“Were we, Mr Binford?” Now the other one, the girl, had stopped eating too.
“Were you what?” Mr Binford said.
“You know what,” the girl said, cried. “Miss Reba,” she said, “you know we do the best we can — dont dare make no extra noise — no music on Sunday when all the other places do — always shushing our customers up every time they just want to have a little extra fun — but if we aint already setting down at our places in this dining room when he sticks his nose in the door, next Saturday we got to drop twenty-five cents into that God damned box—”
“They are house rules,” Mr Binford said. “A house without rules is not a house. The trouble with you bitches is, you have to act like ladies some of the time but you dont know how. I’m learning you how.”
“You cant talk to me that way,” the older one said.
“All right,” Mr Binford said. “Well turn it around. The trouble with you ladies is, you dont know how to quit acting like bitches.”
The older one was standing now. There was something wrong about her too. It wasn’t that she was old, like Grandmother is old, because she wasn’t. She was alone. It was just that she shouldn’t have had to be here, alone, to have to go through this. No, that’s wrong too. It’s that nobody should ever have to be that alone, nobody, not ever. She said, “I’m sorry, Miss Reba. I’m going to move out. Tonight.”
“Where?” Mr Binford said. “Across the street to Birdie Watts’s? Maybe she’ll let you bring your trunk back with you this time — unless she’s already sold it.”
“Miss Reba,” the woman said quietly. “Miss Reba.”
“All right,” Miss Reba said briskly. “Sit down and eat your supper; you aint going nowhere. Yes,” she said, “I like peace too. So I’m going to mention just one more thing, then we’ll close this subject for good.” She was talking up the table at Mr Binford now. “What the hell’s wrong with you? What the hell happened this afternoon to get you into this God damned humor?”
“Nothing that I noticed,” Mr Binford said.
“That’s right,” Otis said suddenly. “Nothing sure didn’t happen. He wouldn’t even run.” There was something, like a quick touch of electricity; Miss Reba was sitting with her mouth open and her fork halfway in it. I didn’t understand yet but everybody else, even Boon, did. And in the next minute I did too.
“Who wouldn’t run?” Miss Reba said.
“The horse,” Otis said. “The horse and buggy we bet on in the race. Did they, Mr Binford?” Now the silence was no longer merely electric: it was shocked, electrocuted. Remember I told you there was something wrong somewhere about Otis. Though I still didn’t think this was quite it, or at least all of it. But Miss Reba was still fighting. Because women are wonderful. They can bear anything because they are wise enough to know that all you have to do with grief and trouble is just go on through them and come out on the other side. I think they can do this because they not only decline to dignify physical pain by taking it seriously, they have no sense of shame at the idea of being knocked out. She didn’t quit, even then.
“A horse race,” she said. “At the zoo? in Overton Park?”
“Not Overton Park,” Otis said. “The driving park. We met a man on the streetcar that knowed which horse and buggy was going to win, and changed our mind about Overton Park. Only, they didn’t win, did they, Mr Binford? But even then, we never lost as much as the man did, we didn’t even lose forty dollars because Mr Binford give me twenty-five cents of it not to tell, so all we lost was just thirty-nine dollars and seventy-five cents. Only, on top of that, my twenty-five cents got away from me in that beer mix-up Mr Binford was telling about. Didn’t it, Mr Binford?” And then some more silence. It was quite peaceful. Then Miss Reba said,
“You son of a bitch.” Then she said, “Go on. Finish your steak first if you want.” And Mr Binford wasn’t a quitter either. He was proud too: that gave no quarter and accepted none, like a gamecock. He crossed his knife and fork neatly and without haste on the steak he had barely cut into yet; he even folded his napkin and pushed it back through the ring and got up and said,
“Excuse me, all,” and went out, looking at nobody, not even Otis.
“Well, Jesus,” the younger of the two late ones, the girl, said; it was then I noticed Minnie standing in the half-open kitchen door. “What do you know?”
“Get to hell out of here,” Miss Reba said to the girl. “Both of you.” The girl and the woman rose quickly.
