“Not too late to scare McWillie,” Lycurgus said.
“Skeer him how much?” Ned said.
“Enough,” Lycurgus said. Ned squatted there. He must have got a little sleep last night, even with the hounds treeing Otis every now and then. He didn’t look it too much though.
“All right,” he said to me. “You and Lycurgus just stroll up yonder to that stable awhile. All you’re doing is taking your natural look at the horse you gonter ride against this evening. For the rest of it, let Lycurgus do the talking, and dont look behind you on the way back.” I didn’t even ask him why. He wouldn’t have told me. It was not far: past the neat half-mile track with its white-painted rails that it would be nice to be rich too, on to the barns, the stable that if Cousin Zack had one like it out at McCaslin,
Cousin Louisa would probably have them living in it. There was nobody in sight. I dont know what I had expected: maybe still more of the overalled and tieless aficionados squatting and chewing tobacco along the wall as we had seen them in the dining room at breakfast. Maybe it was too early yet: which, I now realised, was probably exactly why Ned had sent us; we—Lycurgus— lounging into the hallway which—the stable—was as big as our dedicated-to-a-little-profit livery one in Jefferson and a good deal cleaner—a tack room oa one side and what must have been an office on the other, just like ours; a Negro stableman cleaning a stall at the rear and a youth who for size and age and color might have been Lycur-gus’s twin, lounging on a bale of hay against the wall, who said to Lycurgus: “Hidy, son. Looking for a horse?”
“Hidy, son,” Lycurgus said. “Looking for two. We thought maybe the other one might be here too.”
“You mean Mr van Torch aint even come yet?”
“He aint coming a-tall,” Lycurgus said. “Some other folks running Coppermine this time. Whitefolks named Mr Boon Hogganbeck. This white boy gonter ride him. This is McWillie,” he told me. McWillie looked at me a minute. Then he went back to the office door and opened it and said something inside and stood back while a white man (“Trainer,” Lycurgus murmured. “Name Mr Walter”) came out and said,
“Morning, Lycurgus. Where you folks keeping that horse hid, anyway? You aint ringing in a sleeper on us, are you?”
“No sir,” Lycurgus said. “I reckon he aint come out from town yet. We thought they might have sent him out here. So we come to look.”
“You walked all the way here from Possum’s?”
“No sir,” Lycurgus said. “We rid the mules.”
“Where’d you tie them? I cant even see them. Maybe you painted them with some of that invisible paint you put on that horse when you took him out of that boxcar yesterday morning.”
“No sir,” Lycurgus said. “We just rid as far as the pasture and turned them loose. We walked the balance of the way.”
“Well, anyway, vou come to see a horse, so we wont disappoint you. Bring him out, McWillie, where you can look at him.”
“Look at his face for a change,” McWillie said. “Folks on that Coppermine been looking at Akron’s hind end all winter, but aint none of them seen his face yet.”
“Then at least this boy can start out knowing what he looks like in front. What’s your name, son?” I told him. “You aint from around here.”
“No sir. Jefferson, Mississippi.”
“He travelling with Mr Hogganbeck that’s running Coppermine now,” Lycurgus said.
“Oh,” Mr Walter said. “Mr Hogganbeck buy him?”
“I dont know, sir,” Lycurgus said. “Mr Hogganbeck’s running him.” McWillie brought the horse out; he and Mr Walter stripped off the blanket. He was black, bigger than Lightning but very nervous; he came out showing eye-white; every time anybody moved or spoke near him his ears went back and he stood on the point of one hind foot as though ready to lash out with it, Mr Walter and McWillie both talking, murmuring at him but both of them always watching him.
“All right,” Mr. Walter said. “Give him a drink and put him back up.” We followed him toward the front. “Dont let him discourage you,” he said. “After all, it’s just a horse race.”
“Yes sir,” Lycurgus said. “That’s what they says. Much oblige for letting us look at him.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
“Good-bye,” Mr. Walter said. “Don’t keep them mules waiting. See you at post time this afternoon.”
