Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

by Faulkner, William

  Sho now, he thought, moving on: Doing what? Because he did not believe that the Ab Snopes he had known would have more than two mules. And one of these he had already seen standing idle in the lot beyond the house; and the other he knew to be tied at this moment to a tree behind Varner’s store eight miles away, because only three hours ago he had left it there, tied where for six days now he had watched Varner’s new clerk ride up each morning and tie it. For an instant he actually halted the buckboard again. By God, he thought quietly, This would be exactly the chance he must have been waiting on for twenty-three years now to get hisself that new un-Stampered start. So when he came in sight of the field and recognised the stiff, harsh, undersized figure behind a plow drawn by two mules, he was not even surprised. He did not wait until he had actually recognised the mules to be a pair which until a week ago at least had belonged to Will Varner: he merely changed the tense of the possessing verb: Not had belonged, he thought. They still do. By God, he has done even better than that. He aint even trading horses now. He has done swapped a man for a span of them.

  He halted the buckboard at the fence. The plow had reached the far end of the field. The man turned the team, their heads tossing and yawing, their stride breaking as he sawed them about with absolutely needless violence. Ratliff watched soberly. Just like always, he thought. He still handles a horse or a mule like it had done already threatened him with its fist before he even spoke to it. He knew that Snopes had seen and even recognised him too, though there was no sign of it, the team straightened out now and returning, the delicate mule-legs and narrow deer-like feet picking up swiftly and nervously, the earth shearing dark and rich from the polished blade of the plow. Now Ratliff could even see Snopes looking directly at him—the cold glints beneath the shaggy ill-tempered brows as he remembered them even after eight years, the brows only a little grayer now—though once more the other merely swung the team about with that senseless savageness, canting the plow onto its side as he stopped it. “What you doing here?” he said.

  “Just heard you were here and stopped by,” Ratliff said “It’s been a while, aint it? Eight years.”

  The other grunted. “It dont show on you, though. You still look like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.”

  “Sho now,” Ratliff said. “Speaking of mouths.” He reached beneath the seat cushion and produced a pint bottle filled apparently with water. “Some of McCallum’s best,” he said. “Just run off last week. Here.” He extended the bottle. The other came to the fence. Although they were now not five feet apart, still all that Ratliff could see were the two glints beneath the fierce overhang of brow.

  “You brought it to me?”

  “Sholy,” Ratliff said. “Take it.”

  The other did not move. “What for?”

  “Nothing,” Ratliff said. “I just brought it. Try a sup of it. It’s good.”

  The other took the bottle. Then Ratliff knew that something had gone out of the eyes. Or maybe they were just not looking at him now. “I’ll wait till tonight,” Snopes said. “I dont drink in the sun any more.”

  “How about in the rain?” Ratliff said. And then he knew that Snopes was not looking at him, although the other had not moved, no change in the harsh knotted violent face as he stood holding the bottle. “You ought to settle down pretty good here,” Ratliff said. “You got a good farm now, and Flem seems to taken hold in the store like he was raised store-keeping.” Now the other did not seem to be listening either. He shook the bottle and raised it to the light as though testing the bead. “I hope you will,” Ratliff said.

  Then he saw the eyes again, fierce and intractable and cold. “What’s it to you if I do or dont?”

  “Nothing,” Ratliff said, pleasantly, quietly. Snopes stooped and hid the bottle in the weeds beside the fence and returned to the plow and raised it.

  “Go on to the house and tell them to give you some dinner,” he said.

  “I reckon not,” Ratliff said. “I got to get on to town.”

  “Suit yourself,” the other said. He looped the single rein about his neck and gave another savage yank on the inside line; again the team swung with yawing heads, already breaking stride even before they had come into motion. “Much obliged for the bottle,” he said.

