“It’s the best I know to do. I dont know anything else to do.”
“Maybe we all ought to walk in the middle,” he said, loud, too loud, twice louder than he had intended or even thought; it should carry for miles especially over a whole countryside already hopelessly waked and alerted by the sleepless sibilant what Paralee probably and old Ephraim certainly and Lucas too would call “miration” of the pines. She was looking at him now. He could feel it.
“I’ll never be able to explain to your mother but Aleck Sander hasn’t got any business here at all,” she said. “Youall walk exactly behind me and let the horse come last:” and turned and went on though what good that would do he didn’t know because in his understanding the very word “ambush” meant “from the flank, the side:” back in single file that way down the hill to where Aleck Sander had driven the truck into the bushes: and he thought If I were him this is where it would be and so did she; she said, “Wait.”
“How can you keep on standing in front of us if we dont stay together?” he said. And this time she didn’t even say This is all I can think of to do but just stood there so that Aleck Sander walked past her and on into the bushes and started the truck and backed it out and swung it to point down the hill, the engine running but no lights yet and she said, “Tie the reins up and let him go. Wont he come home?”
“I hope so,” he said. He got up.
“Then tie him to a tree,” she said. “We will come back and get him as soon as we have seen your uncle and Mr. Hampton—”
“Then we can all watch him ride down the road with maybe a horse or the mule in front of him too,” Aleck Sander said. He raced the engine then let it idle again. “Come on, get in, He’s either here watching us or he aint and if he aint we’re all right and if he is he’s done waited too late now when he let us get back to the truck.”
“Then you ride right behind the truck,” she said. “We’ll go slow—”
“Nome,” Aleck Sander said; he leaned out. “Get started; we’re going to have to wait for you anyway when we get to town.”
So—he needed no urging—he let Highboy down the hill, only holding his head up; the truck’s lights came on and it moved and once on the flat even in the short space to the highroad Highboy was already trying to run but he checked him back and up onto the highroad, the lights of the truck fanning up and out as it came down onto the flat then he slacked the curb, Highboy beginning to run, clashing the snaffle as always, thinking as always that one more champing regurg would get it forward enough to get his teeth on it, running now when the truck lights swung up onto the highroad too, his feet in eight hollow beats on the bridge and he leaned into the dark wind and let him go, the truck lights not even in sight during the full half-mile until he slowed him into the long reaching hard road-gait and almost a mile then before the truck overtook and then passed and the ruby tail-lamp drew on and away and then was gone but at least he was out of the pines, free of that looming down-watching sibilance uncaring and missing nothing saying to the whole circumambience: Look. Look: but then they were still saying it somewhere and they had certainly been saying it long enough for all Beat Four, Gowries and Ingrums and Workitts and Frasers and all to have heard it by this time so he wouldn’t think about that and so he stopped thinking about it now, all in the same flash in which he had remembered it, swallowing the last swallow from the bowl and setting it down as his father more or less plunged up from the table, clattering his chairlegs back across the floor, saying:
“Maybe I better go to work. Somebody’ll have to earn a little bread around here while the rest of you are playing cops and robbers:” and went out and apparently the coffee had done something to what he called his thinking processes or anyway the processes of what people called thinking because now he knew the why for his father too—the rage which was relief after the event which had to express itself some way and chose anger not because he would have forbidden him to go but because he had had no chance to, the pseudo-scornful humorous impugnment of his and Aleck Sander’s courage which blinked not even as much at a rifled grave in the dark as it did at Miss Habersham’s will,—in fact the whole heavy-handed aspersion of the whole thing by reducing it to the terms of a kind of kindergarten witch-hunt: which was probably merely the masculine form of refusing also to believe that he was what his uncle called big enough to button his pants and so dismissed his father, hearing his mother about to emerge from the kitchen and pushing his chair back and getting up himself when suddenly he was thinking how coffee was already a good deal more than he had known but nobody had warned him that it produced illusions like cocaine or opium: seeing watching his father’s noise and uproar flick and vanish away like blown smoke or mist, not merely revealing but exposing the man who had begot him looking back at him from beyond the bridgeless abyss of that begetting not with just pride but with envy too; it was his uncle’s abnegant and rhetorical self-lacerating which was the phony one and his father was gnawing the true bitter irremediable bone of all which was dismatchment with time, being born too soon or late to have been himself sixteen and gallop a horse ten miles in the dark to save an old nigger’s insolent and friendless neck.
But at least he was awake. The coffee had accomplished that anyway. He still needed to doze only now he couldn’t; the desire to sleep was there but it was awakefulness now he would have to combat and abate. It was after eight now; one of the county schoolbusses passed as he prepared to drive Miss Habersham’s truck away from the curb and the street would be full of children too fresh for Monday morning with books and paper bags of recess-time lunches and behind the schoolbus was a string of cars and trucks stained with country mud and dust so constant and unbroken that his uncle and his mother would already have reached the jail before he ever managed to cut into it because Monday was stock-auction day at the sales barns behind the Square and he could see them, the empty cars and trucks rank on dense rank along the courthouse curb like shoats at a feed-trough and the men with their stock-trader walking-sticks not even stopping but gone straight across the Square and along the alley to the sales barns to chew tobacco and unlighted cigars from pen to pen amid the ammonia-reek of manure and liniment and the bawling of calves and the stamp and sneeze of horses and mules and the secondhand wagons and plow gear and guns and harness and watches and only the women (what few of them that is since stock-sale day unlike Saturday was a man’s time) remained about the Square and the stores so that the Square itself would be empty except for the parked cars and trucks until the men would come back for an hour at noon to meet them at the cafes and restaurants.
Whereupon this time he jerked himself, no reflex now, not even out of sleep but illusion, who had carried hypnosis right out of the house with him even into the bright strong sun of day, even driving the pickup truck which before last night he would not even have recognised yet which since last night had become as inexpugnable a part of his memory and experience and breathing as hiss of shoveled dirt or the scrape of a metal blade on a pine box would ever be, through a mirage-vacuum in which not simply last night had not happened but there had been no Saturday either, remembering now as if he had only this moment seen it that there had been no children in the schoolbus but only grown people and in the stream of cars and trucks following it and now following him where he had finally cut in, a few of which even on stock-auction Monday (on Saturday half of the flat open beds would have been jammed and packed with them, men women and children in the cheap meagre finery in which they came to town) should have carried Negroes, there had not been one dark face.