Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “Tech my elbers,” he said. “Not you,” he said. “You that didn’t believe.” When Bookwright touched them, inside the sleeves the arms — arms thin and frail and dead as rotten sticks — were jerking faintly and steadily; when the old man stopped suddenly again and Bookwright blundered into him, he felt the whole thin body straining backward. Armstid was cursing steadily in his dry whisper. “Tech the peach fork,” the old man panted. “You that didn’t believe.” When Bookwright touched it, it was arched into a rigid down-pointing curve, the string taut as wire. Armstid made a choked sound; Bookwright felt his hand on the branch too. The branch sprang free; the old man staggered, the fork lying dead on the ground at his feet until Armstid, digging furiously with his bare hand, flung it away.

  They turned as one and plunged back down the slope to where they had left the tools. They could hardly keep up with Armstid. “Don’t let him get the pick,” Bookwright panted. “He will kill somebody with it.” But Armstid was not after the pick. He went straight to where he had left his shovel when the old man produced the forked branch and refused to start until he put the shovel down, and snatched it up and ran back up the slope. He was already digging when Ratliff and Bookwright reached him. They all dug then, frantically, hurling the dirt aside, in each other’s way, the tools clashing and ringing together, while the old man stood above them behind the faint gleam of his beard in the starlight and his white brows above the two caverns from which, even if they had paused to look, they could not have told whether his eyes even watched them or not, musing, detached, without interest in their panting frenzy. Suddenly the three of them became frozen in the attitudes of digging for perhaps a second. Then they leaped into the hole together; the six hands at the same instant touched the object — a heavy solid sack of heavy cloth through which they all felt the round milled edges of coins. They struggled for it, jerking it back and forth among them, clutching it, gripping it, panting.

  “Stop it!” Ratliff panted. “Stop it! Ain’t we all three partners alike?” But Armstid clung to it, trying to jerk it away from the others, cursing. “Let go, Odum,” Ratliff said. “Let him have it.” They turned it loose. Armstid clutched it to himself, stooping, glaring at them as they climbed out of the hole. “Let him keep it,” Ratliff said. “Don’t you know that ain’t all?” He turned quickly away. “Come on, Uncle Dick,” he said. “Get your — —” He ceased. The old man was standing motionless behind them, his head turned as if he were listening toward the ditch from which they had come. “What?” Ratliff whispered. They were all three motionless now, rigid, still stooped a little as when they had stepped away from Armstid. “Do you hear something?” Ratliff whispered. “Is somebody down there?”

  “I feel four bloods lust-running,” the old man said. “Hit’s four sets of blood here lusting for trash.” They crouched, rigid. But there was no sound.

  “Well, ain’t it four of us here?” Bookwright whispered.

  “Uncle Dick don’t care nothing about money,” Ratliff whispered. “If somebody’s hiding there — —” They were running. Armstid was the first to start, still carrying his shovel. Again they could hardly keep up with him as they went plunging down the slope.

  “Kill him,” Armstid said. “Watch every bush and kill him.”

  “No,” Ratliff said. “Catch him first.” When he and Bookwright reached the ditch, they could hear Armstid beating along the edge of it, making no effort whatever to be quiet, slashing at the dark undergrowth with the axe-like shovel-edge with the same fury he had dug with. But they found nothing, nobody.

  “Maybe Uncle Dick never heard nothing,” Bookwright said.

  “Well, whatever it was is gone, anyway,” Ratliff said. “Maybe it — —” He ceased. He and Bookwright stared at one another; above their breaths they heard the horse. It was in the old road beyond the cedars; it was as if it had been dropped there from the sky in full gallop. They heard it until it ceased into the sand at the branch. After a moment they heard it again on the hard ground beyond, fainter now. Then it ceased altogether. They stared at one another in the darkness, across their held breaths. Then Ratliff exhaled. “That means we got till daylight,” he said. “Come on.”

  Twice more the old man’s peach branch sprang and bent; twice more they found small bulging canvas bags solid and unmistakable even in the dark. “Now,” Ratliff said, “we got a hole a-piece and till daylight to do it in. Dig, boys.”

