Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

by Faulkner, William

  “Be durn if you dont look like you aint been to bed in a week, V. K.,” Freeman said. “What you up to now? Lon Quick said his boy seen your team and buckboard hid out in the bottom below Armstid’s two mornings ago, but I told him I didn’t reckon them horses had done nothing to have to hide from. So it must be you.”

  “I reckon not,” Ratliff said. “Or I’d a been caught too, same as the team. I used to think I was too smart to be caught by anybody around here. But I dont know now.” He looked at Grimm, his face, except for the sleeplessness and fatigue, as bland and quizzical and impenetrable as ever. “Eustace,” he said, “you’re strayed.”

  “It looks like it,” Grimm said. “I come to see——”

  “He’s paid his road-tax,” Lump Snopes, the clerk, sitting as usual in the single chair tilted in the doorway, said. “Do you object to him using Yoknapatawpha roads too?”

  “Sholy not,” Ratliff said. “And if he’d a just paid his poll-tax in the right place, he could drive his wagon through the store and through Will Varner’s house too.” They guffawed, all except Lump.

  “Maybe I will yet,” Grimm said. “I come up here to see—” He ceased, looking up at Ratliff. He was perfectly motionless, squatting, a sliver of wood in one hand and his open and arrested knife in the other. Ratliff watched him.

  “Couldn’t you see him last night either?” he said.

  “Couldn’t I see who last night?” Grimm said.

  “How could he have seen anybody in Frenchman’s Bend last night when he wasn’t in Frenchman’s Bend last night?” Lump Snopes said. “Go on to the house, Eustace,” he said. “Dinner’s about ready. I’ll be along in a few minutes.”

  “I got—” Grimm said.

  “You got twelve miles to drive to get home tonight,” Snopes said. “Go on, now.” Grimm looked at him a moment longer. Then he rose and descended the steps and went on up the road. Ratliff was no longer watching him. He was looking at Snopes.

  “Eustace eating with you during his visit?” he said.

  “He happens to be eating at Winterbottom’s where I happen to be boarding,” Snopes said harshly. “Where a few other folks happens to be eating and paying board too.”

  “Sho now,” Ratliff said. “You hadn’t ought to druv him away like that. Likely Eustace dont get to town very often to spend a day or two examining the country and setting around store.”

  “He’ll have his feet under his own table tonight,” Snopes said. “You can go down there and look at him. Then you can be in his back yard even before he opens his mouth.”

  “Sho now,” Ratliff said, pleasant, bland, inscrutable, with his spent and sleepless face. “When you expecting Flem back?”

  “Back from where?” Snopes said, in that harsh voice. “From laying up yonder in that barrel-slat hammock, taking time about with Will Varner, sleeping? Likely never.”

  “Him and Will and the womenfolks was in Jefferson yesterday,” Freeman said. “Will said they was coming home this morning.”

  “Sho now,” Ratliff said. “Sometimes it takes a man even longer than a year to get his new wife out of the idea that money was just made to shop with.” He stood above them, leaning against a gallery post, indolent and easy, as if he had not ever even heard of haste. So Flem Snopes has been in Jefferson since yesterday, he thought. And Lump Snopes didn’t want it mentioned. And Eustace Grimm—again his mind clicked; still it would be three days before he would know what had clicked, because now he believed he did know, that he saw the pattern complete—and Eustace Grimm has been here since last night, since we heard that galloping horse anyway. Maybe they was both on the horse. Maybe that’s why it sounded so loud. He could see that too—Lump Snopes and Grimm on the single horse, fleeing, galloping in the dark back to Frenchman’s Bend where Flem Snopes would still be absent until sometime in the early afternoon. And Lump Snopes didn’t want that mentioned either, he thought, and Eustace Grimm had to be sent home to keep folks from talking to him. And Lump Snopes aint just worried and mad: he’s scared. They might even have found the hidden buckboard. They probably had, and so knew at least one of those who were digging in the garden; now Snopes would not only have to get hold of his cousin first through his agent, Grimm, he might even then become involved in a bidding contest for the place against someone who (Ratliff added this without vanity) had more to outbid him with; he thought, musing, amazed as always though still impenetrable, how even a Snopes was not safe from another Snopes. Damn quick, he thought. He stood away from the post and turned back toward the steps. “I reckon I’ll get along,” he said. “See you boys tomorrow.”

