“What could we do?” Tull said. “It ain’t right. But it ain’t none of our business.”
“I believe I would think of something if I lived there,” Ratliff said.
“Yes,” Bookwright said. He was eating his ham as he had the pie. “And wind up with one of them bow-ties in place of your buckboard and team. You’d have room to wear it.”
“Sho now,” Ratliff said. “Maybe you’re right.” He stopped looking at them now and raised his spoon, but lowered it again. “This here cup seems to have a draft in it,” he said to the counterman. “Maybe you better warm it up a little. It might freeze and bust, and I would have to pay for the cup too.” The counterman swept the cup away and refilled it and slid it back. Ratliff spooned sugar into it carefully, his face still wearing that faint expression which would have been called smiling for lack of anything better. Bookwright had mixed his six eggs into one violent mess and was now eating them audibly with a spoon. He and Tull both ate with expedition, though Tull even contrived to do that with almost niggling primness. They did not talk, they just cleaned their plates and rose and went to the cigar case and paid their bills.
“Or maybe them tennis shoes,” Bookwright said. “He ain’t wore them in a year now. — No,” he said. “If I was you I would go out there nekid in the first place. Then you won’t notice the cold coming back.”
“Sho now,” Ratliff said mildly. After they left he drank his coffee again, sipping it without haste, talking again to the three or four listeners, finishing the story of his operation. Then he rose too and paid for his coffee, scrupulously, and put on his overcoat. It was now March but the doctor had told him to wear it, and in the alley now he stood for a while beside the buckboard and the sturdy little horses overfat with idleness and sleek with new hair after their winter coats, looking quietly at the dog kennel box where, beneath the cracked paint of their fading and incredible roses, the women’s faces smiled at him in fixed and sightless invitation. It would need painting again this year; he must see to that. It will have to be something that will burn, he thought. And in his name. Known to be in his name. Yes, he thought, if my name was Will Varner and my partner’s name was Snopes I believe I would insist that some part of our partnership at least, that part of it that will burn anyway, would be in his name. He walked on slowly, buttoned into the overcoat. It was the only one in sight. But then the sick grow well fast in the sun; perhaps when he returned to town he would no longer need it. And soon he would not need the sweater beneath it either — May and June, the summer, the long good days of heat. He walked on, looking exactly as he always had save for the thinness and the pallor, pausing twice to tell two different people that yes, he felt all right now, the Memphis doctor had evidently cut the right thing out whether by accident or design, crossing the Square now beneath the shaded marble gaze of the Confederate soldier, and so into the Court House and the Chancery Clerk’s office, where he found what he sought — some two hundred acres of land, with buildings, recorded to Flem Snopes.
Toward the end of the afternoon he was sitting in the halted buckboard in a narrow back road in the hills, reading the name on a mailbox. The post it sat on was new, but the box was not. It was battered and scarred; at one time it had apparently been crushed flat as though by a wagon wheel and straightened again, but the crude lettering of the name might have been painted on it yesterday. It seemed to shout at him, all capitals, MINK SNOPES, sprawling, without any spacing between the two words, trailing off and uphill and over the curve of the top to include the final letters. Ratliff turned in beside it — a rutted lane now, at the end of it a broken-backed cabin of the same two rooms which were scattered without number through these remote hill sections which he travelled. It was built on a hill; below it was a foul muck-trodden lot and a barn leaning away downhill as though a human breath might flatten it. A man was emerging from it, carrying a milk pail, and then Ratliff knew that he was being watched from the house itself though he had seen no one. He pulled the team up. He did not get down. “Howdy,” he said. “This Mr. Snopes? I brought your machine.”
“Brought my what?” the man in the lot said. He came through the gate and set the pail on the end of the sagging gallery. He was slightly less than medium height also but thin, with a single line of heavy eyebrow. But it’s the same eyes, Ratliff thought.
“Your sewing-machine,” he said pleasantly. Then he saw from the corner of his eye a woman standing on the gallery — a big-boned hard-faced woman with incredible yellow hair, who had emerged with a good deal more lightness and quickness than the fact that she was barefoot would have presaged. Behind her were two towheaded children. But Ratliff did not look at her. He watched the man, his expression bland courteous and pleasant.
“What’s that?” the woman said. “A sewing-machine?”
“No,” the man said. He didn’t look at her either. He was approaching the buckboard. “Get on back in the house.” The woman paid no attention to him. She came down from the gallery, moving again with that speed and co-ordination which her size belied. She stared at Ratliff with pale hard eyes.
“Who told you to bring it here?” she said.
Now Ratliff looked at her, still bland, still pleasant. “Have I done made a mistake?” he said. “The message come to me in Jefferson, from Frenchman’s Bend. It said Snopes. I taken it to mean you, because if your . . . cousin??” Neither of them spoke, staring at him. “Flem. If Flem had wanted it, he would have waited till I got there. He knowed I was due there tomorrow. I reckon I ought to make sho.” The woman laughed harshly, without mirth.
“Then take it on to him. If Flem Snopes sent you word about anything that cost more than a nickel it wasn’t to give away. Not to his kinfolks anyhow. Take it on to the Bend.”
“I told you to go in the house,” the man said. “Go on.” The woman didn’t look at him. She laughed harshly and steadily, staring at Ratliff.
“Not to give away,” she said. “Not the man that owns a hundred head of cattle and a barn and pasture to feed them in his own name.” The man turned and walked toward her. She turned and began to scream at him, the two children watching Ratliff quietly from behind her skirts as if they were deaf or as if they lived in another world from that in which the woman screamed, like two dogs might. “Deny it if you can!” she cried at the man. “He’d let you rot and die right here and glad of it, and you know it! Your own kin you’re so proud of because he works in a store and wears a necktie all day! Ask him to give you a sack of flour even and see what you get. Ask him! Maybe he’ll give you one of his old neckties someday so you can dress like a Snopes too!” The man walked steadily toward her. He did not even speak again. He was the smaller of the two of them; he walked steadily toward her with a curious sidling deadly, almost deferential, air until she broke, turned swiftly and went back toward the house, the herded children before her still watching Ratliff over their shoulders. The man approached the buckboard.
“You say the message came from Flem?” he said.
“I said it come from Frenchman’s Bend,” Ratliff said. “The name mentioned was Snopes.”
“Who was it seems to done all this mentioning about Snopes?”
“A friend,” Ratliff said pleasantly. “He seems to make a mistake. I ask you to excuse it. Can I follow this lane over to the Whiteleaf Bridge road?”
“If Flem sent you word to leave it here, suppose you leave it.”
“I just told you I thought I had made a mistake and ask you to excuse it,” Ratliff said. “Does this lane — —”
“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 ain’t talking about messages now,” Ratliff said. “We’re talking about a se
wing-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’ 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 can’t 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 colour 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 ain’t just exactly a cash ten dollars — —”
“Listen,” the other said. “I don’t know what you are up to and I don’t care. But you ain’t 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 ain’t 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’s risen 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 don’t 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. Don’t 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 ain’t 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 does 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 don’t 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 ain’t 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 b
ought 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 don’t we all just move over there.”
“Sho now,” Ratliff said. “You fellows don’t 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 he did lower 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 parlour or wherever it was he couldn’t keep the goats out of a goat-ranch and let it go at that. But a Northerner don’t 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 don’t 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 can’t 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 ain’t 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 ain’t another goat betwixt Jackson and the Tennessee line apparently.”
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 321
