On successive days and two counties apart, the buckboard and the sturdy mismatched team might be seen tethered in the nearest shade, and Suratt’s affable, ready face and neat, tieless blue shirt one of the squatting group on the porch of a crossroads store. Or — and still squatting — among the women surrounded by laden clotheslines and blackened wash pots at springs and wells, or decorous in a splint chair in cabin dooryards, talking and listening. He had a regular itinerary, selling perhaps three machines a year, and the rest of the time trading in land and livestock, in secondhand farm tools and musical instruments, or whatever came to his hand. He had an affable and impenetrable volubility, a gift for anecdote and gossip. He never forgot names and he knew everyone, man, mule and dog, in fifty miles. He was believed to be well fixed.
His itinerary brought him to Varner’s store every six weeks. One day he arrived two weeks ahead of schedule. While across the county he had bought, for twenty dollars, of a Northerner who was establishing a ranch to breed native goats, a contract to sell the Northerner a hundred goats which Suratt knew to be owned near Varner’s store, in the Frenchman’s Bend country. Of the four or five men squatting along the porch of the store Suratt made his guarded inquiries, larding them skillfully into his anecdote, and got the information which he wanted. The next morning he drove out to the first goat owner.
“Wish you’d got here yesterday,” the man said. “I done already sold them goats.”
“The devil you have,” Suratt said. “Who to?”
“Flem Snopes.”
“Flem Snopes?”
Snopes was the man who ran Varner’s store. Varner himself — he was a politician, a veterinary, a Methodist lay preacher — was hardly ever seen about the store. Snopes had been running the store for two or three years — a squat man who might have been any age between twenty-five and fifty, with a round full face and dull eyes, who sat all day, between the infrequent customers, in a tilted chair in the door, chewing and whittling and saying no word. All that was known of him was known on hearsay, and that not his own; it was not even known what his exact relation to Varner and the store was, whether clerk, partner or what. He had been sitting in his usual chair, chewing and whittling, while Suratt was getting his information about the goats.
“He come out here last night and bought all I had,” the goat owner said.
“You mean, he come out here after dark?”
“About nine o’clock it was. I reckon he couldn’t leave the store sooner.”
“Sho,” Suratt said. “I reckon not.” The second goat owner lived four miles away. Suratt drove it in thirty-two minutes. “I come out to see if you sold your goats at ten o’clock last night, or was it half-past ten?”
“Why, yes,” the man said. “It was along about midnight when Flem got here. How did you know?”
“I knowed I had the best team,” Suratt said. “That’s how. Good-by.”
“What’s your hurry? I got a couple of shotes I might sell.”
“Sho, now,” Suratt said. “They wouldn’t do me no good. Soon as they belonged to me they would get elephant-sized overnight, and bust. This here country’s too rich for me.”
He did not call on the other goat owner at all. He returned to Jefferson without passing Varner’s store. Three miles from town, a single goat balanced with somnolent precariousness upon the roof of a barn. Beside the fence a small boy in overalls watched Suratt draw up and stop.
“What did Flem Snopes offer you for that goat, bud?” Suratt said.
“Sir?” the boy said.
Suratt drove on. Three days later Snopes gave Suratt twenty-one dollars for the contract for which Suratt had paid twenty. He put the twenty dollars away in a tobacco sack and held the other dollar in his hand. He chucked it, caught it, the squatting men along the wall watching him. Snopes had sat again, whittling.
“Well, at least I ain’t skunked.” Suratt said. The others guffawed, save Snopes. Suratt looked about at them, bleak, sardonic, humorous too. Two children, a boy and a girl, mounted the steps, carrying a basket. Suratt gave them the dollar. “Here, chillens,” he said. “Here’s something Mr. Snopes sent you.”
