“Well,” Boon said to him, “you been here ever since daylight to peep at it through that crack. What do you think about it?”
“I dont think nothing about it,” Ned said. “Boss Priest could a bought the best two-hundred-dollar horse in Yoknapatawpha County for this money.”
“There aint any two-hundred-dollar horse in Yoknapatawpha County,” Boon said. “If there was, this automobile would buy ten of them. Go be hooking up that hose.”
“Go be hooking up that hose, Lucius,” Ned said to me; he didn’t even look around. He went to the automobile door and opened it. It was the back seat. Front seats didn’t have doors in those days; you just walked up and got in. “Come on, Miss Sarah, you and Miss Alison,” Ned said. “Delphine can wait with the children for the next trip.”
“You go hook up that hose like I told you,” Boon said. “I got to get it out of here before I can do anything to it.”
“You aint gonter tote it out in your hand, is you?” Ned said. “I reckon we can ride that far. I reckon I’m gonter have to drive it so the sooner I starts, the quicker it will be.” He said: “Hee hee hee.” He said: “Come on, Miss Sarah.”
“Will it be all right, Boon?” Grandmother said.
“Yessum, Miss Sarah,” Boon said. Grandmother and Mother got in. Before Boon could close the door, Ned was already in the front seat.
“Get out of there,” Boon said.
“Go ahead and tend to your business, if you knows how to,” Ned said. “I aint gonter touch nothing until I learns how, and just setting here aint gonter learn me. Go on and hook up, or whatever you does to it.”
Boon went around to the driver’s side and set the switches and levers, and went to the front and jerked the crank. On the third pull, the engine roared.
“Boon!” Grandmother cried.
“It’s all right, Miss Sarah!” Boon hollered above the noise, running back to the guiding wheel.
“I dont care!” Grandmother said. “Get in quick! I’m nervous!” Boon got in and quieted the engine and shifted the levers; a moment, then the automobile moved quietly and slowly backward out of the shed, into the lot, the sunshine, and stopped.
“Hee hee hee,” Ned said.
“Be careful, Boon,” Grandmother said. I could see her hand gripping the stanchion of the top.
“Yessum,” Boon said. The automobile moved again, backward, beginning to turn. Then it moved forward, still turning; Grandmother’s hand still gripped the stanchion. Mother’s face looked like a girl’s. The car went slowly and quietly across the lot until it was facing the gate to the lane, to the outside, to the world, and stopped. And Boon didn’t say anything: he just sat there behind the wheel, the engine running smooth and quiet, his head turned just enough for Grandmother to see his face. Oh yes, maybe he wasn’t a negotiable-paper wizard like Grandfather, and there were folks in Jefferson that would say he wasn’t much of anything else either, but for this skirmish anyway he was a skirmish fighter of consummate skill and grace. Grandmother sat for maybe a half a minute. Then she drew a long breath and expelled it.
“No,” she said. “We must wait for Mister Priest.” Maybe it wasn’t a victory, but anyway our side — Boon — had not only discovered the weak point in the enemy’s (Grandfather’s) front, by suppertime that night the enemy himself would discover it too.
Discover in fact that his flank had been turned. The next afternoon (Saturday) after the bank closed, and each succeeding Saturday afternoon, and then when summer came, every afternoon except when rain was actually falling, Grandfather in front beside Boon and the rest of us in rotation — Grandmother, Mother, me and my three brothers and Aunt Callie that nursed us in turn, including Father, and Delphine and our various connections and neighbors and Grandmother’s close friends in their ordered rote — in the linen dusters and goggles, would drive through Jefferson and the adjacent countryside; Aunt Callie and Delphine in their turns, but not Ned. He rode in it once: that one minute while it backed slowly out of the garage, and the two minutes while it turned and moved slowly forward across the lot until Grandmother lost her nerve and said No to the open gate and the public world, but not again. By the second Saturday he had realised, accepted — anyway become convinced — that even if Grandfather had ever intended to make him the official operator and custodian of the automobile, he could have approached it only over Boon’s dead body. But although he declined to recognise that the automobile existed on the place, he and Grandfather had met on some unspoken gentlemen’s ground regarding it: Ned never to speak in scorn or derogation of its ownership and presence, Grandfather never to order Ned to wash and polish it as he used to do the carriage — which Grandfather and Ned both knew Ned would have refused to do, even if Boon had let him: by which Grandfather visited on Ned his only punishment for his apostasy: he refused to give Ned the public chance to refuse to wash the automobile before Boon might have had a public chance to refuse to let him do it.
