“So Ab was desperate. I can see him now, backed off in a corner behind Cain’s plows and cultivators, with his face white and his voice shaking and his hand shaking so he couldn’t hardly hand me the six bits outen his pocket. ‘Go to Doc Peabody’s,’ he says, ‘and get me a bottle of whiskey. Hurry.’ He was desperate. It wasn’t even quicksand now. It was a whirlpool and him with just one jump left. He drunk that pint of whiskey in two drinks and set the empty bottle down in the corner careful as a egg and we went back to the wagon. The mules was still standing up this time and we loaded the separator in and he eased them away careful, with folks still telling each other it was that team of Stamper’s. Ab’s face was red instead of white now and the sun was gone but I dont think he even noticed it. And we hadn’t et too, and I dont believe he knowed that either. And I be dog if it didn’t seem like Pat Stamper hadn’t moved either, standing there at the gate to his rope stock pen, with that Stetson cocked and his thumbs still hooked in the top of his pants and Ab sitting in the wagon trying to keep his hands from shaking and the team Stamper had swapped him stopped now with their heads down and their legs spraddled and breathing like a sawmill. ‘I come for my team,’ Ab says.
“ ‘What’s the matter?’ Stamper says. ‘Dont tell me these are too lively for you too. They dont look it.’
“ ‘All right,’ Ab says. ‘All right. I got to have my team. I got four dollars. Make your four-dollar profit and give me my team.’
“ ‘I aint got your team,’ Stamper says. ‘I didn’t want that horse neither. I told you that. So I got shut of it.’
“Ab set there for a while. It was cooler now. A breeze had got up and you could smell the rain in it. ‘But you still got my mule,’ Ab says. ‘All right. I’ll take it.’
“ ‘For what?’ Stamper says. ‘You want to swap that team for your mule?’ Because Ab wasn’t trading now. He was desperate, sitting there like he couldn’t even see, with Stamper leaning easy against the gate post and looking at him for a minute. ‘No,’ Stamper says. ‘I dont want them mules. Yours is the best one. I wouldn’t trade that way, even swap.’ He spit, easy and careful. ‘Besides, I done included your mule into another team. With another horse. You want to look at it?’
“ ‘All right,’ Ab says. ‘How much?’
“ ‘Dont you even want to see it first?’ Stamper says.
“ ‘All right,’ Ab says. So the nigger led out Ab’s mule and a horse, a little dark brown horse; I remember how even with it clouded up and no sun, how that horse shined—a horse a little bigger than the one we had traded Stamper, and hog fat. That’s just exactly how it was fat: not like a horse is fat but like a hog: fat right up to its ears and looking tight as a drum; it was so fat it couldn’t hardly walk, putting its feet down like they didn’t have no weight nor feeling in them at all. ‘It’s too fat to last,’ Ab says. ‘It wont even get me home.’
“ ‘That’s what I think myself,’ Stamper says. ‘That’s why I want to get shut of it.’
“ ‘All right,’ Ab says. ‘I’ll have to try it.’ He begun to get outen the wagon.
“ ‘Try it?’ Stamper says. Ab didn’t answer. He got outen the wagon careful and went to the horse, putting his feet down careful and stiff too, like he never had no weight in his feet too, like the horse. It had a hackamore on and Ab taken the rope from the nigger and started to get on the horse. ‘Wait,’ Stamper said. ‘What are you fixing to do?’
“ ‘Going to try it,’ Ab says. ‘I done swapped a horse with you once today.’ Stamper looked at Ab a minute. Then spit again and kind of stepped back.
“ ‘All right, Jim,’ he says to the nigger. ‘Help him up.’ So the nigger holp Ab onto the horse, only the nigger never had time to jump back like Stamper because soon as Ab’s weight come onto the horse it was like Ab had a live wire in his britches. The horse made one swirl, it looked round as a ball, without no more front or back end than a Irish potato. It throwed Ab hard and Ab got up and went back to the horse and Stamper says, ‘Help him up, Jim,’ and the nigger holp Ab up again and the horse slammed him off again and Ab got up with his face just the same and went back and taken the rope again when Stamper stopped him. It was just exactly like Ab wanted that horse to throw him, hard, like the ability of his bones and meat to stand that ere hard ground was all he had left to pay for something with life enough left to get us home. ‘Are you trying to kill yoursel’?’ Stamper says.
