You see what I mean? Zachary Edmonds, whom Jefferson never saw on a weekday between the first ground-breaking in March and laying-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 nobody 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. Then they got to see me and you, but separate, just walking around like wasn’t nothing going on.” But how could I say that either? No. Let’s go now.
If I’ve got to tell 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?”
“Where to leave it. While I take a santer around the Square and you go home and get a clean shirt or whatever you’ll need. I had to unload all the stuff out at McCaslin, remember. Yours too. I mean, just in case some meddling busybody is hanging around just on the happen-chance.” We both knew who he meant.
“Why cant you lock it in the carriage house?”
“I aint got the key,” he said. “All I got is the lock. Boss took the key away from me this morning and unlocked the lock and give the key to Mr Ballott to keep until he gets back. I’m supposed to run the car in as soon as I get back from McCaslin and lock the lock shut and Boss will telegraph Mr Ballott what train to unlock the door so I can meet them.”
“Then we’ll just have to risk it,” I said.
“Yes, we’ll have to risk it. Maybe with Boss and Miss Sarah gone, even Delphine aint going to see him again until Monday morning.” So we risked it. Boon drove into the carriage house and got his grip and coat down from where he had hidden them in the loft and reached up again and dragged down a folded tarpaulin and put his grip and coat in on the floor of the back seat.
The gasoline can was all ready: a brand-new five-gallon can which Grandfather had had the tinsmith who made the toolbox more or less rebuild until it was smell-tight, since Grandmother already didn’t like the smell of gasoline, which we had never used yet because the automobile had never been this far before; the funnel and the chamois strainer were already in the toolbox with the tire tools and jack and wrenches that came with the car, and the lantern and axe and shovel and coil of barbed wire and the block and tackle which Grandfather had added, along with the tin bucket to fill the radiator when we passed creeks or barrow pits.
He put the can (it was full; maybe that was what took him the extra time before he came for us) in the back and opened the tarpaulin, not spreading it but rumbling it into the back until everything was concealed to just look like a jumbled mass of tarpaulin. “We’ll shove yours under the same way,” he said. “Then it wont look like nothing but a wad of tarpollyon somebody was too lazy to fold up. What you better do is go home and get your clean shirt and come straight back here and wait. I wont be long: just santer around the Square in case Ike wants to start asking questions too. Then we’ll be gone.”
We closed the door. Boon started to hang the open padlock back in the staple. “No,” I said; I couldn’t even have said why, so fast I had progressed in evil. “Put it in your pocket.”
But he knew why; he told me. “You damn right,” he said. “We done gone through too much to have somebody happen-chance by and snap it shut because they thought I forgot to.”
I went home. It was just across the street. A filling station is there now, and what was Grandfather’s house is now chopped into apartments, precarious of tenure. The house was empty, unlocked of course, since nobody in Jefferson locked mere homes in those innocent days.
It was only a little after five, nowhere near sundown, yet the day was finished, done for; the empty silent house was not vacant at all but filled with presences like held breath; and suddenly I wanted my mother; I wanted no more of this, no more of free will; I wanted to return, relinquish, be secure, safe from the sort of decisions and deciding whose foster twin was this having to steal an automobile.
But it was too late now; I had already chosen, elected; if I had sold my soul to Satan for a mess of pottage, at least I would damn well collect the pottage and eat it too: hadn’t Boon himself just reminded me, almost as if he had foreseen this moment of weakness and vacillation in the empty house, and forewarned me: “We done gone through too much to let nothing stop us now.”
My clothes — fresh blouses, pants, stockings, my toothbrush — were out at McCaslin now. I had more in my drawer of course, except the toothbrush, which in Mother’s absence it was a fair gamble that neither Aunt Callie nor Cousin Louisa would remember about. But I took no clothes, nothing; not that I forgot to but probably because I had never intended to. I just entered the house and stood inside the door long enough to prove to myself that of Boon and me it wouldn’t be me who failed us, and went back across the street and across Grandfather’s back yard to the lot.
Nor was Boon the one who would fail us; I heard the engine running quietly before I reached the carriage house. Boon was already behind the wheel; I think the automobile was even already in gear. “Where’s your clean shirt?” he said. “Never mind. I’ll buy you one in Memphis. Come on. We can move now.” He backed the car out. The open lock was once more hanging in the staple. “Come on,” he said. “Dont stop to lock it. It’s too late now.”
“No,” I said. I couldn’t have said then why either: with the padlock snapped through the staple and hasp of the closed door, it would look like the automobile was safely inside. And so it would be: the whole thing
