Reivers, The - William Faulkner [67]
"Twelve?" Miss Corrie said. "He'll be fifteen years old next Monday." She was looking at me. "Do you want—"
"Just keep him out of here," I said. "I'm tired. I want to go to sleep."
"Don't worry about Otis," she said. "He's going back home this morning. There's a train that leaves at nine oclock. I'm going to send Minnie to the depot with him and tell her to watch him get on it and stand where she can see his face through the window until the train moves."
"Sure," Boon said. "And he can have my grip to carry the refinement and culture back in. Bringing him over here to spend a week in a Memphis—"
"You hush," Miss Corrie said.
"—house hunting refinement and culture. Maybe he found it; he might a hunted for years through Arkansas cat-cribs and still not found nobody near enough his size to draw that pocketknife on—"
"Stop it! Stop it!" Miss Corrie said. "Sure sure," Boon said. "But after all, Lucius has got to know the name of where he's at in order to brag about where he's been." Then they turned the light out and were gone. Or so I thought. It was Boon this time, turning the light on again. "Maybe you better tell me what it was," he said.
"Nothing," I said. He looked down at me, huge, naked to the waist, his hand on the light to turn it out again.
"Eleven years old," he said, "and already knife-cut in a whorehouse brawl." He looked at me. "I wish I had knowed you thirty years ago. With you to learn me when I was eleven years old, maybe by this time I'd a had some sense too. Good night."
"Good night," I said. He turned off the light. Then I had been asleep, it was Miss Corrie this time, kneeling beside the mattress; I could see the shape of her face and the moon through her hair. She was the one crying this time—a big girl, too big to know how to cry daintily: only quietly.
"I made him tell me," she said. "You fought because of me. I've had people—drunks—fighting over me, but you're the first one ever fought for me. I aint used to it, you see. That's why I dont know what to do about it. Except one thing. I can do that. I want to make you a promise. Back there in Arkansas it was my fault. But it wont be my fault any more." You see? You have to learn too fast; you have to leap in the dark and hope that Something—It —They—will place your foot right. So maybe there are after all other things besides just Poverty and Non-virtue who look after their own.
"It wasn't your fault then," I said.
"Yes it was. You can choose. You can decide. You can say No. You can find a job and work. But it wont be my fault any more. That's the promise I want to make you. For me to keep like you kept that one you told Mr Bin-ford about before supper tonight. You'll have to take it. Will you take it?"
"All right," I said.
"But you'll have to say you'll take it. You'll have to say it out loud."
"Yes," I said. "I'll take it."
"Now try to get back to sleep," she said. "I've brought a chair and I'm going to sit here where I'll be ready to wake you in time to go to the depot."
"You go back to bed too," I said.
"I aint sleepy," she said. "I'll just sit here. You go on back to sleep." And this time, Boon again. The moon-shaped square of window had shifted, so I had slept this time, his voice trying at least for whisper or anyway monotone, looming still naked from the waist up over the kitchen chair where Everbe (I mean Miss Corrie) sat, his hand grasping the backward-straining of her arm:
"Come on now. We aint got but a hour left."
"Let me go." She whispered too. "It's too late now. Let me go, Boon." Then his rasping murmur, still trying for, calling itself whisper:
"What the hell do you think I came all the way for, waited all this long for, all this working and saving up and waiting for—" Then the shape of the mooned window had moved still more and I could hear a rooster 'somewhere and my cut hand was partly tinder me and hurting, which was maybe what waked me. So I couldn't tell if this was the same time or he had gone and then come back: only the voices, still trying for whisper