Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion

by William Faulkner

  “I see,” the other said. “That means you aim to have a little cash down. How much?”

  “You mean on the machine?”

  “What do you think I am talking about?”

  “Ten dollars,” Ratliff said. “A note for twenty more in six months. That’s gathering-time.”

  “Ten dollars? With the message you got from—”

  “We aint talking about messages now,” Ratliff said. “We’re talking about a sewing machine.”

  “Make it five.”

  “No,” Ratliff said pleasantly. “All right,” the other said, turning. “Fix up your note.” He went back to the house. Ratliff got out and went to the rear of the buckboard and opened the dog kennel’s door and drew from beneath the new machine a tin dispatch box. It contained a pen, a carefully corked ink bottle, a pad of note forms. He was filling in the note when Snopes returned, reappeared at his side. As soon as Ratliff’s pen stopped Snopes slid the note toward himself and took the pen from Ratliff’s hand and dipped it and signed the note, all in one continuous motion, without even reading it, and shoved the note back to Ratliff and took something from his pocket which Ratliff did not look at yet because he was looking at the signed note, his face perfectly expressionless. He said quietly,

  “This is Flem Snopes’s name you have signed.”

  “All right,” the other said. “Then what?” Ratliff looked at him. “I see. You want my name on it too, so one of us anyway cant deny it has been signed. All right.” He took the note and wrote again on it and passed it back. “And here’s your ten dollars. Give me a hand with the machine.” But Ratliff did not move again, because it was not money but another paper which the other had given him, folded, dog-eared and soiled. Opened, it was another note. It was dated a little more than three years ago, for ten dollars with interest, payable on demand one year after date of execution, to Isaac Snopes or bearer, and signed Flem Snopes. It was indorsed on the back (and Ratliff recognised the same hand which had just signed the two names to the first note) to Mink Snopes, by Isaac Snopes (X) his mark, and beneath that and still in the same hand and blotted (or dried at least), to V. K. Ratliff, by Mink Snopes, and Ratliff looked at it quite quietly and quite soberly for almost a minute. “All right,” the other said. “Me and Flem are his cousins. Our grandma left us all three ten dollars a piece. We were to get it when the least of us—that was him—come twenty-one. Flem needed some cash and he borrowed his from him on this note. Then he needed some cash a while back and I bought Flem’s note from him. Now if you want to know what color his eyes are or anything else, you can see for yourself when you get to Frenchman’s Bend. He’s living there now with Flem.”

  “I see,” Ratliff said. “Isaac Snopes. He’s twenty-one, you say?”

  “How could he have got that ten dollars to lend Flem if he hadn’t been?”

  “Sho,” Ratliff said. “Only this here aint just exactly a cash ten dollars—”

  “Listen,” the other said. “I dont know what you are up to and I dont care. But you aint fooling me any more than I am fooling you. If you were not satisfied Flem is going to pay that first note, you wouldn’t have taken it. And if you aint afraid of that one, why are you afraid of this one, for less money, on the same machine, when this one has been collectible by law for more than two years? You take these notes on to him down yonder. Just hand them to him. Then you give him a message from me. Say ‘From one cousin that’s still scratching dirt to keep alive, to another cousin that’selse,n from scratching dirt to owning a herd of cattle and a hay barn. To owning cattle and a hay barn.’Just say that to him. Better keep on saying it over to yourself on the way down there so you will be sure not to forget it.”

  “You dont need to worry,” Ratliff said. “Does this road lead over to Whiteleaf Bridge?”

  He spent that night in the home of kin people (he had been born and raised not far away) and reached Frenchman’s Bend the next afternoon and turned his team into Mrs Littlejohn’s lot and walked down to the store, on the gallery of which apparently the same men who had been there when he saw it last a year ago were still sitting, including Bookwright. “Well, boys,” he said. “A quorum as usual, I see.”

  “Bookwright says it was your pocketbook that Memphis fellow cut outen you,” one said. “No wonder it taken you a year to get over it. I’m just surprised you didn’t die when you reached back and found it gone.”

  “That’s when I got up,” Ratliff said. “Otherwise I’d a been laying there yet.” He entered the store. The front of it was empty but he did not pause, not even long enough for his contracted pupils to have adjusted themselves to the obscurity, as he might have been expected to. He went on to the counter, saying pleasantly, “Howdy, Jody. Howdy, Flem. Dont bother; I’ll get it myself.” Varner, standing beside the desk at which the clerk sat, looked up.

  “So you got well, hah,” he said.

  “I got busy,” Ratliff said, going behind the counter and opening the store’s single glassed-in case which contained a jumble of shoestrings and combs and tobacco and patent medicines and cheap candy. “Maybe that’s the same thing.” He began to choose sticks of the striped gaudy candy with care, choosing and rejecting. He did not once look toward the rear of the store, where the clerk at the desk had never looked up at all. “You know if Uncle Ben Quick is at home or not?”

  “Where would he be?” Varner said. “Only I thought you sold him a sewing machine two-three years back.”

  “Sho,” Ratliff said, rejecting a stick of candy and substituting another one for it. “That’s why I want him to be at home: so his folks can look after him when he faints. I’m going to buy something from him this time.”

  “What in thunder has he got you had to come all the way out here to buy?”

