Father Abraham Read online

  Uncle Billy Varner is the big man of the Frenchman’s Bend neighborhood. Beat supervisor, politician, farmer, usurer, present owner of the dead Frenchman’s homestead and the legend. Uncle Billy is a tall reddish colored man with little bright blue eyes: he looks like a Methodist elder, and is; and a milder mannered man never foreclosed a mortgage or carried a voting precinct. He wears a turnip shaped silver watch on a plaited horsehair chain and his son in law is election commissioner for the precinct and his son owns the store and is postmaster of Frenchman’s Bend. The rest of Uncle Billy’s family consists of a gray placid wife and a daughter of sixteen or so—a softly ample girl with eyes like cloudy hothouse grapes and a mouth always slightly open in a kind of moist unalarmed surprise and a body that, between rare and reluctant movements, falls into attitudes passively and richly disturbing to the male beholder.

  And quite a few of them come to behold. The young men from the surrounding countryside gather like wasps about the placid honey of her being; they ride in to church on Sunday morning and linger about the shadespotted portals until Uncle Billy drives up in his surrey, his wife beside him and Eula and her chosen swain stiffly arrayed and garnished on the back seat; and always one saddle or driving horse and often three or four doze and stamp the long Sunday afternoons away beneath the oaks before Uncle Billy’s house while their owners uncomfortable in Sunday finery perch stiff and fuming on Uncle Billy’s veranda, doggedly sitting each other out. So the afternoon passes. Eula rife and richly supine in the porch swing, showing no partiality; and the afternoon falls into a drowse of heat and the odor of Eula’s washed and scented flesh is terribly sweet to the young men with a week of manual labor behind them and another week waiting on the morrow. So they sit leashed and savage and loud amid her rich responsive giggles until the shadows merge eastward and night falls upon the land and the crickets raise their dry monotonous voices from the dew, and the frogs quaver and thump from the creekside and whipporwills are quiring among the trees and the cold remains of dinner have been eaten beneath the moth swirled lamp. Then the young men give up and depart in a body and ride in seething and wordless amity to the ford across the creek half a mile away, where they get down and hitch their horses and fight silently and viciously and remount their horses and take their separate ways, temporarily freed of jealousy and anger and thwarted desire, across the planted land, beneath the moon.

  Eula was a very popular girl. She attended all the dances and picnics and meetings and allday singings within ten miles, and with the best young blood of the countryside she drove homeward beneath the moon or the summer stars, along quiet roads gashed vaguely across the dark land, behind rythmic horses between the fecund fields and lightless houses slumbering beside the road, and dark wood patches feathering their tops against the stars and whipporwills like snared stars in audible bursts among the trees or blundering out of the dust beneath the horse’s hoofs. And life would seem remote and disturbing and exquisitely sad to them beneath the overarching trees, and the horse’s feet plopped quietly and without haste in the sandy dust and the buggy wheels turned through the sand with continuous secretive sounds, and the road dropped gradually and the darkness grew denser, with a low wet smell in it and the horse stopped and lowered his head and snorted into the murmurous invisible water of the ford.….….

  One day one of the young bucks of the village sold his new yellow wheeled runabout and his matched horses and departed for Texas. The next day Uncle Billy Varner and Eula and Flem Snopes, the clerk in Uncle Billy’s son’s store, drove into Jefferson, the county seat. Here Flem Snopes bought a wedding license and he and Eula were married. Uncle Billy made them a wedding present of forty acres of land which included the old Frenchman’s homesite, and the third day Flem was sitting again in the door of the store, chewing his tobacco and minding his own endless affairs, as usual. The fourth day it was learned that another young man, son of a well to do farmer five or six miles down the river, had also moved to Texas.

  Flem Snopes had always been a great one for attending to his own business, so much so that his employer often wondered coldly if Flem ever would tot up the column, strike a balance and close the ledger. But if Flem ever did do so, no one ever knew it, and had his employer ever learned Flem’s single axiom of social relations, he would have been astonished, if not alarmed. For Flem had reduced all human conduct to a single workable belief: that some men are fools but all men are no honester than the occasion requires.

