“Well, you cant sleep like that. Look at them clean sheets. At least take off your shoes and pants. And your maw would make you brush your teeth too.”
“No she wouldn’t,” I said. “She couldn’t. I aint got anything to brush them with.”
“That wouldn’t stop her, and you know it. If you couldn’t find something, you’d make something to do it with or know the reason why.”
“All right,” I said. I was already on my mattress. “Good night.” He stood with his hand up to blow out the lamp.
“You all right?” he said.
“Shut up,” I said.
“Say the word. We’ll go back home. Not now but in the morning.”
“Did you wait this long to get scared?” I said.
“Good night,” he said. He blew out the lamp and got on his mattress. Then there was all the spring darkness: the big bass-talking frogs from the sloughs, the sound that the woods makes, the big woods, the wilderness with the wild things: coons and rabbits and mink and mushrats and the big owls and the big snakes — moccasins and rattlers — and maybe even the trees breathing and the river itself breathing, not to mention the ghosts — the old Chickasaws who named the land before the white men ever saw it, and the white men afterward — Wyott and old Sutpen and Major de Spain’s hunters and the flatboats full of cotton and then the wagon trains and the brawling teamsters and the line of brigands and murderers which produced Miss Ballenbaugh; suddenly I realised what the noise was that Boon was making.
“What are you laughing at?” I said.
“I’m thinking about Hell Creek bottom. We’ll hit it about eleven oclock tomorrow morning.”
“I thought you said we’ll have trouble there.”
“You damn right we will,” Boon said. “It’ll take that axe and shovel and bob wire and block and tackle and all the fence rails and me and you and Ned all three. That’s who I’m laughing at: Ned. By the time we are through Hell Creek tomorrow, he’s going to wish he hadn’t busted what he calls his manners nor et nor done nothing else under that tarpollyon until he felt Memphis itself under them wheels.”
Then he waked me early. And everybody else within a half mile, though it still took some time to get Ned up from where he had slept in Ephum’s house, to the kitchen to eat his breakfast (and even longer than that to get him out of the kitchen again with a woman in it). We ate breakfast — and after that breakfast if I had been a hunter or a fisherman I wouldn’t have felt like walking anywhere for a while — and Boon gave Miss Ballenbaugh another ride in the automobile, but without Alice and Ephum this time, though Ephum was on hand. Then we — Boon — filled the gasoline tank and the radiator, not because they needed it but I think because Miss Ballenbaugh and Ephum were there watching, and started. The sun was just rising as we crossed the Iron Bridge over the river (and the ghost of that steamboat too; I had forgot that last night) into foreign country, another county; by night it would even be another state, and Memphis.
“Providing we get through Hell Creek,” Boon said.
“Maybe if you’d just stop talking about it,” I said.
“Sure,” Boon said. “Hell Creek bottom dont care whether you talk about it or not. It dont have to give a durn. You’ll see.” Then he said, “Well, there it is.” It was only a little after ten; we had made excellent time following the ridges, the roads dry and dusty between the sprouting fields, the land vacant and peaceful with Sunday, the people already in their Sunday clothes idle on the front galleries, the children and dogs already running toward the fence or road to watch us pass; then in the surreys and buggies and wagons and horse- and mule-back, anywhere from one to three on the horse but not on the mule (a little after nine we passed another automobile; Boon said it was a Ford; he had an eye for automobiles like Miss Ballenbaugh’s), on the way to the small white churches in the spring groves.
A wide valley lay before us, the road descending from the plateau toward a band of willow and cypress which marked the creek. It didn’t look very bad to me, nowhere near as wide as the river bottom we had already crossed, and we could even see the dusty gash of the road mounting to the opposite plateau beyond it. But Boon had already started to curse, driving even faster down the hill almost as if he were eager, anxious to reach and join battle with it, as if it were something sentient, not merely inimical but unredeemable, like a human enemy, another man. “Look at it,” he said. “Innocent as a new-laid egg. You can even see the road beyond it like it was laughing at us, like it was saying If you could just get here you could durn near see Memphis; except just see if you can get here.”
“If it’s all that bad, why dont we go around it?” Ned said. “That’s what I would do if it was me setting there where you is.”
