“Morning, boys,” he said. “Looks like you’re about ready for me now. Howdy, Jefferson,” he said to Boon. “Looks like you did get through last summer, after all.”
“Looks like it,” Boon said. He had changed, instantaneous and complete, like a turned page: the poker player who has just seen the second deuce fall to a hand across the table. “We might a got through this time too if you folks didn’t raise such heavy mud up here.”
“Dont hold that against us,” the man said. “Mud’s one of our best crops up thisaway.”
“At two dollars a mudhole, it ought to be your best,” Ned said. The man blinked at Ned a moment.
“I dont know but what you’re right,” he said. “Here. You take this doubletree; you look like a boy that knows which end of a mule to hook to.”
“Get down and do it yourself,” Boon said. “Why else are we paying you two dollars to be the hired expert? You done it last year.”
“That was last year,” the man said. “Dabbling around in this water hooking log chains to them things undermined my system to where I come down with rheumatism if I so much as spit on myself.” So he didn’t stir. He just brought the mules up and turned them side by side while Boon and Ned hooked the trace chains to the singletrees and then Boon squatted in the mud to make the log chain fast to the car.
“What do you want me to hook it to?” he said.
“I dont care myself,” the man said. “Hook up to any part of it you want out of this mudhole. If you want all of it to come out at the same time, I’d say hook to the axle. But first I’d put all them spades and ropes back in the automobile. You wont need them no more, at least here.” So Ned and I did that, and Boon hooked up and we all three stood clear and watched. He was an expert of course, but by now the mules were experts too, breaking the automobile free of the mud, keeping the strain balanced on the doubletree as delicately as wire walkers, getting the automobile into motion and keeping it there with no more guidance than a word now and then from the man who rode the near mule, and an occasional touch from the peeled switch he carried; on to where the ground was more earth than water.
“All right, Ned,” Boon said. “Unhook him.”
“Not yet,” the man said. “There’s another hole just this side of the bridge that I’m throwing in free. You aint been acquainted here for a year now.” He said to Ned: “What we call the reserve patch up thisaway.”
“You means the Christmas middle,” Ned said.
“Maybe I do,” the man said. “What is it?”
Ned told him. “It’s how we done at McCaslin back before the Surrender when old L.Q.C. was alive, and how the Edmonds boy still does. Every spring a middle is streaked off in the best ground on the place, and every stalk of cotton betwixt that middle and the edge of the field belongs to the Christmas fund, not for the boss but for every McCaslin nigger to have a Christmas share of it. That’s what a Christmas middle is. Likely you mud-farming folks up here never heard of it.” The man looked at Ned awhile. After a while Ned said, “Hee hee hee.”
“That’s better,” the man said. “I thought for a minute me and you was about to misunderstand one another.” He said to Boon: “Maybe somebody better guide it.”
“Yes,” Boon said. “All right,” he told me. So I got under the wheel, mud and all. But we didn’t move yet. The man said, “I forgot to mention it, so maybe I better. Prices have doubled around here since last year.”
“Why?” Boon said. “It’s the same car, the same mudhole; be damned if I dont believe it’s even the same mud.”
“That was last year. There’s more business now. So much more that I cant afford not to go up.”
“All right, goddammit,” Boon said. “Go on.” So we moved, ignominious, at the pace of the mules, on, into the next mudhole without stopping, on and out again. The bridge was just ahead now; beyond it, we could see the road all the way to the edge of the bottom and safety.
“You’re all right now,” the man said. “Until you come back.” Boon was unhooking the log chain while Ned freed the traces and handed the doubletree back up to the man on the mule.
“We aint coming back this way,” Boon said.
“I wouldn’t neither,” the man said. Boon went back to the last puddle and washed some of the mud from his hands and came back and took four dollars from his wallet. The man didn’t move.
“It’s six dollars,” he said.
“Last year it was two dollars,” Boon said. “You said it’s double now. Double two is four. All right. Here’s four dollars.”
“I charge a dollar a passenger,” the man said. “There was two of you last year. That was two dollars. The price is doubled now. There’s three of you. That’s six dollars. Maybe you’d rather walk back to Jefferson than pay two dollars, but maybe that boy and that nigger wouldn’t.”
“And maybe I aint gone up neither,” Boon said. “Suppose I dont pay you six dollars. Suppose in fact I dont pay you nothing.”
“You can do that too,” the man said. “These mules has had a hard day, but I reckon there’s still enough git in them to drag that thing back where they got it from.”
But Boon had already quit, given up, surrendered. “God damn it,” he said, “this boy aint nothing but a child! Sholy for just a little child—”
“Walking back to Jefferson might be lighter for him,” the man said, “but it wont be no shorter.”
“All right,” Boon said, “but look at the other one! When he gets that mud washed off, he aint even white!”
The man looked at distance awhile. Then he looked at Boon. “Son,” he said, “both these mules is color-blind.”
V
BOON HAD TOLD Ned and me that, once we had conquered Hell Creek bottom, we would be in civilisation; he drew a picture of all the roads from there on cluttered thick as fleas with automobiles. Though maybe it was necessary first to put Hell Creek as far behind us as limbo, or forgetfulness, or at least out of sight; maybe we would not be worthy of civilisation until we had got the Hell Creek mud off. Anyway, nothing happened yet.
The man took his six dollars and went away with his mules and doubletree; I noticed in fact that he didn’t return to his little house but went on back through the swamp and vanished, as if the day were over; so did Ned notice it. “He aint a hog,” Ned said. “He dont need to be. He’s done already made six dollars and it aint even dinnertime yet.”
“It is as far as I’m concerned,” Boon said. “Bring the lunch too.” So we took the lunch box Miss Ballenbaugh had packed for us and the block and tackle and axe and shovel and our shoes and stockings and my pants (we couldn’t do anything about the automobile, besides being a waste of work until we could reach Memphis, where surely — at least we hoped — there wouldn’t be any more mudholes) and went back down to the creek and washed the tools off and coiled down the block and tackle.
And there wasn’t much to be done about Boon’s and Ned’s clothes either, though Boon got bodily into the water, clothes and all, and washed himself off and tried to persuade Ned to follow suit since he — Boon — had a change of clothes in his grip. But all Ned would do was to remove his shirt and put his coat back on.
I think I told you about his attaché case, which he didn’t so much carry when abroad as he wore it, as diplomats wear theirs, carrying (I mean Ned’s Bible and the two tablespoonfuls of — probably — Grandfather’s best whiskey) I suspect at times even less in them.
Then we ate lunch — the ham and fried chicken and biscuits and homemade pear preserves and cake and the jug of buttermilk — and put back the emergency mud-defying gear (which in the end had been not a defiance but an inglorious brag) and measured the gasoline tank — a gesture not to distance but to time — and went on. Because the die was indeed cast now; we looked not back to remorse or regret or might-have-been; if we crossed Rubicon when we crossed the Iron Bridge into another county, when we conquered Hell Creek we locked the portcullis and set the bridge on fire.
And it did seem as though we had won to reprieve as a reward for invincible determination, or refusal to recognise defeat when we faced it or it faced us. Or maybe it was just Virtue who had given up, relinquished us to Non-virtue to cherish and nurture and coddle in the style whose right we had won with the now irrevocable barter of
