The Reivers

back there, Minnie.'

'All right,' Minnie said. 'I'll try to keep him out of the icebox. But he's too fast for me.'

'Hell, let him stay here,' Miss Reba said. 'It's too late now. He should have been sent somewhere else before he ever got off that Arkansas train last week.' Miss Corrie went to the chair next to Miss Reba.

'Why dont you go and help him pack?' she said, quite gently.

'Who the hell are you accusing?' Miss Reba said. 'I will trust him with every penny I've got. Except for those God damn horses.' She stood up suddenly, with her trim rich body and the hard handsome face and the hair that was too richly red. 'Why the hell cant I do without him?' she said. 'Why the hell cant I?'

'Now, now,' Miss Corrie said. 'You need a drink. Give Minnie the keys— No, she cant go to your room yet —'

'He gone,' Minnie said. 'I heard the front door. It dont take him long. It never do.'

'That's right,' Miss Reba said. 'Me and Minnie have been here before, haven't we. Minnie?' She gave Minnie the keys and sat down and Minnie went out and came back with a bottle of gin this time and they all had a glass of gin, Minnie too (though she declined to drink with this many white people at once, each time carrying her full glass back to the kitchen then reappearing a moment later with the glass empty), except Otis and me. And so I found out about Mr Binford.

He was the landlord. That was his official even if unwritten title and designation. All places, houses like this, had one, had to have one. In the alien outside world fortunate enough not to have to make a living in this hard and doomed and self-destroying way, he had a harder and more contemptuous name. But here, the lone male not even in a simple household of women but in a hysteria of them, he was not just lord but the unthanked and thankless catalyst, the single frail power wearing the shape of respectability sufficient to compel enough of order on the hysteria to keep the unit solvent or anyway eating—he was the agent who counted down the money and took the receipt for the taxes and utilities, who dealt with the tradesmen from the liquor dealers through the grocers and coal merchants, down through the plumbers who thawed the frozen pipes in winter and the casual labor which cleaned the chimneys and gutters and cut the weeds out of the yard; his was the hand which paid the blackmail to the law; it was his voice which fought the losing battles with the street- and assessment-commissioners and cursed the newspaper boy the day after the paper wasn't delivered. And of these (I mean, landlords) in this society, Mr Bin-ford was the prince and paragon: a man of style and presence and manner and ideals; incorruptible in principles, impeccable in morals, more faithful than many husbands during the whole five years he had been Miss Reba's lover: whose sole and only vice was horses running in competition on which bets could be placed. This he could not resist; he knew it was his weakness and he fought against it. But each time, at the cry of 'They're off!' he was putty in the hands of any stranger with a dollar to bet.

'He knowed it his-self,' Minnie said. 'He was ashamed of his-self and for his-self both, for being so weak, of there being anything bigger than him; to find out he aint bigger than anything he could meet up with, he dont care where nor what, even if on the outside, to folks that didn't know him, he just looked like a banty rooster. So he would promise us and mean it, like he done that time two years ago when we finally had to throw him out. You remember how much work it taken to get him back that time,' she told Miss Reba.

'I remember,' Miss Reba said. 'Pour another round.'

'I dont know how he'll manage it,' Minnie said. 'Because when he leaves, he dont take nothing but his clothes, I mean, just the ones he's got on since it was Miss Reba's money that paid for them. But wont two days pass before a messenger will be knocking on the door with every cent of them forty dollars—'

'You mean thirty-nine, six bits,' Boon said. 'No,' Minnie said. 'Every one of them forty dollars, even that quarter, was Miss Reba's. He wont be satisfied less. Then Miss Reba will send for him and he wont come; last year when we finally found him he was working in a gang laying a sewer line way down past the Frisco depot until she had to beg him right down on her bended knee—'

'Come on,' Miss Reba said. 'Stop running your mouth long enough to pour the gin, anyway.' Minnie began to pour. Then she stopped, the bottle suspended.

'What's that hollering?' she said. Now we all heard it —a faint bawling from somewhere toward the back.

'Go and see,' Miss Reba said. 'Here, give me the bottle.' Minnie gave her the bottle and went back to the kitchen. Miss Reba poured and passed the bottle.

'He's two years older now,' Miss Corrie said. 'He'll have more sense—'

'What's he saving it for?' Miss Reba said. 'Go on. Pass it.' Minnie came back. She said:

'Man standing in the back yard hollering Mr Boon Hogganbeck at the back wall of the house. He got something big with him.'

We ran, following Boon, through the kitchen and out onto the back gallery. It was quite dark now; the moon was not high enough yet to do any good. Two dim things, a little one and a big one, were standing in the middle of the back yard, the little one bawling 'Boon Hogganbeck! Mister Boon Hogganbeck! Hellaw. Hellaw' toward the upstairs windows until Boon overrode him by simple volume:

'Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!'

It was Ned. What he had with him was a horse.

Chapter 6

We were all in the kitchen. 'Good Godalmighty,' Boon said. 'You swapped Boss's automobile for a horse?' He had to say it twice even. Because Ned was still looking at Minnie's tooth. I mean, he was waiting for it again. Maybe Miss Reba had said something to her or maybe Minnie had spoken herself. What I do remember is the rich instantaneous glint of gold out of the middle of whatever Minnie said, in the electric light of the kitchen, as if the tooth itself had gained a new luster, lambence from the softer light of the lamp in the outside darkness, like the horse's eyes had—this, and its effect on Ned.

It had stopped him cold for that moment, instant, like basilisk. So had it stopped me when I first saw it, so I knew what Ned was experiencing. Only his was more so. Because I realised this dimly too, even at only eleven: that I was too far asunder, not merely in race but in age, to feel what Ned felt; I could only be awed, astonished and pleased by it; I could not, like Ned, participate in that tooth. Here, in the ancient battle of the sexes, was a foe-man worthy of his steel; in the ancient mystic solidarity of race, here was a high priestess worth dying for—if such was your capacity for devotion: which, it was soon obvious, was not what Ned intended (anyway hoped) to do with