That was it. Prolongation. Not only the anguish of hope deferred, not even the outrage of simple justice deferred, but the knowledge that, even when the blow fell on Houston, it would cost him, Mink, eight dollars in cash — the eight dollars which he would have to affirm that the imaginary purchaser of the cow had paid him for the animal in order to make good the lie that he had sold it, which, when he reclaimed the cow in the spring, he would have to give to Houston as an earnest that until that moment he really believed he had sold the animal — or at least had established eight dollars as its value — when he went to Houston and told him how the purchaser had come to him, Mink, only that morning and told him the cow had escaped from the lot the same night he had bought it and brought it home, and so reclaimed the eight dollars he had paid for it, thus establishing the cow not only in Houston’s arrogant contempt but in the interested curiosity of the rest of Frenchman’s Bend too, as having now cost him, Mink, sixteen dollars to reclaim his own property.
That was the outrage: the eight dollars. The fact that he could not even have wintered the cow for eight dollars, let alone put on it the weight of flesh he could see with his own eyes it now carried, didn’t count. What mattered was, he would have to give Houston, who didn’t need it and wouldn’t even miss the feed the cow had eaten, the eight dollars with which he, Mink, could have bought a gallon of whiskey for Christmas, plus a dollar or two of the gewgaw finery his wife and his two daughters were forever whining at him for.
But there was no help for it. And even then, his pride was that he was not reconciled. Not he to be that meagre and niggling and puny as meekly to accept something just because he didn’t see yet how he could help it. More, since this too merely bolstered the anger and rage at the injustice: that he would have to go fawning and even cringing a little when he went to recover his cow; would have to waste a lie for the privilege of giving eight dollars which he wanted, must sacrifice to spare, to a man who didn’t even need them, would not even miss their lack, did not even know yet that he was going to receive them. The moment, the day at last at the end of winter when by local custom the livestock which had run loose in the skeletoned cornfields since fall, must be taken up by their owners and put inside fences so the land could be ploughed and planted again; one afternoon, evening rather, waiting until his cow had received that final feeding with the rest of Houston’s herd before he approached the feed lot, the worn ploughline coiled over his arm and the meagre lump of worn dollar bills and nickels and dimes and quarters wadded into his overall pocket, not needing to fawn and cringe yet because only the Negro with his hayfork would be in the lot now, the rich man himself in the house, the warm kitchen, with in his hand a toddy not of the stinking gagging home-made corn such as he, Mink, would have had to buy with his share of the eight dollars if he could have kept them, but of good red chartered whiskey ordered out of Memphis. Not having to fawn and cringe yet: just saying, level and white-man, to the nigger paused in the door to the feeding shed to look back at him:
“Hidy. I see you got my cow there. Put this rope on her and I’ll get her outen your way,” the Negro looking back at him a second longer then gone, on through the shed toward the house; not coming back to take the rope, which he, Mink, had not expected anyway, but gone first to tell the white man, to know what to do. Which was exactly what he, Mink, had expected, leaning his cold-raw, cold-reddened wrists which even the frayed slicker sleeves failed to cover, on the top rail of the white-painted fence. Oh yes, Houston with the toddy of good red whiskey in his hand and likely with his boots off and his stocking feet in the oven of the stove, warming for supper, who now, cursing, would have to withdraw his feet and drag on again the cold wet muddy rubber and come back to the lot.
Which Houston did: the very bang of the kitchen door and the squish and slap of the gum boots across the back yard and into the lot sounding startled and outraged. Then he came on through the shed too, the Negro about ten feet behind him. “Hidy, Jack,” Mink said. “Too bad to have to roust you out into the cold and wet again. That nigger could have tended to it. I jest learned today you wintered my cow for me. If your nigger’ll put this ploughline on her, I’ll get her out of your way.”
“I thought you sold that cow to Nub Gowrie,” Houston said.