“ ‘All right,’ Ab says. ‘How much?’
“ ‘Come into the tent,’ Stamper says.
“So I waited in the wagon. It was beginning to blow a little now, and we hadn’t brought no coats with us. But we had some croker sacks in the wagon Miz Snopes had made us bring along to wrap the separator in and I was wrapping it in the sacks when the nigger come outen the tent and when he lifted up the flap I seen Ab drinking outen the bottle. Then the nigger led up a horse and buggy and Ab and Stamper come outen the tent and Ab come to the wagon, he didn’t look at me, he just lifted the separator outen the sacks and went an put it into the buggy and him and Stamper went and got into it and drove away, back toward town. The nigger was watching me. ‘You fixing to get wet fo you get home,’ he said.
“ ‘I reckon so,’ I said.
“ ‘You want to eat a snack of dinner until they get back?’ he said. ‘I got it on the stove.’
“ ‘I reckon not,’ I said. So he went back into the tent and I waited in the wagon. It was most sholy going to rain, and that soon. I mind how I thought that anyway we would have the croker sacks now to try to keep dry under. Then Ab and Stamper come back and Ab never looked at me that time either. He went back into the tent and I could see him drinking outen the bottle again and this time he put it into his shirt. And then the nigger led our mule and the new horse up and put them in the wagon and Ab come out and got in. Stamper and the nigger both holp him now.
“ ‘Dont you reckon you better let that boy drive?’ Stamper says.
“ ‘I’ll drive,’ Ab says. ‘Maybe I cant swap a horse with you, but by God I can still drive it.’
“ ‘Sho now,’ Stamper says. ‘That horse will surprise you.’
“And it did,” Ratliff said. He laughed, for the first time, quietly, invisible to his hearers though they knew exactly how he would look at the moment as well as if they could see him, easy and relaxed in his chair, with his lean brown pleasant shrewd face, in his faded clean blue shirt, with that same air of perpetual bachelorhood which Jody Varner had, although there was no other resemblance between them and not much here, since in Varner it was a quality of shabby and fustian gallantry where in Ratliff it was that hearty celibacy as of a lay brother in a twelfth-century monastery—a gardener, a pruner of vines, say. “That horse surprised us. The rain, the storm, come up before we had gone a mile and we rode in it for two hours, hunched under the croker sacks and watching that new shiny horse that was so fat it even put its feet down like it couldn’t even feel them, that every now and then, even during the rain, would give a kind of flinching jerk like when Ab’s weight had come down onto its back at Stamper’s camp, until we found a old barn to shelter under. I did, that is, because Ab was laying out in the wagon bed by then, flat on his back with the rain popping him in the face and me on the seat driving now and watching that shiny black horse turning into a bay horse. Because I was just eight then, and me and Ab had done all our horse-trading up and down that lane that run past his lot. So I just drove under the first roof I come to and shaken Ab awake. The rain had cooled him off by then and he waked up sober. And he got a heap soberer fast. ‘What?’ he says. ‘What is it?’
“ ‘The horse!’ I hollered. ‘He’s changing color!’
“He was sober then. We was both outen the wagon then and Ab’s eyes popping and a bay horse standing in the traces where he had went to sleep looking at a black one. He put his hand out like he couldn’t believe it was even a horse and touched it at a spot where the reins must every now and then just barely touched it and as about where his weight h
ad come down on it when he was trying to ride it at Stamper’s, and next I knowed that horse was plunging and swurging. I dodged just as it slammed into the wall behind me; I could even feel the wind in my hair. Then there was a sound like a nail jabbed into a big bicycle tire. It went whishhhhhhhhh and then the rest of that shiny fat black horse we had got from Pat Stamper vanished. I dont mean me and Ab was standing there with just the mule left. We had a horse too. Only it was the same horse we had left home with that morning and that we had swapped Beasley Kemp the sorghum mill and the straight stock for two weeks ago. We even got our fish hook back, with the barb still bent where Ab had bent it and the nigger had just moved it a little. But it wasn’t till next morning that Ab found the bicycle pump valve under its hide just inside the nigh foreshoulder—the one place in the world where a man might own a horse for twenty years and never think to look at it.