  “Sho now,” Ratliff said. The plow went on. Ratliff watched it. He never said, Come back again, he thought. He lifted his own reins. “Come up, rabbits,” he said. “Let’s hit for town.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  On the Monday morning when Flem Snopes came to clerk in Varner’s store, he wore a brand-new white shirt. It had not even been laundered yet; the creases where the cloth had lain bolted on a shelf, and the sun-browned streaks repeated zebra-like on each successive fold, were still apparent. And not only the women who came to look at him, but Ratliff himself (he did not sell sewing machines for nothing. He had even learned to operate one quite well from demonstrating them, and it was even told of him that he made himself the blue shirts which he wore) knew that the shirt had been cut and stitched by hand and by a stiff and unaccustomed hand too. He wore it all that week. By Saturday night it was soiled, but on the following Monday he appeared in a second one exactly like it, even to the zebra-stripes. By the second Saturday night that one was soiled too, in exactly the same places as the other. It was as though its wearer, entering though he had into a new life and milieu already channelled to compulsions and customs fixed long before his advent, had nevertheless established in it even on that first day his own particular soiling groove.

  He rode up on a gaunt mule, on a saddle which was recognised at once as belonging to the Varners, with a tin pail tied to it. He hitched the mule to a tree behind the store and untied the pail and came and mounted to the gallery, where already a dozen men, Ratliff among them, lounged. He did not speak. If he ever looked at them individually, that one did not discern it—a thick squat soft man of no establishable age between twenty and thirty, with a broad still face containing a tight seam of mouth stained slightly at the corners with tobacco, and eyes the color of stagnant water, and projecting from among the other features in startling and sudden paradox, a tiny predatory nose like the beak of a small hawk. It was as though the original nose had been left off by the original designer or craftsman and the unfinished job taken over by someone of a radically different school or perhaps by some viciously maniacal humorist or perhaps by one who had had only time to clap into the center of the face a frantic and desperate warning.

  He entered the store, carrying the pail, and Ratliff and his companions sat and squatted about the gallery all that day and watched not only the village proper but all the countryside within walking distance come up singly and in pairs and in groups, men women and children, to make trivial purchases and look at the new clerk and go away. They came not belligerently but completely wary, almost decorous, like half-wild cattle following word of the advent of a strange beast upon their range, to buy flour and patent medicine and plow lines and tobacco and look at the man whose name a week ago they had never heard, yet with whom in the future they would have to deal for the necessities of living, and then depart as quietly as they had come. About nine o’clock Jody Varner rode up on his roan saddle horse and entered the store. They could hear the bass murmur of his voice inside, though for all the answer he got he might have been talking to himself. He came out at noon and mounted and rode away, though the clerk did not follow him. But they had known anyway what the tin pail would contain, and they began to disperse noonward too, looking into the store as they passed the door, seeing nothing. If the clerk was eating his lunch, he had hidden to do it. Ratliff was back on the gallery before one o’clock, since he had had to walk only a hundred yards for his dinner. But the others were not long after him, and for the rest of that day they sat and squatted, talking quietly now and then about nothing at all, while the rest of the people within walking distance came and bought in nickels and dimes and went away.

  By the end of that first week t
hey had all come in and seen him, not only all those who in future would have to deal through him for food and supplies but some who had never traded with the Varners and never would—the men, the women, the children—the infants who had never before crossed the doorsteps beyond which they had been born, the sick and the aged who otherwise might never have crossed them but once more—coming on horses and mules and by wagonsful. Ratliff was still there, the buckboard still containing the music box and the set of virgin harrow teeth standing, a plank propping its tongue and the sturdy mismatched team growing vicious with idleness, in Mrs Littlejohn’s lot, watching each morning as the clerk would ride up on the mule, on the borrowed saddle, in the new white shirt growing gradually and steadily a little more and more soiled with each sunset, with the tin pail of lunch which no man had ever yet seen him eating, and hitch the mule and unlock the store with the key which they had not quite expected him to have in his possession for a few days yet at least. After the first day or so he would even have the store open when Ratliff and the others arrived. Jody Varner would appear on the horse about nine o’clock and mount the steps and jerk his head bluffly at them and enter the store, though after the first morning he remained only about fifteen minutes. If Ratliff and his companions had hoped to divine any hidden undercurrent or secret spark between the younger Varner and the clerk, they were disappointed. There would be the heavy bass matter-of-fact murmur, still talking apparently to itself for all the audible answer it ever got, then he and the clerk would come to the door and stand in it while Varner finished his instructions and sucked his teeth and departed; when they looked toward the door, it would be empty.