“You mean . . . leave?” the girl said.
“No,” Miss Corrie said. “Just get out of here. If you’re not expecting anybody in the next few minutes, why dont you take a walk around the block or something?” They didn’t waste any time either. Miss Corrie got up. “You too,” she told Otis. “Go upstairs to your room and stay there.”
“He’ll have to pass Miss Reba’s door to do that,” Boon said. “Have you forgot about that quarter?”
“It was more than a quarter,” Otis said. “There was them eighty-five cents I made pumping the pee a noler for them to dance Saturday night. When he found out about the beer, he taken that away from me too.” But Miss Reba looked at him.
“So you sold him out for eighty-five cents,” she said.
“Go to the kitchen,” Miss Corrie told Otis. “Let him come back there, Minnie.”
“All right,” Minnie said. “I’ll try to keep him out of the icebox. But he’s too fast for me.”
“Hell, let him stay here,” Miss Reba said. “It’s too late now. He should have been sent somewhere else before he ever got off that Arkansas train last week.” Miss Corrie went to the chair next to Miss Reba.
“Why dont you go and help him pack?” she said, quite gently.
“Who the hell are you accusing?” Miss Reba said. “I will trust him with every penny I’ve got. Except for those God damn horses.” She stood up suddenly, with her trim rich body and the hard handsome face and the hair that was too richly red. “Why the hell cant I do without him?” she said. “Why the hell cant I?”
“Now, now,” Miss Corrie said. “You need a drink. Give Minnie the keys — No, she cant go to your room yet—”
“He gone,” Minnie said. “I heard the front door. It dont take him long. It never do.”
“That’s right,” Miss Reba said. “Me and Minnie have been here before, haven’t we, Minnie?” She gave Minnie the keys and sat down and Minnie went out and came back with a bottle of gin this time and they all had a glass of gin, Minnie too (though she declined to drink with this many white people at once, each time carrying her full glass back to the kitchen then reappearing a moment later with the glass empty), except Otis and me. And so I found out about Mr Binford.
He was the landlord. That was his official even if unwritten title and designation. All places, houses like this, had one, had to have one. In the alien outside world fortunate enough not to have to make a living in this hard and doomed and self-destroying way, he had a harder and more contemptuous name. But here, the lone male not even in a simple household of women but in a hysteria of them, he was not just lord but the unthanked and thankless catalyst, the single frail power wearing the shape of respectability sufficient to compel enough of order on the hysteria to keep the unit solvent or anyway eating — he was the agent who counted down the money and took the receipt for the taxes and utilities, who dealt with the tradesmen from the liquor dealers through the grocers and coal merchants, down through the plumbers who thawed the frozen pipes in winter and the casual labor which cleaned the chimneys and gutters and cut the weeds out of the yard; his was the hand which paid the blackmail to the law; it was his voice which fought the losing battles with the street- and assessment-commissioners and cursed the newspaper boy the day after the paper wasn’t delivered. And of these (I mean, landlords) in this society, Mr Binford was the prince and paragon: a man of style and presence and manner and ideals; incorruptible in principles, impeccable in morals, more faithful than many husbands during the whole five
years he had been Miss Reba’s lover: whose sole and only vice was horses running in competition on which bets could be placed. This he could not resist; he knew it was his weakness and he fought against it. But each time, at the cry of “They’re off!” he was putty in the hands of any stranger with a dollar to bet.
“He knowed it his-self,” Minnie said. “He was ashamed of his-self and for his-self both, for being so weak, of there being anything bigger than him; to find out he aint bigger than anything he could meet up with, he dont care where nor what, even if on the outside, to folks that didn’t know him, he just looked like a banty rooster. So he would promise us and mean it, like he done that time two years ago when we finally had to throw him out. You remember how much work it taken to get him back that time,” she told Miss Reba.
“I remember,” Miss Reba said. “Pour another round.”
