“How do you know?” one said.
“Do you reckon I’d a got up outen bed and come all the way out here if I hadn’t?” Ratliff said.
“Then you better get in that buckboard right now and go and make yourself sure,” Bookwright said. He was sitting against a gallery post, facing the window at Ratliff’s back. Ratliff looked at him for a moment, pleasant and inscrutable behind his faint constant humorous mask.
“Sho,” he said. “He’s had them goats a good while now. I reckon he’ll be still telling me I can’t do this and must do that for the next six months, not to mention sending me bills for it” — changing the subject so smoothly and completely that, as they realised later, it was as if he had suddenly produced a signboard with Hush in red letters on it, glancing easily and pleasantly upward as Varner and Snopes came out. Snopes did not speak. He went on across the gallery and descended the steps. Varner locked the door. “Ain’t you closing early, Jody?” Ratliff said.
“That depends on what you call late,” Varner said shortly. He went on after the clerk.
“Maybe it is getting toward supper-time,” Ratliff said.
“Then if I was you I’d go eat it and then go and buy my goats,” Bookwright said.
“Sho now,” Ratliff said. “Uncle Ben might have a extra dozen or so by tomorrow. Howsomedever — —” He rose and buttoned the overcoat about him.
“Go buy your goats first,” Bookwright said. Again Ratliff looked at him, pleasant, impenetrable. He looked at the others. None of them were looking at him.
“I figure I can wait,” he said. “Any of you fellows eating at Mrs. Littlejohn’s?” Then he said, “What’s that?” and the others saw what he was looking at — the figure of a grown man but barefoot and in scant faded overalls which would have been about right for a fourteen-year-old boy, passing in the road below the gallery, dragging behind him on a string a wooden block with two snuff tins attached to its upper side, watching over his shoulder with complete absorption the dust it raised. As he passed the gallery he looked up and Ratliff saw the face too — the pale eyes which seemed to have no vision in them at all, the open drooling mouth encircled by a light fuzz of golden virgin beard.
“Another one of them,” Bookwright said, in that harsh short voice. Ratliff watched the creature as it went on — the thick thighs about to burst from the overalls, the mowing head turned backward over its shoulder, watching the dragging block.
“And yet they tell us we was all made in His image,” Ratliff said.
“From some of the things I see here and there, maybe he was,” Bookwright said.
“I don’t know as I would believe that, even if I knowed it was true,” Ratliff said. “You mean he just showed up here one day?”
“Why not?” Bookwright said. “He ain’t the first.”
“Sho,” Ratliff said. “He would have to be somewhere.” The creature, opposite Mrs. Littlejohn’s now, turned in the gate.
“He sleeps in her barn,” another said. “She feeds him. He does some work. She can talk to him somehow.”
“Maybe she’s the one that was then,” Ratliff said. He turned; he still held the end of the stick of candy. He put it into his mouth and wiped his fingers on the skirt of his overcoat. “Well, how about supper?”
“Go buy your goats,” Bookwright said. “Wait till after that to do your eating.”
“I’ll go tomorrow,” Ratliff said. “Maybe by then Uncle Ben will have another fifty of them even.” Or maybe the day after tomorrow, he thought, walking on toward the brazen sound of Mrs. Littlejohn’s supper-bell in the winy chill of the March evening. So he will have plenty of time. Because I believe I done it right. I had to trade not only on what I think he knows about me, but on what he must figure I know about him, as conditioned and restricted by that year of sickness and abstinence from the science and pastime of skullduggery. But it worked with Bookwright. He done all he could to warn me. He went as far and even further than a man can let his self go in another man’s trade.
So tomorrow he not only did not go to see the goat-owner, he drove six miles in the opposite direction and spent the day trying to sell a sewing-machine he did not even have with him. He spent the night there and did not reach the village until midmorning of the second day, halting the buckboard before the store, to one of the gallery posts of which Varner’s roan horse was tied. So he’s even riding the horse now, he thought. Well well well. He did not get out of the buckboard. “One of you fellows mind handing me a nickel’s worth of candy?” he said. “I might have to bribe Uncle Ben through one of his grandchillen.” One of the men entered the store and fetched out the candy. “I’ll be back for dinner,” he said. “Then I’ll be ready for another needy young doc to cut at again.”