“Because we never got home till well after sunup the next day, and my pap was waiting at Ab’s house, considerable mad. So I didn’t stay long, I just had time to see Miz Snopes standing in the door where I reckon she had been setting all night too, saying, ‘Where’s my separator?’ and Ab saying how he had always been a fool about a horse and he couldn’t help it and then Miz Snopes begun to cry. I had been hanging around them a heap by now, but I never had seen her cry before. She looked like the kind of somebody that never had done much crying to speak of nohow, because she cried hard, like she didn’t know just how to do it, like even the tears never knowed just exactly what they was expected to do, standing there in a old wrapper, not even hiding her face, saying, ‘Fool about a horse, yes! But why the horse? why the horse?’
“So me and Pap went on. He had my arm a right smart twisted up in his hand, but when I begun to tell him about what happened yesterday, he changed his mind about licking me. But it was almost noon before I got back down to Ab’s. He was setting on the lot fence and I dumb up and set by him. Only the lot was empty. I couldn’t see his mule nor Beasley’s horse neither. But he never said nothing and I never said nothing, only after a while he said, ‘You done had breakfast?’ and I said I had and he said, ‘I aint et yet.’ So we went to the house then, and sho enough, she was gone. And I could imagine it—Ab setting there on that fence and her coming down the hill in her sunbonnet and shawl and gloves too and going into the stable and saddling the mule and putting the halter on Beasley’s horse and Ab setting there trying to decide whether to go and offer to help her or not.
“So I started the fire in the stove. Ab wasn’t much of a hand at cooking, so by the time he got his breakfast started it was so late we just decided to cook enough for breakfast and dinner too and we et it and I washed the dishes and we went back to the lot. The middle buster was still setting down yonder in the far field, but there wasn’t nothing to pull it with nohow now lessen he walked up to Old Man Anse’s and borrowed a span of mules, which would be just like going up to a rattlesnake and borrowing a rattle: but then, I reckon he felt he had stood all the excitement he could for the rest of that day at least. So we just set on the fence and looked at that empty lot. It never had been a big lot and it would look kind of crowded even with just one horse in it. But now it looked like all Texas; and sho enough, I hadn’t hardly begun to think about how empty it was when he clumb down offen the fence and went across and looked at a shd that was built against the side of the barn and that would be all right if it was just propped up and had a new roof on it. ‘I think next time I will trade for a mare and build me up a brood herd and raise mules,’ he says. ‘This here will do all right for colts with a little fixing up.’ Then he come back and we set on the fence again, and about middle of the afternoon a wagon druv up. It was Cliff Odum, it had the side-boards on it and Miz Snopes was on the seat with Cliff, coming on past the house, toward the lot. ‘She aint got it,’ Ab says. ‘He wouldn’t dicker with her.’ We was behind the barn now and we watched Cliff back his wagon up against a cut bank by the gate and we watched Miz Snopes get out and take off her shawl and gloves and come across the lot and into the cow shed and lead the cow back and up onto the cut bank behind the wagon and Cliff said, ‘You come hold the team. I’ll get her in the wagon.’ But she never even stopped. She faced the cow into the tail gate and got behind it and laid her shoulder against its hams and hove that cow into the wagon before Cliff could have got out. And Cliff put up the tail gate and Miz Snopes put her shawl and gloves back on and they got into the wagon and they went on.
