William Faulkner - The Reivers

That is, until the summer of 1886, when a Baptist minister named Hiram Hightower—also a giant of a man, as tall and almost as big as Ballenbaugh himself, who on Sunday from 1861 to 1865 had been one of Forrest's company chaplains and on the other six days one of his hardest and most courageous troopers—rode into Ballen-baugh's armed with a Bible and his bare hands and converted the entire settlement with his fists, one at a time when he could, two or three at a time when he had to. So when Boon and Ned and I approached it in this May dusk of 1905, Ballenbaugh was accomplishing his third avatar in the person of a fifty-year-old maiden: his only child: a prim fleshless severe iron-gray woman who farmed a quarter section of good bottom cotton- and corn-land and conducted a small store with a loft above it containing a row of shuck mattresses each with its neat perfectly clean sheets and pillow cases and blankets for the accommodation of fox- and coon-hunters and fishermen, who (it was said) returned the second time not for the hunting and fishing but for the table Miss Ballenbaugh set.

She heard us too. Nor were we the first; she told us that we were the thirteenth automobile to pass there in the last two years, five of them in the last forty days; she had already lost two hens and would probably have to begin keeping everything penned up, even the hounds. She and the cook and a Negro man were already on the front gallery, shading their eyes against the ghostly flicker of our headlights as we drove up. She not only knew Boon of old, she recognised the automobile first; already, even after only thirteen of them, her eye for individual cars was that good.

"So you really did make it to Jefferson, after all," she said.

"In a year?" Boon said. "Lord, Miss Ballenbaugh, this automobile has been a hundred times farther than Jefferson since then. A thousand times. You might as well give you got to get used to automobiles like everybody else." That was when she told us about the thirteen cars in two years, and the two hens.

"At least they got a ride on an automobile for a little piece anyway," she said. "Which is more than I can say."

"You mean to say you ain't never rode in one?" Boon said. "Here, Ned," he said, "jump out of there and get them grips out too. Loosh, let Miss Ballenbaugh set up in front where she can see out."

"Wait," Miss Ballenbaugh said. "I must tell Alice about supper."

"Supper can wait," Boon said. "I bet Alice aint never had a car ride neither. Come on, Alice. Who's that with you? Your husband?"

"I aint studying no husband," the cook said. "And I wouldn't be studying Ephum even if I was."

"Bring him on anyway," Boon said. The cook and the man came and got in too, into the back seat with the gasoline can and the folded tarpaulin. Ned and I stood in the lamplight from the open door and watched the automobile, the red tail lamp, move on up the rokd, then stop and back and turn and come back past us, Boon blowing the horn now, Miss Ballenbaugh sitting erect and a little tense in the front seat, Alice and Ephum in the back seat waving to us as they passed.

"Whooee, boy," Ephum shouted at Ned. "Git a horse!"

"Showing off," Ned said; he meant Boon. "He better be sho proud Boss Priest aint standing here too. He'd show him off." The car stopped and backed and turned again and came back to us and stopped. After a moment Miss Ballenbaugh said,

"Well." Then she moved; she said briskly: "All right, Alice." So we have supper. And I knew why the hunters and fishermen came back. Then Ned went off with Ephum and I made my manners to Miss Ballenbaugh and, Boon carrying the lamp, we went upstairs to the loft above the store.

"Didn't you bring nothing?" Boon said. "Not even a clean handkerchief?"

"I wont need anything," I said.

"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 Ballen-baugh; 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."