“So did I,” Mink said. “Until Nub rid up this morning on a mule and said that cow broke out of his lot the same night he got her home and he ain’t seen her since, and collected back the eight dollars he paid me for her,” already reaching into his pocket, the meagre wad of frayed notes and coins in his hand. “So, since eight dollars seems to be the price of this cow, I reckon I owe you that for wintering her. Which makes her a sixteen-dollar cow now, don’t it, whether she knows it or not. So here. Take your money and let your nigger put this ploughline on her and I’ll—”
“That cow wasn’t worth eight dollars last fall,” Houston said. “But she’s worth a considerable more now. She’s eaten more than sixteen dollars’ worth of my feed. Not to mention my young bull topped her last week. It was last week, wasn’t it, Henry?” he said to the Negro.
“Yes sir,” the Negro said. “Last Tuesday. I put it on the book.” “If you had jest notified me sooner I’d have saved the strain on your bull and that nigger and his pitchfork too,” Mink said. He said to the Negro: “Here. Take this rope—”
“Hold it,” Houston said; he was reaching into his pocket too. “You yourself established the price of that cow at eight dollars. All right. I’ll buy her.”
“You yourself jest finished establishing the fact that she has done went up since then,” Mink said. “I’m trying right now to give the rest of sixteen for her. So evidently I wouldn’t take sixteen, let alone jest eight. So take your money. And if your nigger’s too wore out to put this rope on her, I’ll come in and do it myself.” Now he even began to climb the fence.
“Hold it,” Houston said again. He said to the Negro: “What would you say she’s worth now?”
“She’d bring thirty,” the Negro said. “Maybe thirty-five.” “You hear that?” Houston said.
“No,” Mink said, still climbing the fence. “I don’t listen to niggers: I tell them. If he don’t want to put this rope on my cow, tell him to get outen my way.”
“Don’t cross that fence, Snopes,” Houston said.
“Well well,” Mink said, one leg over the top rail, the coil of rope dangling from one raw-red hand, “don’t tell me you bring a pistol along every time you try to buy a cow. Maybe you even tote it to put a cotton-seed or a grain of corn in the ground too?” It was tableau: Mink with one leg over the top rail, Houston standing inside the fence, the pistol hanging in one hand against his leg, the Negro not moving either, not looking at anything, the whites of his eyes just showing a little. “If you had sent me word, maybe I could a brought a pistol too.”
“All right,” Houston said. He laid the pistol carefully on the top of the fence post beside him. “Put that rope down. Get over the fence at your post. I’ll back off one post and you can count three and we’ll see who uses it to trade with.”
“Or maybe your nigger can do the counting,” Mink said. “All he’s got to do is say Three. Because I ain’t got no nigger with me neither. Evidently a man needs a tame nigger and a pistol both to trade livestock with you.” He swung his leg back to the ground outside the fence. “So I reckon I’ll jest step over to the store and have a word with Uncle Billy and the constable. Maybe I ought to done that at first, saved a walk up here in the cold. I would a suh-jested leaving my ploughline here, to save toting it again, only likely you would be charging me thirty-five dollars to get it back, since that seems to be your bottom price for anything in your lot that don’t belong to you.” He was leaving now. “So long then. In case you do make any eight-dollar stock deals, be sho you don’t take no wooden nickels.”
He walked away steadily enough but in such a thin furious rage that for a while he couldn’t even see, and with his ears ringing as if someone had fired a shotgun just over his
head. In fact he had expected the rage too and now, in solitude and privacy, was the best possible time to let it exhaust itself. Because he knew now he had anticipated something like what had happened and he would need his wits about him. He had known by instinct that his own outrageous luck would invent something like this, so that even the fact that going to Varner, the justice of the peace, for a paper for the constable to serve on Houston to recover the cow would cost him another two dollars and a half, was not really a surprise to him: it was simply them again, still testing, trying him to see just how much he could bear and would stand.
