Reivers, The - William Faulkner [121]
"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