Because that was when Boon transferred — was transferred by mutual and instantaneous consent — from the day shift at the stable to the night shift. Otherwise, the livery business would have known him no more. That part of our Jefferson leisure class, friends or acquaintances of Father’s or maybe just friends of horses, who could have used the stable as a permanent business address — if they had had any business or expected any mail — were less strangers there than Boon. If — when — you, meaning Father, wanted Boon now, you sent me to Grandfather’s lot, where he would be washing and polishing the automobile — this, even during those first weeks when it had not left the lot since last Saturday and would not leave it again until the next one, backing it out of the shed and washing it again each morning, with tender absorption, right down to the last spoke and nut, then sitting guard over it while it dried.
“He’s going to soak all the paint off of it,” Mr Ballott said. “Does Boss know he’s running the hose on that automobile four or five hours every day?”
“What if he did?” Father said. “Boon would still sit there in the lot all day looking at it.”
“Put him on the night shift,” Mr Ballott said. “Then he could do whatever he wants to with his daylight and John Powell could go home and sleep in a bed every night for a change.”
“I already have,” Father said. “As soon as I can find somebody to go to that lot and tell him.”
There was a shuck mattress in the harness room on which until now John Powell or one of the other drivers or hostlers under his command always spent the night, mainly as night watchmen against fire. Now Father installed a cot and mattress in the office itself, where Boon could get some sleep, which he needed, since now he could spend all day with complete immunity in Grandfather’s lot either washing the automobile or just looking at it.
So now every afternoon, as many of us as the back seat would hold in our ordered turns would drive through the Square and into the country; Grandfather had already installed the extraneous emergency gear to be as much and inseparable a part of the automobile’s equipment as the engine which moved it.
But always through the Square first. You would have thought that as soon as he bought the automobile, Grandfather would have done what you would have done, having bought the automobile for that end: lain in wait for Colonel Sartoris and his carriage and ambushed, bushwhacked him and really taught him how to pass ordinances restricting others’ rights and privileges without consulting his betters first. But Grandfather didn’t do this. We finally realised that he wasn’t interested in Colonel Sartoris: he was interested in teams, vehicles. Because I told you he was a far-sighted man, a man capable of vision: Grandmother sitting tense and rigid and gripping the top stanchion and not even calling Grandfather Mister Priest now, as she had done as long as we had known her, but calling him by his given name as though she were no kin to him, the horse or team we were approaching reined back and braced to shy and sometimes even rearing and Grandmother saying, “Lucius! Lucius!” and Grandfather (if a man was driving and there were no wom
en or children in the buggy or wagon) saying quietly to Boon:
“Dont stop. Keep going. But slow now.” Or, when a woman had the lines, telling Boon to stop and himself getting out, talking quietly and steadily to the spooked horse until he could get hold of the bit and lead the vehicle past and remove his hat to the ladies in the buggy and come back and get back into the front seat and only then answer Grandmother: “We must get them used to it. Who knows? there may be another automobile in Jefferson in the next ten or fifteen years.”
In fact, that homemade dream which Mr Buffaloe had created single-handed in his back yard two years ago came within an ace of curing Grandfather of a habit which he had had since he was nineteen years old. He chewed tobacco. The first time he turned his head to spit out of the moving automobile, we in the back seat didn’t know what was going to happen until it was already too late. Because how could we? None of us had ever ridden in an automobile before farther than (this was the first trip) from the carriage house to the lot gate, let alone one going fifteen miles an hour (and this was something else: when we were going ten miles an hour Boon always said we were doing twenty; at twenty, he always said forty; we discovered a straight stretch about a half a mile long a few miles out of town where the automobile would get up to twenty-five, where I heard him tell a group of men on the Square that the automobile made sixty miles an hour; this was before he knew that we knew that the thing on the dashboard which looked like a steam gauge was a speedometer), so how could we be expected to? Besides, it didn’t make any difference to the rest of us; we all had our goggles and dusters and veils and even if the dusters were new, the spots and splashes were just brown spots and splashes and just because they were called dusters was no reason why they should not be called on to face anything else but dust. Maybe it was because Grandmother was sitting on the left side (in those days automobiles operated from the right side, like buggies; even Henry Ford, a man as long-visioned as Grandfather, had not yet divined that the steering wheel would be on the left) directly behind Grandfather. She said at once to Boon: “Stop the automobile,” and sat there, not mad so much as coldly and implacably outraged and shocked. She was just past fifty then (she was fifteen when she and Grandfather married) and in all those fifty years she had no more believed that a man, let alone her husband, would spit in her face than she could have believed that Boon for instance would approach a curve in the road without tooting the horn. She said, to nobody; she didn’t even raise her hand to wipe the spit away:
“Take me home.”