“Because Hell Creek bottom aint got no around,” Boon said violently. “Go one way and you’d wind up in Alabama; go the other way and you’ll fall off in the Missippi River.”
“I seen the Missippi River at Memphis once,” Ned said. “Now you mention it, I done already seen Memphis too. But I aint never seen Alabama. Maybe I’d like a trip there.”
“You aint never visited Hell Creek bottom before neither,” Boon said. “Providing what you hid under that tarpollyon for yesterday is education. Why do you reckon the only two automobiles we have seen between now and Jefferson was this one and that Ford? Because there aint no other automobiles in Missippi below Hell Creek, that’s why.”
“Miss Ballenbaugh counted thirteen passed her house in the last two years,” I said.
“Two of them was this one,” Boon said. “And even them other eleven she never counted crossing Hell Creek, did she?”
“Maybe it depends on who’s doing the driving,” Ned said. “Hee hee hee.”
Boon stopped the car, quickly. He turned his head. “All right. Jump out. You want to visit Alabama. You done already made yourself fifteen minutes late running your mouth.”
“Why you got to snatch a man up just for passing the day with you?” Ned said. But Boon wasn’t listening to him. I dont think he was really speaking to Ned. He was already out of the car; he opened the toolbox Grandfather had had made on the running board to hold the block and tackle and axe and spade and the lantern, taking everything out but the lantern and tumbling them into the back seat with Ned.
“So we wont waste any time,” he said, speaking rapidly, but quite composed, calm, without hysteria or even urgency, closing the box and getting back under the wheel. “Let’s hit it. What’re we waiting for?”
Still it didn’t look bad to me — just another country road crossing another swampy creek, the road no longer dry but not really wet yet, the holes and boggy places already filled for our convenience by previous pioneers with brush tops and limbs, and sections of it even corduroyed with poles laid crossways in the mud (oh yes, I realised suddenly that the road — for lack of any closer term — had stopped being not really wet yet too) so perhaps Boon himself was responsible; he himself had populated the stagnant cypress- and willow-arched mosquito-whined gloom with the wraiths of stuck automobiles and sweating and cursing people. Then I thought we had struck it, except for that fact that I not only couldn’t see any rise of drier ground which would indicate we were reaching, approaching the other side of the swamp, I couldn’t even see the creek itself ahead yet, let alone a bridge. Again the automobile lurched, canted, and hung as it did yesterday at Hurricane Creek; again Boon was already removing his shoes and socks and rolling up his pants. “All right,” he said to Ned over his shoulder, “get out.”
“I dont know how,” Ned said, not moving. “I aint learned about automobiles yet. I’ll just be in your way. I’ll set here with Lucius so you can have plenty of room.”
“Hee hee hee,” Boon said in savage and vicious mimicry. “You wanted a trip. Now you got one. Get out.”
“I got my Sunday clothes on,” Ned said.
“So have I,” Boon said. “If I aint scared of a pair of britches, you needn’t be.”
“You can talk,” Ned said.
“You got Mr Maury. I has to work for my money. When my clothes gets ruint or wore out, I has to buy new ones myself.”
“You never bought a garment of clothes or shoes or a hat neither in your life,” Boon said. “You got one pigeon-tailed coat I know of that old Lucius McCaslin himself wore, let alone General Compson’s and Major de Spain’s and Boss’s too. You can roll your britches up and take off your shoes or not, that’s your business. But you’re going to get out of this automobile.”
“Let Lucius get out,” Ned said. “He’s younger than me and stouter too for his size.”
“He’s got to steer it,” Boon said.
“I’ll steer it, if that’s all you needs,” Ned said. “I been what you calls steering horses and mules and oxen all my life and I reckon gee and haw with that steering wheel aint no different from gee and haw with a pair of lines or a goad.” Then to me: “Jump out, boy, and help Mr Boon. Better take your shoes and stockings—”
“Are you going to get out, or do I pick you up with one hand and snatch this automobile out from under you with the other?” Boon said. Ned moved then, fast enough when he finally accepted the fact that he had to, only grunting a little as he took off his shoes and rolled up his pants and removed his coat. When I looked back at Boon, he was already dragging two poles, sapling-sized tree trunks, out of the weeds and briers.