“No sir,” Lycurgus said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. We went on, past the stables and the track once more.
“Mind what Mr McCaslin told us,” Lycurgus said.
“Mr McCaslin?” I said. “Oh yes,” I said. I didn’t ask What? this time either. I think I knew now. Or maybe I didn’t want to believe I knew; didn’t want to believe even yet that at a mere eleven you could progress that fast in weary unillusion; maybe if I had asked What? it would have been an admission that I had. “That horse is bad,” I said.
“He’s scared,” Lycurgus said. “That’s what Mr McCaslin said last night.”
“Last night?” I said. “I thought you all came to look at the track.”
“What do we want to look at that track for?” Lycurgus said. “That track dont move. He come to see that horse.”
“In the dark?” I said. “Didn’t they have a watchman or wasn’t the stable locked or anything?”
“When Mr McCaslin make up his mind to do something, he do it,” Lycurgus said. “Aint you found out that about him yet?” So we—I—didn’t look back. We went on to our sanctuary, where Lightning—I mean Coppermine —and the two mules stamped and swished in the dappled shade and Ned squatted beside Uncle Parsham‘3 saddle and another man sat on his heels across the spring from them—another Negro; I almost knew him, had known him, seen him, something—before Ned spoke:
“It’s Bobo,” he said. And then it was all right. He was a McCaslin too, Bobo Beauchamp, Lucas’s cousin—Lucas Quintus Carothers McCaslin Beauchamp, that Grandmother, whose mother had described old Lucius to her, said looked (and behaved: just as arrogant, just as iron-headed, just as intolerant) exactly like him except for color. Bobo was another motherless Beauchamp child whom Aunt Tennie raised until the call of the out-world became too much for him and he went to Memphis three years ago. “Bobo used to work for the man that used to own Lightning,” Ned said. “He came to watch him run.” Because it was all right now: the one remaining thing which had troubled us—me: Bobo would know where the automobile was. In fact, he might even have it. But that was wrong, because in that case Boon and Ned would simply have taken it away from him—until suddenly I realised that the reason it was wrong was, I didn’t want it to be; if we could get the automobile back for no more than just telling Bobo to go get it and be quick about it, what were we doing here? what had we gone to all this trouble and anxiety for? camouflaging and masquerading Lightning at midnight through the Memphis tenderloin to get him to the depot; ruthlessly using a combination of uxo-riousness and nepotism to disrupt a whole boxcar from the railroad system to get him to Parsham; not to mention the rest of it: having to cope with Butch, Minnie’s tooth, invading and outraging Uncle Parsham’s home and sleeplessness and (yes) homesickness and (me again) not even a change of underclothes; all that striving and struggling and finagling to run a horse race with a horse which was not ours, to recover an automobile we had never had any business with in the first place, when all we had to do to get the automobile was to send one of the family colored boys to fetch it. You see what I mean? if the successful outcome of the race this afternoon wasn’t really the pivot; if Lightning and I were not the last desperate barrier between Boon and Ned and Grandfather’s anger, even if not his police; if without winning the race or even having to run it, Ned and Boon could go back to Jefferson (which was the only home Ned knew, and the only milieu in which Boon could have survived) as if nothing had happened, and take up again as though they had never been away, then all of us were engaged in a make-believe not too different from a boys’ game of cops and robbers. But Bobo could know where the autom
obile was; that would be allowable, that would be fair; and Bobo was one of us. I said so to Ned. “I thought I told you to stop worrying about that automobile,” he said. “Aint I promised you I’d tend to it when the right time come? You got plenty other things to fret your mind over: you got a horse race. Aint that enough to keep it busy?” He said to Lycurgus: “all right?”
“I think so,” Lycurgus said. “We never looked back to see.”
