“Come now,” Basket said. The Negro was still going through the motion of walking, his knee action high, his head high, as though he were on a treadmill. His eyeballs had a wild, restrained glare, like those of a horse. “You wanted water,” Basket said. “Here it is.”
There was a gourd in the well. They dipped it full and gave it to the Negro, and they watched him try to drink. His eyes had not ceased rolling as he tilted the gourd slowly against his caked face. They could watch his throat working and the bright water cascading from either side of the gourd, down his chin and breast. Then the water stopped. “Come,” Basket said.
“Wait,” the Negro said. He dipped the gourd again and tilted it against his face, beneath his ceaseless eyes. Again they watched his throat working and the unswallowed water sheathing broken and myriad down his chin, channeling his caked chest. They waited, patient, grave, decorous, implacable; clansman and guest and kin. Then the water ceased, though still the empty gourd tilted higher and higher, and still his black throat aped the vain motion of his frustrated swallowing. A piece of water-loosened mud carried away from his chest and broke at his muddy feet, and in the empty gourd they could hear his breath: ah-ah-ah.
“Come,” Basket said, taking the gourd from the Negro and hanging it back in the well.
1859
Was
I
When Cass Edmonds and Uncle Buck ran back to the house from discovering that Tomey’s Turl had run again, they heard Uncle Buddy cursing and bellowing in the kitchen, then the fox and the dogs came out of the kitchen and crossed the hall into the dogs’ room and they heard them run through the dogs’ room into his and Uncle Buck’s room, then they saw them cross the hall again into Uncle Buddy’s room and heard them run through Uncle Buddy’s room into the kitchen again and this time it sounded like the whole kitchen chimney had come down and Uncle Buddy bellowing like a steamboat blowing, and this time the fox and the dogs and five or six sticks of firewood all came out of the kitchen together with Uncle Buddy in the middle of them hitting at everything in sight with another stick. It was a good race.
When Cass and Uncle Buck ran into their room to get Uncle Buck’s necktie, the fox had treed behind the clock on the mantel. Uncle Buck got the necktie from the drawer and kicked the dogs off and lifted the fox down by the scruff of the neck and shoved it back into the crate under the bed and they went to the kitchen, where Uncle Buddy was picking the breakfast up out of the ashes and wiping it off with his apron. “What in damn’s hell do you mean,” he said, “turning that damn fox out with the dogs all loose in the house?”
“Damn the fox,” Uncle Buck said. “Tomey’s Turl has broke out again. Give me and Cass some breakfast quick. We might just barely catch him before he gets there.”
Because they knew exactly where Tomey’s Turl had gone, he went there every time he could slip off, which was about twice a year. He was heading for Mr. Hubert Beauchamp’s place just over the edge of the next county, that Mr. Hubert’s sister, Miss Sophonsiba (Mr. Hubert was a bachelor too, like Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy) was still trying to make people call Warwick after the place in England that she said Mr. Hubert was probably the true earl of only he never even had enough pride, not to mention energy, to take the trouble to establish his just rights. Tomey’s Turl would go there to hang around Mr. Hubert’s girl Tennie, until somebody came and got him. They couldn’t keep him at home by buying Tennie from Mr. Hubert because Uncle Buck said he and Uncle Buddy had so many niggers already that they could hardly walk around on their own land for them, and they couldn’t sell Tomey’s Turl to Mr. Hubert because Mr. Hubert said he not only wouldn’t buy Tomey’s Turl, he wouldn’t have that damn white half-McCaslin on his place even as a free gift, not even if Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy were to pay board and keep for him. And if somebody didn’t go and get Tomey’s Turl right away, Mr. Hubert would fetch him back himself, bringing Miss Sophonsiba, and they would stay for a week or longer, Miss Sophonsiba living in Uncle Buddy’s room and Uncle Buddy moved clean out of the house, sleeping in one of the cabins in the quarters where the niggers used to live in his great-grandfather’s time until his great-grandfather died and Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy moved all the niggers into the big house which his great-grandfather had not had time to finish, and not even doing the cooking while they were there and not even coming to the house any more except to sit on the front gallery after supper, sitting in the darkness between Mr. Hubert and Uncle Buck until after a while even Mr. Hubert would give up telling how many more head of niggers and acres of land he would add to what he would give Miss Sophonsiba when she married, and go to bed. And one midnight last summer Uncle Buddy just happened by accident to be awake and hear Mr. Hubert drive out of the lot and by the time he waked them and they got Miss Sophonsiba up and dressed and the team put to the wagon and caught Mr. Hubert, it was almost daylight. So it was always he and Uncle Buck who went to fetch Tomey’s Turl because Uncle Buddy never went anywhere, not even to town and not even to fetch Tomey’s Turl from Mr. Hubert’s, even though they all knew that Uncle Buddy could have risked it ten times as much as Uncle Buck could have dared.
