The Reivers
Page 29
“Not this time, Boss,” Father said. Then to me: “Let’s get it over with.”
“Yes sir,” I said, and followed him, on down the hall to the bathroom and stopped at the door while he took the razor strop from the hook and I stepped back so he could come out and we went on; Mother was at the top of the cellar stairs; I could see the tears, but no more; all she had to do would be to say Stop or Please or Maury or maybe if she had just said Lucius. But nothing, and I followed Father on down and stopped again while he opened the cellar door and we went in, where we kept the kindling in winter and the zinc-lined box for ice in summer, and Mother and Aunt Callie had shelves for preserves and jelly and jam, and even an old rocking chair for Mother and Aunt Callie while they were putting up the jars, and for Aunt Callie to sleep in sometimes after dinner, though she always said she hadn’t been asleep. So here we were at last, where it had taken me four days of dodging and scrabbling and scurrying to get to; and it was wrong, and Father and I both knew it. I mean, if after all the lying and deceiving and disobeying and conniving I had done, all he could do about it was to whip me, then Father was not good enough for me. And if all that I had done was balanced by no more than that shaving strop, then both of us were debased. You see? it was impasse, until Grandfather knocked. The door was not locked, but Grandfather’s father had taught him, and he had taught Father, and Father had taught me that no door required a lock: the closed door itself was sufficient until you were invited to enter it. But Grandfather didn’t wait, not this time.
“No,” Father said. “This is what you would have done to me twenty years ago.”
“Maybe I have more sense now,” Grandfather said. “Persuade Alison to go on back upstairs and stop snivelling.” Then Father was gone, the door closed again. Grandfather sat in the rocking chair: not fat, but with just the right amount of paunch to fill the white waistcoat and make the heavy gold watch chain hang right.
“I lied,” I said.
“Come here,” he said.
“I cant,” I said. “I lied, I tell you.”
“I know it,” he said.
“Then do something about it. Do anything, just so it’s something.”
“I cant,” he said.
“There aint anything to do? Not anything?”
“I didn’t say that,” Grandfather said. “I said I couldn’t. You can.”
“What?” I said. “How can I forget it? Tell me how to.”
“You cant,” he said. “Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever lost. It’s too valuable.”
“Then what can I do?”
“Live with it,” Grandfather said.
“Live with it? You mean, forever? For the rest of my life? Not ever to get rid of it? Never? I cant. Dont you see I cant?”
“Yes you can,” he said. “You will. A gentleman always does. A gentleman can live through anything. He faces anything. A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences, even when he did not himself instigate them but only acquiesced to them, didn’t say No though he knew he should. Come here.” Then I was crying hard, bawling, standing (no: kneeling; I was that tall now) between his knees, one of his hands at the small of my back, the other at the back of my head holding my face down against his stiff collar and shirt and I could smell him—the starch and shaving lotion and chewing tobacco and benzine where Grandmother or Delphine had cleaned a spot from his coat, and always a faint smell of whiskey which I always believed was from the first toddy which he took in bed in the morning before he got up. When I slept with him, the first thing in the morning would be Ned (he had no white coat; sometimes he didn’t have on any coat or even a shirt, and even after Grandfather sent the horses to stay at the livery stable. Ned still managed to smell like them) with the tray bearing the decanter and water jug and sugar bowl and spoon and tumbler, and Grandfather would sit up in bed and made the toddy and drink it, then put a little sugar into the heel-tap and stir it and add a little water and give it to me until Grandmother came suddenly in one morning and put a stop to it. “There,” he said at last. “That should have emptied the cistern. Now go wash your face. A gentleman cries too, but he always washes his face.”
And this is all. It was Monday afternoon, after school (Father wouldn’t let Mother write me an excuse, so I had to take the absent marks. But Miss Rhodes was going to let me make up the work) and Ned was sitting on the back steps again, Grandmother’s steps this time, but in the shade this time too. I said:
“If we’d just thought to bet that money Sam gave us on Lightning that last time, we could have settled what to do about it good.”
“I did settle it good,” Ned said. “I got five for three this time. Old Possum Hood’s got twenty dollars for his church now.”
“But we lost,” I said.
“You and Lightning lost,” Ned said. “Me and that money was on Akrum.”
“Oh,” I said. Then I said, “How much was it?” He didn’t move. I mean, he didn’t do anything. I mean, he looked no different at all; it might have been last Friday instead of this one; all the four days of dodging and finagling and having to guess right and guess fast and not having but one guess to do it with, had left no mark on him, even though I had seen him once when he not only had had no sleep, he didn’t even have any clothes to wear. (You see, how I keep on calling it four days? It was Saturday afternoon when Boon and I—we thought—left Jefferson, and it was Friday afternoon when Boon and Ned and I saw Jefferson again. But to me, it was the four days between that Saturday night at Miss Ballenbaugh’s when Boon would have gone back home tomorrow if I had said so, and the moment when I looked down from Lightning Wednesday and saw Grandfather and passed to him, during which Ned had carried the load alone, held back the flood, shored up the crumbling levee with whatever tools he could reach—including me—until they broke in his hand. I mean, granted we had no business being behind that levee: a gentleman always sticks to his lit whether he told it or not.) And I was only eleven: I didn’t know how I knew that too, but I did: that you never ask anyone how much he won or lost gambling. So I said: “I mean, would there be enough to pay back Boss his four hundred and ninety-six dollars?” And he still sat there, unchanged; so why should Mother have a gray hair since I saw her last? since I would have to be unchanged too? Because now I knew what Grandfather meant: that your outside is just what you live in, sleep in, and has little connection with who you are and even less with what you do. Then he said:
“You learned a considerable about folks on that trip; I’m just surprised you aint learnt more about money too. Do you want Boss to insult me, or do you want me to insult Boss, or do you want both?”
“How do you mean?” I said.
“When I offers to pay his gambling debt, aint I telling him to his face he aint got enough sense to bet on horses? And when I tells him where the money come from I’m gonter pay it with, aint I proving it?”
“I still dont see where the insult to you comes in,” I said.
“He might take it,” Ned said.
Then the day came at last. Everbe sent for me and I walked across town to the little back-street almost doll-size house that Boon was buying by paying Grandfather fifty cents every Saturday. She had a nurse and she should have been in bed. But she was sitting up, waiting for me, in a wrapper; she even walked across to the cradle and stood hand cm ms sttcyvMei vrtue -we looked at it.
“Well?” she said. “What do you think?”
I didn’t think anything. It was just another baby, already as ugly as Boon even if it would have to wait twenty years to be as big. I said so. “What are you going to call it?”
“Not it,” she said. “Him. Cant you guess?”
“What?” I said.
“His name is Lucius Priest Hogganbeck,” she said.
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