slipped the sock over it, bandage and all, and tied it around my wrist with the string. 'You can still use your thumb, but this'll keep you from forgetting and trying to open your hand and bust them cuts again.'
Uncle Parsham and Lycurgus were waiting with the horse. He was bridled now, under an old, used, but perfectly cared-for McClellan saddle. Ned looked at it. 'We might run him bareback, unless they makes us. But leave it on. We can try him both ways and let him learn us which he likes best.'
It was a small pasture beside the creek, flat and smooth, with good footing. Ned shortened the leathers, to suit not me so much as him, and threw me up. 'You know what to do: the same as with them colts out at McCaslin. Let him worry about which hand he's on; likely all anybody ever tried to learn him is just to run as fast as the bit will let him, whichever way somebody points his head. Which is all we wants too. You dont need no switch yet. Besides, we dont want to learn a switch: we wants to learn him. Go on.'
I moved him out, into the pasture, into a trot. He was nothing on the bit; a cobweb would have checked him. I said so. 'I bet,' Ned said. 'I bet he got a heap more whip calluses on his behind than bit chafes in his jaw. Go on. Move him.' but he wouldn't. I kicked, pounded my heels, but he just trotted, a little faster in the back stretch (I was riding a circular course like the one we had beaten out in Cousin Zack's paddock) until I realised suddenly that he was simply hurrying back to Ned. But still behind the bit; he had never once come into the bridle, his whole head bent around and tucked but with no weight whatever on the hand, as if the bit were a pork rind and he a Mohammedan (or a fish spine and he a Mississippi candidate for constable whose Baptist opposition had accused him of seeking the Catholic vote, or one of Mrs Roosevelt's autographed letters and a secretary of the Citizens Council, or Senator Goldwater's cigar butt and the youngest pledge to the A.D.A.), on until he reached Ned, and with a jerk I felt clean up to my shoulder, snatched his head free and began to nuzzle at Ned's shirt. 'U-huh,' Ned said. He had one hand behind him; I could see a peeled switch in it now. 'Head him back.' He said to the horse: 'You got to learn, son, not to run back to me until I sends for you.' Then to me: 'He aint gonter stop this time. But you make like he is: just one stride ahead of where, if you was him, you would think about turning to come to me, reach back with your hand and whop him hard as you can. Now set tight,' and stepped back and cut the horse quick and hard across the buttocks.
It leapt, sprang into full run: the motion (not our speed nor even our progress: just the horse's motion) seemed terrific: graceless of course, but still terrific. Because it was simple reflex from fright, and fright does not become horses. They are built wrong for it, being merely mass and symmetry, while fright demands fluidity and grace and bi-zarreness and the capacity to enchant and enthrall and even appall and aghast, like an impala or a giraffe or a snake; even as the fright faded I could feel, sense the motion become simply obedience, no more than an obedient hand gallop, on around the back turn and stretch and into what would be the home stretch, when I did as Ned ordered: one stride before the point at which he had turned to Ned before, I reached back and hit him as hard as I could with the flat of my sound hand; and again the leap, the spring, but only into willingness, obedience, alarm: not anger nor even eagerness. 'That'll do,' Ned said. 'Bring him in.' We came up and stopped. He was sweating a little, but that was all. 'How do he feel?' Ned said.
I tried to tell him. 'The front half of him dont want to run.'
'He reached out all right when I touched him,' Ned said.
I tried again. 'I dont mean his front end. His legs feel all right. His head just dont want to go anywhere.' - 'U- huh,' Ned said. He said to Uncle Parsham: 'You seen one of them races. What happened?'
'I saw both of them,' Uncle Parsham said. 'Nothing happened. He was running good until all of a sudden he must have looked up and seen there wasn't nothing in front of him but empty track.'
'U-huh,' Ned said. 'Jump down.' I got down. He stripped off the saddle. 'Hand me your foot.'
'How do you know that horse has been ridden bareback before?' Uncle Parsham said.
'I dont,' Ned said. 'We gonter find out.'
'This boy aint got but one hand,' Uncle Parsham said. 'Here, Lycurgus------'
But Ned already had my foot. 'This boy learnt holding on riding Zack Edmonds's colts back in Missippi. I watched him at least one time when I didn't know what he was holding on with lessen it was his teeth.' He threw me up. The horse did nothing: it squatted, flinched a moment, trembling a little; that was all. 'U-huh,' Ned said. 'Let's go eat your breakfast. Whistle-britches will be here to work him this evening, then maybe Lightning will start having some fun outen this too.'
Lycurgus's mother, Uncle Parsham's daughter, was cooking dinner now; the kitchen smelled of the boiling vegetables. But she had kept my breakfast warm—fried sidemeat, grits, hot biscuits and buttermilk or sweet milk or coffee; she untied my riding-glove from my hand so I could eat, a little surprised that I had never tasted coffee since Lycurgus had been having it on Sunday morning since he was two years old. And I thought I was just hungry until I went to sleep right there in the plate until Lycurgus half dragged, half carried me to his bed in the lean-to. And, as Ned said, Mr Sam Caldwell was some Sam Caldwell; Everbe and Otis got down from the caboose of a freight train which stopped that long at Par-sham a few minutes before noon. It was a through freight, not intended to stop until it reached Florence, Alabama, or some place like that. I dont know how much extra coal it took to pump up the air brakes to stop it dead still at Parsham and then fire the boiler enough to regain speed and make up the lost time. Some Sam Caldwell. Twenty-three skiddoo, as Otis said.
So when the loud unfamiliar voice waked me and Lycurgus's mother tied the riding-sock back on from where she had put it away when I went to sleep in my plate, and I went outside, there they all were: a surrey tied outside the gate and Uncle Parsham standing again at the top of his front steps, still wearing his hat, and Ned sitting on the next-to-bottom step and Lycurgus standing in the angle between steps and gallery as if the three of them were barricading the house; and in the yard facing them Everbe (yes, she brought it. I mean, Ned's grip) and Otis and Boon and the one who was doing the loud talking—a man almost as big as Boon and almost as ugly, with a red face and a badge and a bolstered pistol stuck in his hind pocket, standing between Boon and Everbe, who'was still trying to pull away from the hand which was holding her arm.
'Yep,' he was saying, 'I know old Possum Hood. And more than that, old Possum Hood knows me, dont you, boy?'
'We all knows you here, Mr Butch,' Uncle Parsham said with no inflection whatever.
'If any dont, it's just a oversight and soon corrected,' Butch said. 'If your womenfolks are too busy dusting and sweeping to invite us in the house, tell them to bring some chairs out here so this young lady can set down. You, boy,' he told Lycurgus, 'hand down two of them chairs on the gallery there where me and you'—he was talking at Everbe now—'can set in the cool and get acquainted while Sugar Boy'—he meant Boon. I dont know how I knew it —'takes these boys down to look at that horse. Huh?' Still holding Everbe's elbow, he would tilt her gently away from him until she was almost off balance; then, a little faster though still not a real jerk, pull her back again, she still trying to get loose; now she used her other hand, pushing at his wrist. And now I was watching Boon. 'You sure I aint seen you somewhere? at Birdie Watts's maybe? Where you been hiding, anyway? a good-looking gal like you?' Now Ned got up, not fast.