“Aint you going to use the block and tackle yet?” I said.
“Hell no,” Boon said. “When the time comes for that, you wont need to ask nobody’s permission about it. You’ll already know it.” So it’s the bridge I thought. Maybe there’s not even a bridge at all and that’s what’s wrong. And Boon read my mind there too. “Don’t worry about the bridge. We aint even come to the bridge yet.”
I would learn what he meant by that too, but not now. Ned lowered one foot gingerly into the water. “This water got dirt in it,” he said. “If there’s one thing I hates, it’s dirt betwixt my nekkid toes.”
“That’s because your circulation aint warmed up yet,” Boon said. “Take a-holt of this pole. You said you aint acquainted with automobiles yet. That’s one complaint you wont never have to make again for the rest of your life. All right” — to me— “ease her ahead now and whenever she bites, keep her going.” Which we did, Boon and Ned levering their poles forward under the back axle, pinching us forward for another lurch of two or three or sometimes five feet, until the car hung spinning again, the whirling back wheels coating them both from knee to crown as if they had been swung at with one of the spray nozzles which house painters use now. “See what I mean?” Boon said, spitting, giving another terrific wrench and heave which sent us lurching forward, “about getting acquainted with automobiles? Exactly like horses and mules: dont never stand directly behind one that’s got one hind foot already lifted.”
Then I saw the bridge. We had come up onto a patch of earth so (comparatively) dry that Boon and Ned, almost indistinguishable now with mud, had to trot with their poles and even then couldn’t keep up, Boon hollering, panting, “Go on! Keep going!” until I saw the bridge a hundred yards ahead and then saw what was still between us and the bridge and I knew what he meant. I stopped the car. The road (the passage, whatever you would call it now) in front of us had not altered so much as it had transmogrified, exchanged mediums, elements. It now resembled a big receptacle of milk-infused coffee from which protruded here and there a few forlorn impotent hopeless odds and ends of sticks and brush and logs and an occasional hump of actual earth which looked startlingly like it had been deliberately thrown up by a plow. Then I saw something else, and understood what Boon had been telling me by indirection about Hell Creek bottom for over a year now, and what he had been reiterating with a kind of haunted bemused obsession ever since we left Jefferson yesterday. Standing hitched to a tree just off the road (canal) were two mules in plow gear — that is, in bridles and collars and hames, the trace chains looped over the hames and the plowlines coiled into neat hanks and hanging from the hames also; leaning against another tree nearby was a heavy double-winged plow — a middlebuster — caked, wings shank and the beam itself, with more of the same mud which was rapidly encasing Boon and Ned, a doubletree, likewise mud-caked, leaning against the plow; and in the immediate background a new two-room paintless shotgun cabin on the gallery of which a man sat tilted in a splint chair, barefoot, his galluses down about his waist and his (likewise muddy) brogan shoes against the wall beside the chair. And I knew that this, and not Hurricane Creek, was where (Boon said) he and Mr Wordwin had had to borrow the shovel last year, which (Boon said) Mr Wordwin had forgot to return, and which (the shovel) Mr Wordwin might as well have forgot to borrow also for all the good it did them.
Ned had seen it too. He had already had one hard look at the mudhole. Now he looked at the already geared-up mules standing there swishing and slapping at mosquitoes while they waited for us. “Now, that’s what I calls convenient—” he said.
“Shut up,” Boon said in a fierce murmur. “Not a word. Dont make a sound.” He spoke in a tense controlled fury, propping his muddy pole against the car and hauling out the block and tackle and the barbed wire and the axe and spade. He said Son of a bitch three times. Then he said to me: “You too.”
“Me?” I said.
“But look at them mules,” Ned said. “He even got a log chain already hooked to that doubletree—”
“Didn’t you hear me say shut up?” Boon said in that fierce, quite courteous murmur. “If I didn’t speak plain enough, excuse me. What I’m trying to say is, shut up.”