  Then at last, on Friday afternoon, Will Varner himself appeared. Perhaps it was for this Ratliff and his companions had been waiting. But if it was, it was doubtless not Ratliff but the others who even hoped that anything would divulge here. So it was verylikely Ratliff alone who was not surprised, since what did divulge was the obverse of what they might have hoped for; it was not the clerk who now discovered at last whom he was working for, but Will Varner who discovered who was working for him. He came up on the old fat white horse. A young man squatting on the top step rose and descended and took the reins and tied the horse and Varner got down and mounted the steps, speaking cheerily to their deferential murmur, to Ratliff by name: “Hell fire, aint you gone back to work yet?” Two more of them vacated the knife-gnawed wooden bench, but Varner did not approach it at once. Instead, he paused in front of the open door in almost exactly the same attitude of the people themselves, lean, his neck craned a little like a turkey as he looked into the store, though only for an instant because almost at once he shouted, “You there. What’s your name? Flem. Bring me a plug of my tobacco. Jody showed you where he keeps it.” He came and approached the group, two of whom vacated the knife-gnawed wooden bench for him, and he sat down and took out his knife and had already begun his smoking-car story in his cheerful drawling bishop’s voice when the clerk (Ratliff had not heard his feet at all) appeared at his elbow with the tobacco. Still talking, Varner took the plug and cut off a chew and shut the knife with his thumb and straightened his leg to put the knife back into his pocket, when he stopped talking and looked sharply upward. The clerk was still standing at his elbow. “Hey?” Varner said. “What?”

  “You aint paid for it,” the clerk said. For an instant Varner did not move at all, his leg still extended, the plug and the severed chew in one hand and the knife in the other just about to enter his pocket. None of them moved in fact, looking quietly and attentively at their hands or at wherever their eyes had been when Varner interrupted himself. “The tobacco,” the clerk said.

  “Oh,” Varner said. He put the knife into his pocket and drew from his hip a leather purse about the size and shape and color of an eggplant and took a nickel from it and gave it to the clerk. Ratliff had not heard the clerk come out and he did not hear him return. Now he saw why. The clerk wore also a new pair of rubber-soled tennis shoes. “Where was I?” Varner said.

  “The fellow had just begun to unbutton his overhalls,” Ratliff said mildly.

  The next day Ratliff departed. He was put into motion not by the compulsion of food, earning it. He could have passed from table to table in that country for six months without once putting his hand into his pocket. He was moved by his itinerary, his established and nurtured round of newsmongering, the pleasure of retailing it, not the least nor stalest of which present stock he had spent the last two weeks actually watching. It was five months before he saw the village again. His route embraced four counties. It was absolutely rigid, flexible only within itself. In ten years he had not once crossed the boundaries of these four, yet one day in this summer he found himself in Tennessee. He found himself not only on foreign soil but shut away from his native state by a golden barrier, a wall of neatly accumulating minted coins.