His destination was not far: a little under a mile to the river bridge, a little more than a mile beyond it. He drove up to a neat well-kept house with a big barn and pasture beyond it; he saw the goats. A hale burly old man was sitting in his stocking-feet on the veranda, who roared, “Howdy, V. K. What in thunder are you fellows up to over at Varner’s?”
Ratliff did not get out of the buckboard. “So he beat me,” he said.
“Fifty goats,” the other roared. “I’ve heard of a man paying a dime to get shut of two or three, but I never in my life heard of a man buying fifty.”
“He’s smart,” Ratliff said. “If he bought fifty of anything he knowed beforehand he was going to need exactly that many.”
“Yes, he’s smart. But fifty goats. Hell and sulphur. I still got a passel left, bout one hen-house full, say. You want them?”
“No,” Ratliff said. “It was just them first fifty.”
“I’ll give them to you. I’ll even pay you a quarter to get the balance of them outen my pasture.”
“I thank you,” Ratliff said. “Well, I’ll just charge this to social overhead.”
“Fifty goats,” the other said. “Stay and eat dinner.”
“I thank you,” Ratliff said. “I seem to done already wasted too much time eating now. Or sitting down doing something, anyway.” So he returned to the village — that long mile then the short one, the small sturdy team trotting briskly and without synchronisation. The roan horse still stood before the store and the men still sat and squatted about the gallery, but Ratliff did not stop. He went on to Mrs. Littlejohn’s and tied his team to the fence and went and sat on the veranda, where he could see the store. He could smell food cooking in the kitchen behind him and soon the men on the store’s gallery began to rise and disperse, noonward, though the saddled roan still stood there. Yes, he thought, He has passed Jody. A man takes your wife and all you got to do to ease your feelings is to shoot him. But your horse.
Mrs. Littlejohn spoke behind him: “I didn’t know you were back. You going to want some dinner, ain’t you?”
“Yessum,” he said. “I want to step down to the store first. But I won’t be long.” She went back into the house. He took the two notes from his wallet and separated them, putting one into his inside coat pocket, the other into the breast pocket of his shirt, and walked down the road in the March noon, treading the noon-impacted dust, breathing the unbreathing suspension of the meridian, and mounted the steps and crossed the now deserted gallery stained with tobacco and scarred with knives. The store, the interior, was like a cave, dim, cool, smelling of cheese and leather; it needed a moment for his eyes to adjust themselves. Then he saw the grey cap, the white shirt, the minute bow-tie. The face looked up at him, chewing. “You beat me,” Ratliff said. “How much?” The other turned his head and spat into the sand-filled box beneath the cold stove.
“Fifty cents,” he said.
“I paid twenty-five for my contract,” Ratliff said. “All I am to get is seventy-five. I could tear the contract up and save hauling them to town.”
“All right,” Snopes said. “What’ll you give?”
“I’ll trade you this for them,” Ratliff said. He drew the first note from the pocket where he had segregated
it. And he saw it — an instant, a second of a new and completer stillness and immobility touch the blank face, the squat soft figure in the chair behind the desk. For that instant even the jaw had stopped chewing, though it began again almost at once. Snopes took the paper and looked at it. Then he laid it on the desk and turned his head and spat into the sand-box.
“You figure this note is worth fifty goats,” he said. It was not a question, it was a statement.
“Yes,” Ratliff said. “Because there is a message goes with it. Do you want to hear it?”
