The Reivers

Memphis. We're going home tonight.'

'But wait,' I said. 'Wait.'

'Forget this horse,' Ned said. 'We dont want him. Boss has got his automobile back and all he lost was four hundred and ninety-six dollars and it's worth four hundred and ninety-six dollars not to own this horse. Because what in the world would we do with him, supposing they was to quit making them stinking little fishes? Let Mr van Man have him back; maybe some day Coppermine will tell him and Bobo what happened here yesterday.'

We didn't go home tonight though. We were still at Colonel Linscomb's, in the office again, after supper again. Boon looked battered and patched up and a considerable subdued, but he was calm and peaceful enough. And clean too: he had shaved and had on a fresh shirt. I mean, a new shirt that he must have bought in Hardwick, sitting on the same straight hard chair Ned had sat on last night. 'Naw,' he said. 'I wasn't fighting him about that. I wasn't even mad about that no more. That was her business. Besides, you cant just cut right off: you got to— got—'

'Taper off?' Grandfather said.

'No sir,' Boon said. 'Not taper off. You quit, only you still got to clean up the trash, litter, no matter how good you finished. It wasn't that. What I aimed to break his neck for was for calling my wife a whore.'

'You mean you're going to marry her?' Grandfather said. But it was not Grandfather: it was me that Boon pounced, almost jumped at.

'God damn it,' he said, 'if you can go bare-handed -against a knife defending her, why the hell cant I marry her? Aint I as good as you are, even if I aint eleven years old?'

And that's about all. About six the next afternoon we came over the last hill, and there was the clock on the courthouse above the trees around the Square. Ned said, 'Hee hee hee.' He was in front with Boon. He said: 'Seems like I been gone twp years.'

'When Delphine gets through with you tonight, maybe you'll wish you had,' Grandfather said.

'Or maybe not come back a-tall,' Ned said. 'But a woman, got to keep sweeping and cooking and washing and dusting on her mind all day long, I reckon she needs a little excitement once in a while.'

Then we were there. The automobile stopped. I didn't move. Grandfather got out, so I did too. 'Mr Ballott's got the key,' Boon said.

'No he hasn't,' Grandfather said. He took the key from his pocket and gave it to Boon. 'Come on,' he said. We crossed the street toward home. And do you know what I thought? I thought It hasn't even changed. Because it should have. It should have J>een altered, even if only a little. I dont mean it should have changed of itself, but that I, bringing back to it what the last four days must have changed in me, should have altered it. I mean, if those four days—the lying and deceiving and tricking and decisions and undecisions, and the things I had done and seen and heard and learned that Mother and Father wouldn't have let me do and see and hear and learn—the things I had had to learn that I wasn't even ready for yet, had nowhere to store them nor even anywhere to lay them down; if all that had changed nothing, was the same as if it had never been—nothing smaller or larger or older or wiser or more pitying—then something had been wasted, thrown away, spent for nothing; either it was wrong and false to begin with and should never have existed, or I was wrong or false or weak or anyway not worthy of it.

'Come on,' Grandfather said—not kind, not unkind, not anything; I thought // Aunt Callie would just come out whether she's carrying Alexander or not and start hollering at me. But nothing: just a house I had known since before I could have known another, at a little after six oclock on a May evening, when people were already thinking about supper; and Mother should have had a few gray hairs at least, kissing me for a minute, then looking at me; then Father, whom I had always been a little . . . afraid is not the word but I cant think of another—afraid of because if I hadn't been, I think I would have been ashamed of us both. Then Grandfather said, 'Maury.'

'Not this time, Boss,' Father said. Then to me: 'Let's get it over with.'

'Yes sir,' I said, and followed him, on down the hall to the bathroom and stopped at the door while he took the razor strop from the hook and I stepped back so he could come out and we went on; Mother was at the top of the cellar stairs; I could see the tears, but no more; all she had to do would be to say Stop or Please or Maury or maybe if she had just said Lucius. But nothing, and I followed Father on down and stopped again while he opened the cellar door and we went in, where we kept the kindling in winter and the zinc-lined box for ice in summer, and Mother and Aunt Callie had shelves for preserves and jelly and jam, and even an old rocking chair for Mother and Aunt Callie while they were putting up the jars, and for Aunt Callie to sleep in sometimes after dinner, though she always said she hadn't been asleep. So here we were at last, where it had taken me four days of dodging and scrabbling and scurrying to get to; and it was wrong, and Father and I both knew it. I mean, if after all the lying and deceiving and disobeying and conniving I had done, all he could do about it was to whip me, then Father was not good enough for me. And if all that I had done was balanced by no more than that shaving strop, then both of us were debased. You see? it was impasse, until Grandfather knocked. The door was not locked, but Grandfather's father had taught him, and he had taught Father, and Father had taught me that no door required a lock: the closed door itself was sufficient until you were invited to enter it. But Grandfather didn't wait, not this time.

'No,' Father said. 'This is what you would have done to me twenty years ago.'

'Maybe I have more sense now,' Grandfather said. 'Persuade Alison to go on back upstairs and stop snivelling.' Then Father was gone, the door closed again. Grandfather sat in the rocking chair: not fat, but with just the right amount of paunch to fill the white waistcoat and make the heavy gold watch chain hang right.

'I lied,' I said.

'Come here,' he said.

'I cant,' I said. 'I lied, I tell you.'

'I know it,' he said.

'Then do something about it. Do anything, just so it's something.'

'I cant,' he said.

'There aint anything to do? Not anything?'

'I didn't say that,' Grandfather said. 'I said I couldn't. You can.'

'What?' I said. 'How can I forget it? Tell me how to.'