“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 clumb 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 ain’t 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 shed 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 ain’t 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 cowshed 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 see 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 don’t 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 ain’t 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 don’t 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, it will 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. ‘Don’t 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.”
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 t
o get his self that new un-Stampered start. So when he came in sight of the field and recognised the stiff, harsh, undersized figure behind a plough 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 ain’t even trading horses now. He has done swapped a man for a span of them.
He halted the buckboard at the fence. The plough 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 plough. 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 greyer now — though once more the other merely swung the team about with that senseless savageness, canting the plough 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, ain’t it? Eight years.”
The other grunted. “It don’t 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 don’t 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 storekeeping.” 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 don’t?”
“Nothing,” Ratliff said, pleasantly, quietly. Snopes stooped and hid the bottle in the weeds beside the fence and returned to the plough 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 plough 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 colour 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 centre 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 plough-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 they 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 grow
ing 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 very likely 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, ain’t 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?”
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 318