  “Come home with me and take dinner,” Freeman said.

  “Much obliged,” Ratliff said. “I ate breakfast late at Bookwright’s. I want to collect a machine note from Ike McCaslin this afternoon and be back here by dark.” He got into the buckboard and turned the team back down the road. Presently they had fallen into their road gait, trotting rapidly on their short legs in the traces though their forward motion was not actually fast, on until they had passed Varner’s house, beyond which the road turned off to McCaslin’s farm and so out of sight from the store. They entered this road galloping, the dust bursting from their shaggy backs in long spurts where the whip slashed them. He had three miles to go. After the first half mile it would be all winding and little-used lane, but he could do it in twenty minutes. And it was only a little after noon, and it had probably been at least nine o’clock before Will Varner got his wife away from the Jefferson church-ladies’ auxiliary with which she was affiliated. He made it in nineteen minutes, hurtling and bouncing among the ruts ahead of his spinning dust, and slowed the now-lathered team and swung them into the Jefferson highroad a mile from the village, letting them trot for another half mile, slowing, to cool them out gradually. But there was no sign of the surrey yet, so he went on at a walk until he reached a crest from which he could see the road for some distance ahead, and pulled out of the road into the shade of a tree and stopped. Now he had had no dinner either. But he was not quite hungry, and although after he had put the old man out and turned back toward the village this morning he had had an almost irresistible desire to sleep, that was gone too now. So he sat in the buckboard, lax now, blinking painfully against the glare of noon, while the team (he never used check-reins) nudged the lines slack and grazed over the breast-yoke. People would probably pass and see him there; some might even be going toward the village, where they might tell of seeing him. But he would take care of that when it arose. It was as though he said to himself, Now I got a little while at least when I can let down.

  Then he saw the surrey. He was already in the road, going at that road-gait which the whole countryside knew, full of rapid little hooves which still did not advance a great deal faster than two big horses could have walked, before anyone in the surrey could have seen him. And he knew that they had already seen and recognised him when, still two hundred yards from it, he pulled up and sat in the buckboard, affable, bland and serene except for his worn face, until Varner stopped the surrey beside him. “Howdy, V.K.,” Varner said.

  “Morning,” Ratliff said. He raised his hat to the two women in the back seat. “Mrs Varner. Mrs Snopes.”

  “Where you headed?” Varner said. “Town?” Ratliff told no lie; he attempted none, smiling a little, courteous, perhaps even a little deferential.

  “I come out to meet you. I want to speak to Flem a minute.” He looked at Snopes for the first time. “I’ll drive you on home,” he said.

  “Hah,” Varner said. “You had to come two miles to meet him and then turn around and go two miles back, to talk to him.”

  “That’s right,” Ratliff said. He was still looking at Snopes.

  “You got better sense than to try to sell Flem Snopes anything,” Varner said. “And you sholy aint fool enough by God to buy anything from him, are you?”

  “I dont know,” Ratliff said in that same pleasant and unchanged and impenetrable voice out of his spent and sleepless f
ace, still looking at Snopes. “I used to think I was smart, but now I dont know. I’ll bring you on home,” he said. “You wont be late for dinner.”

  “Go on and get out,” Varner said to his son-in-law. “He aint going to tell you till you do.” But Snopes was already moving. He spat outward over the wheel and turned and climbed down over it, backward, broad and deliberate in the soiled light-gray trousers, the white shirt, the plaid cap; the surrey went on. Ratliff cramped the wheel and Snopes got into the buckboard beside him and he turned the buckboard and again the team fell into their tireless and familiar road-gait. But this time Ratliff reined them back until they were walking and held them so while Snopes chewed steadily beside him. They didn’t look at one another again.

  “That Old Frenchman place,” Ratliff said. The surrey went on a hundred yards ahead, pacing its own dust, as they themselves were now doing. “What are you going to ask Eustace Grimm for it?” Snopes spat tobacco juice over the moving wheel. He did not chew fast nor did he seem to find it necessary to stop chewing in order to spit or speak either.

  “He’s at the store, is he?” he said.

