The Reivers

Now we were almost there. 'So you want—' Boon said, out of the side of his mouth, just exactly loud enough for me to hear, aimed exactly at my right ear like a gun or an arrow or maybe a handful of sand at a closed window.

'Shut up,' I said, exactly like him. The simple and cowardly thing would be to tell him suddenly to stop and as he did so, leap from the car, already running, presenting to Aunt Callie the split-second alternative either to abandon Alexander to Boon and try to run me down in the bushes, or stick with Alexander and pursue me with simple yelling. I mean, have Boon drive on and leave them at the house and I to spring out from the roadside and leap back aboard as he passed going back to town or any direction opposite from all who would miss me and have authority over me; the cowardly way, so why didn't I take it, who was already a lost liar, already damned by deceit; why didn't I go the whole hog and be a coward too; be irrevocable and irremediable like Faustus became? glory in baseness, make, compel my new Master to respect me for my completeness even if he did scorn my size? Only I didn't. It wouldn't have worked, one of us anyway had to be practical; granted that Boon and I would be well on our way before Cousin Louisa could send someone to the field where Cousin Zack would be at three oclock in the afternoon during planting time, and granted that Cousin ' Zack couldn't possibly have overtaken us on his saddle horse: he wouldn't have tried to: he would have ridden straight to town and after one minute each with Ned and Cousin Ike, he would have known exactly what to do and would have done it, using the telephone and the police.

We were there. I got out and opened the gate (the same posts of old Lucius Quintus Carothers's time; your present Cousin Carothers has a cattle guard in it now so automobiles can cross, not owning hooves) and we went on up the locust drive toward the house (it is still there: the two-room mud-chinked log half domicile and half fort which old Lucius came with his slaves and foxhounds across the mountains from Carolina in 1813 and built; it is still there somewhere, bidden beneath the clapboards and Greek Revival and steamboat scroll-work which the women the successive Edmondses marry have added to it).

Cousin Louisa and everybody else on the place had already heard us approaching and (except probably the ones Cousin Zack could actually see from bis horse) were all on the front gallery and steps and the yard when we drove up and stopped.

'All right,' Boon said, again out of the side of his mouth, 'do you want.' Because, as you say nowadays, this was it; no time any more, let alone privacy, to get some—any—inkling of what he now must desperately know. Because we—he and I—were so new at this, you

see. We were worse than amateurs: innocents, complete innocents at stealing automobiles even though neither of us would have called it stealing since we intended to return it unharmed; and even, if people, the world (Jefferson anyway) had just let us alone, unmissed. Even if I could have answered him if he had asked. Because it was even worse for me than for him; both of us were desperate but mine was the more urgent desperation since I had to do something, and quick, in a matter of seconds now, while all he had to do was sit in the car with at most his fingers crossed. I didn't know what to do now; I had already told more lies than I had believed myself capable of inventing, and had had them believed or at least accepted with a consistency which had left me spellbound if not already appalled; I was in the position of the old Negro who said, 'Here I is, Lord. If You wants me saved, You got the best chance You ever seen standing right here looking at You.' I had shot my bow, Boon's too. If Non-virtue still wanted either of us, it was now her move.

Which she did. She was dressed as Cousin Zachary Edmonds. He came out the front door at that moment and at the same moment I saw that a Negro boy in the yard was holding the reins of his saddle horse. You see what I mean? Zachary Edmonds, whom Jefferson never saw on a weekday between the first ground-breaking in March and lay-ing-by in July, had been in town this morning (something urgent about the grist mill) and had stopped in Cousin Ike's store barely minutes after I had done so myself; which, dovetailed neatly and exactly with the hour and more Non-virtue had required to shave Boon and change his shirt, had given Cousin Zack the exact time necessary to ride home and be getting off his horse at his doorstep when they heard us coming. He said—to me: 'What are you doing out here? Ike told me you were going to stay in town tonight and he is going to take you fishing tomorrow.'

So of course Aunt Callie began yelling then so I didn't need to say anything at all even if I had known anything to say. 'Fishing?' she hollered. 'On Sunday? If his paw could hear that, he would jump off that train this minute without even waiting to telegraph! His maw too! Miss Alison aint told him to stay in town with no Mister Ike nor anybody else! She told him to come on out here with me and these other chillen and if he dont behave his-self, Mister Zack would make him!'

'All right, all right,' Cousin Zack said. 'Stop yelling a minute; I cant hear him. Maybe he's changed his mind. Have you?'

'Sir?' I said. 'Yes sir. I mean, no sir.'

'Well, which? Are you going to stay out here, or are you going back with Boon?'

'Yes sir,' I said. 'I'm going back. Cousin Ike told me to ask you if I could.' And Aunt Callie yelled again (she had never really stopped except for maybe that one long breath when Cousin Zack told her to) but that was all: she still yelling and Cousin Zack saying,

'Stop it, stop it, stop it. I cant hear my ears. If Ike dont bring him out tomorrow, I'll send in for him Monday.' I went back to the car; Boon had the engine already running.

'Well I'll be damned,' he said, not loud but with complete respect, even awe a little.

'Come on,' I said. 'Get away from here.' We went on, smoothly but quick, faster, back down the drive toward the gate.

'Maybe we're wasting something, just spending it on a automobile trip,' he said. 'Maybe I ought to use you for something that's got money in it.'

'Just get on,' I said. Because how could I tell him, how say it to him? I'm sick and tired of lying, of having to lie. Because I knew, realised now that it had only begun; there would be no end to it, not only no end to the lies I would continue to have to tell merely to protect the ones I had already told, but that I would never be free of the old worn-out ones I had already used and exhausted.

We went back to town. We went fast this time; if there was scenery now, nobody in that automobile used any of it. It was going on five oclock now. Boon spoke, tense and urgent but quite composed: 'We got to let it cool awhile. They saw me drive out of town taking you folks out to McCaslin; they'll see me come back with just you and me alone; they'll expect to see me put the car back in Boss's carriage house. They got to see me and you, but separate, just walking around like it wasn't nothing going on.' But how could I say that either? No. Let's go now. If I've got to tett more lies, at least let it be to strangers. He was still talking: '—car. What was that he said about were we coming back through town before we left?'

'What? Who said?'

'Ned. Back there just before we left town.'

'I dont remember,' I said. 'What about the car?'