They ate breakfast fast. Uncle Buck put on his necktie while they were running toward the lot to catch the horses. The only time he wore the necktie was on Tomey’s Turl’s account and he hadn’t even had it out of the drawer since that night last summer when Uncle Buddy had waked them in the dark and said, “Get up out of that bed and damn quick.” Uncle Buddy didn’t own a necktie at all; Uncle Buck said Uncle Buddy wouldn’t take that chance even in a section like theirs, where ladies were so damn seldom thank God that a man could ride for days in a straight line without having to dodge a single one. His grandmother (she was Uncle Buck’s and Uncle Buddy’s sister; she had raised him following his mother’s death. That was where he had got his christian name: McCaslin, Carothers McCaslin Edmonds) said that Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy both used the necktie just as another way of daring people to say they looked like twins, because even at sixty they would still fight anyone who claimed he could not tell them apart; whereupon his father had answered that any man who ever played poker once with Uncle Buddy would never mistake him again for Uncle Buck or anybody else.
Jonas had the two horses saddled and waiting. Uncle Buck didn’t mount a horse like he was any sixty years old either, lean and active as a cat, with his round, close-cropped white head and his hard little gray eyes and his white-stubbled jaw, his foot in the iron and the horse already moving, already running at the open gate when Uncle Buck came into the seat. He scrabbled up too, onto the shorter pony, before Jonas could boost him up, clapping the pony with his heels into its own stiff, short-coupled canter, out the gate after Uncle Buck, when Uncle Buddy (he hadn’t even noticed him) stepped out from the gate and caught the bit. “Watch him,” Uncle Buddy said. “Watch Theophilus. The minute anything begins to look wrong, you ride to hell back here and get me. You hear?”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “Lemme go now. I won’t even ketch Uncle Buck, let alone Tomey’s Turl—–”
Uncle Buck was riding Black John, because if they could just catch sight of Tomey’s Turl at least one mile from Mr. Hubert’s gate, Black John would ride him down in two minutes. So when they came out on the long flat about three miles from Mr. Hubert’s, sure enough, there was Tomey’s Turl on the Jake mule about a mile ahead. Uncle Buck flung his arm out and back, reining in, crouched on the big horse, his little round head and his gnarled neck thrust forward like a cooter’s. “Stole away!” he whispered. “You stay back where he won’t see you and flush. I’ll circle him through the woods and we will bay him at the creek ford.”
He waited until Uncle Buck had vanished into the woods. Then he went on. But Tomey’s Turl saw him. He closed in too fast; maybe he was afraid he wouldn’t be there in time to see him when he treed. It was the best race he had ever seen. He had never seen old Jake go that fast, and nobody had ever known Tomey’s Turl to go faster than his natural walk, even riding a mule. Uncle B
uck whooped once from the woods, running on sight, then Black John came out of the trees, driving, soupled out flat and level as a hawk, with Uncle Buck right up behind his ears now and yelling so that they looked exactly like a big black hawk with a sparrow riding it, across the field and over the ditch and across the next field, and he was running too; the mare went out before he even knew she was ready, and he was yelling too. Because, being a nigger, Tomey’s Turl should have jumped down and run for it afoot as soon as he saw them. But he didn’t; maybe Tomey’s Turl had been running off from Uncle Buck for so long that he had even got used to running away like a white man would do it. And it was like he and old Jake had added Tomey’s Turl’s natural walking speed to the best that old Jake had ever done in his life, and it was just exactly enough to beat Uncle Buck to the ford. Because when he and the pony arrived, Black John was blown and lathered and Uncle Buck was down, leading him around in a circle to slow him down, and they could already hear Mr. Hubert’s dinner horn a mile away.
