The Reivers

"Ah," Uncle Parsham said. "It was a three-heat race just like this one, only they never run but two of them. By that time there wasn't no need to run the third one. Or maybe somebody got tired."

"Tired reached into his hind pocket, maybe," Ned said.

"Maybe," Uncle Parsham said. "The first time, your horse run too soon, and the second time he run too late. Or maybe it was the whip whipped too soon the first time and not soon enough the second. Anyhow, at the first lick your horse jumped out in front, a good length, and stayed there all the way around the first lap, even after the whipping had done run out, like it does with a horse or a man either: he can take just so much whipping and after that it aint no more than spitting on him. They they came into the home stretch and it was like your horse saw that empty track in front of him and said to himself, This aint polite; I'm a stranger here, and dropped back just enough to lay his head more or less on Colonel Linscomb's boy's knee, and kept it there until somebody told him he could stop. And the next time your horse started out like he still thought he hadn't finished that first heat, his head all courteous and polite about opposite Colonel Linscomb's boy's knee, on into the back turn of the last lap, where that Memphis boy hit him the first lick, not late enough this time, because all that full-length jump done this time was to show him that empty track again."

"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 automobile 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 had 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."

"Maybe he's behind something," Ned said. He came back to me. "What did this horse learn you yesterday? You was on a twice-around track that time too. What did he learn you? Think." I thought hard. But there still wasn't anything.

"Nothing," I said. "All I did was to keep him from going straight to you whenever he saw you."

"And that's exactly what you want to do this first heat: just keep him in the middle of the track and keep him going and then dont bother him. Dont bother nohow; we gonter lose this first heat anyway and get shut of it—"

"Lose it?" Boon said. "What the hell—"

"Do you want to run this horse race, or do you want me to?" Ned asked him.

"AH right," Boon said. "But, God damn it—" Then he said: "You said that damn boy—"

"Lemme ask you another way then," Ned said. "Do you want to run this horse race and lemme go hunt for that tooth?"

"Here they come," Sam said. "We aint got time now. Gimme your foot." He threw me up. So we didn't have time, for Ned to instruct me further or for anything else. But we didn't need it; our victory in the first heat (we didn't win it; it was only a dividend which paid off later) was not due to me or even to Lightning, but to Ned and McWillie; I didn't even really know what was happening until afterward. Because of my (indubitable) size and (more than indubitable) inexperience, not to mention the unmanageable state toward which the other horse was now well on his way, it was stipulated and agreed that we should be led up to the wire by grooms, and there released at the word Go. Which we did (or were), Lightning behaving as he always did when Ned was near enough for him to nuzzle at his coat or hand, Acheron behaving as (I assumed, having seen him but that once) he always did when anyone was near his head, skittering, bouncing, snatching the groom this way and that but gradually working up to the wire; it would be any moment now; it seemed to me that I actually saw the marshal-murderer fill his lungs to holler Go! when I dont know what happened, I mean the sequence: Ned said suddenly:

"Set tight," and my head, arms, shoulders and all, snapped; I dont know what it was he used—awl, ice pick, or maybe just a nail in his palm, the spring, the leap; the voice not hollering Go! because it never had, hollering instead:

"Stop! Stop! Whoa! Whoa!" which we—Lightning and me—did, to see Acheron's groom still on his knees where Acheron had flung him, and Acheron and McWillie already at top speed going into the first turn, McWillie sawing back on him, wrenching Acheron's whole neck sideways. But he already had the bit, the marshal and three or four spectators cutting across the ring to try to stop him in the back stretch, though they might as well have been hollering at Sam's cannonball limited between two flag stops. But McWillie had slowed him now, though it was now a matter of mere choice: whether to come on around the track or turn and go back, the distance being equal, McWillie (or maybe it was Acheron) choosing the former, Ned murmuring-rapidly at my knee now:

"Anyhow, we got one extra half a mile on him. This time you'll have to do it yourself because them judges gon-ter—" They were; they were already approaching. Ned said: "Just remember. This un dont matter nohow—" Then they did: disqualified him. Though they had seen nothing: only that he had released Lightning's head before the word Go. So this time I had a volunteer from the crowd to hold Lightning's head, McWillie glaring at me while Acheron skittered and plunged under him while the groom gradually worked him back toward position. And this time the palm went to McWillie. You see what I mean? Even if Non-virtue knew nothing about backcoun-try horse racing, she didn't need to: all necessary was to supply me with Sam, to gain that extra furtherance in evil by some primeval and insentient process like osmosis or maybe simple juxtaposition. I didn't even wait for Lightning to come in to the bridle, I didn't know why: I brought the bit back to him and (with no little, in fact considerable, help from the volunteer who was mine and Lightning's individual starter) held so, fixed; and sure enough, I saw the soles of Acheron's groom's feet and Acheron himself already two leaps on his next circuit of the track, Lightning and me still motionless. But McWillie was on him this time, before he reached the turn, so that the emergency squad not only reached the back stretch first but even stopped and caught Acheron and led him back. So our—mine and Ned's—net was only six furlongs, and the last one of them debatable. Though our main gain was McWillie; he was not just mad now, he was scared too, glaring at me again but with more than just anger in it, two grooms holding Acheron now long enough for us to be more or less in position, Lightning and me well to the outside to give them room, when the word Go came.

And that's all. We were off, Lightning strong and willing, every quality you could want in fact except eagerness, his brain not having found out yet that this was a race, McWillie holding Acheron back now so that we were setting the pace, on around the first lap, Lightning moving slower and slower, confronted with all that solitude, until Acheron drew up and passed us despite all McWillie could do; whereupon Lightning also moved out again, with companionship now, around the second lap and really going now, Acheron a neck ahead and our crowd even beginning to yell now as though they were getting their money's worth; the wire ahead now and McWillie, giving Acheron a terrific cut with his whip, might as well have hit Lightning too; twenty more feet, and we would have passed McWillie on simple momentum. But the twenty more feet were not there, McWillie giving me one last glare over his shoulder of rage and fright, but triumph too now as I slowed Lightning and turned him and saw it: not a fight but rather a turmoil, a seething of heads and shoulders and backs out of the middle of the crowd around the judges' stand, out of the middle of which Boon stood suddenly up like a pine sapling out of a plum thicket, his shirt torn half off and one flailing arm with two or three men clinging to it: I could see him bellowing. Then he vanished and I saw Ned running toward me up the track. Then Butch and another man came out of the crowd toward us. "What?" I said to Ned.

"Nemmine that," he said. He took the bridle with one hand, his other hand already digging into his hip pocket. "It's that Butch again; it dont matter why. Here." He held his hand up to me. He was not rushed, hurried: he was just rapid. "Take it. They aint gonter bother you." It was a cloth tobacco sack containing a hardish lump about the size of a pecan. "Hide it and keep it. Dont lose it. Just remember who it come from: Ned William McCaslin. Will you remember that? Ned William McCaslin Jefferson Missippi."

"Yes," I said. I put it in my hip pocket. "But what—" He didn't even let me finish.

"Soon as you can, find Uncle Possum and stay with him. Nemmine about Boon and the rest of them. If they got him, they got all the others too. Go straight to Uncle Possum and stay with him. He will know what to do."

"Yes," I said. Butch and the other man had reached the gate onto the track; part of Butch's shirt was gone too. They were looking at us.

"That it?" the man with him said.

"Yep," Butch said.

"Bring that horse here, boy," the man said to Ned. "I want it."

"Set still," Ned told me. He led the horse up to where they waited.

"Jump down, son," the man told me, quite kindly. "I dont want you." I did so. "Hand me the reins," he told Ned. Ned did so. "I'll take you bareback," the man told Ned. "You're under arrest."

Chapter 11

We were going to have all the crowd too presently. We just stood there, facing Butch and the other man, who now held Lightning. "What's it for, Whitefolks?" Ned said.

"It's for jail, son," the other man said. "That's what we call it here. I dont know what you call it where you come from."

"Yes sir," Ned said. "We has that back home too. Only they mentions why, even to niggers."

"Oh, a lawyer," Butch said. "He wants to see a paper. Show him one. —Never mind, I'll do it." He took something from his hip pocket: a letter in a soiled envelope. Ned took it. He stood there quietly, holding it in his hand. "What do you think of that," Butch said. "A man that cant even read, wanting to see a paper. Smell it then. Maybe it smells all right."

"Yes sir," Ned said. "It's all right."

"Dont say you are satisfied if you aint," Butch said. "Yes sir," Ned said. "It's all right." We had the crowd now. Butch took the envelope back from Ned and put it back in his pocket and spoke to them: "It's all right, boys; just a little legal difficulty about who owns this horse. The race aint cancelled. The first heat will still stand; the next ones are just put off until tomorrow. Can you hear me back there?"

"We likely cant, if the bets is cancelled too," a voice said. There was a guffaw, then two or three.

"I dont know," Butch said. "Anybody that seen this Memphis horse run against Akron them two heats last winter and still bet on him, has done already cancelled his money out before he even got it put up." He waited, but there was no laughter this time; then the voice—or another—said:

"Does Walter Clapp think that too? Ten foot more, and that chestnut would a beat him today."

"All right, all right," Butch said. "Settle it tomorrow. Aint nothing changed; the next two heats is just put off until tomorrow. The fifty-dollar heat bets is still up and Colonel Linscomb aint won but one of them. Come on, now; we got to get this horse and these witnesses in to town where we can get everything cleared up and be ready to run again tomorrow. Somebody holler back there to send my surrey." Then I saw Boon, a head above them. His face was quite calm now, still blood-streaked, and somebody (I had expected him to be handcuffed, but he wasn't; we were still democracy; he was still only a minority and not a heresy) had tied the sleeves of his torn shirt around his neck so that he was covered. Then I saw Sam too; he was barely marked; he was the one who pushed through first. "Now, Sam," Butch said. "We been trying for thirty minutes to step around you, but you wont let us."

"You damn right I wont," Sam said. "I'll ask you again, and let this be the last one. Are we under arrest?"

"Are who under arrest?" Butch said.

"Hogganbeck. Me. That Negro there."

"Here's another lawyer," Butch said to the other man. I learned quite quick now that he was the Law in Parsham; he was who Miss Reba had told us about last night: the elected constable of the Beat, where Butch for all his badge and pistol was just another guest like we were, being (Butch) just one more tenureless appointee from the nepotic files of the County Sheriff's office in the county seat at Hardwick thirteen miles away. "Maybe he wants to see a paper too."

"No," the other man, the constable, told Sam. "You can go whenever you want to."

"Then I'm going back to Memphis to find some law," Sam said. "I mean the kind of law a man like me can approach without having his britches and underwear both ripped off. If I aint back tonight, I'll be here early tomorrow morning." He had already seen me. He said, "Come on. You come with me."

"No," I said. "I'm going to stay here." The constable was looking at me.

"You can go with him, if you want," he said.

"No sir," I said. "I'm going to stay here."

"Who does he belong to?" the constable said. "He's with me," Ned said. The constable said, as though Ned had not spoken, there had been no sound: "Who brought him here?"

"Me," Boon said. "I work for his father."

"I work for his grandfather," Ned said. "We done already fixed to take care of him."

"Just hold on," Sam said. "I'll try to get back tonight. Then we can attend to everything."

"And when you come back," the constable said, "remember that you aint in Memphis or Nashville either. That you aint even in Hardwick County except primarily. What you're in right now, and what you'll be in every time you get off of a train at that depot yonder, is Beat Four."

"That's telling them, judge," Butch said. "The free state of Possum, Tennessee."

"I was talking to you too," the constable told Butch. "You may be the one that better try hardest to remember it." The surrey came up to where they were holding Boon. The constable gestured Ned toward it. Suddenly Boon was struggling; Ned was saying something to him. Then the constable turned back to me. "That Negro says you are going home with old Possum Hood."

"Yes sir," I said.

"I dont think I like that—a white boy staying with a family of niggers. You come home with me."

"No sir," I said.

"Yes," he said, but still really kind. "Come on. I'm busy."

"There's somewhere you stops," Ned said. The constable became completely motionless, half turned. "What did you say?" he said.

"There's somewhere the Law stops and just people starts," Ned said. And still for another moment the constable didn't move—an older man than you thought at first, spare, quite hale, but older, who wore no pistol, in his pocket or anywhere else, and if he had a badge, it wasn't in sight either.

"You're right," he said. He said to me: "That's where you want to stay? with old Possum?"

"Yes sir," I said.

"All right," he said. He turned. "Get in, boys," he said. "What you going to do with the nigger?" Butch said. He had taken the lines from the man who brought the surrey up; his foot was already on the stirrup to get into the driver's seat; Boon and Sam were already in the back. "Let Mm ride your horse?"