The other looked at him, chewing. Otherwise he didn’t move, he didn’t even seem to breathe. After a moment he said, “No.” He rose, without haste. “All right,” he said. He took his wallet from his hip and extracted a folded paper and gave it to Ratliff. It was Quick’s bill-of-sale for the fifty goats. “Got a match?” Snopes said. “I don’t smoke.” Ratliff gave him the match and watched him set fire to the note and hold it, blazing, then drop it still blazing into the sand-box and then crush the carbon to dust with his toe. Then he looked up; Ratliff had not moved. And now just for another instant Ratliff believed he saw the jaw stop. “Well?” Snopes said. “What?” Ratliff drew the second note from his pocket. And then he knew that the jaw had stopped chewing. It did not move at all during the full minute while the broad impenetrable face hung suspended like a balloon above the soiled dog-eared paper, front back then front again. The face looked at Ratliff again with no sign of life in it, not even breathing, as if the body which belonged to it had learned somehow to use over and over again its own suspirations. “You want to collect this too,” he said. He handed the note back to Ratliff. “Wait here,” he said. He crossed the room to the rear door and went out. What, Ratliff thought. He followed. The squat reluctant figure was going on, in the sunlight now, toward the fence to the livery lot. There was a gate in it. Ratliff watched Snopes pass through the gate and go on across the lot, toward the barn. Then something black blew in him, a suffocation, a sickness, nausea. They should have told me! he cried to himself. Somebody should have told me! Then, remembering: Why, he did! Bookwright did tell me. He said Another one. It was because I have been sick, was slowed up, that I didn’t —— He was back beside the desk now. He believed he could hear the dragging block long before he knew it was possible, though presently he did hear it as Snopes entered and turned, moving aside, the block thumping against the wooden step and the sill, the hulking figure in the bursting overalls blotting the door, still looking back over its shoulder, entering, the block thumping and scraping across the floor until it caught and lodged behind the counter leg where a three-year-old child would have stooped and lifted it clear though the idiot himself merely stood jerking fruitlessly at the string and beginning a wet whimpering moaning at once pettish and concerned and terrified and amazed until Snopes kicked the block free with his toe. They came on to the desk where Ratliff stood — the mowing and bobbing head, the eyes which at some instant, some second once, had opened upon, been vouchsafed a glimpse of, the Gorgon-face of that primal injustice which man was not intended to look at face to face and had been blasted empty and clean forever of any thought, the slobbering mouth in its mist of soft gold hair. “Say what your name is,” Snopes said. The creature looked at Ratliff, bobbing steadily, drooling. “Say it,” Snopes said, quite patiently. “Your name.”
“Ike H-mope,” the idiot said hoarsely.
“Say it again.”
“Ike H-mope.” Then he began to laugh, though almost at once it stopped being laughing and Ratliff knew that it had never been laughing, cachinnant, sobbing, already beyond the creature’s power to stop it, galloping headlong and dragging breath behind it like something still alive at the galloping heels of a cossack holiday, the eyes above the round mouth fixed and sightless.
“Hush,” Snopes said. “Hush.” At last he took the idiot by the shoulder, shaking him until the sound began to fall, bubbling and gurgling away. Snopes led him toward the door, pushing him on ahead, the other moving obediently, looking backward over his shoulder at the block with its two raked snuff tins dragging at the end of the filthy string, the block about to lodge again behind the same counter leg though this time Snopes kicked it free before it stopped. The hulking shape — the backlooking face with its hanging mouth and pointed faun’s ears, the bursting overalls drawn across the incredible female thighs — blotted the door again and was gone. Snopes closed the door and returned to the desk. He spat again into the sand-box. “That was Isaac Snopes,” he said. “I’m his guardian. Do you want to see the papers?”
Ratliff didn’t answer. He looked down at the note where he had laid it on the desk when he returned from the door, with that same faint, quizzical, quiet expression which his face had worn when he looked at his coffee-cup in the restaurant four days ago. He took up the note, though he did not look at Snopes yet. “So if I pay him his ten dollars myself, you will take charge of it as his guardian. And if I collect the ten dollars from you, you will have the note to sell again. And that will make three times it has been collected. Well well well.” He took another match from his pocket and extended it and the note to Snopes. “I hear tell you said once you never set fire to a piece of money. This here’s your chance to see what it feels like.” He watched the second note burn too and drift, still blazing, onto the stained sand in the box, curling into carbon which vanished in its turn beneath the shoe.
He descended the steps, again into the blaze of noon upon the pocked quiet dust of the road actually it was not ten minutes later. Only thank God men have done learned how to forget quick what they ain’t brave enough to try to cure, he told himself, walking on. The empty road shimmered with mirage, the pollen-wroiled chiaroscuro of spring. Yes, he thought, I reckon I was sicker than I knowed. Because I missed it, missed it clean. Or maybe when I have et I will feel better. Yet, alone in the dining-room where Mrs. Littlejohn had set a plate for him, he could not eat. He could feel what he had thought was appetite ebbing with each mouthful becoming heavy and tasteless as dirt. So at last he pushed the plate aside and onto the table he counted the five dollars profit he had made — the thirty-seven-fifty he would get for the goats, less the twelve-fifty his contract had cost him, plus the twenty of the first note. With a chewed pencil stub he calculated the three years’ interest on the ten-dollar note, plus the principal (that ten dollars would have been his commission on the machine, so it was no actual loss anyway) and added to the five dollars the other bills and coins — the frayed banknotes, the worn coins, the ultimate pennies. Mrs. Littlejohn was in the kitchen, where she cooked what meals she sold and washed the dishes too, as well as caring for the rooms in which they slept who ate them. He put the money on the table beside the sink. “That what’s-his-name, Ike. Isaac. They tell me you feed him some. He don’t need money. But maybe — —”
“Yes,” she said. She dried her hands on her apron and took the money and folded the bills carefully about the silver and stood holding it. She didn’t count it. “I’ll keep it for him. Don’t you worry. You going on to town now?”