  Ten years ago Flem had appeared one day behind the counter of Varner’s store—a quiet unwinking slightly bowlegged young man. His eyes were all surface and were the color of stagnant water, and you never saw his eyelids closed over them, even momentarily, and his tobacco pouch seam of a mouth was slightly stained at the corners with snuff. He had brought his own secret affairs with him and at thirty he was still pursuing with a quiet implacability their devious and hidden turns. Lending money at exorbitant interest, buying and selling live stock, turning an odd penny here and there. The only concession he had made to his more sophisticated surroundings was to substitute chewing tobacco for snuff.

  The Snopes sprang untarnished from a long line of shiftless tenant farmers—a race that is of the land and yet rootless, like mistletoe; owing nothing to the soil, giving nothing to it and getting nothing of it in return; using the land as a harlot instead of an imperious yet abundant mistress, passing on to another farm. Cunning and dull and clannish, they move and halt and move and multiply and marry and multiply like rabbits: magnify them and you have political hangerson and professional officeholders and prohibition officers; reduce the perspective and you have mold on cheese, steadfast and gradual and implacable: theirs that dull provincial cunning that causes them to doubt anything that does not jibe with their preconceived and arbitrary standards of verity, and that permits them to be taken in by the most barefaced liar who is at all plausible.

  Three years after Flem came to the settlement proper, a second Snopes appeared, likewise unannounced. One day he was not there, the next day he was working in the blacksmith shop; two years later he was married to a local maiden and owned the blacksmith shop, which he operated with the assistance of a third Snopes who looked exactly like him, and was to be seen on Sunday propelling a fourth Snopes in a homemade perambulator, to the Methodist church.

  So Flem was not the first Snopes to wed a Frenchman’s Bend belle. Though nobody had expected Flem to take a partner of any sort into that endless and secret business of his, let alone Uncle Billy Varner’s Eula, who had half the yellow wheeled buggies in the vicinity tied to her fence of a Sunday while their owners shook cigar ashes over the veranda railing onto Mrs Varner’s geraniums. But two of these had gone suddenly to Texas and the other yellow wheeled buggies rested the long drowsy Sunday afternoons away before other houses about the countryside, and Flem Snopes had moved his straw suitcase to Uncle Billy’s house and, chewing his tobacco with a rythmic implacable thrusting of his lower jaw, he went steadily and implacably about his endless secret affairs. Occasionally he was Sunday afternoons seen chewing his tobacco about the old Frenchman’s place which was his wife’s marriage portion, and people believed that he was planning to build on it. But a month or so after the marriage he and his wife also moved to Texas, which is quite a large though virgin state.

  II

  Texas in those days was a large easy region, with boundaries in Washington, D.C. And conventional: you grew cotton, or raised cattle or stole it from those who did; and Flem Snopes, who had never put anything into the ground except a long succession of baking powder tins that rusted slowly in the quiet earth about a growing niggard hoard of coins and filthy bills, and who neither owned nor desired a pistol and who had no more use for a horse than he had for three percent interest, found Texas crude.

  Eula doubtless agreed with him, for one day in early spring and about a year after her wedding, Uncle Billy Varner drove into Jefferson and returned with Eula and a bouncing granddaughter. It was a fine child, remarkably well
grown, and Mrs Varner immediately and voluntarily became its bond slave, carrying it about the neighborhood or hovering about it with a fond raptness while it clawed itself erect from chair to chair, already evincing a desire to walk. Meanwhile Eula, altered a little by motherhood, but still rifely and placidly disturbing to the male beholder, settled down once more in Uncle Billy’s home. She resigned all maternal obligations to her mother, and passed her days helping about the house and, on Sundays, in fresh print dresses she sat on the veranda while evening grew, looking placidly out across the lawn and the fence beneath the locust trees where once flashy yellow wheeled buggies had stood while the combed and curried horses that drew them stamped the long drowsy afternoons away, and beyond, down the quiet road stretching on beneath the budding trees.

