re: Midnight sleepy time reading, an ode to Auburn.

7
"Don't you want to ride now?" he whispered. "We kin both ride now," the light within the house altering
now, flaring up and sinking, He's coming down the stairs now, he thought. He had already ridden the mule
up beside the horse block; presently his father was up behind him and he doubled the reins over and
slashed the mule across the neck, but before the animal could begin to trot the hard, thin arm came round
him, the hard, knotted hand jerking the mule back to a walk.
In the first red rays of the sun they were in the lot, putting plow gear on the mules. This time the sorrel
mare was in the lot before he heard it at all, the rider collarless and even bareheaded, trembling,
speaking in a shaking voice as the woman in the house had done, his father merely looking up once
before stooping again to the hame he was buckling, so that the man on the mare spoke to his stooping
back:
"You must realize you have ruined that rug. Wasn't there anybody here, any of your women…" he
ceased, shaking, the boy watching him, the older brother leaning now in the stable door, chewing,
blinking slowly and steadily at nothing apparently. "It cost a hundred dollars. But you never had a hundred
dollars. You never will. So I'm going to charge you twenty bushels of corn against your crop. I'll add it in
your contract and when you come to the commissary you can sign it. That won't keep Mrs. de Spain quiet
but maybe it will teach you to wipe your feet off before you enter her house again."
Then he was gone. The boy looked at his father, who still had not spoken or even looked up again, who
was now adjusting the logger-head in the hame.
"Pap," he said. His father looked at him - the inscrutable face, the shaggy brows beneath which the gray
eyes glinted coldly. Suddenly the boy went toward him, fast, stopping as suddenly. "You done the best
you could!" he cried. "If he wanted hit done different why didn't he wait and tell you how? He won't git no
twenty bushels! He won't git none! We'll gether hit and hide hit! I kin watch…"
"Did you put the cutter back in that straight stock like I told you?"
"No sir," he said.
"Then go do it."
That was Wednesday. During the rest of that week he worked steadily, at what was within his scope and
some which was beyond it, with an industry that did not need to be driven nor even commanded twice; he
had this from his mother, with the difference that some at least of what he did he liked to do, such as
splitting wood with the half-size axe which his mother and aunt had earned, or saved money somehow, to
present him with at Christmas. In company with the two older women (and on one afternoon, even one of
the sisters), he built pens for the shoat and the cow which were a part of his father's contract with the
landlord, and one afternoon, his father being absent, gone somewhere on one of the mules, he went to
the field,
They were running a middle buster now, his brother holding the plow straight while he handled the reins,
and walking beside the straining mule, the rich black soil shearing cool and damp against his bare ankles,
he thought Maybe this is the end of it. Maybe even that twenty bushels that seems hard to have to pay for
just a rug will be a cheap price for him to stop forever and always from being what he used to be; thinking,
dreaming now, so that his brother had to speak sharply to him to mind the mule: Maybe he even won't
collect the twenty bushels. Maybe it will all add up and balance and vanish - corn, rug, fire; the terror and
grief, the being pulled two ways like between two teams of horses - gone, done with for ever and ever.
Then it was Saturday; he looked up from beneath the mule he was harnessing and saw his father in the
black coat and hat. "Not that," his father said. "The wagon gear." And then, two hours later, sitting in the
wagon bed behind his father and brother on the seat, the wagon accomplished a final curve, and he saw
the weathered paintless store with its tattered tobacco and patent-medicine posters and the tethered