“I dont know how he’ll manage it,” Minnie said. “Because when he leaves, he dont take nothing but his clothes, I mean, just the ones he’s got on since it was Miss Reba’s money that paid for them. But wont two days pass before a messenger will be knocking on the door with every cent of them forty dollars—”
“You mean thirty-nine, six bits,” Boon said.
“No,” Minnie said. “Every one of them forty dollars, even that quarter, was Miss Reba’s. He wont be satisfied less. Then Miss Reba will send for him and he wont come; last year when we finally found him he was working in a gang laying a sewer line way down past the Frisco depot until she had to beg him right down on her bended knee—”
“Come on,” Miss Reba said. “Stop running your mouth long enough to pour the gin, anyway.” Minnie began to pour. Then she stopped, the bottle suspended.
“What’s that hollering?” she said. Now we all heard it — a faint bawling from somewhere toward the back.
“Go and see,” Miss Reba said. “Here, give me the bottle.” Minnie gave her the bottle and went back to the kitchen. Miss Reba poured and passed the bottle.
“He’s two years older now,” Miss Corrie said. “He’ll have more sense—”
“What’s he saving it for?” Miss Reba said. “Go on. Pass it.” Minnie came back. She said:
“Man standing in the back yard hollering Mr Boon Hogganbeck at the back wall of the house. He got something big with him.”
We ran, following Boon, through the kitchen and out onto the back gallery. It was quite dark now; the moon was not high enough yet to do any good. Two dim things, a little one and a big one, were standing in the middle of the back yard, the little one bawling “Boon Hogganbeck! Mister Boon Hogganbeck! Hellaw. Hellaw” toward the upstairs windows until Boon overrode him by simple volume:
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
It was Ned. What he had with him was a horse.
vi
WE WERE ALL in the kitchen. “Good Godalmighty,” Boon said. “You swapped Boss’s automobile for a horse?” He had to say it twice even. Because Ned was still looking at Minnie’s tooth. I mean, he was waiting for it again. Maybe Miss Reba had said something to her or maybe Minnie had spoken herself. What I do remember is the rich instantaneous glint of gold out of the middle of whatever Minnie said, in the electric light of the kitchen, as if the tooth itself had gained a new luster, lambence from the softer light of the lamp in the outside darkness, like the horse’s eyes had — this, and its effect on Ned.
It had stopped him cold for that moment, instant, like basilisk. So had it stopped me when I first saw it, so I knew what Ned was experiencing. Only his was more so. Because I realised this dimly too, even at only eleven: that I was too far asunder, not merely in race but in age, to feel what Ned felt; I could only be awed, astonished and pleased by it; I could not, like Ned, participate in that tooth. Here, in the ancient battle of the sexes, was a foeman worthy of his steel; in the ancient mystic solidarity of race, here was a high priestess worth dying for — if such was your capacity for devotion: which, it was soon obvious, was not what Ned intended (anyway hoped) to do with Minnie. So Boon had to repeat before Ned heard — or anyway noticed — him.
“You know good as me,” Ned said, “that Boss dont want no automobile. He bought that thing because he had to, because Colonel Sartoris made him. He had to buy that automobile to put Colonel Sartoris back in his place he had done upstarted from. What Boss likes is a horse — and I dont mean none of these high-named harness plugs you and Mr Maury has in that livery stable: but a horse. And I got him one. The minute he sees this horse, he’s gonter say right down much oblige to me just for being where I could get a-holt of it before somebody else done it—” It was like a dream, a nightmare; you know it is, and if you can only touch something hard, real, actual, unaltered, you can wake yourself; Boon and I had the same idea, instantaneous: I moved quicker only because there was less of me to put in motion. Ned stopped us; he read two minds: “No need to go look,” he said. “He done already come and got it.” Boon, frozen in midstride, glared at me, the two of us mutual in one horrified unbelief while I fumbled in my pocket. But the switch key was there. “Sho,” Ned said, “he never needed that thing. He was a expert. He claimed he knowed how to reach his hand in behind the lock and turn it on from the back. He done it, too. I didn’t believe it neither, until I seen it. It never give him no trouble a-tall. He even throwed in the halter with the horse—”
We — Boon and I — were not running, but fast enough, Miss Reba and Miss Corrie too, to the front door. The automobile was gone. That was when I realised that Miss Reba and Miss Corrie were there too, and that they had said nothing whatever themselves — no surprise, shock; watching and listening, not missing any part of it but not saying anything at all, as if they belonged to a different and separate society, kind, from Boon and me and Ned and Grandfather’s automobile and the horse (whoever it belonged to) and had no concern with us and our doings but entertainment; and I remembered how that was exactly the way Mother would watch me and my brothers and whatever neighborhood boys were involved, not missing anything, quite constant and quite dependable, even warmly so, bright and kind but insulate until the moment, the need arrived to abolish the bone and (when necessary) stanch the consequent blood.