  Then it was April. Peach and pear and apple were in bloom, and blackbirds swung and stooped with raucous cries like rusty shutters in the wind, and like random scraps of burned paper slanted across the fields, and new fledged willow-screens beyond which waters chuckled and murmured with the grave continuous irrelevance of children, and behind surging horses and mules men broke the land anew and the turned earth smelled like new calves in a clean barn, and sowed it, and nightly the new moon waxed in the windless west and soon stood by day though incomplete in the marbled zenith. Thus the world, and on a day Flem Snopes came up the road in a covered wagon, accompanied by a soiled swaggering man in a clay colored Stetson hat and a sweeping black moustache, and followed by a score of horses larger than rabbits and colored like patchwork quilts and shackled one to another with sections of barbed wire.

  “Startin’ you a circus, Flem?” asked a casual in overalls, and other casuals squatting on their heels against the wall of Varner’s store came to see, and Jody Varner in a white shirt and a brass collar button came out also and approached the ponies and one of the ponies stood on its hind feet and tried to beat Jody Varner’s face in.

  “Keep away from ’em, boys,” the black moustached man said, “They’ve got kind of skittish, they aint been rode in so long.” He descended heavily, in boots. His belly fitted like a round wedge into the tops of his corduroy pants, and from his hip pocket protruded a heavy pistol-butt and a gay pasteboard carton. “They’ll settle down once they’ve been worked a day or so,” he added.

  “What you aim to do with ’em, Flem?” Jody Varner asked curiously, from a safe distance, while the pony watched him with a pale cerulean eye. But Flem Snopes only chewed his tobacco with his customary rythmic thrust and climbed down on the other side of the wagon and retreated toward the store, where Jody Varner presently followed him.

  The stranger’s ear on the off side had been recently and almost completely sheared from his head and the severed edge of the remainder had been treated with a blackish substance resembling axel grease. Through the hair on the back of his neck were slashed two vicious furrows, and he drew the cardboard carton from his pocket and shook a gingersnap into his other hand and inserted it beneath his moustache. The varicolored ponies huddled behind the wagon, wild as rabbits, deadly as rattlesnakes, and quiet as doves. Other casuals came up, and they stood quietly about, looking at the ponies and the stranger.

  “You and Flem have some trouble back yonder?” one asked in a while.

  The stranger ceased chewing. “Back where?” he said quickly, looking at his interrogator.

  “Look like you been nicked,” the other explained. The stranger looked at him quietly, holding his innocent florid carton. “Yo’ year,” the man added.

  “Oh. That?” The stranger touched his damaged ear briefly. “That’s just a little mistake of mine,” he said easily. “Nothing a tall. I was kind of absent-minded about picketting them ponies one night. Studyin’ about something and fergot they was one of ’em behind me.” He put another gingersnap into his mouth while the spectators looked at his ear quietly. “Happen to any man that aint careful,” he added. “But put a little axel dope on her and you dont notice it. They’re pretty lively, now, lazing along all day doing nothing. It’ll work out of ’em in a day or so, though.”

  “Hmph,” grunted a spectator, “Work ’em through a feed chopper if they was mine. That’s what I’d do.”

  “No, no, brother,” the stranger protested quickly, “Them’s good gentle ponies. Look a here.” He approached the herd and extended his hand. The nearest horse dozed on three legs in a kind of watchful dejection. It had mild mismatched eyes and a head shaped like an ironing board, and seemingly without coming awake its long head cropped yellow teeth in a flashing arc and for a moment man and horse seemed hopelessly and inextricably tangled together. “You would, would you, you hammer-headed bastard?” the man said in a repressed earnest tone, then his feet touched the ground again and he half turned with one hand gripping the beast’s nostrils and the pony’s muzzle completely reversed and pointing skyward. The pony stood and trembled, emitting hoarse smothered sounds.

  “See,” the owner panted, digging his heels into the soil while the cords of his neck thrust taut under his sunburned skin, “gentle as a dog. All you want to do is handle ’em a little and work ’em like hell for a couple of days, and they’ll be gentle as a dog.”