"You're going to ride my horse," the constable said. "Jump up, son," he told Ned. "You're the horse expert around here." Ned took the lines from Butch and got up and cramped the wheel for the constable to get up beside him. Boon was still looking down at me, his face battered and bruised but quiet now under the drying blood.

"Come on with Sam," he said.

"I'm all right," I said.

"No," Boon said. "I cant—"

"I know Possum Hood," the constable said. "If I get worried about him, I'll come back tonight and get him. Drive on, son." They went on. They were gone. I was alone. I mean, if I had been left by myself like when two hunters separate in the woods or fields, to meet again later, even as late as camp that night, I would not have been so alone. As it was, I was anything but solitary. I was an island in that ring of sweated hats and tieless shirts and overalls, the alien nameless faces already turning away from me as I looked about at them, and not one word to me of Yes or No or Go or Stay: who—me—was being reabandoned who had already been abandoned once: and at only eleven you are not really big enough in size to be worth that much abandonment; you would be obliterated, effaced, dissolved, vaporised beneath it. Until one of them said:

"You looking for Possum Hood? I think he's over yonder by his buggy, waiting for you." He was. The other wagons and buggies were pulling out now; most of them and all the saddled horses and mules were already gone. I went up to the buggy and stopped. I dont know why: I just stopped. Maybe there was nowhere else to go. I mean, there was no room for the next step forward until somebody moved the buggy.

"Get in," Uncle Parsham said. "We'll go home and wait for Lycurgus."

"Lycurgus," I said as though I had never heard the name before even.

"He rode on to town on the mule. He will find out what all this is about and come back and tell us. He's going to find out what time a train goes to Jefferson tonight."

"To Jefferson?" I said.

"So you can go home." He didn't quite look at me. "If you want to."

"I cant go home yet," I said. "I got to wait for Boon."

"I said if you want to," Uncle Parsham said. "Get in." I got in. He drove across the pasture, into the road. "Close the gate," Uncle Parsham said. "It's about time somebody remembered to." I closed the gate and got back in the buggy. "You ever drive a mule to a buggy?"

"No sir," I said. He handed me the lines. "I dont know how," I said.

"Then you can learn now. A mule aint like a horse. When a horse gets a wrong notion in his head, all you got to do is swap him another one for it. Most anything will do—a whip or spur or just scare him by hollering at him. A mule is different. He can hold two notions at the same time and the way to change one of them is to act like you believe he thought of changing it first. He'll know different, because mules have got sense. But a mule is a gentleman too, and when you act courteous and respectful at him without trying to buy him or scare him, he'll act courteous and respectful back at you—as long as you dont overstep him. That's why you dont pet a mule like you do a horse: he knows you dont love him: you're just trying to fool him into doing something he already dont aim to do, and it insults him. Handle him like that. _He knows the way home, and he will know it aint me holding the lines. So all you need to do is tell him with the lines that you know the way too but he lives here and you're just a boy so you want him to go in front."

We went on, at a fair clip now, the mule neat and nimble, raising barely half as much dust as a horse would; already I could feel what Uncle Parsham meant; there came back to me through the lines not just power, but intelligence, sagacity; not just the capacity but the willingness to choose when necessary between two alternatives and to make the right decision without hesitation. "What do you do at home?" Uncle Parsham said.

"I work on Saturdays," I said.

"Then you going to save some of the money. What are you going to buy with it?" And so suddenly I was talking, telling him: about the beagles: how I wanted to be a fox hunter like Cousin Zack and how Cousin Zack said the way to learn was with a pack of beagles on rabbits; and how Father paid me ten cents each Saturday at the livery stable and Father would match whatever I saved of it until I could buy the first couple to start my pack, which would cost twelve dollars and I already had eight dollars and ten cents; and then, all of a sudden too, I was crying, bawling: I was tired, not from riding a mile race because I had ridden more than that at one time before, even though it wasn't real racing; but maybe from being up early and chasing back and forth across the country without any dinner but a piece of corn bread. Maybe that was it: I was just hungry. But anyway, there I sat, bawling like a baby, worse than Alexander and even Maury, against Uncle Parsham's shirt while he held me with one arm and took the lines from me with his other hand, not saying anything at all, until he said, "Now you can quit. We're almost home; you'll have just time to wash your face at the trough before we go in the house. You dont want womenfolks to see it like that."

Which I did. That is, we unhitched the mule first and watered him and hung the harness up and wiped him down and stalled and fed him and pushed the buggy back under its shed and then I smeared my face with water at the trough and dried it (-after a fashion) with the riding-sock and we went into the house. And the evening meal —supper—was ready although it was barely five oelock, as country people, farmers, ate; and we sat down: Uncle Parsham and his daughter and me since Lycurgus was not yet back from town, and Uncle Parsham said, "You gives thanks at your house too," and I said, "Yes sir," and he said,

"Bow your head," and we did so and he said grace, briefly, courteously but with dignity, without abasement or cringing: one man of decency and intelligence to another: notifying Heaven that we were about to eat and thanking It for the privilege, but at the same time reminding It that It had had some help too; that if someone named Hood or Briggins (so that was Lycurgus's and his mother's name) hadn't sweated some, the acknowledgment would have graced mainly empty dishes, and said Amen and unfolded his napkin and stack the corner in his collar exactly as Grandfather did, and we ate: the dishes of cold vegetables which should have been eaten hot at the country hour of eleven oclock, but there were hot biscuits and three kinds of preserves, and buttermilk. And still it wasn't even sundown: the long twilight and even after that, still the long evening, the long night and I didn't even know where I was going to sleep nor even on what, Uncle Parsham sitting there picking his teeth with a gold toothpick just like Grandfather's and reading my mind like it was a magic-lantern slide: "Do you like to go fishing?" I didn't really like it. I couldn't seem to learn to want—or maybe want to learn—to be still that long. I said quickly: "Yes sir."

"Come on then. By that time Lycurgus will be back." There were three cane poles, with lines floats sinkers hooks and all, on two nails in the wall of the back gallery. He took down two of them. "Come on," he said. In the tool shed there was a tin bucket with nail holes punched through the lid. "Lycurgus's cricket bucket," he said. "I like worms myself." They were in a shallow earth-filled wooden tray; he—no: I; I said,

"Lemme do it," and took the broken fork from him and dug the long frantic worms out of the dirt, into a tin can.

"Come on," he said, shouldering his pole, passing the stable but turning sharp away and down toward the creek bottom, not far; there was a good worn path among the blackberry thickets and then the willows, then the creek, the water seeming to gather gently the fading light and then as gently return it; there was even a log to sit on. "This is where my daughter fishes," he said, "We call it Mary's hole. But you can use it now. I'll be on down the bank." Then he was gone. The light was going fast now; it would be night before long. I sat on the log, in a gentle whine of mosquitoes. It wouldn't be too difficult; all I would have to do would just be to say / wont think whenr ever it was necessary. After a while I thought about putting the hook into the water, then I could watch how long it would take the float to disappear into darkness when night finally came. Then I even thought about putting one of Lycurgus's crickets on the hook, but crickets were not always easy to catch and Lycurgus lived by a creek and would have more time to fish and would need them. So I just thought / wont think; I could see the float plainer than ever, now that it was on the water; it would probably be the last of all to vanish into the darkness, since the water itself'would be next to last; I couldn't see or hear Uncle Parsham at all, I didn't know how much further he called on down the bank and now was the perfect time, chance to act like a baby, only what's the good of acting like a baby, of wasting it with nobody there to know it or offer sympathy—if anybody ever wants sympathy or even in fact really to be back home because what you really want is just a familiar soft bed to sleep in for a change again, to go to sleep hi; there were whippoorwills now and back somewhere beyond the creek an owl too, a big one by his voice; maybe there were big woods there and if Lycurgus's (or maybe they were Uncle Parsham's) hounds were all that good on Otis last night, they sure ought to be able to handle rabbits or coons or possums. So I asked him. It was full night now for some tune. He said quietly behind me; I hadn't even heard him until then: "Had a bite yet?"

"I aint much of a fisherman," I said. "How do your hounds hunt?"

"Good," he said. He didn't even raise his voice: "Pappy." Uncle Parsham's white shirt held light too, up to us where Lycurgus took the two poles and we followed, up the path again where the two hounds met us, on into the house again, into the lamplight, a plate of supper with a cloth over it ready for Lycurgus.

"Sit down," Uncle Parsham said. "You can talk while you eat." Lycurgus sat down. "They're still there," he said.

"They aint took them to Hardwick yet?" Uncle Parsham said. "Possum hasn't got a jail," he told me. "They lock them in the woodshed behind the schoolhouse until they can take them to the jail at Hardwick. Men, that is. They aint had women before."

"No sir," Lycurgus said. "The ladies is still in the hotel, with a guard at the door. Just Mr Hogganbeck is in the woodshed. Mr Caldwell went back to Memphis on Number Thirty-one. He taken that boy with him."

"Otis?" I said. "Did they get the tooth back?"

"They never said," Lycurgus said, eating; he glanced briefly at me. "And the horse is all right too. I went and seen him. He's in the hotel stable. Before he left, Mr Caldwell made a bond for Mr McCaslin so he can watch the horse." He ate. "A train leaves for Jefferson at nine-forty. We could make it all right if we hurry." Uncle Parsham took a vast silver watch from his pocket and looked at it. "We could make it," Lycurgus said.

"I cant," I said. "I got to wait." Uncle Parsham put the watch back. He rose. He said, not loud:

"Mary." She was in the front room; I hadn't heard a sound. She came to the door.

"I already did it," she said. She said to Lycurgus: "Your pallet's ready in the hall." Then to me: "You sleep in Lycurgus's bed where you was yestiddy."

"I dont need to take Lycurgus's bed," I said. "I can sleep with Uncle Parsham. I wont mind." They looked at me, quite still, quite identical. "I sleep with Boss a lot of times," I said. "He snores too. I don't mind."

"Boss?" Uncle Parsham said.

"That's what we call Grandfather," I said. "He snores too. I wont mind."

"Let him," Uncle Parsham said. We went to his room. His lamp had flowers painted on the china shade and there was a big gold-framed portrait on a gold easel in one corner: a woman, not very old but in old-timey clothes; the bed had a bright patchwork quilt on it like Lycurgus's and even in May there was a smolder of fire on the hearth. There was a chair, a rocking chair too, but I didn't sit down. I just stood there. Then he came in again. He wore a nightshirt now and was winding the silver watch. "Undress," he said. I did so. "Does your mother let you sleep like that at home?"

"No sir," I said.

"You aint got anything with you, have you?"

"No sir," I said. He put the watch on the mantel and went to the door and said,

"Mary." She answered. "Bring one of Lycurgus's clean shirts." After a while her hand held the shirt through the door crack. He took it. "Here," he said. I came and put it on. "Do you say your Now I lay me in bed or kneeling down?"

"Kneeling down," I said.

"Say them," he said. I knelt beside the bed and said my prayers. The bed was already turned back. I got into it and he blew out the lamp and I heard the bed again and then —the moon would be late before it was very high tonight but there was already enough light—I could see him, all black and white against the white pillow and the white moustache and imperial, lying on his back, his hands folded on his breast. "Tomorrow morning I'll take you to town and we'll see Mr Hogganbeck. If he says you have done all you can do here and for you to go home, will you go then?"

"Yes sir," I said.

"Now go to sleep," he said. Because even before he said it, Fknew that that was exactly what I wanted, what I had been wanting probably ever since yesterday: to go home. I mean, nobody likes to be licked, but maybe there are times when nobody can help being; that all you can da about it is not quit. And Boon and Ned hadn't quit, or they wouldn't be where they were right now. And maybe they wouldn't say that I had quit either, when it was them who told me to go home. Maybe I was just too little, too young; maybe I just wasn't able to tote whatever my share was, and if they had had somebody else bigger or older or maybe just smarter, we wouldn't have been licked. You see? like that: all specious and rational; unimpugnable even, when the simple truth was, I wanted to go home and just wasn't brave enough to say so, let alone do it. So now, having admitted at last that I was not only a failure but a coward too, my mind should be peaceful and easy and I should go on to sleep like a baby: where Uncle Parsham already was, just barely snoring (who should hear Grandfather once). Not that that mattered either, since I would be home tomorrow with nothing—no stolen horses nor chastity-stricken prostitutes and errant pullman conductors and Ned and Boon Hogganbeck in his normal condition once he had slipped Father's leash—to interfere with sleep, hearing the voice, the bawling two or three times before I struggled up and out, into daylight, sunlight; Uncle Parsham's side of the bed was empty and now I could hear the bawling from outside the house:

"Hellaw. Hellaw. Lycurgus. Lycurgus," and leapt, sprang from the bed, already running, across to the window where I could look out into the front yard. It was Ned. He had the horse.

