"Dont touch me," she said. "Drive on." So we went on, Grandmother with the long drying brown splash across one of her goggles and down her cheek even though Mother kept on offering to spit on her handkerchief and wipe it off. "Let me alone, Alison," Grandmother said.
But not Mother. She didn't mind tobacco, not in the car. Maybe that was why. But more and more that summer it would be just Mother and us and Aunt Callie and one or two neighbor children in the back seat, Mother's face flushed and bright and eager, like a girl's. Because she had invented a kind of shield on a handle like a big fan, light enough for her to raise in front of us almost as fast as Grandfather could turn his head. So he could chew now, Mother always alert and ready with the screen; all of us were quick now in fact, so that almost before the instant when Grandfather knew he was going to turn his head to the left to spit, the screen had already come up and all of us in the back seat had leaned to the right like we were on the same wire, actually doing twenty and twenty-five miles an hour now because there were already two more automobiles in Jefierson that summer; it was as though the automobiles themselves were beating the roads smooth long before the money they represented would begin to compel smoother roads.
"Twenty-five years from now there wont be a road in the county you cant drive an automobile on in any weather," Grandfather said.
"Wont that cost a lot of money, Papa?" Mother said. . "It will cost a great deal of money," Grandfather said. "The road builders will issue bonds. The bank will buy them."
"Our bank?" Mother said. "Buy bonds for automobiles?"
"Yes," Grandfather said. "We will buy them."
"But what about us?—I mean, Maury."
"He will still be in the livery business," Grandfather said. "He will just have a new name for it. Priest's Garage maybe, or the Priest Motor Company. People will pay any -price for motion. They will even work for it. Look at bicycles. Look at Boon. We dont know why."
Then the next May came and my other grandfather, Mother's father, died in Bay St Louis.
Chapter 3
It was Saturday again. The next one in fact; Ludus was going to start getting paid again every Saturday night; maybe he had even stopped borrowing mules. It was barely eight oclock; I wasn't even halfway around the Square with the freight bills and my canvas sack to carry the money in, just finishing in the Farmers Supply when Boon came hi, fast, too quick for him. I should have suspected at once. No, I should have known at once, having known Boon all my life, let alone having watched him for a year now with that automobile. He was already reaching for the money sack, taking it right out of my hand before I could even close my fist "Leave it," he said. "Come on."
"Here," I said. "I've barely started."
"I said leave it. Shake it up. Hurry. They've got to make Twenty-three," he said, already turning. He had completely ignored the unpaid freight bills themselves. They were just paper; the railroad company had plenty more of them. But the sack contained money.
"Who's got to make Twenty-three?" I said. Number Twenty-three was the southbound morning train. Oh yes, Jefferson had passenger trains then, enough of them so they had to number them to keep them separate.
"Goddammit," Boon said, "how can I break it gentle to you when you wont even listen? Your grandpa died last night. We got to hurry."
"He didn't!" I said, cried. "He was on the front gallery this morning when we passed." He was. Father and I both saw him, either reading the paper or just standing or sitting there like he was every morning, waiting for time to go to the bank.
"Who the hell's talking about Boss?" Boon said. "I said your other grandpa, your ma's papa down there at Jackson or Mobile or wherever it is."
"Oh," I said. "Dont you even know the difference between Bay St Louis and Mobile?" Because it was all right now. This was different. Bay St Louis was three hundred miles; I hardly knew Grandfather Lessep except twice at Christmas in Jefferson and three times we went down there in the summer. Also, ihe had been sick a long time; we—Mother and us—had been there last summer actually to see him enter what was to be his last bed even if we didn't know it then (Mother and Aunt Callie, because your Great-uncle Alexander had arrived a month before, had been down last whiter when they thought he was going to die). I say "if," meaning Mother; to a child, when an old person becomes sick he or she has already quitted living; the actual death merely clears the atmosphere so to speak, incapable of removing anything which was already gone.
"All right, all right," Boon said. "Just come on. Jackson, Mobile, New Orleans—all I know is, it's down that way somewhere, and wherever it is, they still got to catch that train." And that—the name New Orleans, not dropped so much as escaped into that context—should have told me all, revealed the whole of Boon's outrageous dream, intent, determination; his later elaborate machinations to seduce me to it should merely have corroborated. But maybe I was still recovering from shock; also, at that moment I didn't have as many facts as Boon did. So we just went on, fast, I trotting to keep up, the shortest way across the Square, until we reached home.
Where was much commotion. It was barely two hours until the train and Mother was far too busy to take time to mourn or grieve: merely pale-faced, intent, efficient. Because I now learned what Boon had already told me twice: that Grandfather and Grandmother were going to bury Grandfather Lessep also. He and Grandfather had been roommates, in the same class at the University; they had been groomsmen in each other's wedding, which possibly had a little something to do with why Mother and Father chose one another out of all the earth to look into her eyes forever more (I understand you call it going steady), and Grandmother and Grandmother Lessep lived far enough apart to continue to be civil and even pleasant to the other mother of an only child. Besides that, people took funerals seriously in those days. Not death: death was our constant familiar: no family but whose annals were dotted with headstones whose memorialees had. been too brief in tenure to bear a name even—unless of course the mother slept there too in that one grave, which happened more often than you would like to think. Not to mention the husbands and uncles and aunts in the twenties and thirties and forties, and the grandparents and childless great-uncles and -aunts who died at home then, in the same rooms and beds they were born in, instead of in cu-bicled euphemisms with names pertaining to sunset. But the funerals, the ritual ceremonial of interment, with tenuous yet steel-strong threads capable of extending even further and bearing even more weight than the distance between Jefferson and the Gulf of Mexico.
So Grandfather and Grandmother were also going to the funeral. Which meant only incidentally that, lacking any other close kinfolks in town, we—me and my three brothers and Aunt Callie—would have to be sent out to Cousin Zachary Edmonds's farm seventeen miles away to stay until Father and Mother got back; it meant only incidentally that Father and Mother would be gone four days. What it actually meant was that Grandfather and Grandmother would not even come back after four days. Because Grandfather never left Jefferson at all, even to go only to Memphis, without spending two or three days in New Orleans, which he loved, either going or coming; and this time they might quite possibly take Mother and Father with them. It meant in fact what Boon had already told me twice by exuberant and still unbelieving inadvertence: that the owner of that automobile, and everyone else having or even assuming authority over it, would be three hundred miles from it for anywhere from four days to a week. So all his clumsy machinations to seduce and corrupt me were only corroboration. They were not even cumshaw, lagniappe. He could have taken the car alone, and doubtless would if I had been incorruptible, even knowing that someday he must bring it back or come back himself in order to face lesser music than he would if— when—Grandfather's police caught up with him. Because come back he must Where else could he go, who knew nowhere else, to whom the words, names—Jefferson, McCaslin, De Spain, Compson—were not just home but father and mother both? But some frayed ragtag judgment, some embryo gleam of simple yet-virgin discretion and common sense, persuaded him at least to try me first, to have me by as a kind of hostage. And he didn't need to try, test me first. When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not yet be old enough to desire the fruits of it, which is not innocence but appetite; his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it, which is not ignorance but size.