Only, for a while Tomey’s Turl didn’t seem to be at Mr. Hubert’s either. The boy was still sitting on the gatepost, blowing the horn—there was no gate there; just two posts and a nigger boy about his size sitting on one of them, blowing a fox-horn; this was what Miss Sophonsiba was still reminding people was named Warwick even when they had already known for a long time that’s what she aimed to have it called, until when they wouldn’t call it Warwick she wouldn’t even seem to know what they were talking about and it would sound as if she and Mr. Hubert owned two separate plantations covering the same area of ground, one on top of the other. Mr. Hubert was sitting in the springhouse with his boots off and his feet in the water, drinking a toddy. But nobody there had seen Tomey’s Turl; for a time it looked like Mr. Hubert couldn’t even place who Uncle Buck was talking about. “Oh, that nigger,” he said at last. “We’ll find him after dinner.”
Only it didn’t seem as if they were going to eat either. Mr. Hubert and Uncle Buck had a toddy, then Mr. Hubert finally sent to tell the boy on the gatepost he could quit blowing, and he and Uncle Buck had another toddy and Uncle Buck still saying, “I just want my nigger. Then we got to get on back toward home.”
“After dinner,” Mr. Hubert said. “If we don’t start him somewhere around the kitchen, we’ll put the dogs on him. They’ll find him if it’s in the power of mortal Walker dogs to do it.”
But at last a hand began waving a handkerchief or something white through the broken place in an upstairs shutter. They went to the house, crossing the back gallery, Mr. Hubert warning them again, as he always did, to watch out for the rotted floor-board he hadn’t got around to having fixed yet. Then they stood in the hall, until presently there was a jangling and swishing noise and they began to smell the perfume, and Miss Sophonsiba came down the stairs. Her hair was roached under a lace cap; she had on her Sunday dress and beads and a red ribbon around her throat and a little nigger girl carrying her fan and he stood quietly a step behind Uncle Buck, watching her lips until they opened and he could see the roan tooth. He had never known anyone before with a roan tooth and he remembered how one time his grandmother and his father were talking about Uncle Buddy and Uncle Buck and his grandmother said that Miss Sophonsiba had matured into a fine-looking woman once. Maybe she had. He didn’t know. He wasn’t but nine.
“Why, Mister Theophilus,” she said. “And McCaslin,” she said. She had never looked at him and she wasn’t talking to him and he knew it, although he was prepared and balanced to drag his foot when Uncle Buck did. “Welcome to Warwick.”
He and Uncle Buck dragged their foot. “I just come to get my nigger,” Uncle Buck said. “Then we got to get on back home.”
Then Miss Sophonsiba said something about a bumble-bee, but he couldn’t remember that. It was too fast and there was too much of it, the earrings and beads clashing and jingling like little trace chains on a toy mule trotting and the perfume stronger too, like the earrings and beads sprayed it out each time they moved and he watched the roan-colored tooth flick and glint between her lips; something about Uncle Buck was a bee sipping from flower to flower and not staying long anywhere and all that stored sweetness to be wasted on Uncle Buddy’s desert air, calling Uncle Buddy Mister Amodeus like she called Uncle Buck Mister Theophilus, or maybe the honey was being stored up against the advent of a queen and who was the lucky queen and when? “Ma’am?” Uncle Buck said. Then Mr. Hubert said:
“Hah. A buck bee. I reckon that nigger’s going to think he’s a buck hornet, once he lays hands on him. But I reckon what Buck’s thinking about sipping right now is some meat gravy and biscuit and a cup of coffee. And so am I.”
They went into the dining room and ate and Miss Sophonsiba said how seriously now neighbors just a half day’s ride apart ought not to go so long as Uncle Buck did, and Uncle Buck said Yessum, and Miss Sophonsiba said Uncle Buck was just a confirmed roving bachelor from the cradle born and this time Uncle Buck even quit chewing and looked and said, Yes, ma’am, he sure was, and born too late at it to ever change now but at least he could thank God no lady would ever have to suffer the misery of living with him and Uncle Buddy, and Miss Sophonsiba said Ah, that maybe Uncle Buck just ain’t met the woman yet who would not only accept what Uncle Buck was pleased to call misery, but who would make Uncle Buck consider even his freedom a small price to pay, and Uncle Buck said, “Nome. Not yet.”
