“Hold on,” Houston said. “Is that coal oil you’ve got?”
“It was setting on that ere ledge yonder,” the other said. “It looks like the kind of a can coal oil would be in. It’s a little rusty, but I never heard tell of even rusty coal oil that wouldn’t burn before.” Houston came and took the can from him and sniffed it. The other watched him. The splendid hound sat in the doorway and watched them both. “It don’t smell exactly like coal oil, does it?”
“ —— t,” Houston said. He set the can back on the sooty ledge above the forge. “Go on. Haul that mud out. You’ll have to start over. Where’s Trumbull?” Trumbull was the smith who had been in the shop for almost twenty years, until this morning.
“I don’t know,” the other said. “Wasn’t nobody here when I come.”
“What are you doing here? Did he send you?”
“I don’t know,” the other said. “It was my cousin hired me. He told me to be here this morning and get the fire started and tend to the business till he come. But everytime I put that ere coal oil — —”
“Who is your cousin?” Houston said. At that moment a gaunt aged horse came up rapidly, drawing a battered and clattering buggy one of whose wheels was wired upright by two crossed slats, which looked as if its momentum alone held it intact and that the instant it stopped it would collapse into kindling. It contained another stranger — a frail man none of whose garments seemed to belong to him, with a talkative weasel’s face — who halted the buggy, shouting at the horse as if they were a good-sized field apart, and got out of the buggy and came into the shop, already (or still) talking.
“Morning, morning,” he said, his little bright eyes darting. “Want that horse shod, hey? Good, good: save the hoof and save all. Good-looking animal. Seen a considerable better one in a field a-piece back. But no matter; love me, love my horse, beggars can’t be choosers, if wishes was horseflesh we’d all own thoroughbreds. What’s the matter?” he said to the man in the apron. He paused, though still he seemed to be in violent motion, as though the attitude and position of his garments gave no indication whatever of what the body within them might be doing — indeed, if it were still inside them at all. “Ain’t you got that fire started yet? Here.” He darted to the ledge; he seemed to translate himself over beneath it without increasing his appearance of violent motion at all, and had taken the can down and sniffed at it and then prepared to empty it onto the coals in the forge before anyone could move. Then Houston intercepted him at the last second and took the can from him and flung it out the door.
“I just finished taking that damn hog piss away from him,” Houston said. “What the hell’s happened here? Where’s Trumbull?”
“Oh, you mean the fellow that used to be here,” the newcomer said. “His lease has done been cancelled. I’m leasing the shop now. My name’s Snopes. I. O. Snopes. This here’s my young cousin, Eck Snopes. But it’s the old shop, the old stand; just a new broom in it.”
“I don’t give a damn what his name is,” Houston said. “Can he shoe a horse?” Again the newcomer turned upon the man in the apron, shouting at him as he had shouted at the horse:
“All right. All right. Get that fire started.” After watching a moment, Houston took charge and they got the fire going. “He’ll pick it up though,” the newcomer said. “Just give him time. He’s handy with tools, even though he ain’t done no big sight of active blacksmithing. But give a dog a good name and you don’t need to hang him. Give him a few days to practise up and he’ll shoe a horse quick as Trumbull or any of them.”
“I’ll shoe this one,” Houston said. “Just let him keep pumping that bellows. He looks like he ought to be able to do that without having to practise.” Nevertheless, the shoe shaped and cooled in the tub, the newcomer darted in again. It was as if he took not only Houston but himself too by complete surprise — that weasel-like quality of existing independent of his clothing so that although you could grasp and hold that you could not restrain the body itself from doing what it was doing until the damage had been done — a furious already dissipating concentration of energy vanishing the instant after the intention took shape, the newcomer darting between Houston and the raised hoof and clapping the shoe onto it and touching the animal’s quick with the second blow of the hammer on the nail and being hurled, hammer and all, into the shrinking-tub by the plunging horse which Houston and the man in the apron finally backed into a corner and held while Houston jerked nail and shoe free and flung them into the corner and backed the horse savagely out of the shop, the hound rising and resuming its position quietly at proper heeling distance behind the man. “And you can tell Will Varner — if he cares a damn, which evidently he don’t,” Houston said, “that I have gone to Whiteleaf to have my horse shod.”
