Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

by Faulkner, William

  “I was,” Ratliff said. “I went with him that day to get the separator. We lived about a mile from them. My pap and Ab were both renting from Old Man Anse Holland then, and I used to hang around Ab’s barn with him. Because I was a fool about a horse too, same as he was. And he wasn’t curdled then. He was married to his first wife then, the one he got from Jefferson, that one day her pa druv up in a wagon and loaded her and the furniture into it and told Ab that if he ever crossed Whiteleaf Bridge again he would shoot him. They never had no children and I was just turning eight and I would go down to his house almost every morning and stay all day with him, setting on the lot fence with him while the neighbors would come up and look through the fence at whatever it was he had done swapped some more of Old Man Anse’s bobwire or busted farm tools for this time, and Ab lying to just exactly the right amount about how old it was and how much he give for it. He was a fool about a horse; he admitted it, but he wasn’t the kind of a fool about a horse Miz Snopes claimed he was that day when we brought Beasley Kemp’s horse home and turned it into the lot and come up to the house and Ab taken his shoes off on the gallery to cool his feet for dinner and Miz Snopes standing in the door shaking the skillet at him and Ab saying, ‘Now Vynie, now Vynie. I always was a fool about a good horse and you know it and aint a bit of use in you jawing about it. You better thank the Lord that when He give me a eye for horseflesh He give me a little judgment and gumption with it.’

  “Because it wasn’t the horse. It wasn’t the trade. It was a good trade because Ab had just give Beasley a straight stock and a old wore-out sorghum mill of Old Man Anse’s for the horse, and even Miz Snopes had to admit that that was a good swap for anything that could get up and walk from Beasley’s lot to theirn by itself, because like she said while she was shaking the skillet at him, he couldn’t get stung very bad in a horse-trade because he never had nothing of his own that anybody would want to swap even a sorry horse for. And it wasn’t because Ab had left the plow down in the far field where she couldn’t see it from the house and had snuck the wagon out the back way with the plow stock and the sorghum mill in it while she still thought he was in the field. It was like she knowed already what me and Ab didn’t: that Pat Stamper had owned that horse before Beasley got it and that now Ab had done caught the Pat Stamper sickness just from touching it. And maybe she was right. Maybe to himself Ab did call his-self the Pat Stamper of the Holland farm or maybe even of all Beat Four, even if maybe he was fairly sho that Pat Stamper wasn’t going to walk up to that lot fence and challenge him for it. Sho, I reckon while he was setting there on the gallery with his feet cooling and the side-meat plopping and spitting in the kitchen and us waiting to eat it so we could go back down to the lot and set on the fence while the folks would come up and look at what he had brung home this time, I reckon maybe Ab not only knowed as much about horse-trading as Pat Stamper, but he owned head for head of them with Old Man Anse himself. And I reckon while we would be setting there, just moving enough to keep outen the sun, with that empty plow standing in the furrow down in the far field and Miz Snopes watching him outen the back window and saying to herself, ‘Horse-trader! Setting there bragging and lying to a passel of shiftless men with the weeds and morning glories climbing so thick in the cotton and corn I am afraid to tote his dinner down to him for fear of snakes’; I reckon Ab would look at whatever it was he had just traded the mailbox or some more of Old Man Anse’s bob-wire or some of the winter corn for this time, and he would say to his-self, ‘It’s not only mine, but before God it’s the prettiest drove of a horse I ever see.’

  “It was fate. It was like the Lord Himself had decided to buy a horse with Miz Snopes’s separator money. Though I will admit that when He chose Ab He picked out a good quick willing hand to do His trading for Him. The morning we started, Ab hadn’t planned to use Beasley’s horse a-tall because he knowed it probably couldn’t make that twenty-eight-mile trip to Jefferson and back in one day. He aimed to go up to Old Man Anse’s lot and borrow a mule to work with hisn and he would a done it except for Miz Snopes. She kept on taunting him about swapping for a yard ornament, about how if he could just git it to town somehow maybe he could swap it to the livery stable to prop up in front for a sign. So in a way it was Miz Snopes herself that put the idea in Ab’s head of taking Beasley’s horse to town. So when I got there that morning we hitched Beasley’s horse into the wagon with the mule. We had done been feeding it for two-three days now by forced draft, getting it ready to make the trip, and it looked some better now than when we had brung it home. But even yet it didn’t look so good. So Ab decided it was the mule that showed it up, that when it was the only horse or mule in sight it looked pretty good and that it was standing by something else on four legs that done the damage. ‘If it was just some way to hitch the mule under the wagon, so it wouldn’t show but could still pull, and just leave the horse in sight,’ Ab says. Because he wasn’t soured then. But we had done the best we could with it. Ab thought about mixing a right smart of salt in some corn so it would drink a lot of water so some of the ribs wouldn’t show so bad at least, only we knowed it wouldn’t never get to Jefferson then, let alone back home, besides having to stop at every creek and branch to blow it up again. So we done the best we could. That is, we hoped for the best. Ab went to the house and come back in his preacher’s coat (it’s the same one he’s still got; it was Colonel Sartoris’s that Miss Rosa Millard give him, it would be thirty years ago) and that twenty-four dollars and sixty-eight cents Miz Snopes had been saving on for four years now, tied up in a rag, and we started out.