“Now, Sarah,” Grandfather said. “Now, Sarah.” He threw the chew away and took out the clean handkerchief from his other pocket, but Grandmother wouldn’t even take it. Boon had already started to get out and go to a house we could see and get a pan of water and soap and a towel, but Grandmother wouldn’t have that either.
“Dont touch me,” she said. “Drive on.” So we went on, Grandmother with the long drying brown splash across one of her goggles and down her cheek even though Mother kept on offering to spit on her handkerchief and wipe it off. “Let me alone, Alison,” Grandmother said.
But not Mother. She didn’t mind tobacco, not in the car. Maybe that was why. But more and more that summer it would be just Mother and us and Aunt Callie and one or two neighbor children in the back seat, Mother’s face flushed and bright and eager, like a girl’s. Because she had invented a kind of shield on a handle like a big fan, light enough for her to raise in front of us almost as fast as Grandfather could turn his head. So he could chew now, Mother always alert and ready with the screen; all of us were quick now in fact, so that almost before the instant when Grandfather knew he was going to turn his head to the left to spit, the screen had already come up and all of us in the back seat had leaned to the right like we were on the same wire, actually doing twenty and twenty-five miles an hour now because there were already two more automobiles in Jefferson that summer; it was as though the automobiles themselves were beating the roads smooth long before the money they represented would begin to compel smoother roads.
“Twenty-five years from now there wont be a road in the county you cant drive an automobile on in any weather,” Grandfather said.
“Wont that cost a lot of money, Papa?” Mother said.
“It will cost a great deal of money,” Grandfather said. “The road builders will issue bonds. The bank will buy them.”
“Our bank?” Mother said. “Buy bonds for automobiles?”
“Yes,” Grandfather said. “We will buy them.”
“But what about us? — I mean, Maury.”
“He will still be in the livery business,” Grandfather said. “He will just have a new name for it. Priest’s Garage maybe, or the Priest Motor Company. People will pay any price for motion. They will even work for it. Look at bicycles. Look at Boon. We dont know why.”
Then the next May came and my other grandfather, Mother’s father, died in Bay St Louis.
iii
IT WAS SATURDAY again. The next one in fact; Ludus was going to start getting paid again every Saturday night; maybe he had even stopped borrowing mules. It was barely eight oclock; I wasn’t even halfway around the Square with the freight bills and my canvas sack to carry the money in, just finishing in the Farmers Supply when Boon came in, fast, too quick for him. I should have suspected at once. No, I should have known at once, having known Boon all my life, let alone having watched him for a year now with that automobile. He was already reaching for the money sack, taking it right out of my hand before I could even close my fist. “Leave it,” he said. “Come on.”
“Here,” I said. “I’ve barely started.”
“I said leave it. Shake it up. Hurry. They’ve got to make Twenty-three,” he said, already turning. He had completely ignored the unpaid freight bills themselves. They were just paper; the railroad company had plenty more of them. But the sack contained money.
“Who’s got to make Twenty-three?” I said. Number Twenty-three was the southbound morning train. Oh yes, Jefferson had passenger trains then, enough of them so they had to number them to keep them separate.
“Goddammit,” Boon said, “how can I break it gentle to you when you wont even listen? Your grandpa died last night. We got to hurry.”
“He didn’t!” I said, cried. “He was on the front gallery this morning when we passed.” He was. Father and I both saw him, either reading the paper or just standing or sitting there like he was every morning, waiting for time to go to the bank.