  “Aint this the day you told him to come?” Ratliff said. “How much are you going to ask him for?” Snopes told him. Ratliff made a short sound, something like Varner’s habitual ejaculation. “Do you reckon Eustace Grimm can get his hands on that much money?”

  “I dont know,” Snopes said. He spat over the moving wheel again. Ratliff might have said, Then you dont want to sell it; Snopes would have answered, I’ll sell anything. But they did not. They didn’t need to.

  “All right,” Ratliff said. “What are you going to ask me for it?” Snopes told him. It was the same amount. This time Ratliff used Varner’s ejaculation. “I’m just talking about them ten acres where that old house is. I aint trying to buy all Yoknapatawpha County from you.” They crossed the last hill; the surrey began to move faster, drawing away from them. The village was not far now. “We’ll let this one count,” Ratliff said. “How much do you want for that Old Frenchman place?” His team was trying to trot too, ahead of the buckboard’s light weight. Ratliff held them in, the road beginning to curve to pass the schoolhouse and enter the village. The surrey had already vanished beyond the curve.

  “What do you want with it?” Snopes said.

  “To start a goat-ranch,” Ratliff said. “How much?” Snopes spat over the moving wheel. He named the sum for the third time. Ratliff slacked off the reins and the little strong tireless team began to trot, sweeping around the last curve and past the empty schoolhouse, the village now in sight, the surrey in sight too, already beyond the store, going on. “That fellow, that teacher you had three-four years ago. Labove. Did anybody ever hear what become of him?”

  A little after six that evening, in the empty and locked store, Ratliff and Bookwright and Armstid bought the Old Frenchman place from Snopes. Ratliff gave a quit-claim deed to his half of the side-street lunch-room in Jefferson. Armstid gave a mortgage on his farm, including the buildings and tools and livestock and about two miles of three-strand wire fence; Bookwright paid his third in cash. Then Snopes let them out the front door and locked it again and they stood on the empty gallery in the fading August afterglow and watched him depart up the road toward Varner’s house—two of them did, that is, because Armstid had already gone ahead and got into the buckboard, where he sat motionless and waiting and emanating that patient and seething fury. “It’s ours now,” Ratliff said. “And now we better get on out there and watch it before somebody fetches in Uncle Dick Bolivar some night and starts hunting buried money.”

  They went first to Bookwright’s house (he was a bachelor) and got the mattress from his bed and two quilts and his coffeepot and skillet and another pick and shovel, then they went to Armstid’s home. He had but one mattress too, but then he had a wife and five small children; besides, Ratliff, who had seen the mattress, knew that it would not even bear being lifted from the bed. So Armstid got a quilt and they helped him fill an empty feed sack with shucks for a pillow and returned to the buckboard, passing the house in the door of which his wife still stood, with four of the children huddled about her now. But she still said nothing, and when Ratliff looked back from the moving buckboard, the door was empty.

  When they turned from the old road and drove up through the shaggy park to the shell of the ruined house, there was still light enough for them to see the wagon and mules standing before it, and at that moment a man came out of the house itself and stopped, looking at them. It was Eustace Grimm, but Ratliff never knew if Armstid recognised him or even bothered to try to, because once more before the buck-board had even stopped Armstid was out of it and snatched the other shovel from beneath Bookwright’s and Ratliff’s feet and rushed with his limping and painful fury toward Grimm, who moved swiftly too and put the wagon between Armstid and himself, standing there and watching Armstid across the wagon as Armstid slashed across the wagon at him with the shovel. “Catch him!” Ratliff said. “He’ll kill him!”

  “Or break that damn leg again,” Bookwright said. When they overtook him, he was trying to double the wagon, the shovel raised and poised like an axe. But Grimm had already darted around to the other side, where he now saw Ratliff and Bookwright running up, and he sprang away from them too, watching them, poised and alert. Bookwright caught Armstid from behind in both arms and held him.

  “Get away quick, if you dont want anything,” Ratliff told Grimm.

  “No, I dont want anything,” Grimm said.

  “Then go on while Bookwright’s got him.” Grimm moved toward the wagon, watching Armstid with something curious and veiled in his look.

  “He’s going to get in trouble with that sort of foolishness,” he said.