  “We wasn’t even thinking about horse-trading. We was thinking about horse all right, because we was wondering if maybe we wasn’t fixing to come back home that night with Beasley’s horse in the wagon and Ab in the traces with the mule. Yes sir, Ab eased that team outen the lot and on down the road easy and careful as ere a horse and mule ever moved in this world, with me and Ab walking up every hill that tilted enough to run water offen it, and we was aiming to do that right in to Jefferson. It was the weather, the hot day; it was the middle of July. Because here we was about a mile from Whiteleaf store, with Beasley’s horse kind of half walking and half riding on the double tree and Ab’s face looking worrieder and worrieder every time it failed to lift its feet high enough to step, when all of a sudden that horse popped into a sweat. It flung its head up like it had been touched with a hot poker and stepped up into the collar, touching the collar for the first time since the mule had taken the weight of it when Ab shaken out the whip in the lot, and so we come down the hill and up to Whiteleaf store with that horse of Beasley’s eyes rolling white as darning eggs and its mane and tail swirling like a grass fire. And I be dog if it hadn’t not only sweated itself into as pretty a dark blood bay as you ever saw, but even its ribs didn’t seem to show so much. And Ab that had been talking about taking the back road so we wouldn’t have to pass the store at all, setting there on the wagon seat like he would set on the lot fence back home where he knowed he was safe from Pat Stamper, telling Hugh Mitchell and the other fellows on the gallery that that horse come from Kentucky. Hugh Mitchell never even laughed. ‘Sho now,’ he says. ‘I wondered what had become of it. I reckon that’s what taken it so long; Kentucky’s a long walk. Herman Short swapped Pat Stamper a mule and buggy for that horse five years ago and Beasley Kemp give Herman eight dollars for it last summer. What did you give Beasley? Fifty cents?’

  “That’s what did it. It wasn’t what the horse had cost Ab because you might say all it had cost Ab was the straight stock, since in the first place the sorghum mill was wore out and in the second place it wasn’t Ab’s sorghum mill nohow. And it wasn’t the mule and buggy of Herman’s. It was them eight cash dollars of Beasley’s, and not that Ab held them eight dollars against Herman, because Herman had done already invested a mule and buggy in it. And besides, the eight dollars was still in the country and so it didn’t actually matter whether it was Herman or Beasley that had them. It was the fac
t that Pat Stamper, a stranger, had come in and got actual Yoknapatawpha County cash dollars to rattling around loose that way. When a man swaps horse for horse, that’s one thing and let the devil protect him if the devil can. But when cash money starts changing hands, that’s something else. And for a stranger to come in and start that cash money to changing and jumping from one fellow to another, it’s like when a burglar breaks into your house and flings your things ever which way even if he dont take nothing. It makes you twice as mad. So it was not just to unload Beasley Kemp’s horse back onto Pat Stamper. It was to get Beasley Kemp’s eight dollars back outen Pat someway. And that’s what I meant about it was pure fate that had Pat Stamper camped outside Jefferson right by the road we would have to pass on that day we went to get Miz Snopes’s milk separator; camped right there by the road with that nigger magician on the very day when Ab was coming to town with twenty-four dollars and sixty-eight cents in his pocket and the entire honor and pride of the science and pastime of horse-trading in Yoknapatawpha County depending on him to vindicate it.