Chapter 12

So once again, at two oclock in the afternoon, McWillie and I sat our (his was anyway) skittering mounts-—we had scared Mr Clapp enough yesterday to where we had drawn for pole position this time and McWillie won it—poised for the steward-starter's (the bird-dog trainer-market hunter-homicidist's) Go!

A few things came before that though. One of them was Ned. He looked bad. He looked terrible. It wasn't just lack of sleep; we all had that lack. But Boon and I had at least spent the four nights in bed since we left Jefferson, where Ned had spent maybe two, one of the others in a boxcar with a horse and the other in a stable with him, both on hay if on anything. It was his clothes too. His shirt was filthy and his black pants were not much better. At least Everbe had washed some of mine night before last, but Ned hadn't even had his off until now: sitting now in a clean faded suit of Uncle Parsham's overalls and jumper while Mary was washing his shirt and doing what she could with his pants, at the kitchen table now, he and I eating our breakfast while Uncle Parsham sat and listened.

He said that a little before daylight one of the white men —it wasn't Mr Poleymus, the constable—woke him where he was asleep on some bales of hay and told him to take the horse and get out of town with it—

"Just you and Lightning, and not Boon and the others?" I said. "Where are they?"

"Where them white folks put ran," Ned said. "So I said, Much oblige, Whitefolks, and took Lightning in my hand and—"

"Why?" I said.

"What do you care why? All we need to do now is be up behind that starting wire at two oclock this afternoon and win them two heats and get a holt of Boss's automobile and get on back to Jefferson that we hadn't ought to never left nohow—"

"We cant go back without Boon," I said. "If they let you and Lightning go, why didn't they let him go?"

"Look," Ned said. "Me and you got enough to do just running that horse race. Why dont you finish your breakfast and then go back and lay down and rest until I calls you in time—"

"Stop lying to him," Uncle Parsham said. Ned ate, his head bent over his plate, eating fast. He was tired; his eye-whites were not even just pink any more: they were red.

"Mr Boon Hogganbeck aint going anywhere for a while. He's in jail good this time. They gonter take him to Hard-wick this morning where they can lock him up sho enough. But forget that. What you and me have got to do is—"

"Tell him," Uncle Parsham said. "He's stood everything else you folks got him into since you brought him here; what makes you think he cant stand the rest of it too, until you manage somehow to come out on the other side and can take him back home? Didn't he have to watch it too, right here in my yard and my house, and down yonder in my pasture both, not to mention what he might have seen in town since—that man horsing and studding at that gal, and her trying to get away from him, and not nobody but this eleven-year-old boy to run to? not Boon Hogganbeck and not the Law and not the grown white folks to count on and hope for, but just him? Tell him." And already the thing inside me saying No No Dont ask Leave it Leave it. I said,

"What did Boon do?" Ned chewed over his plate, blinking his reddened eyes like when you have sand in them.

"He whupped that Law. That Butch. He nigh mint him. They let him out before they done me and Lightning. He never even stopped. He went straight to that gal—"

"It was Miss Reba," I said. "It was Miss Reba."

"No," Ned said. "It was that other one. That big one.

They never called her name to me. —and whupped her and turned around—"

"He hit her?" I said. "Boon hit Ever— Miss Corrie?"

"Is that her name? Yes. —and turned around and went straight back until he found that Law and whupped him, pistol and all, before they could pull him off—"

"Boon hit her," I said. "He hit her."

"That's right," Ned said. "She is the reason me and Lightning are free right now. That Butch found out he couldn't get to her no other way, and when he found out that me and you and Boon had to win that race today before we could dare to go back home, and all we had to win it with was Lightning, he took Lightning and locked him up. That's what happened. That's all it was; Uncle Possum just told you how he watched it coming Monday, and maybe I ought to seen it too and maybe I would if I hadn't been so busy with Lightning, or maybe if I had been a little better acquainted with that Butch—"

"I dont believe it," I said.

"Yes," he said. "That's what it was. It was just bad luck, the kind of bad luck you cant count against beforehand. He likely just happened to be wherever he was just by chance when he seen her Monday and figgered right off that that badge and pistol would be all he would need, being likely used to having them be enough around here. Only this time they wasnt and so he had to look again, and sho enough, there was Lightning that we had to depend on to win that race so we could get back Boss's automobile and maybe go back home—"

"No!" I said. "No! It wasn't her! She's not even here! She went back to Memphis with Sam yesterday evening! They just didn't tell you! It was somebody else! It was another one!"

"No," Ned said. "It was her. You seen it Monday out here." Oh yes; and on the way back in the surrey that afternoon, and at the doctor's, and at the hotel that night until Miss Reba frightened him away, we—I anyway— thought for good. Because Miss Reba was only a woman too, I said:

"Why didn't somebody else help her? a man to help her —that man, that man that took you and Lightning, that told Sam and Butch both they could be whatever they wanted in Memphis or Nashville or Hardwick either, but that here in Possum he was the one—" I said, cried: "I dont believe it!"

"Yes," Ned said. "It was her that bought Lightning loose to run again today. I aint talking about me and Boon and them others; Butch never cared nothing about us, except to maybe keep Boon outen the way until this morning. All he needed was Lightning, only he had to throw in me and Boon and the rest to make Mr Poleymus believe him. Because Butch tricked him too, used him too, until whatever it was that happened this morning—whether that Butch, having done been paid off now, said it was all a mistake or it was the wrong horse, or maybe by that time Mr Poleymus his-self had added one to one and smelled a mouse and turned everybody loose and before he could turn around, Boon went and whupped that gal and then come straight back without even stopping and tried to tear that Butch's head off, pistol and all, with his bare hands, and Mr Poleymus smelled a whole rat. And Mr. Poleymus may be little, and he may be old; but he's a man, mon. They told me how last year his wife had one of them strokes and cant even move her hand now, and all the chillen are married and gone, so he has to wash her and feed her and lift her in and outen the bed day and night both, besides cooking and keeping house too unlessen some neighbor woman comes in to help. But you dont know it to look at him and watch him act. He come in there—I never seen none of it; they just told me: two or three holding Boon and another one trying to keep that Butch from whupping him with the pistol whilst they was holding him—and walked up to Butch and snatched that pistol outen his hand and reached up and ripped that badge and half his shirt off too and tele-foamed to Hardwick to send a automobile to bring them all back to jail, the women too. When it's women, they calls it fragrancy."

"Vagrancy," Uncle Parsham said.

"That's what I said," Ned said. "You call it whatever you want. I calls it jail."

"I dont believe it," I said. "She quit."

"Then we sho better say much obliged that she started again," Ned said. "Else me and you and Lightning—"

"She's quit," I said. "She promised me."

"Aint we got Lightning back?" Ned said. "Aint all we got to do now is just run him? Didn't Mr Sam say he will be back today and will know what to do, and then me and you and Boon will be just the same as already back home?

I sat there. It was still early. I mean, even now it was still only eight oclock. It was going to be hot today, the first hot day, precursor of summer. You see, just to keep on saying I dont believe it served only for the moment; as soon as the words, the noise, died, there it still was—anguish, rage, outrage, grief, whatever it was—unchanged. "I have to go to town right away," I said to Uncle Parsham. "If I can use one of the mules, I'll send you the money as soon as I get home." He rose at once.

"Come on," he said.

"Hold on," Ned said. "It's too late now, Mr Poleymus sent for a automobile. They've already left before now."

"He can cut them off," Uncle Parsham said. "It aint a half a mile from here to the road they'll be on."

"I got to get some sleep," Ned said.

"I know it," Uncle Parsham said. "I'm going with him. I told him last night I would."

"I'm not going home yet," I said. "I'm just going to town for a minute. Then I'll come back here."

"All right," Ned said. "At least lemme finish my coffee." We didn't wait for him. One of the mules was gone, probably to the field with Lycurgus. But the other was there. Ned came out before we had the gear on. Uncle Parsham showed us the short cut to the Hardwick road, but I didn't care. I mean, it didn't matter to me now where I met him. If I hadn't been just about worn out with race horses and women and deputy sheriffs and everybody else that wasn't back home where they belonged, I might have preferred to hold my interview with Boon in some quick private place for both our sakes. But it didn't matter now; it could be in the middle of the big road or in the middle of the Square either, as far as I was concerned; there could be a whole automobile full of them. But we didn't meet the automobile; obviously I was being protected; to have had to do it in public would have been intolerable, gratuitously intolerable for one who had served Non-virtue this faithfully for four days and asked so little in return. I mean, not to have to see any more of them than I had to. Which was granted; the still-empty automobile had barely reached the hotel itself when we got there: a seven-passenger Stanley Steamer: enough room even for the baggage of two—no, three: Minnie too—women on a two-day trip from Memphis to Parsham, which they would all be upstairs packing now, so even horse stealing took care of its own. Ned cramped the wheel for me to get down. "You still dont want to tell me what you come for?" he said.

"No," I said. None of the long row of chairs on the gallery were occupied, Caesar could have held his triumph there and had all the isolation Boon's and Butch's new status required; the lobby was empty, and Mr Poleymus could have used that. But it was a man, mon; they were in the ladies' parlor—Mr Poleymus, the driver of the car (another deputy; anyway, in a badge), Butch and Boon

l!

fresh and marked from battle. Though only Boon for me, who read my face (he had known it long enough) or maybe it was his own heart or anyway conscience; he said quickly:

"Look out, now, Lucius; look out!" already flinging up one arm as he rose quickly, already stepping back, retreating, I walking at him, up to him, not tall enough by more than half and nothing to stand on either (that ludicrous anticlimax of shame), having to reach, to jump even, stretch the best I could to strike at his face; oh yes, I was crying, bawling again; I couldn't even see him now: just hitting as high as I could, having to jump at him to do so, against his Alp-hard Alp-tall crags and cliffs, Mr Poleymus saying behind me:

"Hit him again. He struck a woman, I dont care who she is," and (or somebody) holding me until I wrenched, jerked free, turning, blind, for the door or where I thought I remembered it, the hand guiding me now.

"Wait," Boon said. "Dont you want to see her?" You see, I was tired and my feet hurt. I was about worn out, and I needed sleep too. But more: I was dirty. I wanted fresh clothes. She had washed for me Monday night but I didn't want just rewashed clothes: I wanted a change of clothes that had had time to rest for a while, like at home, smelling of rest and quiet drawers and starch and bluing; but mainly my feet; I wanted fresh stockings and my other shoes.

"I dont want to see nobody!" I said. "I want to go home!"

"All right," Boon said. "Here—anybody—will somebody put him on that train this morning? I got money— can get it—"

"Shut up," I said. "I aint going nowhere now." I went on, still blind; or that is, the hand carried me. "Wait," Boon Said. "Wait, Lucius."

"Shut up," I said. The hand curved me around; there was a wall now.

"Wipe your face," Mr Poleymus said. He held out a bandanna handkerchief but I didn't take it; my bandage would sop it up all right. Anyway, the riding-sock did. It was used to being cried into. Who knew? if it stayed with me long enough, it might even win a horse race. I could see now; we were in the lobby. I started to turn but he held me. "Hold up a minute," he said. "If you still dont want to see anybody." It was Miss Reba and Everbe coming down the stairs carrying then- grips but Minnie wasn't with them. The car-driving deputy was waiting. He took the grips and then went on; they didn't look toward us, Miss Reba with her head mad and hard and high; if the deputy hadn't moved quick she would have tromped right over him, grips and all. They went out. "I'll buy you a ticket home," Mr Poleymus said. "Get on that train." I didn't say Shut up to him. "You've run out of folks sure enough now, I'll stay with you and tell the conductor—"

"I'm going to wait for Ned," I said. "I cant go without him. If you hadn't ruined everything yesterday, we'd all been gone by now."

"Who's Ned?" he said. I told him. "You mean you're going to run that horse today anyhow? you and Ned by yourself?" I told him. "Where's Ned now?" I told him. "Come on," he said. "We can go out the side door." Ned was standing at the mule's head. The back of the automobile was towards us. And Minnie still wasn't with them. Maybe she went back to Memphis yesterday with Sam and Otis; maybe now that she had Otis again she wasn't going to lift her hand off of him until it had that tooth in it. That's what I would have done, anyway.

"So Mr Poleymus finally caught you too, did he?" Ned said. "What's the matter? aint he got no handcuffs your size?"

"Shut up," I said.

"When you going to get him back home, son?" Mr Poleymus said to Ned.

"I hope tonight," Ned said; he wasn't being Uncle Remus or smart or cute or anything now. "Soon as I get rid of this horse race and can do something about it."

