Until one morning when he, Mink, was walking to the store (he had no horse to ride when he had to go for a tin of snuff or a bottle of quinine or a piece of meat); he had just come over the brow of a short hill when he heard the horse behind him, coming fast an hard, and he would have given Houston the whole road if he had had time, the horse already on top of him until Houston wrenched it savagely off and past, the damn hound leaping so close it almost brushed his chest, snarling right into his face, Houston whirling the horse and holding it dancing and plunging, shouting down at him: “Why in hell didn’t you jump when you heard me coming? Get off the road! Do you still want him to beat your brains out too before I can get him down again?”
Well, maybe that was what they call grieving for the wife that maybe you didn’t actually kill her yourself and you even killed the horse that did it. But still arrogant enough or rich enough to afford to buy another one exactly like the one that did kill her. Which was all right with him, Mink, especially since all anybody had to do was just wait until sooner or later the son-of-a-bitching horse would kill Houston too; until the next thing happened which he had not counted on, planned on, not even anticipated.
It was his milk cow, the only one he owned, not being a rich man like Houston but only an independent one, asking no favors of any man, paying his own way. She—the cow—had missed some way, failed to freshen; and there he was, not only having gone a winter without milk and now faced with another whole year without it, he had also missed out on the calf for which he had had to pay a fifty-cents-cash bull fee, since the only bull in reach he could get for less than a dollar was the scrub bull belonging to a Negro who insisted on cash at the gate.
So he fed the cow all that winter, waiting for the calf which wasn’t even there. Then he had to lead the cow the three miles back to the Negro’s house, not to claim the return of the fifty cents but only to claim a second stand from the bull, which the Negro refused to permit without the payment in advance of another fifty cents, he, Mink, standing in the yard cursing the Negro until the Negro went back into the house and shut the door, Mink standing in the empty yard cursing the Negro and his family inside the blank house until he had exhausted himself enough to lead the still-barren cow the three miles again back home.
Then he had to keep the barren and worthless cow up under fence while she exhausted his own meager pasture, then he had to feed her out of his meager crib during the rest of that summer and fall, since the local agreement was that all stock would be kept up until all crops were out of the field. Which meant November before he could turn her out for the winter. And even then he had to divert a little feed to her from his winter’s meat hogs, to keep her in the habit of coming more or less back home at night; until she had been missing three or four days and he finally located her in Houston’s pasture with his beef herd.
In fact, he was already in the lane leading to Houston’s house, the coiled plowline in his hand, when without even knowing he was going to and without even pausing or breaking stride he had turned about, already walking back toward home, rapidly stuffing the coiled rope inside his shirt where it would be concealed, not to return to the paintless repairless tenant cabin in which he lived, but simply to find privacy in which to think, stopping presently to sit on a log beside the road while he realised the full scope of what had just dawned before him.
By not claiming the worthless cow yet, he would not only winter her, he would winter her twice—ten times—as well as he himself could afford to. He would not only let Houston winter her (Houston, a man not only rich enough to be able to breed and raise beef cattle, but rich enough to keep a Negro to do nothing else save feed and tend them—a Negro to whom Houston furnished a better house to live in than the one that he, Mink, a white man with a wife and two daughters, lived in) but when he would reclaim the cow in the spring she would have come in season again and, running with Houston’s beef herd-bull, would now be carrying a calf which would not only freshen her for milk but would itself be worth money as grade beef where the offspring of the Negro’s scrub bull would have been worth almost nothing.
Naturally he would have to be prepared for the resulting inevitable questions; Frenchman’s Bend was too little, too damn little for a man to have any privacy about what he did, let alone about what he owned or lacked. It didn’t even take four days. It was at Varner’s store, where he would walk down to the crossroads and back every day, giving them a chance to go ahead and get it over with. Until finally one said—he didn’t remember who; it didn’t matter: “Aint you located your cow yet?”
“What cow?” he said. The other said,
“Jack Houston says for you to come and get that bonerack of yours out of his feed lot; he’s tired of boarding it.”
“Oh, that,” he said. “That aint my cow any more. I sold that cow last summer to one of the Gowrie boys up at Caledonia Chapel.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” the other said. “Because if I was you and my cow was in Jack Houston’s feed lot, I would take my rope and go and get it, without even noticing myself doing it, let alone letting Jack Houston notice me. I don’t believe I would interrupt him right now even to say Much obliged.” Because all Frenchman’s Bend knew Houston: sulking and sulling in his house all alone by himself since the stallion killed his wife four years ago. Like nobody before him had ever lost a wife, even when, for whatever incomprehensible reason the husband could have had, he didn’t want to get shut of her. Sulking and sulling alone on that big place with two nigger servants, the man and the woman to cook, and the stallion and the big Bluetick hound that was as high-nosed and intolerant and surly as Houston himself—a durn surly sullen son of a bitch that didn’t even know he was lucky: rich, not only rich enough to afford a wife to whine and nag and steal his pockets ragged of every dollar he made, but rich enough to do without a wife if he wanted: rich enough to be able to hire a woman to cook his victuals instead of having to marry her. Rich enough to hire another nigger to get up in his stead on the cold mornings and go out in the wet and damp to feed not only the beef cattle which he sold at the top fat prices because he could afford to hold them till then, but that blooded stallion too, and even that damn hound running beside the horse he thundered up and down the road on, until a fellow that never had anything but his own two legs to travel on, would have to jump clean off the road into the bushes or the son-of-abitching horse would have killed him too with its shod feet and left him laying there in the ditch for the son-of-a-bitching hound to eat before Houston would even have reported it.
