“I don’t know,” Snopes said. He spat over the moving wheel again. Ratliff might have said, Then you don’t want to sell it; Snopes would have answered, I’ll sell anything. But they did not. They didn’t need to.
“All right,” Ratliff said. “What are you going to ask me for it?” Snopes told him. It was the same amount. This time Ratliff used Varner’s ejaculation. “I’m just talking about them ten acres where that old house is. I ain’t trying to buy all Yoknapatawpha County from you.” They crossed the last hill; the surrey began to move faster, drawing away from them. The village was not far now. “We’ll let this one count,” Ratliff said. “How much do you want for that Old Frenchman place?” His team was trying to trot too, ahead of the buckboard’s light weight. Ratliff held them in, the road beginning to curve to pass the schoolhouse and enter the village. The surrey had already vanished beyond the curve.
“What do you want with it?” Snopes said.
“To start a goat-ranch,” Ratliff said. “How much?” Snopes spat over the moving wheel. He named the sum for the third time. Ratliff slacked off the reins and the little strong tireless team began to trot, sweeping around the last curve and past the empty schoolhouse, the village now in sight, the surrey in sight too, already beyond the store, going on. “That fellow, that teacher you had three-four years ago. Labove. Did anybody ever hear what become of him?”
A little after six that evening, in the empty and locked store, Ratliff and Bookwright and Armstid bought the Old Frenchman place from Snopes. Ratliff gave a quit-claim deed to his half of the side-street lunch-room in Jefferson. Armstid gave a mortgage on his farm, including the buildings and tools and livestock and about two miles of three-strand wire fence; Bookwright paid his third in cash. Then Snopes let them out the front door and locked it again and they stood on the empty gallery in the fading August afterglow and watched him depart up the road toward Varner’s house — two of them did, that is, because Armstid had already gone ahead and got into the buckboard, where he sat motionless and waiting and emanating that patient and seething fury. “It’s ours now,” Ratliff said. “And now we better get on out there and watch it before somebody fetches in Uncle Dick Bolivar some night and starts hunting buried money.”
They went first to Bookwright’s house (he was a bachelor) and got the mattress from his bed and two quilts and his coffee-pot and skillet and another pick and shovel, then they went to Armstid’s home. He had but one mattress too, but then he had a wife and five small children; besides, Ratliff, who had seen the mattress, knew that it would not even bear being lifted from the bed. So Armstid got a quilt and they helped him fill an empty feed sack with shucks for a pillow and returned to the buckboard, passing the house in the door of which his wife still stood, with four of the children huddled about her now. But she still said nothing, and when Ratliff looked back from the moving buckboard, the door was empty.
When they turned from the old road and drove up through the shaggy park to the shell of the ruined house, there was still light enough for them to see the wagon and mules standing before it, and at that moment a man came out of the house itself and stopped, looking at them. It was Eustace Grimm, but Ratliff never knew if Armstid recognised him or even bothered to try to, because once more before the buckboard had even stopped Armstid was out of it and snatched the other shovel from beneath Bookwright’s and Ratliff’s feet and rushed with his limping and painful fury toward Grimm, who moved swiftly too and put the wagon between Armstid and himself, standing there and watching Armstid across the wagon as Armstid slashed across the wagon at him with the shovel. “Catch him!” Ratliff said. “He’ll kill him!”
“Or break that damn leg again,” Bookwright said. When they overtook him, he was trying to double the wagon, the shovel raised and poised like an axe. But Grimm had already darted around to the other side, where he now saw Ratliff and Bookwright running up, and he sprang away from them too, watching them, poised and alert. Bookwright caught Armstid from behind in both arms and held him.
“Get away quick, if you don’t want anything,” Ratliff told Grimm.
“No, I don’t want anything,” Grimm said.
“Then go on while Bookwright’s got him.” Grimm moved toward the wagon, watching Armstid with something curious and veiled in his look.
“He’s going to get in trouble with that sort of foolishness,” he said.