  “He’ll be all right,” Ratliff said. “You just get on away from here.” Grimm got into the wagon and went on. “You can let him go now,” Ratliff said. Armstid flung free of Bookwright and turned toward the garden. “Wait, Henry,” Ratliff said. “Let’s eat supper first. Let’s get our beds into the house.” But Armstid hurried on, limping in the fading light toward the garden. “We ought to eat first,” Ratliff said. Then he let out a long breath like a sigh; he and Bookwright ran side by side to the rear of the sewing-machine box, which Ratliff unlocked, and they snatched out the other shovels and picks and ran down the slope and into the old garden where Armstid was already digging. Just before they reached him he stood up and began to run toward the road, the shovel raised, whereupon they too saw that Grimm had not departed but was sitting in the wagon in the road, watching them across the ruined fence of iron pickets until Armstid had almost reached it. Then he drove on.

  They dug all that night, Armstid in one hole, Ratliff and Bookwright working together in another. From time to time they would stop to rest while the summer constellations marched overhead. Ratliff and Bookwright would move about to flex their cramped muscles, then they would squat (They did not smoke; they could not risk showing any light. Armstid had probably never had the extra nickel or dime to buy tobacco with.) and talk quietly while they listened to the steady sound of Armstid’s shovel below them. He would be digging when they stopped; he would still be digging, unflagging and tireless, when they started again, though now and then one of them would remember him and pause to see him sitting on the side of his pit, immobile as the lumps of earth he had thrown out of it. Then he would be digging again before he had actually had time to rest; this until dawn began and Ratliff and Bookwright stood over him in the wan light, arguing with him. “We got to quit,” Ratliff said. “It’s already light enough for folks to see us.” Armstid didn’t pause.

  “Let them,” he said. “It’s mine now. I can dig all day if I want.”

  “All right,” Ratliff said. “You’ll have plenty of help then.” Now Armstid paused, looking up at him out of his pit. “How can we dig all night and then set up all day to keep other folks out of it?” Ratliff said. “Come on now,” he said. “We got to eat and then sleep some.” They got th
e mattress and the quilts from the buckboard and carried them into the house, the hall in whose gaping door-frames no doors any longer hung and from whose ceiling depended the skeleton of what had been once a crystal chandelier, with its sweep of stairs whose treads had long since been prized off and carried away to patch barns and chicken-houses and privies, whose spindles and walnut railings and newel-posts had long ago been chopped up and burned as firewood. The room they chose had a fourteen-foot ceiling. There were the remains of a once-gilt filigree of cornice above the gutted windows and the ribbed and serrated grin of lathing from which the plaster had fallen, and the skeleton of another prismed chandelier. They spread the mattress and the quilts upon the dust of plaster, and Ratliff and Bookwright returned to the buckboard and got the food they had brought, and the two sacks of coins. They hid the two sacks in the chimney, foul now with bird-droppings, behind the mantel in which there were still wedged a few shards of the original marble. Armstid didn’t produce his bag. They didn’t know what he had done with it. They didn’t ask.

  They built no fire. Ratliff would probably have objected, but nobody suggested it; they ate cold the tasteless food, too tired to taste it; removing only their shoes stained with the dampening earth from the deepening pits, they lay among the quilts and slept fitfully, too tired to sleep completely also, dreaming of gold. Toward noon jagged scraps and flecks of sun came through the broken roof and the two rotted floors overhead and crept eastward across the floor and the tumbled quilts and then the prone bodies and the slack-mouthed upflung faces, whereupon they turned and shifted or covered their heads and faces with their arms, as though, still sleeping, they fled the weightless shadow of that for which, awake, they had betrayed themselves. They were awake at sunset without having rested. They moved stiffly about, not talking, while the coffeepot boiled on the broken hearth; they ate again, wolfing the cold and tasteless food while the crimson glow from the dying west faded in the high ruined room. Armstid was the first one to finish. He put his cup down and rose, turning first onto his hands and knees as an infant gets up, dragging his stiff twice-broken leg painfully beneath him, and limped toward the door. “We ought to wait till full dark,” Ratliff said, to no one; certainly no one answered him. It was as if he spoke to himself and had answered himself. He rose too. Bookwright was already standing. When they reached the garden, Armstid was already in his pit, digging.