The shop and the store were just opposite, only the road between. There were several men already on the gallery, who watched Houston, followed by the big quiet regal dog, lead the horse away. They did not even need to cross the road to see one of the strangers, because presently the smaller and older one crossed to the store, in the clothes which would still appear not to belong to him on the day they finally fell off his body, with his talkative pinched face and his bright darting eyes. He mounted the steps, already greeting them. Still talking, he entered the store, his voice voluble and rapid and meaningless like something talking to itself about nothing in a deserted cavern. He came out again, still talking: “Well, gentlemen, off with the old and on with the new. Competition is the life of trade, and though a chain ain’t no stronger than its weakest link, I don’t think you’ll find the boy yonder no weak reed to have to lean on once he catches onto it. It’s the old shop, the old stand; it’s just a new broom in it and maybe you can’t teach a old dog new tricks but you can teach a new young willing one anything. Just give him time; a penny on the waters pays interest when the flood turns. Well, well; all pleasure and no work, as the fellow says, might make Jack so sharp he might cut his self. I bid you good morning, gentlemen.” He went on and got into the buggy, still talking, now to the man in the shop and now to the gaunt horse, all in one breath, without any break to indicate to the hearers which he addressed at any time. He drove away, the men on the gallery looking after him, completely expressionless. During the day they crossed to the shop, one by one, and looked at the second stranger — the quiet empty open face which seemed to have been a mere afterthought to the thatching of the skull, like the binding of a rug, harmless. A man brought up a wagon with a broken hound. The new smith even repaired it, though it took him most of the forenoon, working steadily but in a dreamlike state in which what actually lived inside him apparently functioned somewhere else, paying no heed to and having no interest in, not even in the money he would earn, what his hands were doing; busy, thick-moving, getting nowhere seemingly though at last the job was finished. That afternoon Trumbull, the old smith, appeared. But if they had waited about the store to see what would happen when he arrived who until last night anyway must have still believed himself the incumbent, they were disappointed. He drove through the village with his wife, in a wagon loaded with household goods. If he even looked toward his old shop nobody saw him do it — an old man though still hale, morose and efficient, who would have invited no curiosity even before yesterday. They never saw him again.
A few days later they learned that the new smith was living in the house where his cousin (or whatever the relationship was: nobody ever knew for certain) Flem lived, the two of them sleeping together in the same bed. Six months later the smith had married one of the daughters of the family where the two of them boarded. Ten months after that he was pushing a perambulator (once — or still — Will Varner’s, like the cousin’s saddle) about the village on Sundays, accompanied by a five-or six-year-old boy, his son by a former wife which the village did not know either he had ever possessed — indicating that there was considerably more force and motion to his private life, his sex life anyway, than would appear on the surface of his public one. But tha
t all appeared later. All they saw now was that they had a new blacksmith — a man who was not lazy, whose intentions were good and who was accommodating and unfailingly pleasant and even generous, yet in whom there was a definite limitation of physical co-ordination beyond which design and plan and pattern all vanished, disintegrated into dead components of pieces of wood and iron straps and vain tools.