So, in a way, he was not really surprised at what happened next either. It was his own fault in a way: he had simply underestimated them: the whole matter of taking the eight dollars to Houston and putting the rope on the cow and leading it back home had seemed too simple, too puny for Them to bother with. But he was wrong; They were not done yet. Varner would not even issue the paper; whereupon two days later there were seven of them, counting the Negro — himself, Houston, Varner and the constable and two professional cattle buyers — standing along the fence of Houston’s feed lot while the Negro led his cow out for the two experts to examine her.
“Well?” Varner said at last.
“I’d give thirty-five,” the first trader said.
“Bred to a paper bull, I might go to thirty-seven and a half,” the second said.
“Would you go to forty?” Varner said.
“No,” the second said. “She might not a caught.”
“That’s why I wouldn’t even match thirty-seven and a half,” the first said.
“All right,” Varner said — a tall, gaunt, narrow-hipped, heavily moustached man who looked like what his father had been: one of Forrest’s cavalrymen. “Call it thirty-seven and a half then. So we’ll split the difference then.” He was looking at Mink now. “When you pay Houston eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents, you can have your cow. Only you haven’t got eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents, have you?”
He stood there, his raw-red wrists which the slicker did not cover lying quiet on the top rail of the fence, his eyes quite blind again and his ears ringing again as though somebody had fired a shotgun just over his head, and on his face that expression faint and gentle and almost like smiling. “No,” he said.
“Wouldn’t his cousin Flem let him have it?” the second trader said. Nobody bothered to answer that at all, not even to remind them that Flem was still in Texas on his honeymoon, where he and his wife had been since the marriage last August.
“Then he’ll have to work it out,” Varner said. He was talking to Houston now. “What have you got that he can do?”
“I’m going to fence in another pasture,” Houston said. “I’ll pay him fifty cents a day. He can make thirty-seven days and from light till noon on the next one digging post holes and stringing wire. What about the cow? Do I keep her, or does Quick” (Quick was the constable) “take her?”
“Do you want Quick to?” Varner said.
“No,” Houston said. “She’s been here so long now she might get homesick. Besides, if she’s here Snopes can see her every day and keep his spirits up about what he’s really working for.”
“All right, all right,” Varner said quickly. “It’s settled now. I don’t want any more of that now.”
That was what he had to do. And his pride still was that he would not be, would never be, reconciled to it. Not even if he were to lose the cow, the animal itself to vanish from the entire equation and leave him in what might be called peace. Which — eliminating the cow — he could have done himself. More: he could have got eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents for doing it, which, with the eight dollars Houston had refused to accept, would have made practically twenty-seven dollars, more cash at one time than he had seen in he could not remember when, since even with the fall sale of his bale or two of cotton, the subtraction of Varner’s landlord’s share, plus his furnish bill at Varner’s store, barely left him that same eight or ten dollars in cash with which he had believed in vain that he could redeem the cow.
In fact, Houston himself made that suggestion. It was the second or third day of digging the post holes and setting the heavy locust posts in them; Houston came up on the stallion and sat looking down at him. He didn’t even pause, let alone look up.
“Look,” Houston said. “Look at me.” He looked up then, not pausing. Houston’s hand was already extended; he, Mink, could see the actual money in it. “Varner said eighteen seventy-five. All right, here it is. Take it and go on home and forget about that cow.” Now he didn’t even look up any longer, heaving on to his shoulder the post that anyway looked heavier and more solid than he did and dropping it into the hole, tamping the dirt home with the reversed shovel handle so that he only had to hear the stallion turn and go away. Then it was the fourth day; again he only needed to hear the stallion come up and stop, not even looking up when Houston said,
“Snopes,” then again, “Snopes,” then he said, “Mink,” he — Mink — not even looking up, let alone pausing while he said:
“I hear you.”
“Stop this now. You got to break your land for your crop. You got to make your living. Go on home and get your seed in the ground and then come back.”
