Reivers, The - William Faulkner [61]
"I'll go with him to get the crowbars," Miss Corrie told Sam. "Will you keep your eye on the boys?"
"All right, all right," Boon said. "Let's do something, for Christ's sake. That train will be along in four or five hours while we're still debating who's first at the lick dog. Where's that tool shed, Jack?" So he and the man with the lantern went on; we had only moonlight now. The horse hardly smelled at all now and I could see it nuzzling at Ned's coat like a pet. And Sam was thinking what I had been thinking ever since I saw the platform.
"There's a ramp around at the back," he said. "Did he ever walk a ramp before? Why dont you take him on now and let him look at it. When we get the car placed, we can all help you carry him up if we have to—"
"Dont you waste your time worrying about us," Ned said. "You just get that boxcar to where we wont have to jump no ten-foot gash into it. This horse wants to get out of Memphis as bad as you does." Only I was afraid Sam would say, Dont you want this boy to go with you? Because I wanted to see that boxcar moved. I didn't believe it. So we waited. It wasn't long; Boon and the man with the lantern came back with two crowbars that looked at least eight feet long and I watched (Miss Corrie and Otis too) while they did it. The man set his lantern down and climbed the ladder onto the roof and released the brake wheel and Sam and Boon jammed the ends of the bars between the back wheels and the rails, pinching and nudging in short strokes like pumping and I still didn't believe it: the car looming black and square and high in the moon, solid and rectangular as a black wall inside the narrow silver frame of the moonlight, one high puny figure wrenching at the brake wheel on top and two more puny figures crouching, creeping, nudging the silver-lanced iron bars behind the back wheels; so huge and so immobile that at first it looked, not like the car was moving forward, but rather Boon and Sam in terrific pantomimic obeisance were pinching infinitesimally rearward past the car's fixed and foundationed mass, the moon-mazed panoramic earth: so delicately balanced now in the massive midst of Motion that Sam and Boon dropped the bars and Boon alone pressed the car gently on with his hands as though it were a child's perambulator, up alongside the platform and into position and Sam said,
"All right," and the man on top set the brake wheel again. So all we had to do now was get the horse into it. Which was like saying, Here we are in Alaska; all we have to do now is find the gold mine. We went around to the back of the warehouse. There was a cleated ramp. But the platform had been built at the right height for the drays to load and unload from it, and the ramp was little more than a track for hand trucks and wheelbarrows, stout enough but only about five feet wide, rail-less. Ned was standing there talking to the horse. "He done seen it," he said. "He know we want him to walk up it but he aint decided yet do he want to. I wish now Mr Boxcar Man had went a little further and borried a whup too."
"You got one," Boon said. He meant me—one of my tricks, graces. I made it with my tongue, against the sounding board of my mouth, throat, gorge—a sound quite sharp and loud, as sharp and loud when done right as the crack of a whip; Mother finally forbade me to do it anywhere inside our yard, let alone in the house. Then it made Grandmother jump once and use a swear word. But just once. That was almost a year ago so I might have forgotten how by this time.
"That's right," Ned said. "So we has." He said to me: "Get you a long switch. They ought to be one in that hedge bush yonder." There was: a privet bush; all this was probably somebody's lawn or garden before progress, industry, commerce, railroads came. I cut the switch and came back. Ned led the horse up, facing the ramp. "Now you big folks, Mr Boon and Mr Boxcar, come up one on either side like you was the gateposts." They did so, Ned halfway up the ramp now, with the lead rope, facing