“He’ll be all right,” Ratliff said. “You just get on away from here.” Grimm got into the wagon and went on. “You can let him go now,” Ratliff said. Armstid flung free of Bookwright and turned toward the garden. “Wait, Henry,” Ratliff said. “Let’s eat supper first. Let’s get our beds into the house.” But Armstid hurried on, limping in the fading light toward the garden. “We ought to eat first,” Ratliff said. Then he let out a long breath like a sigh; he and Bookwright ran side by side to the rear of the sewing-machine box, which Ratliff unlocked, and they snatched out the other shovels and picks and ran down the slope and into the old garden where Armstid was already digging. Just before they reached him he stood up and began to run toward the road, the shovel raised, whereupon they too saw that Grimm had not departed but was sitting in the wagon in the road, watching them across the ruined fence of iron pickets until Armstid had almost reached it. Then he drove on.
They dug all that night, Armstid in one hole, Ratliff and Bookwright working together in another. From time to time they would stop to rest while the summer constellations marched overhead. Ratliff and Bookwright would move about to flex their cramped muscles, then they would squat (They did not smoke; they could not risk showing any light. Armstid had probably never had the extra nickel or dime to buy tobacco with) and talk quietly while they listened to the steady sound of Armstid’s shovel below them. He would be digging when they stopped; he would still be digging, unflagging and tireless, when they started again, though now and then one of them would remember him and pause to see him sitting on the side of his pit, immobile as the lumps of earth he had thrown out of it. Then he would be digging again before he had actually had time to rest; this until dawn began and Ratliff and Bookwright stood over him in the wan light, arguing with him. “We got to quit,” Ratliff said. “It’s already light enough for folks to see us.” Armstid didn’t pause.
“Let them,” he said. “It’s mine now. I can dig all day if I want.”
“All right,” Ratliff said. “You’ll have plenty of help then.” Now Armstid paused, looking up at him out of his pit. “How can we dig all night and then set up all day to keep other folks out of it?” Ratliff said. “Come on now,” he said. “We got to eat and then sleep some.” They got the mattress and the quilts from the buckboard and carried them into the house, the hall in whose gaping door-frames no doors any longer hung and from whose ceiling depended the skeleton of what had been once a crystal chandelier, with its sweep of stairs whose treads had long since been prised off and carried away to patch barns and chicken-houses and privies, whose spindles and walnut railings and newel-posts had long ago been chopped up and burned as firewood. The room they chose had a fourteen-foot ceiling. There were the remains of a once-gilt filigree of cornice above the gutted windows and the ribbed and serrated grin of lathing from which the plaster had fallen, and the skeleton of another prismed chandelier. They spread the mattress and the quilts upon the dust of plaster, and Ratliff and Bookwright returned to the buckboard and got the food they had brought, and the two sacks of coins. They hid the two sacks in the chimney, foul with bird-droppings, behind the mantel in which there were still wedged a few shards of the original marble. Armstid didn’t produce his bag. They didn’t know what he had done with it. They didn’t ask.
They built no fire. Ratliff would probably have objected, but nobody suggested it; they ate cold the tasteless food, too tired to taste it; removing only their shoes stained with the dampening earth from the deepening pits, they lay among the quilts and slept fitfully, too tired to sleep completely also, dreaming of gold. Toward noon jagged scraps and
flecks of sun came through the broken roof and the two rotted floors overhead and crept eastward across the floor and the tumbled quilts and then the prone bodies and the slack-mouthed upflung faces, whereupon they turned and shifted or covered their heads and faces with their arms, as though, still sleeping, they fled the weightless shadow of that for which, awake, they had betrayed themselves. They were awake at sunset without having rested. They moved stiffly about, not talking, while the coffee-pot boiled on the broken hearth; they ate again, wolfing the cold and tasteless food while the crimson glow from the dying west faded in the high ruined room. Armstid was the first one to finish. He put his cup down and rose, turning first onto his hands and knees as an infant gets up, dragging his stiff twice broken leg painfully beneath him, and limped toward the door. “We ought to wait till full dark,” Ratliff said, to no one; certainly no one answered him. It was as if he spoke to himself and had answered himself. He rose too. Bookwright was already standing. When they reached the garden, Armstid was already in his pit, digging.
