"Let me go." She whispered too. "It's too late now. Let me go, Boon." Then his rasping murmur, still trying for, calling itself whisper:
"What the hell do you think I came all the way for, waited all this long for, all this working and saving up and waiting for—" Then the shape of the mooned window had moved still more and I could hear a rooster 'somewhere and my cut hand was partly tinder me and hurting, which was maybe what waked me. So I couldn't tell if this was the same time or he had gone and then come back: only the voices, still trying for whisper and if a rooster was crowing, it was time to get up. And oh yes, she was crying again.
"I wont! I wont! Let me alone!"
"All right, all right. But tonight is just tonight; tomorrow night, when we're settled down in Possum—"
"No! Not tomorrow either! I cantl I cant! Let me alone! Please, Boon. Please!"
Chapter 8
We—Everbe and Boon 'and I—were at the depot in plenty of time—or so we thought. The first person we saw was Ned, waiting for us in front of it. He had on a clean white shirt—either a new one, or he had managed somehow to get the other one washed. But almost at once things began to go too fast for anyone to learn yet that the new shirt was one of Sam's. Ned didn't even give Boon time to open his mouth. "Calm yourself," he said. "Mr Sam is keeping Lightning whilst I finishes the outside arrangements. The boxcar has done already been picked up and switched onto the train waiting behind the depot right now for you all to get on. When Mr Sam Caldwell runs a railroad, it's run, mon. We done already named him too—Forkid Lightning." Then he saw my bandage. He almost pounced. "What you done to it?"
"I cut it," I said. "It's all right."
"How bad?" he said.
"Yes," Everbe said. "It's cut across all four fingers. He ought not to move it even." Nor did Ned waste any more time there either. He looked quickly about us. "Where's that other one?" he said. "That other what?" Boon said.
"Whistle-britches," Ned said. "That money-mouthed runt boy that was with us last night. I may need two hands on that horse. Who do you think is gonter ride that race? me and you that's even twice as heavy as me? Lucius was going to, but being as we already got that other one, we dont need to risk it. He's even less weight than Lucius and even if he aint got as much sense as Lucius, he's at least old enough in meanness to ride a horse race, and wrapped up enough in money to want to win it, and likely too much of a coward to turn loose and fall off. Which is all we needs. Where is he?"
"Gone back to Arkansas," Boon said. "How old do you think he is?"
"What he looks like," Ned said. "About fifteen, aint he? Gone to Arkansaw? Then somebody better go get him quick."
"Yes," Everbe said. "I'll bring him. There wont be time to go back and get him now. So I'll stay and bring him on the next train this afternoon."
"Now you talking." Ned said. "That's Mr Sam's train. Just turn Whistle-britches over to Mr Sam; he'll handle him."
"Sure," Boon said to Everbe. "That'll give you a whole hour free to practise that No on Sam. Maybe he's a better man than me and wont take it." But she just looked at him.
"Then why dont you wait and bring Otis on and well meet you in Parsham tonight," I said. Now Boon looked at me.
"Well well," he said. "What's that Mr Binford said last night? If here aint still another fresh hog in this wallow. Except that this one's still just a shoat yet. That is, I thought it was."
"Please, Boon," Everbe said. Like that: "Please, Boon."
"Take him too and the both of you get to hell back to that slaughterhouse that maybe you ought not to left in the first place," Boon said. She didn't say anything this time. She just stood there, looking down a little: a big girl that stillness suited too. Then she turned, already walking.
"Maybe I will," I said. "Right on back home. Ned's got somebody else to ride the horse and you dont seem to know what to do with none of the folks trying to help us."
He looked, glared at me: a second maybe. "All right," he said. He strode past me until he overtook her. "I said, all right," he said. "Is it all right?"
"All right," she said.
"I'll meet the first train today. If you aint on it, I'll keep on meeting them. All right?"
"All right," she said. She went on.
"I bet aint none of you thought to bring my grip," Ned said.
"What?" Boon said.
"Where is it?" I said.
"Right there in the kitchen where I set it," Ned said. "That gold-tooth high-brown seen it."
"Miss Corrie'll bring it tonight," I said. "Come on." We went into the depot. Boon bought our tickets and we went out to where the train was waiting, with people already getting on it. Up ahead we could see the boxcar. Sam and the conductor and two other men were standing by the open door; one of them must have been the engineer. You see? not just one casual off-duty flagman, but a functioning train crew.
"You going to run him today?" the conductor said.
"Tomorrow," Boon said.
"Well, we got to get him there first," the conductor said, looking at his watch. "Who's going to ride with him?"
"Me," Ned said. "Soon as I can find a box or something to climb up on."
"Gimme your foot," Sam said. Ned cocked his knee and Sam threw him up into the car. "See you in Parsham tomorrow," he said.
"I thought you went all the way to Washington," Boon said.
"Who, me?" Sam said. "That's just the train. I'm going to double back from Chattanooga tonight on Two-O-Nine. Ill be back in Parsham at seven oclock tomorrow morning. I'd go with you now and pick up Two-O-Eight in Parsham tonight, only I got to get some sleep. Besides, you wont need me anyhow. You can depend on Ned until then."
So did Boon and I. I mean, need sleep. We got some, until the conductor waked us and we stood on the cinders at Parsham in the first light and watched the engine (there was a cattle-loading chute here) spot the boxcar, properly this time, and take its train again and go on, clicking car by car across the other tracks which went south to Jefferson. Then the three of us dismantled the stall and Ned led the horse out; and of course, naturally, materialised from nowhere, a pleasant-looking Negro youth of about nineteen, standing at the bottom of the chute, said, "Howdy, Mr McCaslin."
"That you, son?" Ned said. "Whichaway?" So we left Boon for that time; his was the Motion role now, the doing: to find a place for all of us to live, not just him and me, but Otis and Everbe when they came tonight: to locate a man whose name Ned didn't even know, whom nobody but Ned said owned a horse, and then persuade him to run it, race it—one figment of Ned's imagination to race another figment—in a hypothetical race which was in the future and therefore didn't exist, against a horse it had already beaten twice: (this likewise according only to Ned, or Figment Three), as a result of which Ned intended to recover Grandfather's automobile; all this Boon must do while still keeping clear of being challenged about who really did own the horse. We—Ned and the youth and me —were walking now, already out of town, which didn't take long in those days—a hamlet, two or three stores where the two railroads crossed, the depot and loading chute and freight shed and a platform for cotton bales. Though some of it has not changed: the big rambling mul-tigalleried multistoried steamboatgothic hotel where the overalled aficionados and the professionals who trained the fine bird dogs and the northern millionaires who owned them (one night in the lounge in 1933, his Ohio business with everybody else's under the Damocles sword of the federally closed banks, I myself heard Horace Lytle refuse five thousand dollars for Mary Montrose) gathered for two weeks each February; Paul Rainey also, who liked our country enough—or anyway our bear and deer and panther enough—to use some of the Wall Street money to own enough Mississippi land for him and his friends to hunt them in: a hound man primarily, who took his pack of bear hounds to Africa to see what they would do on lion or vice versa.