Reivers, The - William Faulkner [46]
"You son of a bitch." Then she said, "Go on. Finish your steak first if you want." And Mr Binford wasn't a quitter either. He was proud too: that gave no quarter and accepted none, like a gamecock. He crossed his knife and fork neatly and without haste on the steak he had barely cut into yet; he even folded his napkin and pushed it back through the ring and got up and said,
"Excuse me, all," and went out, looking at nobody, not even Otis.
"Well, Jesus," the younger of the two late ones, the girl, said; it was then I noticed Minnie standing in the half-open kitchen door. "What do you know?"
"Get to hell out of here," Miss Reba said to the girl. "Both of you." The girl and the woman rose quickly. "You mean . . . leave?" the girl said. "No," Miss Corrie said. "Just get out of here. If you're not expecting anybody in the next few minutes, why dont you take a walk around the block or something?" They didn't waste any time either. Miss Corrie got up. "You too," she told Otis. "Go upstairs to your room and stay there."
"He'll have to pass Miss Reba's door to do that," Boon said. "Have you forgot about that quarter?"
"It was more than a quarter," Otis said. "There was them eighty-five cents I made pumping the pee a noler for them to dance Saturday night. When he found out about the beer, he taken that away from me too." But Miss Reba looked at him.
"So you sold him out for eighty-five cents," she said. "Go to the kitchen," Miss Corrie told Otis. "Let him come back there, Minnie."
"All right," Minnie said. "I'll try to keep him out of the icebox. But he's too fast for me."
"Hell, let him stay here," Miss Reba said. "It's too late now. He should have been sent somewhere else before he ever got off that Arkansas train last week." Miss Corrie went to the chair next to Miss Reba.
"Why dont you go and help him pack?" she said, quite gently.
"Who the hell are you accusing?" Miss Reba said. "I will trust him with every penny I've got. Except for those God damn horses." She stood up suddenly, with her trim rich body and the hard handsome face and the hair that was too richly red. "Why the hell cant I do without him?" she said. "Why the hell cant I?"
"Now, now," Miss Corrie said. "You need a drink. Give Minnie the keys— No, she cant go to your room yet—"
"He gone," Minnie said. "I heard the front door. It dont take him long. It never do."
"That's right," Miss Reba said. "Me and Minnie have been here before, haven't we. Minnie?" She gave Minnie the keys and sat down and Minnie went out and came back with a bottle of gin this time and they all had a glass of gin, Minnie too (though she declined to drink with this many white people at once, each time carrying her full glass back to the kitchen then reappearing a moment later with the glass empty), except Otis and me. And so I found out about Mr Binford.
He was the landlord. That was his official even if unwritten title and designation. All places, houses like this, had one, had to have one. In the alien outside world fortunate enough not to have to make a living in this hard and doomed and self-destroying way, he had a harder and more contemptuous name. But here, the lone male not even in a simple household of women but in a hysteria of them, he was not just lord but the unthanked and thankless catalyst, the single frail power wearing the shape of respectability sufficient to compel enough of order on the hysteria to keep the unit solvent or anyway eating—he was