The Reivers Read Online Free PDF

It was a Winton Flyer. (This was the first one he—we— owned, before the White Steamer which Grandfather traded it for when Grandmother finally decided two years later that she couldn't bear the smell of gasoline at all.) You cranked it by hand while standing in front of it, with no more risk (provided you had remembered to take it out of gear) than a bone or two in your forearm; it had kerosene lamps for night driving and when rain threatened five or six people could readily put up the top and curtains in ten or fifteen minutes, and Grandfather himself equipped it with a kerosene lantern, a new axe and a small coil of barbed wire attached to a light block and tackle for driving beyond the town limits. With which equipment it could—and did once, of which I shall speak presently—go as far as Memphis. Also, all of us, grandparents, parents, aunts, cousins and children, had special costumes for riding in it, consisting of veils, caps, goggles, gauntlet gloves and long shapeless throat-close neutral-colored garments called dusters, of which I shall also speak later.
    By this time Mr Buffaloe had long since taught Boon to operate his homemade one. They couldn't use the streets of Jefferson of course—in fact never again did it cross the line of Mr. Buffaloe's front fence—but there was an area of open land behind his house which in time Mr Buffaloe and Boon had beaten down and (relatively) smoothed into a fair motordrome. So by the time Boon and Mr Wordwin, the cashier in Grandfather's bank (he was a bachelor, one of our most prominent clubmen or men about town; in ten years he had been a groomsman in thirteen weddings), went to Memphis by tram and brought the automobile back (in less than two days this time; a record), Boon was already destined to be the dean of Jefferson motor-car drivers.
    Then, as far as Boon's dream was concerned, my grandfather abolished that automobile. He merely bought it, paid what Boon called a sizable chunk of hard valuable cash for it, looked at it thoroughly and inscrutably once and then eliminated it from circulation. He—Grandfather —couldn't do that completely of course; there was that arrogant decree of Colonel Sartoris's which he—Grandfather—being the senior, could not permit himself to allow to stand, no matter what his own opinion of motor vehicles was. In fact, in this opinion he and Colonel Sartoris were absolutely eye-to-eye; until their deaths (by which time all Yoknapatawpha County's daytime air was odorous with gasoline fumes and its nights, Saturdays especially, filled with the clash of colliding fenders and the squeal of brakes) neither of them would lend a penny to any man they merely suspected was going to buy an automobile with it. Colonel Sartoris's crime was simply in having taken the pas of his senior in a move which they both approved—officially banning automobiles from Jefferson even before they got there. You see? Grandfather bought the automobile not as a defiance of Colonel Sartoris's decree. It was simply a calm and deliberately considered abrogation of it, even if only by weekly token.
    Even before Colonel Sartoris's decree, Grandfather had had Ms carriage and horses moved from his back yard to the livery stable, where they were actually more accessible to Grandmother's telephone call than to her shouts from an upstairs back window, because somebody always answered the telephone at the livery stable. Which Ned, in the kitchen or stable or wherever he happened to be (or was supposed to happen to be when Grandmother wanted him), didn't always. In fact, he was more often nowhere in range of any voice from Grandmother's house since one of them was his wife's. So now we come to Ned. He was Grandfather's coachman. His wife (the one he had then; he had four) was Delphine, Grandmother's cook. At that time he was "Uncle" Ned only to Mother. I mean, she was the one who insisted that all us children—three of us, that is, because Alexander couldn't call anybody