We went back to the kitchen, where we had left Ned and Minnie. We could already hear Ned: “ — money you talking about, Good-looking, I got it or I can get it. Lemme get this horse put up and fed and me and you gonter step out and let that tooth do its shining amongst something good enough to match it, like a dish of catfish or maybe hog meat if it likes hog meat better—”
“All right,” Boon said. “Go get that horse. Where does the man live?”
“Which man?” Ned said. “What you want with him?”
“To get Boss’s automobile back. I’ll decide then whether to send you to jail here or take you back to Jefferson and let Boss have the fun.”
“Whyn’t you stop talking a minute and listen to me?” Ned said. “In course I knows where the man lives: didn’t I just trade a horse from him this evening? Let him alone. We dont want him yet. We wont need him until after the race. Because we aint just got the horse: he throwed in the horse race too. A man at Possum got a horse waiting right this minute to run against him as soon as we get there. In case you ladies dont know where Possum’s at, it’s where the railroad comes up from Jefferson and crosses the Memphis one where you changes cars unlessen you comes by automobile like we done—”
“All right,” Boon said. “A man at Possum—”
“Oh,” Miss Reba said. “Parsham.”
“That’s right,” Ned said. “Where they has the bird-dog trials. It aint no piece. — got a horse done already challenged this un to a three-heat race, fifty dollars a heat, winner take all. But that aint nothing: just a hundred and fifty dollars. What we gonter do is win back that automobile.”
“How?” Boon said. “How the hell are you going to use the horse to win the automobile back from the man that has already give you the horse for it?”
“Because the man dont believe the horse can
run. Why you think he swapped me as cheap as a automobile? Why didn’t he just keep the horse and win him a automobile of his own, if he wanted one, and have both of them — a horse and a automobile too?”
“I’ll bite,” Boon said. “Why?”
“I just told you. This horse done already been beat twice by that Possum horse because never nobody knowed how to make him run. So naturally the man will believe that if the horse wouldn’t run them other two times, he aint gonter run this time neither. So all we got to do is, bet him the horse against Boss’s automobile. Which he will be glad to bet because naturally he wouldn’t mind owning the horse back too, long as he’s already got the automobile, especially when it aint no more risk than just having to wait at the finish line until the horse finally comes up to where he can catch him and tie him behind the automobile and come on back to Memphis—”
This was the first time Miss Reba spoke. She said, “Jesus.”
“ — because he dont believe I can make that horse run neither. But unlessen I done got rusty on my trading and made a mistake I dont know about, he dont disbelieve it enough not to be at Possum day after tomorrow to find out. And if you cant scrap up enough extra boot amongst these ladies here to make him good interested in betting that automobile against it, you better hadn’t never laid eyes on Boss Priest in your born life. It would have tooken a braver man than me to just took his automobile back to him. But maybe this horse will save you. Because the minute I laid my eyes on that horse, it put me in mind of—”
“Hee hee hee,” Boon said, in that harsh and savage parody. “You give away Boss’s automobile for a horse that cant run, and now you’re fixing to give the horse back providing I can scrape up enough boot to interest him—”
“Let me finish,” Ned said. Boon stopped. “You gonter let me finish?” Ned said.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 552