“Then maybe,” Ned said. But Bobo had already gone. I neither saw nor heard him; he was just gone. “Get the bucket,” Ned told Lycurgus. “Now is a good time to eat our snack whilst we still got a little peace and quiet around here.” Lycurgus brought it—a tin lard bucket with a clean dishcloth over it, containing pieces of corn bread with fried sidemeat between; there was another bucket of buttermilk sitting in the spring.
“You et breakfast?” Uncle Parsham said to me.
“Yes sir,” I said.
“Then dont eat no more,” he said. “Just nibble a piece of bread and a little water.”
“That’s right,” Ned said. “You can ride better empty.” So he gave me a single piece of corn bread and we all squatted now around Uncle Parsham’s saddle, the two buckets on the ground in the center; we heard one step or maybe two up the bank behind us, then McWillie said,
“Hidy, Uncle Possum, morning, reverend” (that was Ned), and came down the bank, already—or still—looking at Lightning. “Yep, that’s Coppermine, all right. These boys had Mr Walter skeered this morning that maybe yawl had rung in another horse on him. You running him, reverend?”
“Call him Mr McCaslin,” Uncle Parsham said.
“Yes sir,” McWillie said. “Mr McCaslin. You running him?”
“White man named Mr Hogganbeck is,” Ned said. “We waiting on him now.”
“Too bad you aint got something else besides Coppermine to wait with, that would maybe give Akron a race,” McWillie said.
“I already told Mr Hogganbeck that, myself,” Ned said. He swallowed. Without haste he lifted the bucket of buttermilk and drank, still without haste. McWillie watched him. He set the bucket down. “Set down and eat something,” he said.
“Much obliged,” McWillie said, “I done et. Maybe that’s why Mr Hogganbeck’s late, waiting to bring out that other horse.”
“There aint time now,” Ned said. “He’ll have to run this one now. The trouble is, the only one around here that knows how to rate this horse, is the very one that knows better than to let him run behind. This horse dont like to be in front. He wants to run right behind up until he can see the finish line, and have something to run at. I aint seem him race yet, but I’d be willing to bet that the slower the horse in front of him goes, the more carefuller he is not to get out in front where he aint got no company—until he can see the finish line and find out it’s a race he’s in and run at it. All anybody got to do to beat him is to keep his mind so peaceful that when he does notice he’s in a race, it’s too late. Some day somebody gonter let him get far enough behind to scare him, then look out. But it wont be this race. The trouble is, the onliest one around here that knows that too, is the wrong one.”
“Who’s that?” McWillie said.
Ned took another bite. “Whoever’s gonter ride that other horse today.”
“That’s me,” McWillie said. “Dont tell me Uncle Posum and Lycurgus both aint already told you that.”
“Then you oughter be talking to me instead,” Ned said. “Set down and eat; Uncle Possum got plenty here.”
“Much obliged,” McWillie said again. “Well,” he said. “Mr Walter’ll be glad to know it aint nobody but Coppermine. We was afraid we would have to break in a new one. See yawl at the track.” Then he was gone. But I waited another minute.
“But why?” I said.
“I dont know,” Ned said. “We may not even need it. But if we does, we already got it there. You mind I told you this morning how the trouble with this race was, it had too many different things all mixed up in it? Well, this aint our track and country, and it aint even our horse except just in a borried manner of speaking, so we cant take none of them extra things out. So the next best we can do is, to put a few extry ones into it on our own account. That’s what we just done. That horse up yonder is a thoroughbred paper horse; why aint he in Memphis or Louisville or Chicago running races, instead of back here in a homemade country pasture running races against whoever can slip in the back way, like us? Because why, because I felt him last night and he’s weedy, like a horse that cant nothing catch for six furlongs, but fifty foot more and he’s done folded up right under you before you knowed it. And so far, all that boy—”
“McWillie,” I said.
