constant: single country stores and crossroads hamlets; we were barely free of one before here was another, commerce was rife about us, the air was indeed urban, the very dust itself which we raised and moved in had a metropolitan taste to tongue and nostrils; even the Aittle children and the dogs no longer ran to the gates and fences to watch us and the three other automobiles we had passed in the last thirteen miles.
Then the country itself was gone. There were no longer intervals between the houses and shops and stores; suddenly before us was a wide tree-bordered and ordered boulevard with car tracks in the middle; and sure enough, there was the streetcar itself, the conductor and motorman just lowering the back trolley and raising the front one to turn it around and go back to Main Street. 'Two minutes to five oclock,' Boon said. 'Twenty-three and a half hours ago we were in Jefferson, Missippi, eighty miles away. A record.' I had been in Memphis before (so had Ned. This morning he had told us so; thirty minutes from now he would prove it) but always by train, never like this: to watch Memphis grow, increase; to assimilate it deliberately like a spoonful of ice cream in the mouth. I had never thought about it other than to assume we would go to the Gayoso Hotel as we—I anyway—always had. So I dont know what mind Boon read this time. 'We're going to a kind a boarding house I know,' he said. 'You'll like it. I had a letter last week from one of the g— ladies staying there that she's got her nephew visiting her so you'll even have somebody to play with. The cook can locate a place for Ned to sleep too.'
'Hee hee hee,' Ned said. Besides the streetcars there were buggies and surreys—phaetons, traps, stanhopes, at least one victoria, the horses a little white-eyed at us but still collected; evidently Memphis horses were already used to automobiles—so Boon couldn't turn his head to look at Ned. But he could turn one eye.
'Just what do you mean by that?' he said. 'Nothing,' Ned said. 'Mind where you're going and nemmine me. Nemmine me nohow. I got friends here too. You just show me where this automobile gonter be at to-! morrow morning and I'll be there too.'
'And you damn well better be,' Boon said. 'If you aim to go back to Jefferson in it. Me and Lucius never invited you on this trip so you aint none of mine and his responsibility. As far as me and Jefferson are concerned, I dont give a damn whether you come back or not.'