It was three years after that when Suratt learned that Snopes had bought the Old Frenchman place from Varner. Suratt knew the place. He knew it better than anyone suspected. Perhaps once a year he drove three or four miles out of his way to pass the place, entering from the back. Why he took that precaution he could not have said; he probably would have believed it was not to be seen doing something by which he had no expectation of gaining anything. Once a year he halted his buckboard before the house and sat in the buckboard to contemplate the austere skeleton somnolent in the summer sunlight, a little sinister, thinking of the generations of men who had dug for gold there, contemplating the inscrutable desolation of cedar and brier and crapemyrtle and calycanthus gone lush and wild, sensing out of the sunny and sinister silence the ancient spent and hopeful lusts, the optimism, the effluvium of the defunct greed and despair, the spent and secret nocturnal sweat left upon the place by men as quiet now as the man who had unwittingly left behind him a monument more enduring than any obituary either carved or cast. “It’s bound to be there, somewhere,” Suratt told himself. “It’s bound to.” Then he would drive on to Varner’s store two miles away or to Jefferson twelve miles away, having carried away with him something of that ancient air, that old splendor, confusing it though he did with the fleshly gratifications, the wherewith to possess them, in his peasant’s mind. “It’s bound to. Folks wouldn’t keep on digging for it if it wasn’t there somewhere. It wouldn’t be right to keep on letting them. No, sir.”
When he learned that Snopes had bought the place, Suratt was eating dinner in Jefferson in the restaurant which he and his brother-in-law owned. He sat on a backless and friction-smooth stool, his elbows on the friction-smooth counter, eating steak and potatoes. He became motionless, humped forward in the attitude of eating, the laden knife blade arrested halfway to his mouth, his eyes profoundly concentrant. “If Flem Snopes bought that place, he knows something about it that even Will Varner never knowed. Flem Snopes wouldn’t buy a nickel mousetrap withouten he knowed beforehand it would make him back a dime.”
He reached Varner’s store in mid-afternoon. Snopes was sitting in the chair, chewing, whittling minutely at a piece of soft pine. There was about him, his white shirt, his blue denim trousers braced thick and smooth, a profound inertia impervious to haste like that of a cow, to the necessity for haste like an idol. “That’s what makes me so mad about it,” Suratt told himself. “That he can set still and know what I got to work so hard to find out. That I got to work fast to learn it and ain’t got time to work fast because I don’t know if I got time to make a mistake by working fast. And him just setting still.” But when he mounted the steps there was upon his brown, lean face its usual expression — alert, quizzical, pleasant, impenetrable and immediate. He greeted in rotation the men who squatted along the wall.
“Well, boys,” he said, “I hear Flem has done bought himself a farm. You fixing to start a goat ranch of your own, Flem? Or maybe it’s just a home for the folks you trims trading.” Then he said, getting his sober and appreciative laugh while Snopes chewed slowly and trimmed minutely at the stick with the profound impenetrability of an idol or a cow, “Well, if Flem knowed any way to make anything offen that old place, he’d be too durn close-mouthed to tell himself about it.”
III
The three men crouched in the weeds along the ditch at the foot of the garden. The shaggy slope rose before them in the darkness to the crest where the broken roof and topless chimneys of the house stood sharp against the sky. In one of the windows a single star showed, like a feeble candle set upon the ledge. They lay in the weeds, listening to the sigh and recover of an invisible shovel halfway up the garden slope.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Suratt whispered. “Didn’t I? Is there e’er a man or woman in this country that don’t know Flem Snopes wouldn’t pay a ni
ckel for nothing if he didn’t know all the time he would make a dime back?”
“How do I know it’s Flem?” the second said. His name was Vernon Tull. He was a well-to-do bachelor.
“Ain’t I watched him?” Suratt said. “Ain’t I laid here in these weeds two nights now and watched him come out here and dig? Ain’t I waited until he left, and crawled up there and found every place where he had done filled the hole up again and smoothed the dirt back to hide it?”
“But how do I know it’s Flem?” Vernon said.
“If you knowed, would you believe it was something buried there?” Suratt whispered. The third man was Henry Armstid. He lay between them, glaring up the dark slope; they could feel him trembling like a dog. Now and then he cursed in a dry whisper. He lived on a small mortgaged farm, which he and his wife worked like two men. During one season, having lost one of his mules, he and his wife did the plowing, working day about in the second trace beside the other mule. The land was either poor land or they were poor managers. It made for them less than a bare living, which the wife eked out by weaving by the firelight after dark. She wove fancy objects of colored string saved from packages and of bits of cloth given her by the women in Jefferson, where, in a faded gingham wrapper and sunbonnet and tennis shoes, she peddled the objects from door to door on the market days. They had four children, all under six years of age, the youngest an infant in arms.
