The Reivers by William Faulkner Read Free Book Online Page A

bonds. The bank will buy them."
    "Our bank?" Mother said. "Buy bonds for automobiles?"
    "Yes," Grandfather said. "We will buy them."
    "But what about us?—I mean, Maury."
    "He will still be in the livery business," Grandfather said. "He will just have a new name for it. Priest's Garage maybe, or the Priest Motor Company. People will pay any -price for motion. They will even work for it. Look at bicycles. Look at Boon. We dont know why."
    Then the next May came and my other grandfather, Mother's father, died in Bay St Louis.
    Chapter 3
    It was Saturday again. The next one in fact; Ludus was going to start getting paid again every Saturday night; maybe he had even stopped borrowing mules. It was barely eight oclock; I wasn't even halfway around the Square with the freight bills and my canvas sack to carry the money in, just finishing in the Farmers Supply when Boon came hi, fast, too quick for him. I should have suspected at once. No, I should have known at once, having known Boon all my life, let alone having watched him for a year now with that automobile. He was already reaching for the money sack, taking it right out of my hand before I could even close my fist "Leave it," he said. "Come on."
    "Here," I said. "I've barely started."
    "I said leave it. Shake it up. Hurry. They've got to make Twenty-three," he said, already turning. He had completely ignored the unpaid freight bills themselves. They were just paper; the railroad company had plenty more of them. But the sack contained money.
    "Who's got to make Twenty-three?" I said. Number Twenty-three was the southbound morning train. Oh yes, Jefferson had passenger trains then, enough of them so they had to number them to keep them separate.
    "Goddammit," Boon said, "how can I break it gentle to you when you wont even listen? Your grandpa died last night. We got to hurry."
    "He didn't!" I said, cried. "He was on the front gallery this morning when we passed." He was. Father and I both saw him, either reading the paper or just standing or sitting there like he was every morning, waiting for time to go to the bank.
    "Who the hell's talking about Boss?" Boon said. "I said your other grandpa, your ma's papa down there at Jackson or Mobile or wherever it is."
    "Oh," I said. "Dont you even know the difference between Bay St Louis and Mobile?" Because it was all right now. This was different. Bay St Louis was three hundred miles; I hardly knew Grandfather Lessep except twice at Christmas in Jefferson and three times we went down there in the summer. Also, ihe had been sick a long time; we—Mother and us—had been there last summer actually to see him enter what was to be his last bed even if we didn't know it then (Mother and Aunt Callie, because your Great-uncle Alexander had arrived a month before, had been down last whiter when they thought he was going to die). I say "if," meaning Mother; to a child, when an old person becomes sick he or she has already quitted living; the actual death merely clears the atmosphere so to speak, incapable of removing anything which was already gone.
    "All right, all right," Boon said. "Just come on. Jackson, Mobile, New Orleans—all I know is, it's down that way somewhere, and wherever it is, they still got to catch that train." And that—the name New Orleans, not dropped so much as escaped into that context—should have told me all, revealed the whole of Boon's outrageous dream, intent, determination; his later elaborate machinations to seduce me to it should merely have corroborated. But maybe I was still recovering from shock; also, at that moment I didn't have as many facts as Boon did. So we just went on, fast, I trotting to keep up, the shortest way across the Square, until we reached home.
    Where was much commotion. It was barely two hours until the train and Mother was far too busy to take time to mourn or grieve: merely pale-faced, intent, efficient. Because I now learned what Boon had already told me twice: that Grandfather and