All right, if Houston was in too high and mighty a mood to be said much obliged to, he, Mink, for one wasn’t going to break in on him uninvited. Not that he didn’t owe a much obliged to something somewhere. This was a week later, then a month later, then Christmas had passed and the hard wet dreary winter had set in. Each afternoon, in the slicker held together with baling wire and automobile tire patching which was the only winter outer garment he owned over his worn patched cotton overalls, he would walk up the muddy road in the dreary and fading afternoons to watch Houston’s pedigreed beef herd, his own sorry animal among them, move, not even hurrying, toward and into the barn which was warmer and tighter against the weather than the cabin he lived in, to be fed by the hired Negro who wore warmer clothing than any he and his family possessed, cursing into the steamy vapor of his own breathing, cursing the Negro for his black skin inside the warmer garments than his, a white man’s, cursing the rich feed devoted to cattle instead of humans even though his own animal shared it; cursing above all the unaware white man through or because of whose wealth such a condition could obtain, cursing the fact that his very revenge and vengeance—what he himself believed to be simple justice and inalienable rights—could not be done at one stroke but instead must depend on the slow incrementation of feed converted to weight, plus the uncontrollable, even unpredictable, love mood of the cow and the long subsequent nine months of gestation; cursing his own condition that the only justice available to him must be t
his prolonged and passive one.
That was it. Prolongation. Not only the anguish of hope deferred, not even the outrage of simple justice deferred, but the knowledge that, even when the blow fell on Houston, it would cost him, Mink, eight dollars in cash—the eight dollars which he would have to affirm that the imaginary purchaser of the cow had paid him for the animal in order to make good the lie that he had sold it, which, when he reclaimed the cow in the spring, he would have to give to Houston as an earnest that until that moment he really believed he had sold the animal—or at least had established eight dollars as its value—when he went to Houston and told him how the purchaser had come to him, Mink, only that morning and told him the cow had escaped from the lot the same night he had bought it and brought it home, and so reclaimed the eight dollars he had paid for it, thus establishing the cow not only in Houston’s arrogant contempt but in the interested curiosity of the rest of Frenchman’s Bend too, as having now cost him, Mink, sixteen dollars to reclaim his own property.
That was the outrage: the eight dollars. The fact that he could not even have wintered the cow for eight dollars, let alone put on it the weight of flesh he could see with his own eyes it now carried, didn’t count. What mattered was, he would have to give Houston, who didn’t need it and wouldn’t even miss the feed the cow had eaten, the eight dollars with which he, Mink, could have bought a gallon of whiskey for Christmas, plus a dollar or two of the gewgaw finery his wife and his two daughters were forever whining at him for.
But there was no help for it. And even then, his pride was that he was not reconciled. Not he to be that meager and niggling and puny as meekly to accept something just because he didn’t see yet how he could help it. More, since this too merely bolstered the anger and rage at the injustice: that he would have to go fawning and even cringing a little when he went to recover his cow; would have to waste a lie for the privilege of giving eight dollars which he wanted, must sacrifice to spare, to a man who didn’t even need them, would not even miss their lack, did not even know yet that he was going to receive them. The moment, the day at last at the end of winter when by local custom the livestock which had run loose in the skeletoned cornfields since fall, must be taken up by their owners and put inside fences so the land could be plowed and planted again; one afternoon, evening rather, waiting until his cow had received that final feeding with the rest of Houston’s herd before he approached the feed lot, the worn plowline coiled over his arm and the meager lump of worn dollar bills and nickels and dimes and quarters wadded into his overall pocket, not needing to fawn and cringe yet because only the Negro with his hayfork would be in the lot now, the rich man himself in the house, the warm kitchen, with in his hand a toddy not of the stinking gagging homemade corn such as he, Mink, would have had to buy with his share of the eight dollars if he could have kept them, but of good red chartered whiskey ordered out of Memphis. Not having to fawn and cringe yet: just saying, level and white-man, to the nigger paused in the door to the feeding shed to look back at him:
“Hidy. I see you got my cow there. Put this rope on her and I’ll get her outen your way,” the Negro looking back at him a second longer then gone, on through the shed toward the house; not coming back to take the rope, which he, Mink, had not expected anyway, but gone first to tell the white man, to know what to do. Which was exactly what he, Mink, had expected, leaning his cold-raw, cold-reddened wrists which even the frayed slicker sleeves failed to cover, on the top rail of the white-painted fence. Oh yes, Houston with the toddy of good red whiskey in his hand and likely with his boots off and his stocking feet in the oven of the stove, warming for supper, who now, cursing, would have to withdraw his feet and drag on again the cold wet muddy rubber and come back to the lot.
