So I closed the door and locked the padlock and opened the lot gate for Boon to drive out and closed that too and got in, the car already in motion — if in fact it had ever completely stopped. “If we go the back way, we can dodge the Square,” I said. And again he said:
“It’s too late now. All they can do now is holler.” But none hollered. But even with the Square behind, it still was not too late. That irrevocable decision was still a mile ahead, where the road to McCaslin forked away from the Memphis road, where I could say Stop.
Let me out and he would do it. More: I could say I’ve changed my mind. Take me back to McCaslin and I knew he would do that too. Then suddenly I knew that if I said Turn around. I will get that key from Mr Ballott and we will lock this automobile up in the carriage house where Boss believes it already is at this moment and he would do that.
And more: that he wanted me to do that, was silently begging me to do that; he and I both aghast not at his individual temerity but at our mutual, our confederated recklessness, and that Boon knew he had not the strength to resist his and so must cast himself on my strength and rectitude. You see? What I told you about Non-virtue? If things had been reversed and I had silently pled with Boon to turn back, I could have depended on his virtue and pity, where he to whom Boon pled had neither.
So I said nothing; the fork, the last frail impotent hand reached down to save me, flew up and passed and fled, was gone, irrevocable; I said All right then. Here I come. Maybe Boon heard it, since I was still boss. Anyway, he put Jefferson behind us; Satan would at least defend his faithful from the first one or two tomorrows; he said: “We aint really got anything to worry about but Hell Creek bottom tomorrow. Harrykin Creek aint anything.”
“Who said it was?” I said. Hurricane Creek is four miles from town; you have passed over it so fast all your life you probably dont even know its name. But people who crossed it then knew it. There was a wooden bridge over the creek itself, but even in the top of summer the approaches to it were a series of mudholes.
“That’s what I’m telling you,” Boon said. “It aint anything. Me and Mr Wordwin got through it that day last year without even using the block and tackle: just a shovel and axe Mr Wordwin borrowed from a house about a half a mile away, that now you mention it I dont believe he took back. Likely though the fellow come and got them the next day.”
He was almost right. We got through the first mudhole and even across the bridge. But the other mudhole stopped us. The automobile lurched once, twice, tilted and hung spinning. Boon didn’t waste any time, already removing his shoes (I forgot to say he had had them shined too), and rolled up his pants legs and stepped out into the mud. “Move over,” he said. “Put it in low gear and start when I tell you. Come on. You know how to do it; you learned how this morning.”
I got under the wheel. He didn’t even stop for the block and tackle. “I dont need it. It’ll take too much time getting it out and putting it back and we aint got time.” He didn’t need it. There was a snake fence beside the road; he had already wrenched the top rail off and, himself knee-deep in mud and water, wedged the end under the back axle and said, “Now.
Pour the coal to her,” and lifted the automobile bodily and shot it forward lurching and heaving, by main strength up onto dry ground again, shouting at me: “Shut it off! Shut it off!” which I did, managed to, and he came and shoved me over and got in under the wheel; he didn’t even stop to roll his muddy pants down.
Because the sun was almost down now; it would be nearly dark by the time we reached Ballenbaugh’s, where we would spend the night; we went as fast as we dared now and soon we were passing Mr Wyott’s — a family friend of ours; Father took me bird hunting there that Christmas — which was eight miles from Jefferson and still four miles from the river, with the sun just setting behind the house.
We went on; there would be a moon after a while, because our oil headlights were better to show someone else you were coming rather than to light you where you were going; when suddenly Boon said, “What’s that smell? Was it you?” But before I could deny it he had jerked the automobile to a stop, sat for an instant, then turned and reached back and flung back the lumped and jumbled mass of the tarpaulin which had filled the back of the car. Ned sat up from the floor.
He had on the black suit and hat and the white shirt with the gold collar stud without either collar or tie, which he wore on Sunday; he even had the small battered hand grip (you would call it a brief or attaché case now) which had belonged to old Lucius McCaslin before even Father was born; I dont know what else he might have carried in it at other times.
All I ever saw in it was the Bible (likewise from Great-great-grandmother McCaslin), which he couldn’t read, and a pint flask containing maybe a good double tablespoonful of whiskey. “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Boon said.
“I wants a trip too,” Ned said. “Hee hee hee.”
IV
“I GOT JUST as much right to a trip as you and Lucius,” Ned said. “I got more. This automobile belongs to Boss and Lucius aint nothing but his grandboy and you aint no kin to him a-tall.”
“All right, all right,” Boon said. “What I’m talking about, you laid there under that tarpollyon all the time and let me get out in the mud and lift this whole car out single-handed by main strength.”
“And hot under there too, mon,” Ned said. “I dont see how I stood it. Not to mention having to hold off this here sheet-iron churn from knocking my brains out every time you bounced, let alone waiting for that gasoline or whatever you calls it to get all joogled up to where it would decide to blow up too. What did you aim for me to do? That was just four miles from town. You’d make me walk back home.”
“This is ten miles now,” Boon said. “What makes you think you aint going to walk them back home?”
I said, rapidly, quickly: “Have you forgot? That was Wyott’s about two miles back. We might just as well be two miles from Bay St. Louis.”
“That’s right,” Ned said pleasantly. “The walking aint near so fur from here.” Boon didn’t look at him long.
“Get out and fold up that tarpollyon where it wont take up no more room than it has to,” he told Ned. “And air it off some too if we got to ride with it.”
“It was all that bumping and jolting you done,” Ned said. “You talk like I broke my manners just on purpose to get caught.”
Also, Boon lit the headlights while we were stopped, and now he wiped his feet and legs off on a corner of the tarpaulin and put his socks and shoes on and rolled his pants back down; they were already drying. The sun was gone now; already you could see the moonlight. It would be full night when we reached Ballenbaugh’s.
I understand that Ballenbaugh’s is now a fishing camp run by an off-and-on Italian bootlegger — off I mean during the one or two weeks it takes each new sheriff every four years to discover the true will of the people he thought voted for him; all that stretch of river bottom which was a part of Thomas Sutpen’s doomed baronial dream and the site of Major de Spain’s hunting camp is now a drainage district; the wilderness where Boon himself in his youth hunted (or anyway was present while his betters did) bear and deer and panther, is tame with cotton and corn now and even Wyott’s Crossing is only a name.
Even in 1905 there was still vestigial wilderness, though most of the deer and all the bears and panthers (also Major de Spain and his hunters) were gone; the ferry also; and now we called Wyott’s Crossing the Iron Bridge, THE Iron Bridge since it was the first iron bridge and for several years yet the only one we in Yoknapatawpha County had or knew of.
But back in the old days, in the time of our own petty Chickasaw kings, Issetibbeha and Moketubbe and the regicide-usurper who called himself Doom, and the first Wyott came along and the Indians showed him the crossing and he built his store and ferryboat and named it after himself, this was not only the only crossing within miles but the head of navigation too; boats (in the high water of winter, even a small steamboat) came as it were right to Wyott’s front door, bringing the whiskey and plows and coal oil and peppermint