Two months later Flem Snopes built a new blacksmith shop in the village. He hired it done, to be sure, but he was there most of the day, watching it going up. This was not only the first of his actions in the village which he was ever seen in physical juxtaposition to, but the first which he not only admitted but affirmed, stating calmly and flatly that he was doing it so that people could get decent work done again. He bought completely new equipment at cost price through the store and hired the young farmer who during the slack of planting and harvesting time had been Trumbull’s apprentice. Within a month the new shop had got all the trade which Trumbull had had and three months after that Snopes had sold the new shop — smith clientele and goodwill and new equipment — to Varner, receiving in return the old equipment in the old shop, which he sold to a junk man, moved the new equipment to the old shop and sold the new building to a farmer for a cowshed, without even having to pay himself to have it moved, leaving his kinsman now apprentice to the new smith — at which point even Ratliff had lost count of what profits Snopes might have made. But I reckon I can guess the rest of it, he told himself, sitting, a little pale but otherwise well, in his sunny window. He could almost see it — in the store, at night, the door barred on the inside and the lamp burning above the desk where the clerk sat, chewing steadily, while Jody Varner stood over him, in no condition to sit down, with a good deal more in his eyes than had been in them last fall, shaking, trembling, saying in a shaking voice: “I want to make one pure and simple demand of you and I want a pure and simple Yes and No for a answer: How many more is there? How much longer is this going on? Just what is it going to cost me to protect one goddamn barn full of hay?”
2
He had been sick and he showed it as, the buckboard once more with a new machine in the dog kennel box and the little sturdy team fat and slick with the year’s idleness hitched in an adjacent alley, he sat at the counter of a small side-street restaurant in which he owned a sleeping-partner’s half interest, with a cup of coffee at his hand and in his pocket a contract to sell fifty goats to a Northerner who had recently established a goat-ranch in the western part of the country. It was actually a subcontract which he had purchased at the rate of twenty-five cents a goat from the original contractor who held his from the Northerner at seventy-five cents a goat and was about to fail to complete. Ratliff bought the subcontract because he happened to know of a herd of some fifty-odd goats in a little-travelled section near Frenchman’s Bend village which the original contractor had failed to find and which Ratliff was confident he could acquire by offering to halve his profit with the owner of them.
He was on his way to Frenchman’s Bend now, though he had not started yet and did not know just when he would start. He had not seen the village in a year now. He was looking forward to his visit not only for the pleasure of the shrewd dealing which far transcended mere gross profit, but with the sheer happiness of being out of bed and moving once more at free will, even though a little weakly, in the sun and air which men drank and moved in and talked and dealt with one another — a pleasure no small part of which lay in the fact that he had not started yet and there was absolutely nothing under heaven to make him start until he wanted to. He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in its well state the body is slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body’s pleasure instead of the body thrall to time’s headlong course. So he sat, thin, the fresh clean blue shirt quite loose upon him now, yet looking actually quite well, the smooth brown of his face not pallid but merely a few shades lighter, cleaner-looking; emanating in fact a sort of delicate robustness like some hardy odourless infrequent woodland plant blooming into the actual heel of winter’s snow, nursing his coffee-cup in one thin hand and telling three or four listeners about his operation in that shrewd humorous voice which would require a good deal more than just illness to other than merely weaken its volume a little, when two men entered. They were Tull and Bookwright. Bookwright had a stock-whip rolled about its handle and thrust into the back pocket of his overalls.
“Howdy, boys,” Ratliff said. “You’re in early.”
“You mean late,” Bookwright said. He and Tull went to the counter.
“We just got in last night with some cattle to ship today,” Tull said. “I heard you was sick. I thought I’d missed you.”
“We all missed him,” Bookwright said. “My wife ain’t mentioned nobody’s new sewing-machine in almost a year. What was it that Memphis fellow cut outen you anyway?”
“My pocketbook,” Ratliff said. “I reckon that’s why he put me to sleep first.”
“He put you to sleep first to keep you from selling him a sewing-machine or a bushel of harrow teeth before he could get his knife open,” Bookwright said. The counterman came and slid two plates of bread and butter before them.
“I’ll have steak,” Tull said.
“I won’t,” Bookwright said. “I been watching the dripping sterns of steaks for two days now. Let alone running them back out of corn fields and vegetable patches. Bring me some ham and a half a dozen fried eggs.” He began to eat the bread, wolfing it. Ratliff turned slightly on his stool to face them.