"Have you got enough money?"

"Yes sir," Ned said. "Much oblige. We'll be all right after this race." He cramped the wheel and we got in. Mr Poleymus stood with his hand on the top stanchion. He said:

"So you really are going to race that Linscomb horse this afternoon."

"We gonter beat that Linscomb horse this afternoon," Ned said.

"You hope so," Mr Poleymus said.

"I know so," Ned said.

"How much do you know so?" Mr Poleymus said.

"I wish I had a hundred dollars for my own to bet on it," Ned said. They looked at each other; it was a good while. Then Mr Poleymus turned loosed the stanchion and took from his pocket a worn snap purse that when I saw it I thought I was seeing double because it was exactly like Ned's, scuffed and worn and even longer than the riding-sock, that you didn't even know who was paying who for what, and unsnapped it and took out two one-dollar bills and snapped the purse shut and handed the bills to Ned.

"Bet this for me," he said. "If you're right you can keep half of it." Ned took the money.

"I'll bet it for you," he said. "But much oblige. By sundown tonight I can lend you half or three or four times this much." We drove on then—I mean, Ned drove on— turning: we didn't pass the automobile at all. "Been crying again," he said. "A race-horse jockey and still aint growed out of crying."

"Shut up," I said. But he was turning the buggy again, on across the tracks and on along what would have been the other side of the Square if Parsham ever got big enough to have a Square, and stopped; we were in front of a store.

"Hold him," Ned said and got out and went in the store, not long, and came back with a paper sack and got in and took the lines, back toward home—>I mean Uncle Parsham's—now and with his free hand took from the big bag a small one; it was peppermint drops. "Here," he said. "I got some bananas too and soon as we get Lightning back to that private spring-branch paddock we uses, we can set down and eat um and then maybe I can get some sleep before I forget how to. And meanwhiles, stop fretting about that gal, now you done said your say to Boon Hogganbeck. Hitting a woman dont hurt her because a woman dont shove back at a lick like a man do; she just gives to it and then wken your back is turned, reaches for the flatiron or the butcher knife. That's why hitting them dont break nothing; all it does is just black her eye or cut her mouf a little. And that aint nothing to a woman. Because why? Because what better sign than a black eye or a cut mouf can a woman want from a man that he got her on his mind?"

So once more, in the clutch of our respective starting grooms, McWillie and I sat our skittering and jockeying mounts behind that wire. (That's right, skittering and jockeying, Lightning too; at least he had learned—anyway remembered from yesterday—that he was supposed to be at least up with Acheron when the running started, even if he hadn't discovered yet that he was supposed—hoped—to be in front when it stopped.)

This time Ned's final instructions were simple, explicit, and succinct: "Just remember, I knows I can make him run once, and I believes I can make him run twice. Only, we wants to save that once I knows, until we knows we needs it. So here's what I want you to do for this first heat: Just before them judges and such hollers Go! you say to yourself My name is Ned William McCaslin and then do it."

"Do what?" I said.

"I dont know yet neither," he said. "But Akrum is a horse, and with a horse anything can happen. And with a nigger boy on him, it's twice as likely to. You just got to watch and be ready, so that when it do happen, you done already said My name is Ned William McCaslin and then do it and do it quick. And dont worry. If it dont work and dont nothing happen, I'M be waiting right there at the finish, where I come in. Because we knows I can make him run once."

Then the voice hollered Go! and our grooms sprang for their lives and we were off (as I said, we had drawn this time and McWillie had the pole). Or McWillie was off, that is. Because I dont remember: whether I had planned it or just did it by instinct, so that when McWillie broke, I was already braced and Lightning's first spring rammed him into the bridle all the way up to my shoulders, bad hand and all. Acheron already in full run and three lengths ahead when I let Lightning go, but still kept the three-length gap, both of us 'going now but three horses apart, when I saw McWillie do what you call nowadays a double-take: a single quick glance aside, using only his eyeballs, expecting to see me of course more or less at his knee, then seeming to drive on at full speed for another stride or so before his vision told his intelligence that Lightning and I were not there. Then he turned, jerked his whole head around to look back and I remember still the whites of his eyes and 'his open mouth; I could see him sawing frantically at Acheron to slow him; I sincerely believe I even heard him yell back at me: "Goddammit, white boy, if you gonter race, race!" the gap between us closing fast now because he now had Acheron wrenched back and crossways until he was now at right angles to the course, more or less filling the track sideways from rail to rail it looked like and facing the outside rail and for that moment, instant, second, motionless; I am convinced that McWUlie's now frantic mind actually toyed with the idea of turning and running back until he could turn again with Lightning in front. Nor no premeditation, nothing: I just said in my mind My name is Ned William McCaslin and cut Lightning as hard as I could with the switch, pulling his head over so that when he sprang for the gap between Acheron's stern and the inside rail, we would scrape Acheron; I remember I thought My leg will be crushed and I sat there, the switch poised again, in complete detachment, waiting in nothing but curiosity for the blow, shock, crack, spurt of blood and bones or whatever it would be. But we had just exactly room enough or speed enough or maybe it was luck enough: not my leg but Lightning's hip which scraped across Acheron's buttocks: at which second I cut again with the switch as hard as I could. Nor any judge or steward, dog trainer, market hunter or murderer, nor purist or stickler of the most finicking and irreproachable, to affirm it was not my own mount I struck; in fact, we were so inextricable at that second that, of the four of us, only Acheron actually knew who had been hit.

Then on. I mean, Lightning and me. I didn't—couldn't —look back yet, so I had to wait to learn what happened. They said that Acheron didn't try to jump the rail at all: he just reared and fell through it in a kind of whirling dust of white planks, but still on his feet, frantic now, running more or less straight out into the pasture, spectators scattering before him, until McWillie wrenched him around; and they said that this time McWillie actually set him quartering at the fence (it was too late now to go back to the gap in it he had already made; we—Lightning—were too far ahead by this time) as though he were a hunter. But he refused it, running instead at full speed along the rail, but still on the outside of it, the spectators hollering and leaping like frogs from in front of him as he cleared his new path or precedent. That was when I began to hear him again. He—they: McWillie and Acheron—was closing fast now, though with the outside rail between us: Lightning with the whole track to himself now and going with that same fine strong rhythm and reach and power to which it had simply not occurred yet that there was any horry about it; in the back stretch now and Acheron, who had already run at least one extra fifty yards and would have to run another one before he finished, already abreast of us beyond the rail; around the far turn of the first lap now and now I could actually see Me Willie's desperate mind grappling frantically with the rapidly diminishing choice of whether to swing Acheron wide enough to bring him back through his self-made gap and onto the track again and have him refuse its jumbled wreckage, or play safe and stay where they were in the new track which they had already cleared of obstacles.

Conservatism won (as it should and does); again the back stretch (second lap now); now the far turn (second one also) and even on the outside longer curve, they were drawing 'ahead; there was the wire and Acheron a length at least ahead and I believe I thought for an instant of going to the whip just for the looks of the thing; on, our crowd was yelling now and who could blame them? few if any had seen a heat like this before between two horses running on opposite sides of the rail; on, Acheron still at top speed along his path as empty and open for him as the path to heaven; two lengths ahead when we—Lightning— passed under the wire, and (Acheron: evidently he liked running outside) already into his third lap when McWillie dragged him by main strength away and into the pasture and into a tightening circle which even he could no longer negotiate. And much uproar behind us now: shouts: Foul! Foul! No! No! Yesl No heat! No heat! Yes it was! No it wasn't! Ask the judge! Ask Ed! What was it, Ed?"—that part of the crowd which Acheron had scattered from the outside rail now pouring across the track through the shattered gap to join the others in the infield; I was looking for Ned; I thought I saw him but it was Lycurgus, trotting up the track toward me until he could take Lightning's bit, already turning him back.

"Come on," he said. "You can stop. You got to cool him out. Mr McCaslin said to get him away from the track, take him over yonder to them locust trees where the buggy's at, where he can be quiet and we can rub him down." But I tried to hold back.

"What happened?" I said. "Is it going to count? We won, didn't we? We went under the wire. They just went around it. Here," I said, "you take him while I go back and see."

"No, I tell you," Lycurgus said. He had Lightning trotting now. "Mr McCaslin dont want you there neither. He said for me and you to stay right with Lightning and have him ready to run again; that next heat's in less than a hour now and we got to win that one now, because if this throws this one out, we got to win the next one no matter what happens." So he went on. He lifted down a rail at the end of the track and we went through, on to the clump of locust trees about two hundred yards away; now I could see Uncle Parsham's buggy hitched to one of them. And I could still hear the voices from the judges' stand in the infield and I still wanted to go back and find out. But Lycurgus had forestalled that too: he had the pails and sponges and clothes and even a churn of water in the buggy for us to strip Lightning and go to work on him.

So I had to get my first information about what had happened (and was still happening too) from hearsay— what little Lycurgus had seen before Ned sent him to meet me, and from others later—before Ned came up: the uproar, vociferation of protest and affirmation (oh yes, even after losing two races—heats, whatever they were—last winter, and the first beat of this one yesterday, there were still people who had bet on Lightning. Because I was only eleven; I had not learned yet that no horse ever walked to post, provided he was still on his feet when he got there, that somebody didn't bet on), coming once or twice almost to blows, with Ned in the center of it, in effect the crux of it, polite and calm but dogged and insistent too, rebutting each attack: "It wasn't a race. It takes at least two horses to make a race, and one of these wasn't even on the track." And Ned:

"No sir. The rule book dont mention how many horses. It just talks about one horse at a time: that if it dont commit fouls and dont stop forward motion and the jockey dont fall off and it cross the finish line first, it wins." Then another:

"Then you just proved yourself that black won: it never fouled nothing but about twenty foot of that fence and it sho never stopped forward motion because I myself seen at least a hundred folks barely get out from under it in time and you yourself seen it pass that finish line a good two lengths ahead of that chestnut." And Ned:

"No sir. That finish wire just runs across that track from one rail to the other. It dont run on down into Mis-sippi too. If it done that, there are horses down there been crossing it ever since sunup this morning that we aint even heard about yet. No sir. It's too bad about that little flimsy railmg, but we was too busy running our horse to have time to stop and wait for that other one to come back." When suddenly three newcomers were on the scene, or anyway in the telling of it: not three strangers, because one of them was Colonel Linscomb himself and they all knew him since they were his neighbors. So probably what they meant was that the other two were simply his guests, city men too or very likely simply of Colonel Linscomb's age and obvious solvency and likewise wearing coats and neckties, who—one of them—seemed to take charge of the matter, coming into the crowd clamoring around Ned and the harassed officials and saying,

"Gentlemen, let me offer a solution. As this man"— meaning Ned—"says, his horse ran according to the rules and went under the wire first. Yet we all saw the other horse run the fastest race and was in the lead at the finish.

The owners of the horses are these gentlemen right here behind me: Colonel Linseomb, your neighbor, and Mr van Tosch from Memphis, near enough to be your neighbor too when you get to know him better. They have agreed, and your judges will approve it, to put this heat that was just run, into what the bankers call escrow. You all have done business with bankers whether you wanted to or not" —they said he even paused for the guffaw, and got it— "and you know how they have a name for everything—"

"Interest on it too," a voice said, and so he got that guffaw free and joined it.

"What escrow means this time is, suspended. Not abolished or cancelled: just suspended. The bets still stand just 'as you made them; nobody won and nobody lost; you can increase them or hedge them or whatever you want to; the stake money for the last heat still stands and the owners are already adding another fifty a side for the next heat, the winner of this next heat to be the winner of the one that was just run. Win this next heat, and win all. What do you say?"

That's what I—we—Lycurgus and me—heard later. Right now we knew nothing: just waiting for Ned or somebody to come for us or send for us, Lightning cleaned and blanketed now and Lycurgus leading him up and down, keeping him moving, and I sitting against a tree with my riding-sock off to dry out my bandage; it seemed hours, forever, then in the next thinking it seemed no time, collapsed, condensed. Then Ned came up, walking fast. I told you how he had looked terrible this morning, but that was partly because of Ms clothes. His shirt was white (or almost) again now, and his pants were clean too. But it would not have been his clothes this time, even if they were still filthy. It was his face. He didn't look like he had seen a simple and innocent hant: he looked like he had without warning confronted Doom itself, except that Doom had said to him: Calm down. It will be thirty or forty minutes yet before I will want you. Be ready then but in the meantime stop worrying and tend to your business. But he gave me—us—no time. He went to the buggy and took his black coat out and put it on, already talking:

"They put it in what they calls escrow. That means whoever loses this next one has done lost everything. Tack up." But Lycurgus already had the blanket off; it didn't take us long. Then I was up, Ned standing at Lightning's head, holding the bridle with one hand, his other hand in the pocket of the coat, fumbling at something. "This one is gonter be easy for you. We nudged him a little yestiddy, then you fooled him bad today. So you aint gonter trick him again. But it wont matter. We wont need to trick him now; I'll tend to this one myself. All you got to do is, still be on him at the finish. Dont fall off: that's all you got to do until right at the last. Just keep him between them two rails, and dont fall off of him. Remember what he taught you Monday. When you comes around the first lap, and just before he will think about where I was standing Monday, hit him. Keep him going; dont worry about that other horse, no matter where he is or what he's doing: just tend to yourn. You mind that?"