  “A goat,” Ratliff said. He was counting the candy sticks into a sack now.

  “A what?”

  “Sho,” Ratliff said. “You wouldn’t think it, would you? But there aint another goat in Yoknapatawpha and Grenier County both except them of Uncle Ben’s.”

  “No I wouldn’t,” Varner said. “But what’s curiouser than that is what you want with it.”

  “What d a fellow want with a goat?” Ratliff said. He moved to the cheese cage and put a coin into the cigar box. “To pull a wagon with. You and Uncle Will and Miss Maggie all well, I hope.”

  “Ah-h-h!” Varner said. He turned back to the desk. But Ratliff had not paused to see him do it. He returned to the gallery, offering his candy about.

  “Doctor’s orders,” he said. “He’ll probably send me another bill now for ten cents for advising me to eat a nickel’s worth of candy. I dont mind that though. What I mind is the order he give me to spend so much time setting down.” He looked now, pleasant and quizzical, at the men sitting on the bench. It was fastened against the wall, directly beneath one of the windows which flanked the door, a little longer than the window was wide. After a moment a man on one end of the bench rose.

  “All right,” he said. “Come on and set down. Even if you wasn’t sick you will probably spend the next six months pretending like you was.”

  “I reckon I got to get something outen that seventy-five dollars it cost me,” Ratliff said. “Even if it aint no more than imposing on folks for a while. Only you are fixing to leave me setting in a draft. You folks move down and let me set in the middle.” They moved and made room for him in the middle of the bench. He sat now directly before the open window. He took a stick of his candy himself and began to suck it, speaking in the weak thin penetrating voice of recent illness: “Yes sir. I’d a been in that bed yet if I hadn’t a found that pocketbook gone. But it wasn’t till I got up that I got sho enough scared. I says to myself, here I been laying on my back for a year now and I bet some enterprising fellow has done come in and flooded not only Frenchman’s Bend but all Yoknapatawpha County too with new sewing machines. But the Lord was watching out for me. I be dog if I had hardly got outen bed before Him or somebody had done sent me a sheep just like
He done to save Isaac in the Book. He sent me a goat-rancher.”

  “A what?” one said.

  “A goat-rancher. You never heard of a goat-rancher. Because wouldn’t nobody in this country think of it. It would take a Northerner to do that. This here one thought of it away up yonder in Massachusetts or Boston or Ohio and here he come all the way down to Mississippi with his hand grip bulging with greenback money and bought him up two thousand acres of as fine a hill-gully and rabbit-grass land as ever stood on one edge about fifteen miles west of Jefferson and built him a ten-foot practically waterproof fence around it and was just getting ready to start getting rich, when he run out of goats.”

  “Shucks,” another said. “Never nobody in the world ever run out of goats.”

  “Besides,” Bookwright said, suddenly and harshly, “if you want to tell them folks at the blacksmith shop about it too, why dont we all just move over there.”

  “Sho now,” Ratliff said. “You fellows dont know how good a man’s voice feels running betwixt his teeth until you have been on your back where folks that didn’t want to listen could get up and go away and you couldn’t follow them.” Nevertheless he9;t walower his voice a little, thin, clear, anecdotal, unhurried: “This one did. You got to keep in mind he is a Northerner. They does things different from us. If a fellow in this country was to set up a goat-ranch, he would do it purely and simply because he had too many goats already. He would just declare his roof or his front porch or his parlor or wherever it was he couldn’t keep the goats out of a goat-ranch and let it go at that. But a Northerner dont do it that way. When he does something, he does it with a organised syndicate and a book of printed rules and a gold-filled diploma from the Secretary of State at Jackson saying for all men to know by these presents, greeting, that them twenty thousand goats or whatever it is, is goats. He dont start off with goats or a piece of land either. He starts off with a piece of paper and a pencil and measures it all down setting in the library—so many goats to so many acres and so much fence to hold them. Then he writes off to Jackson and gets his diploma for that much land and fence and goats and he buys the land first so he can have something to build the fence on, and he builds the fence around it so nothing cant get outen it, and then he goes out to buy some things not to get outen the fence. So everything was going just fine at first. He picked out land that even the Lord hadn’t never thought about starting a goat-ranch on and bought it without hardly no trouble at all except finding the folks it belonged to and making them understand it was actual money he was trying to give them, and that fence practically taken care of itself because he could set in one place in the middle of it and pay out the money for it. And then he found he had done run out of goats. He combed this country up and down and backwards and forwards to find the right number of goats to keep that gold diploma from telling him to his face he was lying. But he couldn’t do it. In spite of all he could do, he still lacked fifty goats to take care of the rest of that fence. So now it aint a goat-ranch; it’s a insolvency. He’s either got to send that diploma back, or get them fifty goats from somewhere. So here he is, done come all the way down here from Boston, Maine, and paid for two thousand acres of land and built forty-four thousand feet of fence around it, and now the whole blame pro-jeck is hung up on that passel of goats of Uncle Ben Quick’s because they aint another goat betwixt Jackson and the Tennessee line apparently.”

  “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 cant 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. “Aint you closing early, Jody?” Ratliff said.

  “That depends on what you call late,” Varner said shortly. He went on af 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 dont 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 aint 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 abou 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 hisself 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-hcuse 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 synchronization. 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.