They dug through that brief summer night as through the previous one while the familiar stars wheeled overhead, stopping now and then to rest and ease their muscles and listen to the steady sigh and recover of Armstid’s shovel below them; they prevailed upon him to stop at dawn and returned to the house and ate — the canned salmon, the sidemeat cold in its own congealed grease, the cold cooked bread — and slept again among the tumbled quilts while noon came and the creeping and probing golden sun at whose touch they turned and shifted as though in impotent nightmare flight from that impalpable and weightless burden. They had finished the bread that morning. When the others waked at the second sunset, Ratliff had the coffee-pot on the fire and was cooking another batch of cornbread in the skillet. Armstid would not wait for it. He ate his portion of meat alone and drank his coffee and got to his feet again as small children do, and went out. Bookwright was standing also. Ratliff, squatting beside the skillet, looked up at him. “Go on then,” he said. “You don’t need to wait either.”
“We’re down six foot,” Bookwright said. “Four foot wide and near ten foot long. I’ll start where we found the third sack.”
“All right,” Ratliff said. “Go on and start.” Because something had clicked in his mind again. It might have been while he was asleep, he didn’t know. But he knew that this time it was right. Only I don’t want to look at it, hear it, he thought, squatting, holding the skillet steady over the fire, squinting his watering eyes against the smoke which the broken chimney no longer drew out of the house, I don’t dare to. Anyway, I don’t have to yet. I can dig again tonight. We even got a new place to dig. So he waited until the bread was done. Then he took it out of the skillet and set it near the ashes and sliced some of the bacon into the skillet and cooked it; he had his first hot meal in three days, and he ate it without haste, squatting, sipping his coffee while the last of the sunset’s crimson gathered along the ruined ceiling and died from there too, and the room had only the glow of the dying fire.
Bookwright and Armstid were already digging. When he came close enough to see, Armstid unaided was three feet down and his pit was very nearly as long as the one Ratliff and Bookwright had dug together. He went on to where Bookwright had started the new pit and took up his shovel (Bookwright had fetched it for him) and began to dig. They dug on through that night too, beneath the marching and familiar stars, stopping now and then to rest although Armstid did not stop when they did, squatting on the lip of the new excavation while Ratliff talked, murmurous, not about gold, money, but anecdotal, humorous, his invisible face quizzical, bemused, impenetrable. They dug again. Daylight will be time enough to look at it, he thought. Because I done already looked at it, he thought. I looked at it three days ago. Then it began to be dawn. In the wan beginning of that light he put his shovel down and straightened up. Bookwright’s pick rose and fell steadily in front of him; twenty feet beyond, he could now see Armstid waist-deep in the ground as if he had been cut in two at the hips, the dead torso, not even knowing it was dead, labouring on in measured stoop and recover like a metronome as Armstid dug himself back into that earth which had produced him to be its born and fated thrall forever until he died. Ratliff climbed out of the pit and stood in the dark fresh loam which they had thrown out of it, his muscles flinching and jerking with fatigue, and stood looking quietly at Bookwright until Bookwright became aware of him and paused, the pick raised for the next stroke, and looked up at him. They looked at each other — the two gaunt, unshaven, weary faces. “Odum,” Ratliff said, “who was Eustace Grimm’s wife?”
“I don’t know,” Bookwright said.
“I do,” Ratliff said. “She was one of them Calhoun County Dosheys. And that ain’t right. And his ma was a Fite. And that ain’t right either.” Bookwright quit looking at him. He laid the pick down carefully, almost gently, as if it were a spoon level-full of soup or of that much nitro-glycerine, and climbed out of the pit, wiping his hands on his trousers.
“I thought you knew,” he said. “I thought you knew everything about folks in this country.”
“I reckon I know now,” Ratliff said. “But I reckon you’ll still have to tell me.”
“Fite was his second wife’s name. She wasn’t Eustace’s ma. Pa told me about it when Ab Snopes first rented that place from the Varners five years ago.”
“All right,” Ratliff said. “Tell me.”
“Eustace’s ma was Ab Snopes’s youngest sister.” They looked at one another, blinking a little. Soon the light would begin to increase fast.