"Yes," I said.

"All right. Then here's the onliest other thing you got to do. When you comes around the last lap and around the back turn into the home stretch toward that wire, dont just believe, know that Lightning is where he can see the whole track in front of him. When you get there, you will know why. But before that, dont just think maybe he can, or that by now he sholy ought to, but know he can see that whole track right up to the wire and beyond it. If that other horse is in front of you, pull Lightning all the way across the track to the outside rail if you needs to where there wont be nothing in the way to keep him from seeing that wire and on beyond it too. Dont worry about losing distance; just have Lightning where he can see everything in front of him." His other hand was out now; Lightning was nuzzling his nose into it again and again I smelled that faint thin odor which I had smelled in Uncle Par-sham's pasture Monday, that I or anybody else should recognise at once, and that I would recognise if it would only happen when I had time. "Can you remember that?"

"Yes," I said.

"Then go on," he said. "Lead him on, Lycurgus."

"Aint you coming?" I said. Lycurgus pulled at the bridle; he had to get Lightning's muzzle out of Ned's hand by force; finally Ned had to put his hand back to his pocket.

"Go on," he said. "You knows what to do." Lycurgus led on; he had to for a while; Lightning even tried once to whirl back until Lycurgus snatched him.

"Hit him a little," Lycurgus said. "Get his mind back on what he's doing." So I did and we went on and so for the third time McWillie and I crouched our poised thunderbolts behind that wire. McWillie's starting groom having declined to be hurled to earth three times, and nobody else either volunteering or even accepting conscription, they used a piece of cotton-bagging jute stretched from rail to rail in the hands of two more democrats facing each other across the track. It was probably the best start we had had yet. Acheron, who had thought nothing of diving through a six-inch plank, naturally wouldn't go within six feet of it, and Lightning, though with his nose almost touching it, was standing as still as a cow now, I suppose scanning the crowd for Ned, when the starter hollered Gol and the string dropped and in the same second Acheron and McWillie shot past us, McWillie shouting almost in my ear:

"I'll learn you this time, white boy!" and already gone, though barely a length before Lightning pulled obediently up to McWillie's knee—the power, the rhythm, everything in fact except that still nobody bad told his head yet this was a race. And, in fact, for the first time, at least since I had participated, been a factor, we even looked like a race, the two horses as though bolted together and staggered a little, on into the back stretch of the first lap, our relative positions, in relation to our forward motion, changing and altering with almost dreamlike indolence, Acheron drawing ahead until it would look like he really was about to leave us, then Lightning would seem to no-, tice the gap and close it. It would even look like a challenge; I could hear them along the rail, who didn't really know Lightning yet: that he just didn't want to be that far back by himself; on around the back turn and into the home stretch of the first lap and I give you my word Lightning came into it already looking for Ned; I give you my word he whinnied; going at a dead run, he whinnied: the first time I ever heard a horse nicker while running. I didn't even know they could.

I cut him as hard as I could. He broke, faltered, sprang again; we had already made McWillie a present of two lengths so I cut him again; we went into the second lap two lengths back and traveling now on the peeled switch until the gap between him and Acheron replaced Ned in what Lightning called his mind, and he closed it again until his head was once more at McWillie's knee, completely obedient but not one inch more—this magnificently equipped and organised organisation whose muscles had never been informed by their brain, or whose brain had never been informed by its outposts of observation and experience, that the sole aim and purpose of this entire frantic effort was to get somewhere first. McWillie was whipping now, so I didn't need to; he could no more have drawn away from Lightning than he could have dropped behind him, through the back stretch again and around the back turn again, me still on Lightning and Lightning still between the rails, so all that remained from here out were Ned's final instructions: to pull, ease him out, presenting McWillie again with almost another length, until nothing impeded his view of the track, the wire, and beyond it. He—Lightning—even saw Ned first. The first I knew was that neck-snapping surge and lunge as though he—Lightning—had burst through some kind of invisible band or yoke. Then I saw Ned myself, maybe forty yards beyond the wire, small and puny and lonely in the track's vacancy while Acheron and McWillie's flailing arm fled rapidly back to us; then McWillie's wrung face for an instant too, then gone too; the wire flashed overhead. "Come on, son," Ned said. "I got it."

He—Lightning—almost unloaded me stopping, cutting back across the track (Acheron was somewhere close behind us, trying—I hoped—to stop too) and went to Ned at that same dead run, bit bridle and all notwithstanding, and simply stopped running, his nose already buried in Ned's hand, and me up around his ears grabbing at whatever was in reach, sore hand too. "We did it!" I said, cried. "We did it! We beat him!"

"We don't this part of it," Ned said. "Just hope to your stars it's gonter be enough." Because I had just ridden and won my first race, you see. I mean, a man-size race, with people, grown people, more people than I could remember at one time before, watching me win it and (some of them anyway) betting their money that I would. Also, I didn't have time to notice, remark anything in his face or voice or what he said, because they were already through the rail and on the track, coming toward us: the whole moil and te,em of sweated hats and tieless shirts and faces still gaped with yelling. "Look out now," Ned said; and still to me, nothing: only the faces and the voices like a sea:

"That's riding him, boy! That's bringing him in!" but we not stopping, Ned leading Lightning on, saying,

"Let us through, Whitefolks; let us through, White-folks," until they gave back enough to let us go on, but still moving along with us, like the wave, until we reached the gate to the infield where the judges were waiting, and Ned said again: "Look out, now"; and now I dont remember: only the stopped horse with Ned at the bit like a tableau, and me looking past Lightning's ears at Grandfather leaning a little on his cane (the gold-headed one) and two other people whom I had known somewhere a long time ago just behind him.

"Boss," I said.

"What did you do to your hand?" he said.

"Yes sir," I said. "Boss."

"You're busy now," he said. "So am I." It was quite kind, quite cold. No: it wasn't anything. "We'll wait until we get home," he said. Then he was gone. Now the two people were Sam and Minnie looking up at me with her calm grim inconsolable face for it seemed to me a long time while Ned was still pawing at my leg.

"Where's that tobacco sack I give you to keep yes-tiddy?" he said. "You sholy aint lost it?"

"Oh yes," I said, reaching it from my pocket.

Chapter 13

"Show them," Miss Reba told Minnie. They were in our —I mean Boon's—no, I mean Grandfather's—automobile: Everbe and Miss Reba and Minnie and Sam and Colonel Linscomb's chauffeur; he was McWillie's father; Colonel Linscomb had an automobile too. They—the chauffeur and Sam and Minnie—had gone up to Hard-wick to get Miss Reba and Everbe and Boon and bring them all back to Parsham, where Miss Reba and Minnie and Sam could take the train for Memphis. Except that Boon didn't come back with them. He was in jail again, the third time now, and they had stopped at Colonel Linscomb's to tell Grandfather. Miss Reba told it, sitting in the car, with Grandfather and Colonel Linscomb and me standing around it because she wouldn't come in; she told about Boon and Butch.

"It was bad enough in the automobile going up there. But at least we had that deputy, let alone that little old constable you folks got that dont look like much but I'd say people dont fool around with him much either. When we got to Hardwick, they at least had sense enough to lock them in separate cells. The trouble was, they never had no way to lock up Corrie's new friend's mouth—" and stopped; and I didn't want to have to look at Everbe either: a big girl, too big for little things to have to happen to like the black eye or the cut mouth, whichever one she would have, unless maybe she wouldn't, couldn't, be content with less than both; sitting there, having to, without anywhere to go or room to do it even, with the slow painful blood staining up the cheek I could see from here. "I'm sorry, kid; forget it," Miss Reba said. "Where was I?"

"You were telling what Boon did this time," Grandfather said.

"Oh yes," Miss Reba said. "—locked them up in separate cells across the corridor and they were taking Corrie and me—sure; they treated us fine: just like ladies—down to the jailor's wife's room where we were going to stay, when what's-his-name—Butch—pipes up and says, 'Well, there's one thing about it: me and Sugar Boy lost some blood and skin and a couple of shirts too, but at least we got these excuse my French," Miss Reba said, " 'Memphis whores off the street.' So Boon started in right away to tear that steel door down but they had remembered to already lock it, so you would think that would have calmed him: you know: having to sit there and look at it for a while. Anyhow, we thought so. Then when Sam came with the right papers or whatever they were—and much obliged to you," she told Grandfather. "I dont know how much you had to put up, but if you'll send the bill to me when I get home, I'll attend to it. Boon knows the address and knows me."

"Thank you," Grandfather said. "If there's any charge. I'll let you know. What happened to Boon? You haven't told me yet."

"Oh yes. They unlocked What's-his-name first; that was the mistake, because they hadn't even got the key back out of Boon's lock before he was out of the cell and on—"

"Butch," I said.

"Butch," Miss Reba said. "—one good lick anyhow, knocked him down and was right on top of him before anybody woke up. So they never even let Boon stop; all the out he got was that trip across the corridor and back, into the cell and locked up again before they even had time to take the key out of the lock. But at least you got to admire him for it." But she stopped.

"For what?" I said.

"What did you say?" she said.

"What he did that we're going to admire him for. You didn't tell us that. What did he do?"

"You think that still trying to tear that—"

"Butch," I said.

"—Butch's head off before they even let him out of jail, aint nothing?" Miss Reba said.

"He had to do that," I said.

"I'll be damned," Miss Reba said. "Let's get started; we got to catch that train. You wont forget to send that bill," she told Grandfather.

"Get out and come in," Colonel Linscomb said. "Supper's about ready. You can catch the midnight train."

"No much obliged," Miss Reba said. "No matter how long your wife stays at Monteagle, she'll come back home some day and you'll have to explain it."

"Nonsense," Colonel Linscomb said. "I'm boss in my house."

"I hope you'll keep on being," Miss Reba said. "Oh yes," she said to Minnie. "Show them." She—Minnie— didn't smile at us: she smiled at me. It was beautiful: the even, matched and matchless unblemished porcelain march, curving outward to embrace, almost with passion, the restored gold tooth which looked bigger than any three of the natural merely white ones possibly could. Then she closed her lips again, serene, composed, once more immune, once more invulnerable to that extent which our frail webs of bone and flesh and coincidence ever hold or claim on Invulnerability. "Well," Miss Reba said. Mc-Willie's father cranked the engine and got back in; the automobile moved on. Grandfather and Colonel Linscomb turned and went back toward the house and I had begun to move too when the automobile horn tooted, not loud, once, and I turned back. It had stopped and Sam was standing beside it, beckoning to me.

"Come here," he said. "Miss Reba wants to see you a minute." He watched me while I came up. "Why didn't you and Ned tell me that horse was really going to run?" he said.

"I thought you knew," I said. "I thought that was why we came here."

"Sure, sure," he said. "Ned told me. You told me. Everybody told me. Only, why didnt somebody make me believe it? Oh sure, I never broke a leg. But if I'd just had Miss Reba's nerve, maybe I could have got that boxcar covered too. Here," he said. It was a tight roll of money, bills. "This is Ned's. Tell him the next time he finds a horse that wont run, not to wait to come and get me: just telegraph me." Miss Reba was leaning out, hard and handsome. Everbe was on the other side of her, not moving but still too big not to notice. Miss Reba said:

"I didn't expect to wind up in jail here too. But then, maybe I didn't expect not to, neither. Anyway, Sam bet for me too. I put up fifty for Mr Binford and five for Minnie. Sam got three for two. I—I mean we—want to split fifty-fifty with you. I aint got that much cash now, what with this unexpected side trip I took this morning—"

"I dont want it," I said.

"I thought you'd say that," she said. "So I had Sam put up another five for you. You got seven-fifty coming. Here." She held out her hand.

"I dont want it," I said. "

"What did I tell you?" Sam said.