  “I dont recollect just when and where we found out Pat was in Jefferson that day. It might have been at Whiteleaf store. Or it might have just been that in Ab’s state it was not only right and natural that Ab would have to pass Stamper to get to Jefferson, but it was foreordained and fated that he would have to. So here we come, easing them eight dollars of Beasley Kemp’s up them long hills with Ab and me walking and Beasley’s horse laying into the collar the best it could but with the mule doing most of the pulling and Ab walking on his side of the wagon and cussing Pat Stamper and Herman Short and Beasley Kemp and Hugh Mitchell; and we went down the hills with Ab holding the wagon braked with a sapling pole so it wouldn’t shove Beasley’s horse through the collar and turn it wrong-side-out like a sock, and Ab still cussing Pat Stamper and Herman and Beasley and Mitchell, until we come to the Three Mile Bridge and Ab turned the team outen the road and druv into the bushes and taken the mule out and knotted up one rein so I could ride and give me the quarter and told me to ride for town and get a dime’s worth of saltpeter and a nickel’s worth of tar and a number ten fish hook and hurry back.

  “So we didn’t get into town until after dinner time. We went straight to Pat’s camp and druv in with that horse of Beasley’s laying into the collar now sho enough, with its eyes looking nigh as wild as Ab’s and foaming a little at the mouth where Ab had rubbed the saltpeter into its gums and a couple of as pretty tarred bobwire cuts on its chest as you could want, and another one where Ab had worked that fish hook under its hide where he could touch it by drooping one rein a little, and Pat’s nigger running up to catch the head-stall before the horse run right into the tent where Pat slept and Pat hisself coming out with that ere cream-colored Stetson cocked over one eye and them eyes the color of a new plow point and just about as warm and his thumbs hooked into his waist band. ‘That’s a pretty lively horse you got there,’ he says.

  “‘You damn right,’ Ab says. ‘That’s why I got to get shut of it. Just consider you done already trimmed me and give me something in place of it I can get back home without killing me and this boy both.’ Because that was the right system: to rush right up and say he had to trade instead of hanging back for Pat to persuade him. It had been five years since Pat had seen the horse, so Ab figured that the chance of his recognising it would be about the same as a burglar recognising a dollar watch that happened to get caught for a minute on his vest button five years ago. And Ab wasn’t trying to beat Pat bad. He just wanted to recover that eight dollars’ worth of the honor and pride of Yoknapatawpha County horse-trading, doing it not for profit but for honor. And I believe it worked. I still believe that Ab fooled Pat, and that it was because of what Pat aimed to trade Ab and not because Pat recognised Beasley’s horse, that Pat refused to trade any way except team for team. Or I dont know: maybe Ab was so busy fooling Pat that Pat never had to fool Ab at all. So the nigger led the span of mules out and Pat standing there with his thumbs in his pants-top, watching Ab and chewing tobacco slow and gentle, and Ab standing there with that look on his face that was desperate but not scared yet, because he was realising now he had got in deeper than he aimed to and that he would either have to shut his eyes and bust on through, or back out and quit, get back in the wagon and go on before Beasley’s horse even give up to the fish hook. And then Pat Stamper showed how come he was Pat Stamper. If he had just started in to show Ab what a bargain he was getting, I reckon Ab would have backed out. But Pat didn’t. He fooled Ab just exactly as one first-class burglar would fool another first-class burglar by purely and simply refusing to tell him where the safe was at.

  “‘I already got a good mule,’ Ab says. ‘It’s just the horse I dont want. Trade me a mule for the horse.’

  “‘I dont want no wild horse neither,’ Pat says. ‘Not that I wont trade for anything that walks, provided I can trade my way. But I aint going to trade for that horse alone because I dont want it no more than you do. What I am trading for is that mule. And this here team of mine is matched. I aim to get about three times as much for them as a span as I would selling them single.’

  “‘But you would still have a team to trade with,’ Ab says.

  “‘No,’ Pat says. ‘I aim to get more for them from you than I would if the pair was broken. If it’s a single mule you want, you better try somewhere else.’

  “So Ab looked at the mules again. They looked just exactly right. They didn’t look extra good and they didn’t look extra bad. Neither one of them looked quite as good as Ab’s mule, but the two of them together looked just a little mite better than just one mule of anybody’s. And so he was doomed. He was doomed from the very minute Hugh Mitchell told him about that eight dollars. I reckon Pat Stamper knowed he was doomed the very moment he looked up and seen that nigger holding Beasley’s horse back from running into the tent. I reckon he knowed right then he wouldn’t even have to try to trade Ab: all he would have to do would be just to say No long enough. Because that’s what he done, leaning there against our wagon bed with his thumbs hooked into his pants, chewing his tobacco and watching Ab go through the motions of examining them mules again. And even I knowed that Ab had done traded, that he had done walked out into what he thought was a spring branch and then found out it was quicksand, and that now he knowed he couldn’t even stop long enough to turn back. ‘All right,’ he says. “I’ll take them.’

