She would enter the stores and command objects from the shelves and showcases exactly as she commanded that two hundred dollar headstone from Judge Benbow, and walk out of the store with them — and with the same aberrant cunning which would not wash the dishes and napkins from the baskets she declined to have any discussion of her affairs with Benbow since she must have known that the sums which she had received from him must have years ago over-balanced (he, Benbow, had in his office a portfolio, a fat one, with Estate of Goodhue Coldfield. Private written across it in indelible ink. After the Judge died his son Percy opened it. It was filed with racing forms and cancelled betting tickets on horses whose very bones were no man knew where now, which had won and lost races on the Memphis track forty years ago, and a ledger, a careful tabulation in the Judge's hand, each entry indicating the date and the horse's name and his wager and whether he won or lost; and another one showing how for forty years he had put each winning and an amount equal to each loss, to that mythical account) whatever the store had brought.
But you were not listening, because you knew it all already, had learned, absorbed it already without the medium of speech somehow from having been born and living beside it, with it, as children will and do: so that what your father was saying did not tell you anything so much as it struck, word by word, the resonant strings of remembering.
You had been here before, seen these graves more than once in the rambling expeditions of boyhood whose aim was more than the mere hunting of game, just as you had seen the old house too, been familiar with how it would look before you even saw it, became large enough to go out there one day with four or five other boys of your size and age and dare one another to evoke the ghost, since it would have to be haunted, could not but be haunted although it had stood there empty and unthreatening for twenty-six years and nobody to meet or report any ghost, until the wagon full of strangers moving from Arkansas tried to stop and spend the night in it and something happened before they could begin to unload the wagon even. What it was they did not or could not or would not tell but it had them back in the wagon, and the mules going back down the drive at a gallop, all in about ten minutes, not to stop until they reached Jefferson. You have seen the rotting shell of the house with its sagging portico and scaling walls, its sagging blinds and plank-shuttered windows, set in the middle of the domain which had reverted to the state and had been bought and sold and bought and sold again and again and again. No, you were not listening; you didn't have to: then the dogs stirred, rose; you looked up and sure enough, just as your father had said he would, Luster had halted the mule and the two horses in the rain about fifty yards from the cedars, sitting there with his knees drawn up under the towsack and enclosed by the cloudy vapor of the streaming animals as though he were looking at you and your father out of some lugubrious and painless purgatory.
"Come on in out of the rain, Luster," your father said. "I won't let the old Colonel hurt you" — "Yawl come on and less go home," Luster said. "Aint no more hunting today"
"We'll get wet," your father said.