"Is it because it was gambling?" she said. "Did you promise that too?" I hadn't. Maybe Mother hadn't thought about gambling yet. But I wouldn't have needed to have promised anybody anyway. Only, I didn't know how to tell her when I didn't know why myself: only that I wasn't doing it for money: that money would have been the last thing of all; that once we were in it, I had to go on, finish it, Ned and me both even if everybody else had quit; it was as though only by making Lightning run and run first could we justify (not escape consequences: simply justify) any of it. Not to hope to make the beginning of it any less wrong—I mean, what Boon and I had deliberately, of our own free will, to do back there in Jefferson four days ago; but at least not to shirk, dodge—at least to finish— what we ourselves had started. But I didn't know how to say it. So I said,

"Nome. I dont want it."

"Go on," Sam said. "Take it so we can go. We got to catch that train. Give it to Ned, or maybe to that old boy who took care of you last night. They'll know what to do with it." So I took the money; I had two rolls of it now, the big one and this little one. And still Everbe hadn't moved, motionless, her hands in her lap, big, too big for little things to happen to. "At least pat her on the head," Sam said. "Ned never taught you to kick dogs too, did he?"

"He wont though," Miss Reba said. "Watch him. Jesus, you man. And here's another one that aint but eleven years old. What the hell does one more matter? aint she been proving ever since Sunday she's quit? If you'd been sawing logs as long as she has, what the hell does one more log matter when you've already cancelled the lease and even took down the sign?" So I went around the car to the other side. Still she didn't move, too big for little things to happen to, too much of her to have to be the recipient of things petty and picayune, like bird splashes on a billboard or a bass drum; just sitting there, too big to shrink even, shamed (because Ned was right), her mouth puffed a little but mostly the black eye; with her, even a simole shiner was not content but must look bigger, more noticeable, more unhidable, than on anyone else.

"It's all right," I said.

"I thought I had to," she said. "I didn't know no other way."

"You see?" Miss Reba said. "How easy it is? That's all you need to tell us; we'll believe you. There aint the lousiest puniest bastard one of you, providing he's less than seventy years old. that cant make any woman believe there wasn't no other way."

"You did have to," I said. "We got Lightning back in time to run the race. It dont matter now any more. You better go on or you'll miss that train."

"Sure," Miss Reba said. "Besides, she's got supper to cook too. You aint heard that yet; that's the surprise. She aint going back to Memphis. She aint just reformed from the temptation business: she's reformed from temptation too, providing what they claim, is right: that there aint no temptation in a place like Parsham except a man's own natural hopes and appetites. She's got a job in Parsham washing and cooking and lifting his wife in and out of bed and washing her off, for that constable. So she's even reformed from having to divide half she makes and half she has with the first tin badge that passes, because all she'll have to do now is shove a coffeepot or a greasy skillet in the way. Come on," she told Sam. "Even you cant make that train wait from here."

Then they were gone. I turned and went back toward the house. It was big, with columns and porticoes and formal gardens and stables (with Lightning in one of them) and carriage houses and what used to be slave quarters— the (still is) old Parsham place, what remains of the plantation of the man, family, which gave its name to the town and the countryside and to some of the people too, like Uncle Parsham Hood. The sun was gone now, and soon the day would follow. And then, for the first time, I realised that it was all over, finished—all the four days of scuffling and scrabbling and dodging and lying and anxiety; all over except the paying-for. Grandfather and Colonel Lins-comb and Mr van Tosch would be somewhere in the house now, drinking presupper toddies; it might be half an hour yet before the supper bell rang, so I turned aside and went through the rose garden and on to the back. And, sure enough, there was Ned sitting on the back steps.

"Here," I said, holding out the big roll of money. "Sam said this is yours." He took it. "Aint you going to count it?" I said.

"I reckon he counted it," Ned said. I took the little one from my pocket. Ned looked at it. "Did he give you that too?"

"Miss Reba did. She bet for me."

"It's gambling money," Ned said. "You're too young to have anything to do with gambling money. Aint nobody ever old enough to have gambling money, but you sho aint." And I couldn't tell him either. Then I realised that I had expected him, Ned anyway, to already know without having to be told. And in the very next breath he did know. "Because we never done it for money," he said.

"You aint going to keep yours either?"

"Yes," he said. "It's too late for me. But it aint too late for you. I'm gonter give you a chance, even if it aint nothing but taking a chance away from you."

"Sam said I could give it to Uncle Parsham. But he wouldn't take gambling money either, would he?"

"Is that what you want to do with it?"

"Yes," I said.

"All right," he said. He took the little roll too and took out his snap purse and put both the rolls into it and now it was almost dark but I could certainly hear the supper bell here.

"How did you get the tooth back?" I said.

"It wasn't me," he said. "Lycurgus done it. That first morning, when I come back to the hotel to get you. It wasn't no trouble. The hounds had already treed him once, and Lycurgus said he thought at first he would just use them, put him up that gum sapling again and not call off the hounds until Whistle-britches wropped the tooth up in his cap or something, and dropped it. But Lycurgus said he was still a little rankled up over the upstarty notions Whistle-britches had about horses, mainly about Lightning. So, since Lightning was gonter have to run a race that afternoon and would need his rest, Lycurgus said he decided to use one of the mules. He said how Whistle-britches drawed a little old bitty pocketknife on him, but Lycurgus is gonter take good care of it until he can give it back to some of them." He stopped. He still looked bad. He still hadn't had any sleep. But maybe it is a relief to finally meet doom and have it set a definite moment to start worrying at.

"Well?" I said. "What?"

"I just told you. The mule done it."

"How?" I said.

"Lycurgus put Whistle-britches on the mule without no bridle or saddle and tied his feet underneath and told him any time he decided to wrop that tooth up in his cap and drop it off, he would stop the mule. And Ly-curgus give the mule a light cut, and about halfway round the first circle of the lot Whistle-britches dropped the cap, only there wasn't nothing in it that time. So Lycurgus handed the cap back up to him and give the mule another cut and Lycurgus said he had disremembered that this was the mule that jumped fences until it had already jumped that four-foot bobwire and Lycurgus said it looked like it was fixing to take Whistle-britches right on back to Possum. But it never went far until it turned around and come back and jumped back into the lot again so next time Whistle-britches dropped the cap the tooth was in it. Only he might as well kept it, for all the good it done me. She went back to Memphis too, huh?"

"Yes," I said.

"That's what I figgered. Likely she knows as good as I do it's gonter be a long time before Memphis sees me or Boon Hogganbeck either again. And if Boon's back in jail again, I dont reckon Jefferson, Missippi's gonter see us tonight neither."

I didn't know either; and suddenly I knew that I didn't want to know; I not only didn't want to have to make any more choices, decisions, I didn't even want to know the ones being made for me until I had to face the results. Then McWillie's father came to the door behind us, in a white coat; he was the houseman too. Though I hadn't heard any bell. I had already washed (changed my clothes too; Grandfather had brought a grip for me, and even my other shoes), so the houseman showed me the way to the dining room and I stood there; Grandfather and Mr van Tosch and Colonel Linscomb came in. the old fat Llewel-lin setter walking at Colonel Linscomb's hand, and we all stood while Colonel Linscomb said grace. Then we sat down, the old setter beside Colonel Linscomb's chair, and ate, with not just McWillie's father but a uniformed maid too to change the plates. Because I had quit; I wasn't making choices and decisions any more. I almost went to sleep in my plate, into the dessert, when Grandfather said:

"Well, gentlemen,,shall the guard fire first?"

"We'll go to the office," Colonel Linscomb said. It was the best room I ever saw. I wished Grandfather had one like it. Colonel Linscomb was a lawyer too, so there were cases of law books, but there were farm- and horse-papers too and a glass case of jointed fishing rods and guns, and chairs and a sofa and a special rug for the old setter to lie on in front of the fireplace, and pictures of horses and jockeys on the walls, with the rose wreaths and the dates they won, and a bronze figure of Manassas (I didn't know until then that Colonel Linscomb was the one who had owned Manassas) on the mantel, and a special table for the big book which was his stud book, and another table with a box of cigars and a decanter and water pitcher and sugar bowl and glasses already on it, and a French window that opened onto the gallery above the rose garden so that you could smell the roses even in the house, and honeysuckle too and a mockingbird somewhere outside.

Then the houseman came back with Ned and set a chair at the corner of the hearth for him, and they—we—sat down—Colonel Linscomb in a white linen suit and Mr van Tosch in the sort of clothes they wore in Chicago (which was where he came from until he visited Memphis and liked it and bought a place to breed and raise and train race horses too, and gave Bobo Beauchamp a job on it five or six years ago) and Grandfather in the Confederate-gray pigeon-tailed suit that he inherited (I mean, inherited not the suit but the Confederate gray because he hadn't been a soldier himself; he was only fourteen in Carolina, the only child, so he had to stay with his mother while his father was a color sergeant of Wade Hampton's until a picket of Fitz-John Porter's shot him out of his saddle at one of the Chickahominy crossings the morning after Gaines's Mill, and Grandfather stayed with his mother until she died in 1864, and still stayed until General Sherman finally eliminated him completely from Carolina in 1865 and he came to Mississippi hunting for the descendants of a distant kinsman named McCaslin—he and the kinsman even had the same baptismal -names: Lucius Quintus Carothers—and found one in the person of a great-granddaughter named Sarah Edmonds and in 1869 married her).

"Now," Grandfather told Ned, "begin at the beginning."

"Wait," Colonel Linscomb said. He leaned and poured whiskey into a glass and held it out toward Ned. "Here," he said.

"Thank you kindly," Ned said. But he didn't drink it. He set the glass on the mantel and sat down again. He had never looked at Grandfather and he didn't now: he just waited.

"Now," Grandfather said.

"Drink it," Colonel Linscomb said. "You may need it." So Ned took the drink and swallowed it at one gulp and sat holding the empty glass, still not looking at Grandfather.

"Now," Grandfather said. "Begin—"

"Wait," Mr van Tosch said. "How did you make that horse run?"

Ned sat perfectly still, the empty glass motionless in his hand while we watched him, waiting. Then he said, addressing Grandfather for the first time: "Will these white gentlemen excuse me to speak to you private?"

"What about?" Grandfather said.

"You will know," Ned said. "If you thinks they ought to know too, you can tell them."

Grandfather rose. "Will you excuse us?" he said. He started toward the door to the hall.

"Why not the gallery?" Colonel Linscomb said. "It's dark there; better for conspiracy or confession either." So we went that way. I mean, I was already up too. Grandfather paused again. He said to Ned:

"What about Lucius?"

"He used it too," Ned said. "Anybody got a right to know what his benefits is." We went out onto the gallery, into the darkness and the smell of the roses and the honeysuckle too, and besides the mockingbird which was in a tree not far away, we could hear two whippoorwills and, as always at night in Mississippi and so Tennessee wasn't too different, a dog barking. "It was a sour dean," Ned said quietly.

"Dont lie to me," Grandfather said. "Horses dont eat sardines."

"This one do," Ned said. "You was there and saw it. Me and Lucius tried him out beforehand. But I didn't even need to try him first. As soon as I laid eyes on him last Sunday, I knowed he had the same kind of sense my mule had."

"Ah," Grandfather said. "So that's what you and Maury used to do to that mule."

"No sir," Ned said. "Mr Maury never knowed it neither. Nobody knowed it but me and that mule. This horse was just the same. When he run that last lap this evening, I had the sour dean waiting for him and he knowed it."

We went back inside. They were already looking at us. "Yes," Grandfather said. "But it's a family secret. I wont withhold it if it becomes necessary. But will you let me be the judge, under that stipulation? Of course, Van Tosch has the first claim on it."

"In that Case, I'll either have to buy Ned or_sell you Coppermine," Mr van Tosch said. "But shouldn't all this wait until your man Hogganbeck is here too?"

"You dont know my man Hogganbeck," Grandfather said. "He drove my automobile to Memphis. When I take him put of jail tomorrow, he will drive it back to Jefferson. Between those two points in time, his presence would have been missed no more than his absence is." Only this time he didn't have to even start to tell Ned to begin.