  When the east began to turn grey, they had found nothing else. But digging three holes at once, as they had been doing, none of them had been able to go very deep. And the bulk of the treasure would be deep; as Ratliff had said, if it were not it would have been found ten times over during the last thirty years since there probably were not many square feet of the ten acres which comprised the old mansion-site which had not been dug into between some sunset and dawn by someone without a light, trying to dig fast and dig quiet at the same time. So at last he and Bookwright prevailed on Armstid to see a little of reason, and they desisted and filled up the holes and removed the traces of digging. Then they opened the bags in the grey light. Ratliff’s and Bookwright’s contained twenty-five silver dollars each. Armstid refused to tell what his contained or to let anyone see it. He crouched over it, his back toward them, cursing them when they tried to look. “All right,” Ratliff said. Then a thought struck him. He looked down at Armstid. “Of course ain’t nobody fool enough to try to spend any of it now.”

  “Mine’s mine,” Armstid said. “I found it. I worked for it. I’m going to do any God damn thing I want to with it.”

  “All right,” Ratliff said. “How are you going to explain it?”

  “How am I — —” Armstid said. Squatting, he looked up at Ratliff. They could see one another’s faces now. All three of them were strained, spent with sleeplessness and fatigue.

  “Yes,” Ratliff said. “How are you going to explain to folks where you got it? Got twenty-five dollars all coined before 1861?” He quit looking at Armstid. He and Bookwright looked at one another quietly in the growing light. “There was somebody in the ditch, watching us,” he said. “We got to buy it.”

  “We got to buy it quick,” Bookwright said. “Tomorrow.”

  “You mean today,” Ratliff said. Bookwright looked about him. It was as though he were waking from an anaesthetic, as if he saw the dawn, the earth, for the first time.

  “That’s right,” he said. “It’s already tomorrow now.”

  The old man lay under a tree beside the ditch, asleep, flat on his back, his mouth open, his beard dingy and stained in the increasing dawn; they hadn’t even missed him since they really began to dig. They waked him and helped him back to the buckboard. The dog kennel box in which Ratliff carried the sewing-machines had a padlocked door. He took a few ears of corn from the box, then he stowed his and Bookwright’s bags of coins beneath the odds and ends of small and still-frozen traded objects at the back of it and locked it again.

  “You put yours in here too, Henry,” he said. “What we want to do now is to forget we even got them until we find the rest of it and get it out of the ground.” But Armstid would not. He climbed stiffly onto the horse behind Bookwright, unaided, repudiating the aid which had not even been offered yet, clutching his bag inside the bib of his patched and faded overalls, and they departed. Ratliff fed his team and watered them at the branch; he too was on the road before the sun rose. Just before nine o’clock he paid the old man his dollar fee and put him down where the five-mile path to his hut entered the river-bottom, and turned the wiry and indefatigable little horses back toward Frenchman’s Bend. There was somebody hid in that ditch, he thought. We got to buy it damn quick.

  Later it seemed to him that, until he reached the store, he had not actually realised himself how quick they would have to buy it. Almost as soon as he came in sight of the store, he saw the new face among the familiar ones along the gallery and recognised it — Eustace Grimm, a young tenant-farmer living ten or twelve miles away in the next county
with his wife of a year, to whom Ratliff intended to sell a sewing-machine as soon as they had finished paying for the baby born two months ago; as he tied his team to one of the gallery posts and mounted the heel-gnawed steps, he thought, Maybe sleeping rests a man, but it takes staying up all night for two or three nights and being worried and scared half to death during them, to sharpen him. Because as soon as he recognised Grimm, something in him had clicked, though it would be three days before he would know what it was. He had not had his clothes off in more than sixty hours; he had had no breakfast today and what eating he had done in the last two days had been more than spotty — all of which showed in his face. But it didn’t show in his voice or anywhere else, and nothing else but that showed anywhere at all. “Morning, gentlemen,” he said.

  “Be durn if you don’t look like you ain’t 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 don’t 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 don’t 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 backyard 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 ain’t 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 the 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 ain’t fool enough by God to buy anything from him, are you?”

  “I don’t know,” Ratliff said in that same pleasant and unchanged and impenetrable voice out of his spent and sleepless face, still looking at Snopes. “I used to think I was smart, but now I don’t know. I’ll bring you on home,” he said. “You won’t be late for dinner.”

  “Go on and get out,” Varner said to his son-in-law. “He ain’t 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-grey 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.

  “Ain’t this the day you told him to come?” Ratliff said. “How much are you going to ask him for it?” 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?”