“So I been missed,” he said. “I would a thought you folks would a had so many new citizens in Frenchman’s Bend by now you wouldn’t a missed a dozen sewing-machine agents. How many kinfolks has Flem Snopes brought in to date? Is it two more, or just three?”
“Four,” Bookwright said shortly, eating.
“Four?” Ratliff said. “That’s that blacksmith — I mean, the one that uses the blacksmith shop for his address until it’s time to go back home and eat again — what’s his name? Eck. And that other one, the contractor, the business executive — —”
“He’s going to be the new school professor next year,” Tull said mildly. “Or so they claim.”
“No no,” Ratliff said. “I’m talking about them Snopeses. That other one. I. O. That Jack Houston throwed into the water tub that day in the blacksmith shop.”
“That’s him,” Tull said. “They claim he’s going to teach the school next year. The teacher we had left all of a sudden just after Christmas. I reckon you never heard about that neither.”
But Ratliff wasn’t listening to this. He wasn’t thinking about the other teacher. He stared at Tull, for the moment surprised out of his own humorous poise. “What?” he said. “Teach the school? That fellow? That Snopes? The one that came to the shop that day that Jack Houston —— Here; Odum,” he said; “I been sick, but sholy it ain’t affected my ears that much.”
Bookwright didn’t answer. He had finished his bread; he leaned and took a piece from Tull’s plate. “You ain’t eating it,” he said. “I’ll tell him to bring some more in a minute.”
“Well,” Ratliff said. “I’ll be damned. By God, I knowed there was something wrong with him soon as I saw him. That was it. He was standing in front of the wrong thing — a blacksmith shop or a ploughed field. But teaching the school. I just hadn’t imagined that yet. But that’s it, of course. He has found the one and only place in the world or Frenchman’s Bend either where he not only can use them proverbs of hisn all day long but he will be paid for doing it. Well,” he said. “So Will Varner has caught that bear at last. Flem has grazed up the store and he has grazed up the blacksmith shop and now he is starting in on the school. That just leaves Will’s house. Of course, after that he will have to fall back on you folks, but that house will keep him occupied for
a while because Will — —”
“Hah!” Bookwright said shortly. He finished the slice of bread he had taken from Tull’s plate and called to the counterman: “Here. Bring me a piece of pie while I’m waiting.”
“What kind of pie, Mr. Bookwright?” the counterman said.
“Eating pie,” Bookwright said.
“ — because Will might be a little hard to dislodge outen the actual house,” Ratliff went on. “He might even draw the line there altogether. So maybe Flem will have to start in on you folks sooner than he had figured on — —”
“Hah,” Bookwright said again, harsh and sudden. The counterman slid the pie along to him. Ratliff looked at him.
“All right,” Ratliff said. “Hah what?”
Bookwright sat with the wedge of pie poised in his hand before his mouth. He turned his fierce dark face toward Ratliff. “I was sitting on the sawdust pile at Quick’s mill last week. His fireman and another nigger were shovelling the chips over toward the boiler, to fire with. They were talking. The fireman wanted to borrow some money, said Quick wouldn’t let him have it. ‘Go to Mr. Snopes at the store,’ the other nigger says. ‘He will lend it to you. He lent me five dollars over two years ago and all I does, every Saturday night I goes to the store and pays him a dime. He ain’t even mentioned that five dollars.’ ” Then he turned his head and bit into the pie, taking a little less than half of it. Ratliff watched him with a faint quizzical expression which was almost smiling.
“Well well well,” he said. “So he’s working the top and the bottom both at the same time. At that rate it will be a while yet before he has to fall back on you ordinary white folks in the middle.” Bookwright took another huge bite of the pie. The counterman brought his and Tull’s meal and Bookwright crammed the rest of the pie into his mouth. Tull began to cut his steak neatly into bites as though for a child to eat it. Ratliff watched them. “Ain’t none of you folks out there done nothing about it?” he said.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 320