They lay there in the weeds, the darkness, hearing the shovel. After a while it ceased. “He’s done found it,” Henry said. He surged suddenly between them. They grasped his arms.
“Stop!” Suratt whispered. “Stop! Help hold him, Vernon.” They held him until he ceased and lay again between them, rigid, glaring, cursing. “He ain’t found it yet.” Suratt whispered. “He knows it’s there somewhere; he’s done found the paper maybe that tells. But he’s got to hunt for it same as we will. He knows it’s in that ’ere garden, but he’s got to hunt for it same as us. Ain’t we done watched him?” They spoke in hissing whispers, rigid, panting, glaring up the starlit slope.
“How do I know it’s Flem?” Vernon said.
“Just watch, that’s all,” Suratt whispered. They crouched; the shadowy, deliberate motion of the digger mounted the slope. It was the sound made by a lazy man rather than by a cautious one. Suratt gripped Henry. “Watch, now!” he whispered. They breathed with hissing exhalations, in passionate and dying sighs. Then the man came into sight. For a moment he came into relief against the sky upon the crest of the knoll, as though he had paused there for an instant. “There!” Suratt whispered. “Ain’t that Flem Snopes? Do you believe now?”
Vernon drew his breath quietly in like a man preparing to sleep. “It’s a fact,” he said. He spoke quietly, soberly. “It’s Flem.”
“Do you believe now?” Suratt whispered. “Do you? Do you believe now?” Between them, Henry lay cursing in a dry whisper. Beneath Vernon’s and Suratt’s arms his arms felt like wire cables vibrating faintly.
“All we got to do,” Suratt said, “is to find where it’s at tomorrow night, and then get it.”
“Tomorrow night, hell!” Henry said. “Let’s get up there now and find it. That’s what we got to do. Before he—”
They argued with him, violent, sibilant, expostulant. They held him flat on the ground between them, cursing. “We got to find where it is the first time and dig it up,” Suratt said. “We got to get Uncle Dick. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see we got to find it the first time? That we can’t be caught looking?”
“We got to get Uncle Dick,” Vernon said. “Hush, Henry. Hush, now.”
They returned the next night with Uncle Dick. When Vernon and Suratt, carrying the second shovel and the pick and half carrying Uncle Dick between them, climbed up out of the ditch at the foot of the garden, they could hear Henry already digging. After concealing the buckboard in the branch bottom they had had to run to keep even within hearing of Henry, and so Uncle Dick could not yet stand alone. Yet they released him at once, whereupon he sank to the ground at their feet, from where his invisible breathing rose in reedy gasps, and as one Vernon and Suratt glared into the darkness toward the hushed, furious sound of Henry’s shovel.
“We got to make him quit until Uncle Dick’s ready,” Suratt said. They ran toward the sound, shoulder to shoulder in the stumbling dark. Suratt spoke to Henry. Henry did not cease to dig. Suratt grasped at the shovel. Henry whirled, the shovel raised like an ax; they glared at each other, their faces strained with sleeplessness and weariness and lust. It was Suratt’s fourth night without having removed his clothes; Vernon’s and Henry’s second.
“Touch it,” Henry whispered. “Touch it.”
“Wait, Henry,” Suratt said. “Let Uncle Dick find where it’s at.”
“Get away,” Henry said. “I warn you. Get outen my hole.”
Uncle Dick was sitting up when Suratt and Vernon returned running and plunged down beside him and began to scrabble in the dark weeds for the second shovel. Suratt found the pick and learned the blade with his hand in one motion and flung it behind him into the darkness again, and plunged down again just as Vernon found the shovel. They struggled for it, their breathing harsh, mute, repressed. “Leave go,” Suratt whispered. “Leave go.” They clutched the shovel between them. Out of the darkness came the unflagging sound of Henry’s digging.
