Reivers, The - William Faulkner [25]
We were there. I got out and opened the gate (the same posts of old Lucius Quintus Carothers's time; your present Cousin Carothers has a cattle guard in it now so automobiles can cross, not owning hooves) and we went on up the locust drive toward the house (it is still there: the two-room mud-chinked log half domicile and half fort which old Lucius came with his slaves and foxhounds across the mountains from Carolina in 1813 and built; it is still there somewhere, bidden beneath the clapboards and Greek Revival and steamboat scroll-work which the women the successive Edmondses marry have added to it).
Cousin Louisa and everybody else on the place had already heard us approaching and (except probably the ones Cousin Zack could actually see from bis horse) were all on the front gallery and steps and the yard when we drove up and stopped.
"All right," Boon said, again out of the side of his mouth, "do you want." Because, as you say nowadays, this was it; no time any more, let alone privacy, to get some—any—inkling of what he now must desperately know. Because we—he and I—were so new at this, you
see. We were worse than amateurs: innocents, complete innocents at stealing automobiles even though neither of us would have called it stealing since we intended to return it unharmed; and even, if people, the world (Jefferson anyway) had just let us alone, unmissed. Even if I could have answered him if he had asked. Because it was even worse for me than for him; both of us were desperate but mine was the more urgent desperation since I had to do something, and quick, in a matter of seconds now, while all he had to do was sit in the car with at most his fingers crossed. I didn't know what to do now; I had already told more lies than I had believed myself capable of inventing, and had had them believed or at least accepted with a consistency which had left me spellbound if not already appalled; I was in the position of the old Negro who said, "Here I is, Lord. If You wants me saved, You got the best chance You ever seen standing right here looking at You." I had shot my bow, Boon's too. If Non-virtue still wanted either of us, it was now her move.
Which she did. She was dressed as Cousin Zachary Edmonds. He came out the front door at that moment and at the same moment I saw that a Negro boy in the yard was holding the reins of his saddle horse. You see what I mean? Zachary Edmonds, whom Jefferson never saw on a weekday between the first ground-breaking in March and lay-ing-by in July, had been in town this morning (something urgent about the grist mill) and had stopped in Cousin Ike's store barely minutes after I had done so myself; which, dovetailed neatly and exactly with the hour and more Non-virtue had required to shave Boon and change his shirt, had given Cousin Zack the exact time necessary to ride home and be getting off his horse at his doorstep when they heard us coming. He said—to me: "What are you doing out here? Ike told me you were going to stay in town tonight and he is going to take you fishing tomorrow."
So of course Aunt Callie began yelling then so I didn't need to say anything at all even if I had known anything to say. "Fishing?" she hollered. "On Sunday? If his paw could hear that, he would jump off that train this minute without even waiting to telegraph! His maw too! Miss Alison aint told him to stay in town with no Mister Ike nor anybody else! She told him to come on out here with me and these other chillen and if he dont behave his-self, Mister Zack would make him!"
"All right, all right," Cousin Zack said. "Stop yelling a minute; I cant hear him. Maybe he's changed