"Bobo got mixed up with a white man," Ned said. And this time it was Mr van Tosch who said Ah. And that was how we began to learn it: from Ned and Mr van Tosch both. Because Mr van Tosch was an alien, a foreigner, who hadn't lived in our country long enough yet to know the kind of white blackguard a young country-bred Negro who had never been away from home before, come to a big city to get more money and fun for the work he intended to do, would get involved with. It was probably gambling, or it began with gambling; that would be their simplest mutual meeting ground. But by this time, it was more than just gambling; even Ned didn't seem to know exactly what it was—unless maybe Ned did know exactly what it was, but it was in a white man's world. Anyway, according to Ned, it was by now so bad—the money sum involved was a hundred and twenty-eight dollars—that the white man had convinced Bobo that, if the law found out about it, merely being fired from his job with Mr van Tosch would be the least of Bobo's troubles; in fact, he had Bobo believing that his real trouble wouldn't even start until after he no longer had a white man to front for him. Until at last, the situation, crisis, so desperate and the threat so great, Bobo went to Mr van Tosch and asked for a hundred and twenty-eight dollars, getting the answer whichvhe had probably expected from the man who was not only a white man and a foreigner, but settled too, past the age when he could remember a young man's passions and predicaments, which was No. That was last fall—

"I remember that," Mr van Tosch said. "I ordered the man never to come on my place again. I thought he was gone." You see what I mean. He—Mr van Tosch—was a good man. But he was a foreigner. —Then Bobo, abandoned by that last hope, which he had never really believed in anyway, "got up" as he put it (Ned didn't know how either or perhaps he did know or perhaps the way in which Bobo "got it up" was such that he wouldn't even tell a member of his own race who was his kinsman too) fifteen dollars and gave it to the man, and bought with it just what you might expect and what Bobo himself probably expected. But what else could he do, where else turn? only more threat and pressure, having just proved that he could get money when driven hard enough— "But why didn't he come to me?" Mr van Tosch said.

"He did," Ned said. "You told him No." They sat quite still. "You're a white man," Ned said gently. "Bobo was a nigger boy."

"Then why didn't he come to me," Grandfather said. "Back where he should never have left in the first place, instead of stealing a horse?"

"What would you a done?" Ned said. "If he had come in already out of breath from Memphis and told you, Dont ask me no questions: just hand me a hundred and a few extra dollars and I'll go back to Memphis and start paying you back the first Saturday I gets around to it?"

"He could have told me why," Grandfather said, "I'm a McCaslin too."

"You're a white man too," Ned said.

"Go on," Grandfather said. —So Bobo discovered that the fifteen dollars which he had thought might save him, had actually ruined him. Now, according to Ned, Bobo's demon gave him no rest at all. Or perhaps the white man began to fear Bobo—that a mere dribble, a few dollars at a time, would take too long; or perhaps that Bobo, because of his own alarm and desperation, plus what the white man doubtless considered the natural ineptitude of Bobo's race, would commit some error or even crime which would blow everything up. Anyway, this was when he—the white man—began to work on Bobo to try for a one-stroke killing which would rid him of the debt, creditor, worry and all. His first idea was to have Bobo rifle Mr van Tosch's tack room, load into the buggy or wagon or whatever it would be, as many saddles and bridles and driving harnesses as it would carry, and clear out; Bobo of course would be suspected at once, but the white man would be safely away by then; and if Bobo moved fast enough, which even he should have the sense to do, he had all the United States to flee into and find another job. But (Ned said) even the white man abandoned this one; he would not only have a buggy- or wagon-load of horseless horse gear and daylight coming, it would have taken days to dispose of it piecemeal, even if he had had days to do it in.

So that was when they thought of a horse: to condense the wagon- or buggy-load of uncohered fragments of leather into one entity which could be sold in a lump, and —if the white man worked fast enough and didn't haggle over base dollars—without too much delay. That is, the white man, not Bobo, believed that Bobo was going to steal a horse for him. Only, Bobo knew, if he didn't steal the horse, he could see the end of everything—job, liberty, all—when next Monday morning (the crisis had reached its crux last Saturday, the same day Boon and I—and Ned —left Jefferson in the automobile) came. And the reason for the crisis at this particular moment, what made it so desperate, was that there was a horse of Mr van Tosch's so available for safe stealing that it might almost have been planted for that purpose. This of course was Lightning (I mean, Coppermine) himself, who at the moment was in a sales stable less than half a mile away, where, as Mr van Tosch's known groom (it was Bobo who had delivered the horse to the sales stable in the first place) Bobo could go and get him at any time for no more trouble than putting a halter on him and leading him away. Which by itself might have been tolerable. The trouble was, the white man knew it—a horse bred and trained for running, but which would not run, and which in consequence was in such bad repute with Mr van Tosch and Mr Clapp, the trainer, that it was at the sales stable waiting for the first to come along who would make an offer for it; in further consequence of which, Bobo could go and remove it and it would very likely not even be reported to Mr van Tosch unless he happened to inquire; in still further consequence of which, Bobo had until tomorrow morning (Monday) to do something about it, or else.

That was the situation when Ned left us in front of Miss Reba's Sunday afternoon and walked around the corner to Beale Street and entered the first blind tiger he came to and found Bobo trying to outface his doom through the bottom of a whiskey bottle. Grandfather said: "So that's what it was. Now I'm beginning to understand. A nigger Saturday night. Bobo already drunk, and your tongue hanging out all the way from Jefferson to get to the first saloon you could reach—" and stopped and said, pounced almost: "Wait. That's wrong. It wasn't even Saturday. You got to Memphis Sunday evening," and Ned sitting there, quite still, the empty glass in his hand. He said,

"With my people, Saturday night runs over into Sunday."

"And into Monday morning too," Colonel Linscomb said. "You wake up Monday morning, sick, with a hangover, filthy in a filthy jail, and lie there until some white man comes and pays your fine and takes you straight back to the cotton field or whatever it is and puts you back to work without even giving you time to eat breakfast. And you sweat it out there, and maybe by sundown you feel you are not really going to die; and the next day, and the day after that, and after that, until it's Saturday again and you can put down the plow or the hoe and go back as fast as you can to that stinking jail cell on Monday morning. Why do you do it? I dont know."

"You cant know," Ned said. "You're the wrong color. If you could just be a nigger one Saturday night, you wouldn't never want to be a white man again as long as you live."

"All right," Grandfather said. "Go on." —So Bobo told Ned of his predicament: the horse less than half a mile away, practically asking to be stolen; and the white man who knew it and who had given Bobo an ultimatum measurable now in mere hours—"All right," Grandfather said. "Now get to my automobile."

"We're already to it," Ned said. They—he and Bobo— went to the stable to look at the horse. "And soon as I laid eyes on him, I minded that mule I used to own." And Bobo, like me, was too young actually to remember the mule; but, also like me, he had grown up with its legend. "So we decided to go to that white man and tell him something had happened and Bobo couldn't get that horse outen that stable for him like Bobo thought he could, but we could get him a automobile in place of it. —Now wait," he told Grandfather quickly. "We knowed as good as you that that automobile would be safe at least long enough for us to finish. Maybe in thirty or forty years you can stand on a Jefferson street corner and count a dozen automobiles before sundown, but you cant yet. Maybe then you can steal a automobile and find somebody to buy it that wont worry you with a lot of how-come and who and why. But you cant now. So for a man that looked like I imagined he looked (I hadn't never seen him yet) to travel around trying to sell a automobile quick and private, would be about as hard as selling a elephant quick and private. You never had no trouble locating where it was at and getting your hand on it, once you and Mr van Tosch got started, did you?"

"Go on," Grandfather said. Ned did.

"Then the white man would ask what automobile? and Bobo would let me tend to that; and then the white man would maybe ask what I'm doing in it nohow, and then Bobo would tell him that I want that horse because I know how to make it run; that we already got a match race waiting Tuesday, and if the white man wanted, he could come along too and win enough on the horse to pay back three or four times them hundred and thirteen dollars, and then he wouldn't even have to worry with the automobile if he didn't want to. Because he would be the kind of a white man that done already had enough experience to know what would sell easy and what would be a embarrassment to get caught with. So that's what we were gonter do until yawl come and ruint it: let that white man just watch the first heat without betting yes or no, which he would likely do, and see Lightning lose it like he always done, which the white man would a heard all about too, by now; then we would say Nemmine, just wait to the next heat, and then bet him the horse against the automobile on that one without needing to remind him that when Lightning got beat this time, he would own him too." They—Grandfather and Colonel Linscomb and Mr van Tosch—looked at Ned. I wont try to describe their expressions. I cant. "Then yawl come and ruint it," Ned said.

"I see," Mr van Tosch said. "It was all just to save Bobo. Suppose you had failed to make Coppermine run, and lost him too. What about Bobo then?"

"I made him run," Ned said. "You seen it."

"But just suppose, for the sake of the argument," Mr van Tosch said.

"That would a been Bobo's lookout," Ned said. "It wasn't me advised him to give up Missippi cotton farming and take up Memphis frolicking and gambling for a living in place of it."

"But I thought Mr Priest said he's your cousin," Mr van. Tosch said.

"Everybody got kinfolks that aint got no more sense than Bobo," Ned said.

"Well," Mr van Tosch said.

"Let's all have a toddy," Colonel Linscomb said briskly. He got up and mixed and passed them. "You too," he told Ned. Ned brought his glass and Colonel Linscomb poured. This time when Ned set the untasted glass on the mantel, nobody said anything.

"Yes," Mr van Tosch said. Then he said: "Well, Priest, you've got your automobile. And I've got my horse. And maybe I frightened that damn scoundrel enough to stay clear of my stable hands anyway." They sat there. "What shall I do about Bobo?" They sat there. "I'm asking you," Mr van Tosch said to Ned.

"Keep him," Ned said. "Folks—boys and young men anyhow—in my people dont convince easy—"

"Why just Negroes?" Mr van Tosch said.

"Maybe he means McCaslins," Colonel Linscomb said.

"That's right," Ned said. "McCaslins and niggers both act like the mixtry of the other just makes it worse. Right now I'm talking about young folks, even if this one is a nigger McCaslin. Maybe they dont hear good. Anyhow, they got to learn for themselves that roguishness dont pay. Maybe Bobo learnt it this time. Aint that easier for you than having to break in a new one?"

"Yes," Mr van Tosch said. They sat there. "Yes," Mr van Tosch said again. "So I'll either have to buy Ned, or sell you Coppermine." They sat there. "Can you make him run again, Ned?"

"I made him run that time," Ned said. "I said, again," Mr van Tosch said. They sat there. "Priest," Mr van Tosch said, "do you believe he can do it again?"

"Yes," Grandfather said.

"How much do you believe it?" They sat there. "Are you addressing me as a banker or a what?" Grandfather said.

"Call it a perfectly normal and natural northwest Mississippi countryman taking his perfectly normal and natural God-given and bill-of-rights-defended sabbatical among the fleshpots of southwestern Tennessee," Colonel Linscomb said.

"All right," Mr van Tosch said. "I'll bet you Coppermine against Ned's secret, one heat of one mile. If Ned can make Coppermine beat that black of Linscomb's again, I get the secret and Coppermine is yours. If Coppermine loses, I dont want your secret and you take or leave Coppermine for five hundred dollars—"

"That is, if he loses, I can have Coppermine for five hundred dollars, or if I pay you five hundred dollars, I dont have to take him," Grandfather said.

"Right," Mr van Tosch said. "And to give you a chance to hedge, I will bet you two dollars to one that Ned cant make him run again." They sat there.

"So I've either got to win that horse or buy him in spite of anything I can do," Grandfather said.

"Or maybe you didn't have a youth," Mr van Tosch said. "But try to remember one. You're among friends here; try for a little while not to be a banker. Try." They sat there.

"Two-fifty," Grandfather said. "Five," Mr van Tosch said. "Three-fifty," Grandfather said. "Five," Mr van Tosch said. "Four-and-a-quarter," Grandfather said.

"Five," Mr van Tosch said.

"Four-fifty," Grandfather said. "Four-ninety-five," Mr van Tosch said. "Done," Grandfather said. "Done," Mr van Tosch said.

So for the fourth time McWillie on Acheron and I on Lightning (I mean Coppermine) skittered and jockeyed behind that taut little frail jute string. McWillie wasn't speaking to me at all now; he was frightened and outraged, baffled and determined; he knew that something had happened yesterday which should not have happened; which in a sense should not have happened to anyone, certainly not to a nineteen-year-old boy who was simply trying to win what he had thought was a simple horse race: no holds barred, of course, but at least a mutual agreement that nobody would resort to necromancy. We had not drawn for position this time. We—McWillie and I —had been offered the privilege, but Ned said at once: "Nemmine this time. McWillie needs to feel better after yesterday, so let him have the pole where he can start feeling better now." Which, from rage or chivalry, I didn't know which, McWillie refused, bringing us to what appeared insoluble impasse, until the official—the pending homicide one—solved it quick by saying,

"Here, you boys, if you aim to run this race, get on up behind that-ere bagging twine where you belong." Nor had Ned gone through his preliminary incantation or ritual of rubbing Lightning's muzzle. I dont say, forgot to; Ned didn't forget things. So obviously I hadn't been watching, noticing closely enough; anyway, it was too late now. Nor had he given me any last-minute instructions this time either; but then, what was there for him to say? And last night Mr van Tosch and Colonel Linscomb and Grandfather had agreed that, since this was a private running, almost you might say a grudge match, effort should be made and all concerned cautioned to keep it private. Which would have been as easy to do in Parsham as to keep tomorrow's weather private and restricted to Colonel Lin-scomb's pasture, since—a community composed of one winter-resort hotel and two stores and a cattle chute and depot at a railroad intersection and the churches and schools and scattered farmhouses of a remote countryside —any news, let alone word of any horse race, not to mention a repeat between these two horses, spread across Par-sham as instantaneously as weather does. So they were here today too, including the night-telegraphist judge who really should sleep sometimes: not as many as yesterday, but a considerable more than Grandfather and Mr van Tosch had given the impression of wanting—the stained hats, the tobacco, the tieless shirts and overalls—when somebody hollered Go! and the string snatched away and we were off.