“Wait,” Uncle Dick said. He got stiffly to his feet — a shriveled little old man in a filthy frock coat, with a long white beard. Between sunup and sundown Suratt, seventy-two hours without having removed his clothes, drove thirty miles to fetch him from where he lived alone in a mud-daubed hut in a cane swamp. He had no other name, and he antedated all who knew him. He made and sold nostrums and charms, and they said that he ate not only frogs and snakes but bugs as well — anything that he could catch. “Wait,” he said in a reedy, quavering voice. “Ther air anger in the yearth. Ye must make that ’ere un quit a-bruisin’ hit, so the Lord kin show whar hit’s hid at.”
“That’s so,” Suratt said. “It won’t work unless the ground is quiet. I forgot.”
When they approached, Henry stood erect in his pit and threatened them with the shovel and cursed them, but Uncle Dick walked up and touched him.
“Ye kin dig and ye kin dig, young man,” he said. “Fer what’s rendered to the yearth, the yearth will keep withouten the will of the Lord air revealed.”
Henry desisted then and lowered the shovel. Uncle Dick drove them back to the ditch. From his coat he produced a forked peach branch, from the end of which, dangling on a bit of string, swung an empty brass cartridge containing a gold-filled human tooth. He held them there for five minutes, stooping now and then to lay his hand flat on the ground. Then with the three of them at his heels — Henry rigid, silent; Suratt and Vernon speaking now and then in short, hissing whispers — he went to the fence corner and grasped the two prongs of the branch in his hands and stood there for a moment, muttering to himself.
They moved like a procession, with something at once outrageously pagan and orthodoxly funereal about them, working slowly back and forth across the garden, mounting the slope in overlapping traverses. Near the spot where they had watched the man digging last night Uncle Dick began to slow. The others clumped at his back, breathing with thick, tense breaths. “Tech my elbers,” Uncle Dick said. They did so. Inside his sleeves his arms — arms thin and frail and dead as rotten wood — were jerking a little. Henry began to curse, pointless. Uncle Dick stopped; when they jarred into him they felt his whole thin body straining. Suratt made a sound with his mouth and touched the twig and found it curved into a rigid down-pointing bar, the string taut as wire. Uncle Dick staggered; his arms sprang free. The twig lay dead at his feet until Henry, digging furiously with his bare hands, flung it away. He was still cursing. He was cursing the ground, the earth.
They got the tools and began to dig, swiftly, hurling the dirt aside, while Uncle Dick, shapeless in his shapeless garment, appeared to muse upon them with detached
interest. Suddenly the three of them became utterly still in their attitudes, then they leaped into the hole and struggled silently over something.
“Stop it!” Suratt whispered. “Stop it! Ain’t we all three pardners alike?”
But Henry clung to the object and at last Vernon and Suratt desisted and stood away. Henry was half stooped, clutching the object to his middle, glaring at them.
“Let him keep it,” Vernon said. “Don’t you know that ain’t all? Come here, Uncle Dick.”
Uncle Dick was motionless behind them. His head was turned toward the ditch, toward where they had hidden. “What?” Suratt whispered. They were all three motionless, rigid, stooped a little. “Do you see something? Is it somebody hiding yonder?”
“I feel four bloods lust-running,” Uncle Dick said. “Hit’s four sets of blood here lusting for dross.”
They crouched, rigid. “Well, ain’t it four of us right here?” Vernon said.
“Uncle Dick don’t care nothing about money,” Suratt said. “If it’s somebody hiding there—”
They were running then, the tools clutched, plunging and stumbling down the slope.
“Kill him,” Henry said. “Watch every bush and kill him.”
“No,” Suratt said, “catch him first.”
They halted at the ditch bank. They could hear Henry beating along the ditch. But they found nothing.
“Maybe Uncle Dick never seen nobody,” Vernon said.
“He’s gone, anyway,” Suratt said. “Maybe it—” He ceased. He and Vernon stared at each other; above their held breath they heard the horse. It was going at a gallop, the sound clear but faint, diminishing. Then it ceased. They stared at each other in the darkness, across their breath. “That means we got till daylight,” Suratt said. “Come on.”
Twice more Uncle Dick’s twig sprang and bent; twice more they exhumed small bulging canvas sacks solid and unmistakable even in the dark.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 681