“So I built him another fire to cook his supper and then I had to go home; it was almost sundown then. When I come back the next morning I brung a pail of milk. Ab was in the kitchen, still cooking breakfast. ‘I am glad you thought about that,’ he says when he seen the milk. ‘I was aiming to tell you yesterday to see if you could borrow some.’ He kept on cooking breakfast because he hadn’t expected her that soon, because that would make two twenty-eight-mile trips in not much more than twenty-four hours. But we heard the wagon again and this time when she got out she had the separator. When we got to the barn we could see her toting it into the house. ‘You left that milk where she will see it, didn’t you?’ Ab says.
“ ‘Yes sir,’ I says.
“ ‘Likely she will wait to put on her old wrapper first,’ Ab says. ‘I wish I had started breakfast sooner.’ Only I dont think she even waited that long, because it seemed like we begun to hear it right away. It made a fine high sound, good and strong, like it would separate a gallon of milk in no time. Then it stopped. ‘It’s too bad she aint got but the one gallon,’ Ab says.
“ ‘I can bring her another one in the morning,’ I said. But he wasn’t listening, watching the house.
“ ‘I reckon you can go now and look in the door,’ he says. So I went and did. She was taking Ab’s breakfast offen the stove, onto two plates. I didn’t know she had even seen me till she turned and handed the two plates to me. Her face was all right now, quiet. It was just busy.
“ ‘I reckon you can eat something more too,’ she said. ‘But eat it out yonder. I am going to be busy in here and I dont want you and him in my way.’ So I taken the plates back and we set against the fence and et. And then we heard the separator again. I didn’t know it would go through but one time. I reckon he didn’t neither.
“ ‘I reckon Cain showed her,’ he says, eating. ‘I reckon if she wants it to run through more than once, itwill run through more than once.’ Then it stopped and she come to the door and hollered to us to bring the dishes up so she could wash them and I taken the plates back and set them on the step and me and Ab went back and set on the fence. It looked like it would have held all Texas and Kansas too. ‘I reckon she just rode up to that damn tent and said, Here’s your team. You get my separator and get it quick because I got to catch a ride back home.’, he said. And then we heard it again, and that evening we walked up to Old Man Anse’s to borrow a mule to finish the far piece with, but he never had none to spare now. So as soon as Old Man Anse had finished cussing, we come on back and set on the fence. And sho enough, we could hear the separator start up again. It sounded strong as ever, like it could make the milk fly, like it didn’t give a whoop whether that milk had been separated once or a hundred times. ‘There it goes again,’ Ab says. ‘Dont forget that other gallon tomorrow.’
“ ‘No sir,’ I says. We listened to it. Because he wasn’t curdled then.
“ ‘It looks like she is fixing to get a heap of pleasure and satisfaction outen it,’ he says.”
3
He halted the buckboard and sat for a moment looking down at the same broken gate which Jody Varner had sat the roan horse and looked at nine days ago—the weed-choked and grass-grown yard, the weathered and sagging house—a cluttered desolation filled already, even before he reached the gate and stopped, with the loud flat sound of two female voices. They were young voices, talking not in shouts or screams but with an unhurried profundity of volume the very apparent absence from which of any discernible human speech or language seemed but natural, as if the
sound had been emitted by two enormous birds; as if the aghast and amazed solitude of some inaccessible and empty marsh or desert were being invaded and steadily violated by the constant bickering of the two last survivors of a lost species which had established residence in it—a sound which stopped short off when Ratliff shouted. A moment later the two girls came to the door and stood, big, identical, like two young tremendous cows, looking at him.
“Morning, ladies,” he said. “Where’s your paw?”
They continued to contemplate him. They did not seem to breathe even, though he knew they did, must; bodies of that displacement and that apparently monstrous, that almost oppressive, wellness, would need air and lots of it. He had a fleeting vision of them as the two cows, heifers, standing knee-deep in air as in a stream, a pond, nuzzling into it, the level of the pond fleeing violently and silently to one inhalation, exposing in astounded momentary amaze the teeming lesser subaerial life about the planted feet. Then they spoke exactly together, like a trained chorus: “Down to the field.”
Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion Page 6