aside, following the lantern, through a gate into a maze of loading platforms and tracks; now Ned himself had to come forward and take the halter and quiet the horse to where we could move again in the aura now of the horse's hot ammoniac reek (you never smelled a frightened horse, did you?) and the steady murmur of Ned's voice talking to it, both of them—murmur and smell—thickened, dense, concentrated now between the loom of lightless baggage cars and passenger coaches among the green-and-ruby gleams of switch points; on until we were clear of the passenger yard and were now following a cinder path beside a spur track leading to a big dark warehouse with a loading platform in front of it. And there was the boxcar too, with a good twenty-five feet of moonlit (that's right. We were in moonlight now. Free of the street- and depot-lights, we—I —could see it now) vacancy between it and the nearest point of the platform—a good big jump for even a jumping horse, let alone a three-year-old flat racer that (according to Ned) had a little trouble running anyway. Sam cursed quietly the entire depot establishment: switchmen, yard crews, ticket sellers and all.
'I'll go get the goat,' the man with the lantern said. 'We dont need no goat,' Ned said. 'No matter how far he can jump. What we needs is to either move that flat-form or that boxcar.'
'He means the switch engine,' Sam told Ned. 'No,' he told the man with the lantern. 'I expected this. For a switching crew to miss just twenty-five feet is practically zero. That's why I told you to bring the key to the section house. Get the crowbars. Maybe Mr Boon wont mind helping you.'
'Why dont you go yourself?' Boon said. 'It's your railroad. I'm a stranger here.'
'Why dont you take these boys on back home to bed, if you're all that timid around strangers?' Miss Corrie said.
'Why dont you take them back home yourself?' Boon said. 'Your old buddy-boy there has already told you once you aint got no business here.'
'I'll go with him to get the crowbars,' Miss Corrie told Sam. 'Will you keep your eye on the boys?'
'All right, all right,' Boon said. 'Let's do something, for Christ's sake. That train will be along in four or five hours while we're still debating who's first at the lick dog. Where's that tool shed, Jack?' So he and the man with the lantern went on; we had only moonlight now. The horse hardly smelled at all now and I could see it nuzzling at Ned's coat like a pet. And Sam was thinking what I had been thinking ever since I saw the platform.
'There's a ramp around at the back,' he said. 'Did he ever walk a ramp before? Why dont you take him on now and let him look at it. When we get the car placed, we can all help you carry him up if we have to—'
'Dont you waste your time worrying about us,' Ned said. 'You just get that boxcar to where we wont have to jump no ten-foot gash into it. This horse wants to get out of Memphis as bad as you does.' Only I was afraid Sam would say, Dont you want this boy to go with you? Because I wanted to see that boxcar moved. I didn't believe it. So we waited. It wasn't long; Boon and the man with the lantern came back with two crowbars that looked at least eight feet long and I watched (Miss Corrie and Otis too) while they did it. The man set his lantern down and climbed the ladder onto the roof and released the brake wheel and Sam and Boon jammed the ends of the bars between the back wheels and the rails, pinching and nudging in short strokes like pumping and I still didn't believe it: the car looming black and square and high in the moon, solid and rectangular as a black wall inside the narrow silver frame of the moonlight, one high puny figure wrenching at the brake wheel on top and two more puny figures crouching, creeping, nudging the silver-lanced iron bars behind the back wheels; so huge and so immobile that at first it looked, not like the car was moving forward, but rather Boon and Sam in terrific pantomimic obeisance were pinching infinitesimally rearward past the car's fixed and foundationed mass, the moon-mazed panoramic earth: so delicately balanced now in the massive midst of Motion that Sam and Boon dropped the bars and Boon alone pressed the car gently on with his hands as though it were a child's perambulator, up alongside the platform and into position and Sam said,
'All right,' and the man on top set the brake wheel again. So all we had to do now was get the horse into it. Which was like saying, Here we are in Alaska; all we have to do now is find the gold mine. We went around to the back of the warehouse. There was a cleated ramp. But the platform had been built at the right height for the drays to load and unload from it, and the ramp was little more than a track for hand trucks and wheelbarrows, stout enough but only about five feet wide, rail-less. Ned was standing there talking to the horse. 'He done seen it,' he said. 'He know we want him to walk up it but he aint decided yet do he want to. I wish now Mr Boxcar Man had went a little further and borried a whup too.'
'You got one,' Boon said. He meant me—one of my tricks, graces. I made it with my tongue, against the sounding board of my mouth, throat, gorge—a sound quite sharp and loud, as sharp and loud when done right as the crack of a whip; Mother finally forbade me to do it anywhere inside our yard, let alone in the house. Then it made Grandmother jump once and use a swear word. But just once. That was almost a year ago so I might have forgotten how by this time.
'That's right,' Ned said. 'So we has.' He said to me: 'Get you a long switch. They ought to be one in that hedge bush yonder.' There was: a privet bush; all this was probably somebody's lawn or garden before progress, industry, commerce, railroads came. I cut the switch and came back. Ned led the horse up, facing the ramp. 'Now you big folks, Mr Boon and Mr Boxcar, come up one on either side like you was the gateposts.' They did so, Ned halfway up the ramp now, with the lead rope, facing the horse and talking to it. 'There you is,' he said. 'Right straight up this here chicken walk to glory and Possum, Tennessee, by sunup tomorrow.' He came back down, already turning the horse, moving fairly rapidly, speaking to me now: 'He done seen the switch. Fall right in behind him. Dont touch him or pop till I tell you to.' I did that, the three of us—Ned, the horse, then me—moving directly away from the ramp for perhaps twenty yards, when without stopping Ned turned and wheeled the horse, I still following, until it faced the rise of the ramp between Boon and Sam twenty yards away. When it saw the ramp, it checked. 'Pop,' Ned said. I made the sound, a good one; the horse sprang a little, Ned already moving on, a little faster now, back toward the ramp. 'When I tells you to pop this time, touch him with the switch. Dont bit: just tap him at the root of his tail a second after you pops.' He had already passed between Boon and Sam and was on the ramp. The horse was now trying to decide which to do: refuse, or run out (with the additional confusion of having to decide which of Boon and Sam would run over the easiest) or simply bolt over and through us all. You could almost see it happening: which was maybe what Ned was counting on: an intelligence panicky and timorous and capable of only one idea at a time, in which the intrusion of a second one reduces all to chaos. 'Pop,' Ned said. This time I tapped the horse too, as Ned had told me. It surged, leaped, its forefeet halfway up the ramp, the near hind foot (Boon's side) striking the edge of the ramp and sliding off until Boon, before Ned could speak, grasped the leg in both hands and set it back on the ramp, leaning his weight against the flank, the horse motionless now, trembling, all four feet on the ramp now. 'Now,' Ned said, 'lay your switch right across his hocks so he'll know he got something behind him to not let him fall.'
'To not let him back off the ramp, you mean,' Sam said. 'We need one of the crowbars. Go get it, Charley.'
'That's right,' Ned said. 'We gonter need that crowbar in a minute. But all we needs right now is that switch. You's too little;' he told me. 'Let Mr Boon and Mr Boxcar have it. Loop it behind his hocks like britching.' They did so, one at each end of the Umber switch. 'Now, walk him right on up. When I say pop this time, pop loud, so he will think the lick gonter be loud too.' But I didn't need to pop at all again. Ned said to the horse: 'Come on, son. Let's go to Possum,' and the horse moved, Boon and Sam moving with it, the switch like a loop of string pressing it on, its forefeet on the solid platform now, then one final scuffling scrabbling surge, the platform resounding once as if it had leaped onto a wooden bridge.