“Only, what in the world do he want with the middlebuster?” Ned said. “And it muddy clean up to the handles too. Like he been — You mean to say he gets in here with that team and works this place like a patch just to keep it boggy?” Boon had the spade, axe and block and tackle all three in his hands. For a second I thought he would strike Ned with any one or maybe all three of them. I said quickly:
“What do you want me—”
“Yes,” Boon said. “It will take all of us. I — me and Mr Wordwin had a little trouble with him here last year; we got to get through this time—”
“How much did you have to pay him last year to get drug out?” Ned said.
“Two dollars,” Boon said. “ — so you better take off your whole pants, take off your shirt too; it’ll be all right here—”
“Two dollars?” Ned said. “This sho beats cotton. He can farm right here setting in the shade without even moving. What I wants Boss to get me is a well-travelled mudhole.”
“Fine,” Boon said. “You can learn how on this one.” He gave Ned the block and tackle and the piece of barbed wire. “Take it yonder to that willow, the big one, and get a good holt with it.” Ned payed out the rope and carried the head block to the tree. I took off my pants and shoes and stepped down into the mud. It felt good, cool. Maybe it felt that way to Boon too. Or maybe his — Ned’s too — was just release, freedom from having to waste any time now trying not to get muddy. Anyway, from now on he simply ignored the mud, squatting in it, saying Son of a bitch quietly and steadily while he fumbled the other piece of barbed wire into a loop on the front of the car to hook the block in. “Here,” he told me, “you be dragging up some of that brush over yonder,” reading my mind again too: “I dont know where it came from neither. Maybe he stacks it up there himself to keep handy for folks so they can find out good how bad they owe him two dollars.”
So I dragged up the brush — branches, tops — into the mud in front of the car, while Boon and Ned took up the slack in the tackle and got ready, Ned and I on the take-up rope of the tackle, Boon at the back of the car with his prize pole again. “You got the easy job,” he told us. “All you got to do is grab and hold when I heave. All right,” he said, “Let’s go.”
There was something dreamlike about it. Not nightmarish: just dreamlike — the peaceful, quiet, remote, sylvan, almost primeval setting of ooze and slime and jungle growth and heat in which the very mules themselves, peaceful
ly swishing and stamping at the teeming infinitesimal invisible myriad life which was the actual air we moved and breathed in, were not only unalien but in fact curiously appropriate, being themselves biological dead ends and hence already obsolete before they were born; the automobile: the expensive useless mechanical toy rated in power and strength by the dozens of horses, yet held helpless and impotent in the almost infantile clutch of a few inches of the temporary confederation of two mild and pacific elements — earth and water — which the frailest integers and units of motion as produced by the ancient unmechanical methods, had coped with for countless generations without really having noticed it; the three of us, three forked identical and now unrecognisable mud-colored creatures engaged in a life-and-death struggle with it, the progress — if any — of which had to be computed in dreadful and glacier-like inches. And all the while, the man sat in his tilted chair on the gallery watching us while Ned and I strained for every inch we could get on the rope which by now was too slippery with mud to grip with the hands, and at the rear of the car Boon strove like a demon, titanic, ramming his pole beneath the automobile and lifting and heaving it forward; at one time he dropped, flung away the pole and, stooping, grasped the car with his hands and actually ran it forward for a foot or two as though it were a wheel-barrow. No man could stand it. No man should ever have to. I said so at last. I stopped pulling, I said, panted: “No. We cant do it. We just cant.” And Boon, in an expiring voice as faint and gentle as the whisper of love:
“Then get out of the way or I’ll run it over you.”
“No,” I said. I stumbled, slipping and plunging, back to him. “No,” I said. “You’ll kill yourself.”
“I aint tired,” Boon said in that light dry voice. “I’m just getting started good. But you and Ned can take a rest. While you’re getting your breath, suppose you drag up some more of that brush—”
“No,” I said, “no! Here he comes! Do you want him to see it?” Because we could see him as well as hear — the suck and plop of the mules’ feet as they picked their delicate way along the edge of the mudhole, the almost musical jangle of the looped chains, the man riding one and leading the other, his shoes tied together by the laces looped over one of the hames, the doubletree balanced in front of him as the old buffalo hunters in the pictures carried their guns — a gaunt man, older than we — I anyway — had assumed.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 549