  “Will you throw yerself in with the hosses, Mister?” a voice asked mildly from the rear of the throng. The man gathered himself and released the pony’s muzzle, and as he sprang free a second horse slashed his vest down the back from neck to hem as neatly as ever D’Artagnan could have done it with his rapier, and at this moment Flem Snopes and Jody Varner reappeared.

  “Let’s git ’em in the lot, Buck,” Flem said. He got in the wagon and gathered up the reins, and the stranger with his divided vest flapping from either shoulder put his confection back into his pocket beside the pistol and moved to the rear of the herd while it rolled its wild mismatched eyes at him, and cursed it in a fluent mixture of bastard Spanish and purest Anglo Saxon, and the spectators followed at a respectful distance up the road to Mrs Littlejohn’s boarding house and hotel and to the livery barn lot next to it. Someone opened the gate and the wagon passed through, but when the herd of ponies at last comprehended that it was to pass within the wire enclosure its morale disintegrated again and it stood on its collective hind legs and waved its wire-hobbled forelegs with passion. The onlookers fled again and took refuge on the veranda of Mrs Littlejohn’s boarding house, and the stranger cursed his herd steadily and then it stood on its forelegs for a while, and the stranger rose to sublime heights, like an apotheosis.

  At last he drove them through the gate, and the herd crowded against the wagon and roved its wild assorted eyes and trembled violently. The stranger closed the gate and Flem Snopes descended from the wagon and retired with a fair assumption of deliberation to Mrs Littlejohn’s veranda, and the stranger approached the herd. He got into the wagon and with soft cajoleries he drew steadily on the barbed wire hackamore so as to bring the first one up to be released. The horse plunged madly, and sank back against the wire as though it would hang itself out of hand. The contagion passed through the herd and it once more fell to standing on its various ends and waving its unoccupied feet and the horse that was committing suicide sprawled with its legs at rigid angles and its belly flat on the earth in an ecstasy of negation. The man desisted.

  “Bring me a pair of wire cutters,” he shouted to the group on Mrs Littlejohn’s veranda, and one called Eck detached himself and disappeared into the house and presently reappeared and crossed the lot warily to the wagon. “Here,” the stranger directed, “jump up here and keep the slack out of the wire and I’ll cut ’em aloose.”

  Eck climbed into the wagon and took hold of the wire hackamore gingerly. “Pull him up, pull him up,” the stranger said sharply. He grasped the wire himself and took a turn about one of the wagon stakes with it, and again the first pony lay passionately back against it until his tongue protruded and his mad mismatched eyes started from his head. “Now, hold ’em like that,” the stranger said, and grasped the wire cutters and lept into the herd. His Ste
tson and his flapping severed vest disappeared in a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of yellow teeth and rolling eyes and sickling legs from which there burst one by one like partridges and each wearing a barbed wire necklace, his mad gaudy charges.

  The first one to be freed shot like an arrow across the lot. It struck the wire fence without any diminution of speed whatever. The fence gave a little to the shock, recovered viciously and slammed the horse to earth, where it lay for a second in a static and wild-eyed frenzy, then scrambled to its feet and rushed onward in a new direction, slammed again into the fence and was cast to earth once more. Meanwhile all were now freed and they whipped and whirled dizzily about the narrow enclosure, and from the ultimate dust the stranger emerged and ran for his life. His vest was completely gone now, as was most of his shirt and he weaved through the dizzy calico rushes of the insane beasts, feinting and dodging with the consummate skill of a Red Grange. Eck was still in the wagon bed.

  The stranger mounted Mrs Littlejohn’s veranda and joined the spectators. The ponies yet streaked like wild fish back and forth through the growing dusk in the lot, but not quite so violently. The stranger detached a fragment of his shirt from beneath his galluses and wiped his face with it and threw it away, and produced his carton and tilted a gingersnap into his hand. “Pretty lively, aint they?” he said, breathing heavily. “But it’ll work out of ’em in a couple days. Then you’ll have as good a saddle and work pony as you’ll want.”