  “So the nigger put the new team into the harness and we went on to town. And them mules still looked all right. I be dog if I didn’t begin to think that Ab had walked into that Stamper quicksand and then got out again, and when we had got back into the road and beyond sight of Stamper’s tent, Ab’s face begun to look like it would while he would set on the lot fence at home and tell folks how he was a fool about a horse but not a durn fool. It wasn’t easy yet, it was just watchful, setting there and feeling out the new team. We was right at town now and he wouldn’t have much time to feel them out in, but we would have a good chance on the road back home. ‘By God,’ Ab says. ‘If they can walk home at all, I have got that eight dollars back, damn him.’

  “But that nigger was a artist. Because I swear to God them mules looked all right. They looked exactly like two ordinary, not extra good mules you might see in a hundred wagons on the road. I had done realised how they had a kind of jerky way of starting off, first one jerking into the collar and then jerking back and then the other jerking into the collar and then jerking back, and even after we was in the road and the wagon rolling good one of them taken a spell of some sort and snatched hisself crossways in the traces like he aimed to turn around and go back, maybe crawling right across the wagon to do it, but then Stamper had just told us they was a matched team; he never said they had ever worked together as a matched team, and they was a matched team in the sense that neither one of them seemed to have any idea as to just when the other one aimed to start moving. But Ab got them straightened out and we went on, and we was just starting up that big hi
ll onto the Square when they popped into a sweat too, just like Beasley’s horse had done just beyond Whiteleaf. But that was all right, it was hot enough; that was when I first noticed that that rain was coming up; I mind how I was watching a big hot-looking bright cloud over to the southwest and thinking how it was going to rain on us before we got home or to Whiteleaf either, when all of a sudden I realised that the wagon had done stopped going up the hill and was starting down it backwards and I looked around just in time to see both of them mules this time crossways in the traces and kind of glaring at one another across the tongue and Ab trying to straighten them out and glaring too, and then all of a sudden they straightened out and I mind how I was thinking what a good thing it was they was pointed away from the wagon when they straightened out. Because they moved at the same time for the first time in their lives, or for the first time since Ab owned them anyway, and here we come swurging up that hill and into the Square like a roach up a drainpipe, with the wagon on two wheels and Ab sawing at the reins and saying ‘Hell fire, hell fire’ and folks, ladies and children mostly, scattering and screeching and Ab just managed to swing them into the alley behind Cain’s store and stopped them by locking our nigh wheel with another wagon’s and the other team (they was hitched) holp to put the brakes on. So it was a good crowd by then, helping us to get untangled, and Ab led our team over to Cain’s back door and tied them snubbed up close to a post, with folks still coming up and saying, ‘It’s that team of Stamper’s,’ and Ab breathing hard now and looking a right smart less easy in the face and most all-fired watchful. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s get that damn separator and get out of here.’

  “So we went in and give Cain Miz Snopes’s rag and he counted the twenty-four sixty-eight and we got the separator and started back to the wagon, to where we had left it. Because it was still there; the wagon wasn’t the trouble. In fact, it was too much wagon. I mind how I could see the bed and the tops of the wheels where Ab had brought it up close against the loading platform and I could see the folks from the waist up standing in the alley, twice or three times as many of them now, and I was thinking how it was too much wagon and too much folks; it was like one of these here pictures that have printed under them, What’s wrong with this picture? and then Ab begun to say ‘Hell fire, hell fire’ and begun to run, still toting his end of the separator, up to the edge of the platform where we could see under it. The mules was all right too. They was laying down. Ab had snubbed them up pretty close to the same post, with the same line through both bits, and now they looked exactly like two fellows that had done hung themselves in one of these here suicide packs, with their heads snubbed up together and pointing straight up and their tongues hanging out and their eyes popping and their necks stretched about four foot and their legs doubled back under them like shot rabbits until Ab jumped down and cut them down with his pocket knife. A artist. He had give them just exactly to the inch of whatever it was to get them to town and off the Square before it played out.