“Sholy now,” Ratliff said. “You finished?”
“Yes,” Bookwright said. “I’m finished.”
“Bet you one of them I beat you,” Ratliff said. They mounted the slope and entered the house, the room where they slept. It was still dark in the room, so while Ratliff fumbled the two bags out of the chimney, Bookwright lit the lantern and set it on the floor and they squatted facing each other across the lantern, opening the bags.
“I reckon we ought to knowed wouldn’t no cloth sack . . .” Bookwright said. “After thirty years . . .” They emptied the bags onto the floor. Each of them took up a coin, examined it briefly, then set them one upon the other like a crowned king in checkers, close to the lantern. Then one by one they examined the other coins by the light of the dingy lantern. “But how did he know it would be us?” Bookwright said.
“He didn’t,” Ratliff said. “He didn’t care. He just come out here every night and dug for a while. He knowed he couldn’t possibly dig over two weeks before somebody saw him.” He laid his last coin down and sat back on his heels until Bookwright had finished. “1871,” he said.
“1879,” Bookwright said. “I even got one that was made last year. You beat me.”
“I beat you,” Ratliff said. He took up the two coins and they put the money back into the bags. They didn’t hide them. They left each bag on its owner’s quilt and blew out the lantern. It was lighter now and they could see Armstid quite well where he stooped and rose and stooped in his thigh-deep pit. The sun would rise soon; already there were three buzzards soaring against the high yellow-blue. Armstid did not even look up when they approached; he continued to dig even while they stood beside the pit, looking down at him. “Henry,” Ratliff said. Then Ratliff leaned down and touched his shoulder. He whirled, the shovel raised and turned edgewise and glinting a thin line of steel-coloured dawn as the edge of an axe would.
“Get out of my hole,” he said. “Get outen it.”
2
The wagons containing the men, the women and the children approaching the village from that direction, stopped, and the men who had walked up from the store to stand along Varner’s fence, watched, while Lump and Eck Snopes and Varner’s negro, Sam, loaded the furniture and the trunks and the boxes into the wagon backed up to the edge of the veranda. It was the same wagon drawn by the same mules which had brought Flem Snopes back from Texas in April, and the three men came and went between it and the house,
Eck or the negro backing clumsily through the door with the burden between them and Lump Snopes scuttling along beside it in a constant patter of his own exhortations and commands, holding to it, to be sure, but carrying no weight, to load that into the wagon and return, pausing at the door and stepping aside as Mrs. Varner bustled out with another armful of small crocks and hermetic jars of fruit and vegetables. The watchers along the fence checked the objects off — the dismantled bed, the dresser, the washstand with its flowered matching bowl and ewer and slop-jar and chamber-pot, the trunk which doubtless contained the wife’s and the child’s clothing, the wooden box which the women at least knew doubtless contained dishes and cutlery and cooking vessels, and lastly a tightly roped mass of brown canvas. “What’s that?” Freeman said. “It looks like a tent.”
“It is a tent,” Tull said. “Eck brought it out from the express office in town last week.”
“They ain’t going to move to Jefferson and live in a tent, are they?” Freeman said.
“I don’t know,” Tull said. At last the wagon was loaded; Eck and the negro bumped through the door for the last time, Mrs. Varner bustled out with the final hermetic jar; Lump Snopes re-entered the house and emerged with the straw suitcase which they all knew, then Flem Snopes and then his wife came out. She was carrying the baby which was too large to have been born at only seven months but which had certainly not waited until May, and stood there for a moment, Olympus-tall, a head taller than her mother or husband either, in a tailored suit despite the rich heat of summer’s full maturing, whose complexion alone showed that she was not yet eighteen since the unseeing and expressionless mask-face had no age, while the women in the wagons looked at her and thought how that was the first tailored suit ever seen in Frenchman’s Bend and how she had got some clothes out of Flem Snopes anyway because it would not be Will Varner that bought them now, and the men along the fence looked at her and thought of Hoake McCarron and how any one of them would have bought the suit or anything else for her if she had wanted it.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 351