  During the spring and summer he had done a little too well. He had oversold himself, selling and delivering the machines on notes against the coming harvest, employing what money he collected or sold the exchanged articles for which he accepted as down-payments, to make his own down-payments to the Memphis wholesaler on still other machines, which he delivered in turn on new notes, countersigning them, until one day he discovered that he had almost sold himself insolvent on his own bull market. The wholesaler made demand upon him for his (the wholesaler’s) half of the outstanding twenty-dollar notes. Ratliff in his turn made a swift canvass of his own debtors. He was affable, bland, anecdotal and apparently unhurried as ever but he combed them thoroughly, not to be denied, although the cotton had just begun to bloom and it would be months yet before there would be any money in the land. He collected a few dollars, a set of used wagon harness, eight White Leghorn hens. He owed the wholesaler $120.00. He called on the twelfth customer, a distant kinsman, and found that he had departed a week ago with a string of mules to sell at the mule curb-market at Columbia, Tennessee.

  He followed at once in the buckboard, with the wagon harness and the hens. He not only saw a chance to collect his note, provided he got there before someone sold the kinsman some mules in his own turn, but he might even borrow enough to appease the wholesaler. He reached Columbia four days later, where, after the first amazed moment or so, he looked about him with something of the happy surmise of the first white hunter blundering into the idyllic solitude of a virgin African vale teeming with ivory, his for the mere shooting and fetching out. He sold a machine to the man whom he asked the whereabouts of his cousin, he went with the kinsman to pass the night at the home of the kinsman’s wife’s cousin ten miles from Columbia and sold a machine there. He sold three in the first four days; he remained a month and sold eight in all, collecting $80.00 in down-payments, with the $80.00 and the wagon harness and the eight hens he bought a mule, took the mule to Memphis and sold it at curb auction for $135.00, gave the wholesaler $120.00 and the new notes for a quit-claim on the old ones in Mississippi, and reached home at gathering-time with $2.53 in cash and full title to the twelve twenty-dollar notes which would be paid as the cotton was ginned and sold.

  When he reached Frenchman’s Bend in November, it had returned to normal. It had acquiesced to the clerk’s presence even if it had not accepted him, though the Varners seemed to have done both. Jody had used to be in the store at some time during the day and not far from it at any time. Ratliff now discovered that for months he had been in the habit of sometimes not appearing at all, customers who had traded there for years, mostly serving themselves and putting the correct change into the cigar box inside the cheese cage, now having to deal for each trivial item with a man whose name they had not even heard two months ago, who answered Yes and No to direct questions and who apparently never looked directly or long enough at any face to remember the name which went with it, yet who never made mistakes in any matter pertaining to money. Jody Varner had made them constantly. They were usually in his own favor to be sure, letting a customer get away with a spool of thread or a tin of snuff now
and then, but getting it back sooner or later. They had come to expect mistakes of him, just as they knew he would correct them when caught with a bluff, hearty amiability, making a joke of it, which sometimes left the customer wondering just a little about the rest of the bill. But they expected this too, because he would give them credit for food and plow-gear when they needed it, long credit, though they knew they would pay interest for that which on its face looked like generosity and openhandedness, whether that interest showed in the final discharge or not. But the clerk never made mistakes.

  “Nonsense,” Ratliff said. “Somebody’s bound to catch him sooner or later. There aint a man, woman or child in twenty-five miles that dont know what’s in that store and what it cost as well as Will or Jody Varner either.”

  “Hah,” the other said—a sturdy short-legged black-browed ready-faced man named Odum Bookwright. “That’s it.”

  “You mean aint nobody ever caught him once even?”

  “No,” Bookwright said. “And folks dont like it. Otherwise, how can you tell?”

  “Sho,” Ratliff said. “How can you?”

  “There was that credit business too,” another said—a lank man with a bulging dreamy scant-haired head and pale myopic eyes named Quick, who operated a sawmill. He told about it: how they had discovered almost at once that the clerk did not want to credit anyone with anything. He finally flatly refused further credit to a man who had been into and out of the store’s debt at least once a year for the last fifteen, and how that afternoon Will Varner himself came galloping up on the old fat grumble-gutted white horse and stormed into the store, shouting loud enough to be heard in the blacksmith shop across the road: “Who in hell’s store do you think this is, anyway?”