Then he and Mr. Hubert and Uncle Buck went out to the front gallery and sat down. Mr. Hubert hadn’t even got done taking his shoes off again and inviting Uncle Buck to take his off, when Miss Sophonsiba came out the door carrying a tray with another toddy on it. “Damnit, Sibbey,” Mr. Hubert said. “He’s just et. He don’t want to drink that now.” But Miss Sophonsiba didn’t seem to hear him at all. She stood there, the roan tooth not flicking now but fixed because she wasn’t talking now, handing the toddy to Uncle Buck until after a while she said how her papa always said nothing sweetened a Missippi toddy like the hand of a Missippi lady and would Uncle Buck like to see how she use to sweeten her papa’s toddy for him? She lifted the toddy and took a sip of it and handed it again to Uncle Buck and this time Uncle Buck took it. He dragged his foot again and drank the toddy and said if Mr. Hubert was going to lay down, he would lay down a while too, since from the way things looked Tomey’s Turl was fixing to give them a long hard race unless Mr. Hubert’s dogs were a considerable better than they used to be.
Mr. Hubert and Uncle Buck went into the house. After a while he got up too and went around to the back yard to wait for them. The first thing he saw was Tomey’s Turl’s head slipping along above the lane fence. But when he cut across the yard to turn him, Tomey’s Turl wasn’t even running. He was squatting behind a bush, watching the house, peering around the bush at the back door and the upstairs windows, not whispering exactly but not talking loud either: “Whut they doing now?”
“They’re taking a nap now,” he said. “But never mind that; they’re going to put the dogs on you when they get up.”
“Hah,” Tomey’s Turl said. “And nem you mind that neither. I got protection now. All I needs to do is to keep Old Buck from ketching me unto I gets the word.”
“What word?” he said. “Word from who? Is Mr. Hubert going to buy you from Uncle Buck?”
“Huh,” Tomey’s Turl said again. “I got more protection than whut Mr. Hubert got even.” He rose to his feet. ‘I gonter tell you something to remember: anytime you wants to git something done, from hoeing out a crop to getting married, just get the womenfolks to working at it. Then all you needs to do is set down and wait. You member that.”
Then Tomey’s Turl was gone. And after a while he went back to the house. But there wasn’t anything but the snoring coming out of the room where Uncle Buck and Mr. Hubert were, and some more light-sounding snoring coming from upstairs. He went to the springhouse and sat with his feet in the water as Mr. Hubert had been doing, because soon now it would be cool enough for a race. And sure enough, after a while Mr. Hubert and
Uncle Buck came out onto the back gallery, with Miss Sophonsiba right behind them with the toddy tray only this time Uncle Buck drank his before Miss Sophonsiba had time to sweeten it, and Miss Sophonsiba told them to get back early, that all Uncle Buck knew of Warwick was just dogs and niggers and now that she had him, she wanted to show him her garden that Mr. Hubert and nobody else had any sayso in. “Yessum,” Uncle Buck said. “I just want to catch my nigger. Then we got to get on back home.”
Four or five niggers brought up the three horses. They could already hear the dogs waiting still coupled in the lane, and they mounted and went on down the lane, toward the quarters, with Uncle Buck already out in front of even the dogs. So he never did know just when and where they jumped Tomey’s Turl, whether he flushed out of one of the cabins or not. Uncle Buck was away out in front on Black John and they hadn’t even cast the dogs yet when Uncle Buck roared, “Gone away! I godfrey, he broke cover then!” and Black John’s feet clapped four times like pistol shots while he was gathering to go out, then he and Uncle Buck vanished over the hill like they had run at the blank edge of the world itself. Mr. Hubert was roaring too: “Gone away! Cast them!” and they all piled over the crest of the hill just in time to see Tomey’s Turl away out across the flat, almost to the woods, and the dogs streaking down the hill and out onto the flat. They just tongued once and when they came boiling up around Tomey’s Turl it looked like they were trying to jump up and lick him in the face until even Tomey’s Turl slowed down and he and the dogs all went into the woods together, walking, like they were going home from a rabbit hunt. And when they caught up with Uncle Buck in the woods, there was no Tomey’s Turl and no dogs either, nothing but old Jake about a half an hour later, hitched in a clump of bushes with Tomey’s Turl’s coat tied on him for a saddle and near a half bushel of Mr. Hubert’s oats scattered around on the ground that old Jake never even had enough appetite left to nuzzle up and spit back out again. It wasn’t any race at all.