“Who the hell’s talking about Boss?” Boon said. “I said your other grandpa, your ma’s papa down there at Jackson or Mobile or wherever it is.”
“Oh,” I said. “Dont you even know the difference between Bay St. Louis and Mobile?” Because it was all right now. This was different. Bay St. Louis was three hundred miles; I hardly knew Grandfather Lessep except twice at Christmas in Jefferson and three times we went down there in the summer. Also, he had been sick a long time; we — Mother and us — had been there last summer actually to see him enter what was to be his last bed even if we didn’t know it then (Mother and Aunt Callie, because your Great-uncle Alexander had arrived a month before, had been down last winter when they thought he was going to die). I say “if,” meaning Mother; to a child, when an old person becomes sick he or she has already quitted living; the actual death merely clears the atmosphere so to speak, incapable of removing anything which was already gone.
“All right, all right,” Boon said. “Just come on. Jackson, Mobile, New Orleans — all I know is, it’s down that way somewhere, and wherever it is, they still got to catch that train.” And that — the name New Orleans, not dropped so much as escaped into that context — should have told me all, revealed the whole of Boon’s outrageous dream, intent, determination; his later elaborate machinations to seduce me to it should merely have corroborated. But maybe I was still recovering from shock; also, at that moment I didn’t have as many facts as Boon did. So we just went on, fast, I trotting to keep up, the shortes
t way across the Square, until we reached home.
Where was much commotion. It was barely two hours until the train and Mother was far too busy to take time to mourn or grieve: merely pale-faced, intent, efficient. Because I now learned what Boon had already told me twice: that Grandfather and Grandmother were going to bury Grandfather Lessep also. He and Grandfather had been roommates, in the same class at the University; they had been groomsmen in each other’s wedding, which possibly had a little something to do with why Mother and Father chose one another out of all the earth to look into her eyes forever more (I understand you call it going steady), and Grandmother and Grandmother Lessep lived far enough apart to continue to be civil and even pleasant to the other mother of an only child. Besides that, people took funerals seriously in those days. Not death: death was our constant familiar: no family but whose annals were dotted with headstones whose memorialees had been too brief in tenure to bear a name even — unless of course the mother slept there too in that one grave, which happened more often than you would like to think. Not to mention the husbands and uncles and aunts in the twenties and thirties and forties, and the grandparents and childless great-uncles and -aunts who died at home then, in the same rooms and beds they were born in, instead of in cubicled euphemisms with names pertaining to sunset. But the funerals, the ritual ceremonial of interment, with tenuous yet steel-strong threads capable of extending even further and bearing even more weight than the distance between Jefferson and the Gulf of Mexico.
So Grandfather and Grandmother were also going to the funeral. Which meant only incidentally that, lacking any other close kinfolks in town, we — me and my three brothers and Aunt Callie — would have to be sent out to Cousin Zachary Edmonds’s farm seventeen miles away to stay until Father and Mother got back; it meant only incidentally that Father and Mother would be gone four days. What it actually meant was that Grandfather and Grandmother would not even come back after four days. Because Grandfather never left Jefferson at all, even to go only to Memphis, without spending two or three days in New Orleans, which he loved, either going or coming; and this time they might quite possibly take Mother and Father with them. It meant in fact what Boon had already told me twice by exuberant and still unbelieving inadvertence: that the owner of that automobile, and everyone else having or even assuming authority over it, would be three hundred miles from it for anywhere from four days to a week. So all his clumsy machinations to seduce and corrupt me were only corroboration. They were not even cumshaw, lagniappe. He could have taken the car alone, and doubtless would if I had been incorruptible, even knowing that someday he must bring it back or come back himself in order to face lesser music than he would if — when — Grandfather’s police caught up with him. Because come back he must. Where else could he go, who knew nowhere else, to whom the words, names — Jefferson, McCaslin, De Spain, Compson — were not just home but father and mother both? But some frayed ragtag judgment, some embryo gleam of simple yet-virgin discretion and common sense, persuaded him at least to try me first, to have me by as a kind of hostage. And he didn’t need to try, test me first. When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not yet be old enough to desire the fruits of it, which is not innocence but appetite; his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it, which is not ignorance but size.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 545