“—McWillie has had to worry about is just staying on top of him and keeping him headed in the right direction; he’s won twice now and likely he thinks if he just had the chance, he would run Earl Sande and Dan Patch both clean outen the horse business. Now we’ve put something else in his mind; he’s got two things in it now that dont quite fit one another. So well just wait and see. And whilst we’re waiting, you go over behind them bushes yonder and lay down and rest. Word’s out now, and folks gonter start easing in and out of here to see what they can find out, and over there they wont worry you.”
Which I did. Though not always asleep; I heard the voices: I wouldn’t have needed to see them even if I had raised onto one elbow and opened one eye past a bush: the same overalls, tieless, the sweated hats, the chewing tobacco, squatting, unhurried, not talking very much, looking inscrutably at the horse. Nor always awake, because Lycurgus was standing over me and time had passed; the very light looked postmeridian. “Time to go,” he said. There was nobody with Lightning now but Ned and Uncle Parsham; if they were all up at the track already, it must be even later still. I had expected Boon and Sam and probably Everbe and Miss Reba too. (But not Butch. I hadn’t even thought of him; maybe Miss Reba had really got rid of him for good, back up to Hardwick or wherever it was the clerk said last night he really belonged. I had forgotten him; I realised now what the morning’s peace actually was.) I said so.
“Haven’t they come yet?”
“Aint nobody told them where to come yet,” Ned said. “We dont need Boon Hogganbeck now. Come on. You can walk him up and limber him on the way.” I got up: the worn perfectly cared-for McClellan saddle and the worn perfectly cared-for cavalry bridle which was the other half of Uncle Parsham’s (somebody’s) military loot from that Cause which, the longer I live the more convinced I am, your spinster aunts to the contrary, that whoever lost it, it wasn’t us.
“Maybe they’re looking for Otis,” I said. “Maybe they are,” Ned said. “It’s a good place to hunt for him, whether they finds him or not.” We went on, Uncle Parsham and Ned walking at Lightning’s head; Lycurgus would bring the buggy and the other mule around by the road, provded he could find enough clear space to hitch them in. Because already the pasture next to the track was filled up—wagons, the teams unhitched and reversed and tied to the stanchions and tail gates; buggies, saddle-horses and -mules hitched to the fence itself; and now we—I—could see the people, black and white, the tieless shirts and the overalls, already dense along the rail and around the paddock. Because this race was homemade, remember; this was democracy, not triumphant, because anything can be triumphant provided it is tenderly and firmly enough protected and guarded and shielded in its innocent fragility, but democracy working: Colonel Linscomb, the aristocrat, the baron, the suzerain, was not even present. As far as I knew, nobody knew where he was. As far as I knew, nobody cared. He owned one of the horses (I still didn’t know for certain just who owned the one I was sitting on) and the dirt we were going to race on and the nice white rail enclosing it and the adjacent pasture which the tethered wagons and buggies were cutting up and the fence one entire panel of which a fractious or frightened saddle-horse had just wrenched into kindling, but nobody knew where he was or seemed to bother or care.
We went to the paddock. Oh yes, we ha
d one; we had everything a race track should have except, as Ned said, grandstands and stalls for beer and whiskey; we had everything else that any track had, but we had democracy too: the judges were the night telegraph operator at the depot and Mr McDiarmid, who ran the depot eating room, who, the legend went, could slice a ham so thin that his entire family had made a summer trip to Chicago on the profits from one of them; our steward and marshal was a dog trainer who shot quail for the market and was now out on bond for his part in (participation in or maybe just his presence at) a homicide which had occurred last winter at a neighboring whiskey still; did I hot tell you this was free and elective will,and choice and private enterprise at its purest? And there were Boon and Sam waiting for us. “I cant find him,” Boon said. “Aint you seen him?”
“Seen who?” Ned said. “Jump down,” he told me. The other horse was there too, still nervous, still looking what I would have called bad but that Lycurgus said Ned said was afraid. “Now, what did this horse—”
“That damn boy!” Boon said. “You said this morning he would be out here.”
The Reivers Page 22