Which Houston did; the very bang of the kitchen door and the squish and slap of the gum boots across the backyard and into the lot sounding startled and outraged. Then he came on through the shed too, the Negro about ten feet behind him. “Hidy, Jack,” Mink said. “Too bad to have to roust you out into the cold and wet again. That nigger could have tended to it. I jest learned today you wintered my cow for me. If your nigger’ll put this plowline on her, I’ll get her out of your way.”
“I thought you sold that cow to Nub Gowrie,” Houston said.
“So did I,” Mink said. “Until Nub rid up this morning on a mule and said that cow broke out of his lot the same night he got her home and he aint seen her since, and collected back the eight dollars he paid me for her,” already reaching into his pocket, the meager wad of frayed notes and coins in his hand. “So, since eight dollars seems to be the price of this cow, I reckon I owe you that for wintering her. Which makes her a sixteen-dollar cow now, dont it, whether she knows it or not. So here. Take your money and let your nigger put this plowline on her and I’ll—”
“That cow wasn’t worth eight dollars last fall,” Houston said. “But she’s worth a considerable more now. She’s eaten more than sixteen dollars’ worth of my feed. Not to mention my young bull topped her last week. It was last week, wasn’t it, Henry?” he said to the Negro.
“Yes sir,” the Negro said. “Last Tuesday. I put it on the book.”
“If you had jest notified me sooner I’d have saved the strain on your bull and that nigger and his pitchfork too,” Mink said. He sad to the Negro: “Here. Take this rope—”
“Hold it,” Houston said; he was reaching into his pocket too. “You yourself established the price of that cow at eight dollars. All right. I’ll buy her.”
“You yourself jest finished establishing the fact that she has done went up since then,” Mink said. “I’m trying right now to give the rest of sixteen for her. So evidently I wouldn’t take sixteen, let alone jest eight. So take your money. And if your nigger’s too wore out to put this rope on her, I’ll come in and do it myself.” Now he even began to climb the fence.
“Hold it,” Houston said again. He said to the Negro: “What would you say she’s worth now?”
“She’d bring thirty,” the Negro said. “Maybe thirty-five.”
“You hear that?” Houston said.
“No,” Mink said, still climbing the fence. “I dont listen to niggers: I tell them. If he dont want to put this rope on my cow, tell him to get outen my way.”
“Dont cross that fence, Snopes,” Houston said.
“Well well,” Mink said, one leg over the top rail, the coil of rope dangling from one raw-red hand, “dont tell me you bring a pistol along ever time you try to buy a cow. Maybe you even tote it to put a cottonseed or a grain of corn in the ground too?” It was tableau: Mink with one leg over the top rail, Houston standing inside the fence, the pistol hanging in one hand against his leg, the Negro not moving either, not looking at anything, the whites of his eyes just showing a little. “If you had sent me word, maybe I could a brought a pistol too.”
“All right,” Houston said. He laid the pistol carefully on the top of the fence post beside him. “Put that rope down. Get over the fence at your post. I’ll back off one post and you can count three and we’ll see who uses it to trade with.”
“Or maybe your nigger can do the counting,” Mink said. “All he’s got to do is say Three. Because I aint got no nigger with me neither. Evidently a man needs a tame nigger and a pistol both to trade livestock with you.” He swung his leg back to the ground outside the fence. “So I reckon I’ll jest step over to the store and have a word with Uncle Billy and the constable. Maybe I ought to done that at first, saved a walk up here in the cold. I would a suh-gested leaving my plowline here, to save toting it again, only likely you would be charging me thirty-five dollars to get it back, since that seems to be your bottom price for anything in your lot that dont belong to you.” He was leaving now. “So long then. In case you do make any eight-dollar stock deals, be sho you dont take no wooden nickels.”
He walked away steadily enough but in such a thin furious rage that for a while he couldn’t even see, and with his ears ringing as if someone had fired a s
hotgun just over his head. In fact he had expected the rage too and now, in solitude and privacy, was the best possible time to let it exhaust itself. Because he knew now he had anticipated something like what had happened and he would need his wits about him. He had known by instinct that his own outrageous luck would invent something like this, so that even the fact that going to Varner, the justice of the peace, for a paper for the constable to serve on Houston to recover the cow would cost him another two dollars and a half, was not really a surprise to him: it was simply them again, still testing, trying him to see just how much he could bear and would stand.
So, in a way, he was not really surprised at what happened next either. It was his own fault in a way: he had simply underestimated them: the whole matter of taking the eight dollars to Houston and putting the rope on the cow and leading it back home had seemed too simple, too puny for Them to bother with. But he was wrong; They were not done yet. Varner would not even issue the paper; whereupon two days later there were seven of them, counting the Negro—himself, Houston, Varner and the constable and two professional cattle buyers—standing along the fence of Houston’s feed lot while the Negro led his cow out for the two experts to examine her.
“Well?” Varner said at last.
“I’d give thirty-five,” the first trader said.
“Bred to a paper bull, I might go to thirty-seven and a half,” the second said.
Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion Page 79