“I ain’t got time to make a living,” he said, not even pausing, “I got to get my cow back home.”
The next morning it was not Houston on the stallion but Varner himself in his buckboard. Though he, Mink, did not know yet that it was Varner himself who was suddenly afraid, afraid for the peace and quiet of the community which he held in his iron usurious hand, buttressed by the mortgages and liens in the vast iron safe in his store. And now he, Mink, did look up and saw money in the closed fist resting on Varner’s knee.
“I’ve put this on your furnish bill for this year,” Varner said. “I just come from your place. You ain’t broke a furrow yet. Pick up them tools and take this money and give it to Jack and take that damn cow on home and get to ploughing.”
Though this was only Varner; he could pause and even lean on the post hole digger now. “Have you heard any complaint from me about that-ere cow court judgment of yourn?” he said.
“No,” Varner said.
“Then get out of my way and tend to your business while I tend to mine,” he said. Then Varner was out of the buckboard — a man already old enough to be called Uncle Billy by the debtors who fawned on him, yet agile too: enough so to jump down from the buckboard in one motion, the lines in one hand and the whip in the other.
“God damn you,” he said, “pick up them tools and go on home. I’ll be back before dark, and if I don’t find a furrow run by then, I’m going to dump every sorry stick you’ve got in that house out in the road and rent it to somebody else tomorrow morning.”
And he, Mink, looking at him, with on his face that faint gentle expression almost like smiling. “Likely you would do jest exactly that,” he said.
“You’re god-damned right I will,” Varner said. “Get on. Now. This minute.”
“Why, sholy,” he said. “Since that’s the next court judgment in this case, and a law-abiding feller always listens to a court judgment.” He turned.
“Here,” Varner said to his back. “Take this money.”
“Ain’t it?” he said, going on.
By midafternoon he had broken the better part of an acre. When he swung the plough at the turn-row he saw the buckboard coming up the lane. It carried two this time, Varner and the constable, Quick, and it was moving at a snail’s pace because, on a lead rope at the rear axle, was his cow. He didn’t hurry; he ran out that furrow too, then unhitched the traces and tied the mule to the fence and only then walked on to where the two men still sat in the buckboard, watching him.
“I paid Houston the eighteen dollars and here’s your cow,” Varner said. “And if ever again I hear of you or anything belonging to you on Jack Houston’s land, I’m going to send you to jail.”
“And seventy-five cents,�
� he said. “Or maybe them six bits evaporated. That cow’s under a court judgment. I can’t accept it until that judgment is satisfied.”
“Lon,” Varner said to the constable in a voice flat and almost gentle, “put that cow in the lot yonder and take that rope off it and get to hell back in this buggy.”
“Lon,” Mink said in a voice just as gentle and just as flat, “if you put that cow in my lot I’ll get my shotgun and kill her.”
Nor did he watch them. He went back to the mule and untied the lines from the fence and hooked up the traces and ran another furrow, his back now to the house and the lane, so that not until he swung the mule at the turn-row did he see for a moment the buckboard going back down the lane at that snail’s pace matched to the plodding cow. He ploughed steadily on until dark, until his supper of the coarse fatback and cheap molasses and probably weevilly flour which, even after he had eaten it, would still be the property of Will Varner until he, Mink, had ginned and sold the cotton next fall which he had not even planted yet.
An hour later, with a coal-oil lantern to light dimly the slow lift and thrust of the digger, he was back at Houston’s fence. He had not lain down nor even stopped moving, working, since daylight this morning; when daylight came again he would not have slept in twenty-four hours; when the sun did rise on him he was back in his own field with the mule and plough, stopping only for dinner at noon, then back to the field again, ploughing again — or so he thought until he waked to find himself lying in the very furrow he had just run, beneath the canted handles of the still-bedded plough, the anchored mule still standing in the traces and the sun just going down.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 498