We were off, McWillie as usual two strides out before Lightning seemed to notice we had started, and pulled quickly and obediently up until he could more or less lay his cheek against Me Willie's knee (in case he wanted to), near turn, back stretch, mine and McWillie's juxtaposition altering, closing and opening with that dreamlike and unhurried quality probably quite familiar to people who fly aeroplanes in close formation; far turn and into the stretch for the first lap, I by simple rote whipping Lightning onward about one stride before he would remember to begin to look for Ned; I took one quick raking glance at the faces along the rail looking for Ned's and Lightning ran that whole stretch not watching where he was going at all but scanning the rush of faces for Ned's, likewise in vain; near turn again, the back stretch again and into the far turn, the home stretch; I was already swinging Lightning out toward the outside rail where (Acheron might be beating us but at least he wouldn't obstruct our view) he could see. But if he had seen Ned this time, he didn't tell me. Nor could I tell him, Look! Look yonder! There he is! because Ned wasn't there: only the vacant track beyond the taut line of the wire as fragile-looking as a filtered or maybe attenuated moonbeam, McWillie whipping furiously now and Lightning responding like a charm, exactly one neck back; if Acheron had known any way to run sixty miles an hour, we would too—one neck back; if Acheron had decided to stop ten feet before the wire, so would we—one neck back. But he didn't. We went on, still paired but staggered a little, as though bolted together; the wire flicked overhead, McWillie and I speaking again now —that is, he was, yelling back at me in a kind of cannibal glee: "Yah-yah-yah, yah-yah-yah," slowing also but not stopping, going straight on (I suppose) to the stable; he and Acheron certainly deserved to. I turned Lightning and walked back. Ned was trotting toward us, Grandfather behind him though not trotting; our sycophants and adulators of yesterday had abandoned us; Caesar was not Caesar now.

"Come on," Ned said, taking the bit, rapid but calm: only impatient, almost inattentive. "Hand—"

"What happened?" Grandfather said. "What the devil happened?"

"Nothing," Ned said. "I never had no sour dean for him this time, and he knowed it. Didn't I tell you this horse got sense?" Then to me: "There's Bobo over yonder waiting. Hand this plug back to him so he can take it on to Memphis. We're going home tonight."

"But wait," I said. "Wait."

"Forget this horse," Ned said. "We dont want him. Boss has got his automobile back and all he lost was four hundred and ninety-six dollars and it's worth four hundred and ninety-six dollars not to own this horse. Because what in the world would we do with him, supposing they was to quit making them stinking little fishes? Let Mr van Man have him back; maybe some day Coppermine will tell him and Bobo what happened here yesterday."

We didn't go home tonight though. We were still at Colonel Linscomb's, in the office again, after supper again. Boon looked battered and patched up and a considerable subdued, but he was calm and peaceful enough. And clean too: he had shaved and had on a fresh shirt. I mean, a new shirt that he must have bought in Hardwick, sitting on the same straight hard chair Ned had sat on last night. "Naw," he said. "I wasn't fighting him about that. I wasn't even mad about that no more. That was her business. Besides, you cant just cut right off: you got to— got—"

"Taper off?" Grandfather said.

"No sir," Boon said. "Not taper off. You quit, only you still got to clean up the trash, litter, no matter how good you finished. It wasn't that. What I aimed to break his neck for was for calling my wife a whore."

"You mean you're going to marry her?" Grandfather said. But it was not Grandfather: it was me that Boon pounced, almost jumped at.

"God damn it," he said, "if you can go bare-handed -against a knife defending her, why the hell cant I marry her? Aint I as good as you are, even if I aint eleven years old?"

And that's about all. About six the next afternoon we came over the last hill, and there was the clock on the courthouse above the trees around the Square. Ned said, "Hee hee hee." He was in front with Boon. He said: "Seems like I been gone twp years."

"When Delphine gets through with you tonight, maybe you'll wish you had," Grandfather said.

"Or maybe not come back a-tall," Ned said. "But a woman, got to keep sweeping and cooking and washing and dusting on her mind all day long, I reckon she needs a little excitement once in a while."

Then we were there. The automobile stopped. I didn't move. Grandfather got out, so I did too. "Mr Ballott's got the key," Boon said.

"No he hasn't," Grandfather said. He took the key from his pocket and gave it to Boon. "Come on," he said. We crossed the street toward home. And do you know what I thought? I thought It hasn't even changed. Because it should have. It should have J>een altered, even if only a little. I dont mean it should have changed of itself, but that I, bringing back to it what the last four days must have changed in me, should have altered it. I mean, if those four days—the lying and deceiving and tricking and decisions and undecisions, and the things I had done and seen and heard and learned that Mother and Father wouldn't have let me do and see and hear and learn—the things I had had to learn that I wasn't even ready for yet, had nowhere to store them nor even anywhere to lay them down; if all that had changed nothing, was the same as if it had never been—nothing smaller or larger or older or wiser or more pitying—then something had been wasted, thrown away, spent for nothing; either it was wrong and false to begin with and should never have existed, or I was wrong or false or weak or anyway not worthy of it.

"Come on," Grandfather said—not kind, not unkind, not anything; I thought // Aunt Callie would just come out whether she's carrying Alexander or not and start hollering at me. But nothing: just a house I had known since before I could have known another, at a little after six oclock on a May evening, when people were already thinking about supper; and Mother should have had a few gray hairs at least, kissing me for a minute, then looking at me; then Father, whom I had always been a little . . . afraid is not the word but I cant think of another—afraid of because if I hadn't been, I think I would have been ashamed of us both. Then Grandfather said, "Maury."

"Not this time, Boss," Father said. Then to me: "Let's get it over with."

"Yes sir," I said, and followed him, on down the hall to the bathroom and stopped at the door while he took the razor strop from the hook and I stepped back so he could come out and we went on; Mother was at the top of the cellar stairs; I could see the tears, but no more; all she had to do would be to say Stop or Please or Maury or maybe if she had just said Lucius. But nothing, and I followed Father on down and stopped again while he opened the cellar door and we went in, where we kept the kindling in winter and the zinc-lined box for ice in summer, and Mother and Aunt Callie had shelves for preserves and jelly and jam, and even an old rocking chair for Mother and Aunt Callie while they were putting up the jars, and for Aunt Callie to sleep in sometimes after dinner, though she always said she hadn't been asleep. So here we were at last, where it had taken me four days of dodging and scrabbling and scurrying to get to; and it was wrong, and Father and I both knew it. I mean, if after all the lying and deceiving and disobeying and conniving I had done, all he could do about it was to whip me, then Father was not good enough for me. And if all that I had done was balanced by no more than that shaving strop, then both of us were debased. You see? it was impasse, until Grandfather knocked. The door was not locked, but Grandfather's father had taught him, and he had taught Father, and Father had taught me that no door required a lock: the closed door itself was sufficient until you were invited to enter it. But Grandfather didn't wait, not this time.

"No," Father said. "This is what you would have done to me twenty years ago."

"Maybe I have more sense now," Grandfather said. "Persuade Alison to go on back upstairs and stop snivelling." Then Father was gone, the door closed again. Grandfather sat in the rocking chair: not fat, but with just the right amount of paunch to fill the white waistcoat and make the heavy gold watch chain hang right.

"I lied," I said.

"Come here," he said.

"I cant," I said. "I lied, I tell you."

"I know it," he said.

"Then do something about it. Do anything, just so it's something."

"I cant," he said.

"There aint anything to do? Not anything?"

"I didn't say that," Grandfather said. "I said I couldn't. You can."

"What?" I said. "How can I forget it? Tell me how to."

"You cant," he said. "Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever lost. It's too valuable."

"Then what can I do?"

"Live with it," Grandfather said.

"Live with it? You mean, forever? For the rest of my life? Not ever to get rid of it? Never? I cant. Dont you see I cant?"

"Yes you can," he said. "You will. A gentleman always does. A gentleman can live through anything. He faces anything. A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences, even when he did not himself instigate them but only acquiesced to them, didn't say No though he knew he should. Come here." Then I was crying hard, bawling, standing (no: kneeling; I was that tall now) between his knees, one of his hands at the small of my back, the other at the back of my head holding my face down against his stiff collar and shirt and I could smell him—the starch and shaving lotion and chewing tobacco and benzine where Grandmother or Delphine had cleaned a spot from his coat, and always a faint smell of whiskey which I always believed was from the first toddy which he took in bed in the morning before he got up. When I slept with him, the first thing in the morning would be Ned (he had no white coat; sometimes he didn't have on any coat or even a shirt, and even after Grandfather sent the horses to stay at the livery stable. Ned still managed to smell like them) with the tray bearing the decanter and water jug and sugar bowl and spoon and tumbler, and Grandfather would sit up in bed and made the toddy and drink it, then put a little sugar into the heel-tap and stir it and add a little water and give it to me until Grandmother came suddenly in one morning and put a stop to it. "There," he said at last. "That should have emptied the cistern. Now go wash your face. A gentleman cries too, but he always washes his face."

And this is all. It was Monday afternoon, after school (Father wouldn't let Mother write me an excuse, so I had to take the absent marks. But Miss Rhodes was going to let me make up the work) and Ned was sitting on the back steps again, Grandmother's steps this time, but in the shade this time too. I said:

"If we'd just thought to bet that money Sam gave us on Lightning that last time, we could have settled what to do about it good."

"I did settle it good," Ned said. "I got five for three this time. Old Possum Hood's got twenty dollars for his church now."

"But we lost," I said.

"You and Lightning lost," Ned said. "Me and that money was on Akrum."

"Oh," I said. Then I said, "How much was it?" He didn't move. I mean, he didn't do anything. I mean, he looked no different at all; it might have been last Friday instead of this one; all the four days of dodging and finagling and having to guess right and guess fast and not having but one guess to do it with, had left no mark on him, even though I had seen him once when he not only had had no sleep, he didn't even have any clothes to wear. (You see, how I keep on calling it four days? It was Saturday afternoon when Boon and I—we thought—left Jefferson, and it was Friday afternoon when Boon and Ned and I saw Jefferson again. But to me, it was the four days between that Saturday night at Miss Ballenbaugh's when Boon would have gone back home tomorrow if I had said so, and the moment when I looked down from Lightning Wednesday and saw Grandfather and passed to him, during which Ned had carried the load alone, held back the flood, shored up the crumbling levee with whatever tools he could reach—including me—until they broke in his hand. I mean, granted we had no business being behind that levee: a gentleman always sticks to his lit whether he told it or not.) And I was only eleven: I didn't know how I knew that too, but I did: that you never ask anyone how much he won or lost gambling. So I said: "I mean, would there be enough to pay back Boss his four hundred and ninety-six dollars?" And he still sat there, unchanged; so why should Mother have a gray hair since I saw her last? since I would have to be unchanged too? Because now I knew what Grandfather meant: that your outside is just what you live in, sleep in, and has little connection with who you are and even less with what you do. Then he said:

"You learned a considerable about folks on that trip; I'm just surprised you aint learnt more about money too. Do you want Boss to insult me, or do you want me to insult Boss, or do you want both?"

"How do you mean?" I said.

"When I offers to pay his gambling debt, aint I telling him to his face he aint got enough sense to bet on horses? And when I tells him where the money come from I'm gonter pay it with, aint I proving it?"

"I still dont see where the insult to you comes in," I said.

"He might take it," Ned said.

Then the day came at last. Everbe sent for me and I walked across town to the little back-street almost doll-size house that Boon was buying by paying Grandfather fifty cents every Saturday. She had a nurse and she should have been in bed. But she was sitting up, waiting for me, in a wrapper; she even walked across to the cradle and stood hand cm ms sttcyvMei vrtu\e -we looked at it.

"Well?" she said. "What do you think?"

I didn't think anything. It was just another baby, already as ugly as Boon even if it would have to wait twenty years to be as big. I said so. "What are you going to call it?"

"Not it," she said. "Him. Cant you guess?"

"What?" I said.

"His name is Lucius Priest Hogganbeck," she said.