Reivers, The - William Faulkner [6]
"No," Father said. We—Father and I and Boon—went out down the stairs, to the Street. It was still First Saturday and trade day, but that's all it was now—that is, until somebody else named Boon Hogganbeck got hold of another pistol. We went on back along the street toward the stable, Father and I and Boon; he spoke now across the top of my head toward the back of Father."
"A dollar a week for two hundred dollars is a year and forty-eight weeks. That window of Ike's will be another ten or fifteen I reckon, besides- that girl that got in the way. Say two years and three months. I've got about forty dollars in money. If I gave you that as a cash down payment, I still dont reckon you'd put me and Ludus and Son Thomas in one of the empty stalls and lock the door for ten minutes. Would you?"
"No," Father said.
Chapter 2
That was Saturday. Ludus was back at work Monday morning. On the next Friday my grandfather—the other one, Mother's father, your great-grandmother's father— died in Bay St. Louis.
Boon didn't actually belong to us. I mean, not solely to us, the Priests. Or rather I mean the McCaslins and Edmondses, of whom we Priests are what might be called the cadet branch. Boon had three proprietors: not only us, as represented by Grandfather and Father and Cousin Ike McCaslin and our other cousin, Zachary Edmonds, to whose father, McCaslin Edmonds, Cousin Ike on his twenty-first birthday had abdicated the McCaslin plantation— he belonged not just to us but to Major de Spain and General Compson too until he died. Boon was a corporation, a holding company in which the three of us—McCaslins, De Spain, and General Compson—had mutually equal but completely undefined shares of responsibility, the one and only corporation rule being that whoever was nearest at the crises would leap immediately into whatever breach Boon had this time created or committed or simply fallen heir to; he (Boon) was a mutual benevolent protective benefit association, of which the benefits were all Boon's and the mutuality and the benevolence and the protecting all ours.
His grandmother had been the daughter of one of old Issetibbeha's Chickasaws who married a white whiskey trader; at times, depending on the depth of his cups, Boon would declare himself to be at least ninety-nine one-fara-dredths Chickasaw and in fact a lineal royal descendant of old Issetibbeha himself; the next time he would offer to fight any man who dared even ultimate that he had one drop of Indian blood in his veins.
He was tough, faithful, brave and completely unreliable; he was six feet four inches tall and weighed two hundred and forty pounds and had the mentality of a child; over a year ago Father had already begun to say that at any moment now I would outgrow him.
In fact, although he was obviously a perfectly normal flesh-and-blood biological result (vide the moments in his cups when he was not merely ready and willing but even eager to fight any man or men either pro or con, depending on how the drink had taken him, for the right to ancestry) and hence he had to have been somewhere during those first nine or ten or eleven years, it was as if Boon had been created whole and already nine or ten or eleven years old, by the three of us, McCaslin-De Spain-Comp-son, as a solution to a dilemma one day at Major de Spain's hunting camp.
That's right, the same camp which you will probably continue to call McCaslin's camp for a few years after your Cousin Ike is gone, just as we—your fathers—continued to call it De Spain's camp for years after Major de Spain was gone. But in the time of my fathers, when Major de Spain bought or borrowed or leased the land (however men managed to acquire valid titles in Mississippi between 1865 and '70) and built the lodge and stables and kennels, it was his camp: who culled and selected the men he considered worthy to hunt the game he decreed to be hunted, and so in that sense not only owned who hunted it but where they hunted and even what: the bear and deer, and wolves and panthers