“Yes,” he said. “I got to get busy. No telling when I will run into another starving and eager young fellow that ain’t got no way to get money but to cut meat for it.” He turned, then paused again, not quite looking back at her, with that faint quizzical expression on his face that was smiling now, sardonic, humorous. “I got a message I would like to get to Will Varner. But it don’t matter especially.”
“I’ll give it to him,” Mrs. Littlejohn said. “If it ain’t too long I will remember it.”
“It don’t matter,” Ratliff said. “But if you happen to think of it. Just tell him Ratliff says it ain’t been proved yet neither. He’ll know what it means.”
“I’ll try to remember it,” she said.
He went out to the buckboard and got into it. He would not need the overcoat now, and next time he would not even have to bring it along. The road began to flow beneath the flickering hooves of the small hickory-tough horses. I just n
ever went far enough, he thought. I quit too soon. I went as far as one Snopes will set fire to another Snopeses barn and both Snopeses know it, and that was all right. But I stopped there. I never went on to where that first Snopes will turn around and stomp the fire out so he can sue that second Snopes for the reward and both Snopeses know that too.
3
Those who watched the clerk now saw, not the petty dispossession of a blacksmith, but the usurpation of an heirship. At the next harvest the clerk not only presided at the gin scales but when the yearly settling of accounts between Varner and his tenants and debtors occurred, Will Varner himself was not even present. It was Snopes who did what Varner had never even permitted his son to do — sat alone at the desk with the cash from the sold crops and the accountbooks before him and cast up the accounts and charged them off and apportioned to each tenant his share of the remaining money, one or two of them challenging his figures as they had when he first entered the store, on principle perhaps, the clerk not even listening, just waiting in his soiled white shirt and the minute tie, with his steady thrusting tobacco and his opaque still eyes which they never knew whether or not were looking at them, until they would finish cease; then, without speaking a word, taking pencil and paper and proving to them that they were wrong. Now it was not Jody Varner who would come leisurely to the store and give the clerk directions and instructions and leave him to carry them out; it was the ex-clerk who would enter the store, mounting the steps and jerking his head at the men on the gallery exactly as Will Varner himself would do, and enter the store, from which presently the sound of his voice would come, speaking with matter-of-fact succinctness to the bull-goaded bafflement of the man who once had been his employer and who still seemed not to know just exactly what had happened to him. Then Snopes would depart, to be seen no more that day, for Will Varner’s old fat white horse had a companion now. It was the roan which Jody had used to ride, the white and the roan now tied side by side to the same fence while Varner and Snopes examined fields of cotton and corn or herds of cattle or land boundaries, Varner cheerful as a cricket and shrewd and bowelless as a tax-collector, idle and busy and Rabelaisian; the other chewing his steady tobacco, his hands in the pockets of the disreputable bagging grey trousers, spitting now and then his contemplative bullet-like globules of chocolate saliva. One morning he came to the village carrying a brand-new straw suitcase. That evening he carried it up to Varner’s house. A month after that Varner bought a new runabout buggy with bright red wheels and a fringed parasol top, which, the fat white horse and the big roan in new brass-studded harness and the wheels glinting in vermilion and spokeless blurs, swept all day long along back country roads and lanes while Varner and Snopes sat side by side in outrageous paradox above a spurting cloud of light dust, in a speeding aura of constant and invincible excursion. And one afternoon in that same summer Ratliff again drove up to the store, on the gallery of which was a face which he did not recognise for a moment because he had only seen it once before and that two years ago, though only for a moment, for almost at once he said, “Howdy. Machine still running good?” and sat looking with an expression quite pleasant and absolutely impenetrable at the fierce intractable face with its single eyebrow, thinking Fox? cat? oh yes, mink.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 322