Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion Read online

  “You’ll lose his furnish bill at the store.”

  “Sho. There aint no way of getting around that. But after all, a man that’s making you a crop free gratis for nothing, at least you can afford to feed him while he’s doing it.—Wait,” he said. “Hell fire, we wont even need to do that; I’ll just let him find a couple of rotten shingles with a match laid across them on his doorstep the morning after he finishes laying-by and he’ll know it’s all up then and aint nothing left for him but to move on. That’ll cut two months off the furnish bill and all we’ll be out is hiring his crop gathered.” They stared at one another. To one of them it was already done, accomplished: he could actually see it; when he spoke it was out of a time still six months in the future yet: “Hell fire, he’ll have to! He cant fight it! He dont dare!”

  “Hmph,” Will said. From the pocket of his unbuttoned vest he took a stained cob pipe and began to fill it. “You better stay clear of them folks.”

  “Sho now,” Jody said. He took a toothpick from the china receptacle on the table and sat back. “Burning barns aint right. And a man that’s got habits that way will just have to suffer the disadvantages of them.”

  He did not go the next day nor the one after that either. But early in the afternoon of the third day, his roan saddle horse hitched and waiting at one of the gallery posts, he sat at the roll-top desk in the rear of the store, hunched, the black hat on the back of his head and one broad black-haired hand motionless and heavy as a ham of meat on the paper and the pen in the other tracing the words of the contract in his heavy deliberate sprawling script. An hour after that and five miles from the village, the contract blotted and folded neatly into his hip pocket, he was sitting the horse beside a halted buckboard in the road. It was battered with rough usage and caked with last winter’s dried mud, it was drawn by a pair of shaggy ponies as wild and active-looking as mountain goats and almost as small. To the rear of it was attached a sheet-iron box the size and shape of a dog kennel and painted to resemble a house, in each painted window of which a painted woman’s face simpered above a painted sewing machine, and Varner sat his horse and glared in shocked and outraged consternation at its occupant, who had just said pleasantly, “Well, Jody, I hear you got a new tenant.”

  “Hell fire!” Varner cried. “Do you mean he set fire to another one? even after they caught him, he set fire to another one?”

  “Well,” the man in the buckboard said, “I dont know as I would go on record as saying he set ere a one of them afire. I would put it that they both taken fire while he was more or less associated with them. You might say that fire seems to follow him around, like dogs follows some folks.” He spoke in a pleasant, lazy, equable voice which you did not discern at once to be even more shrewd than humorous. This was Ratliff, the sewing-machine agent. He lived in Jefferson and he travelled the better part of four counties with his sturdy team and the painted dog kennel into which an actual machine neatly fitted. On successive days and two counties apart the splashed and battered buckboard and the strong mismatched team might be seen tethered in the nearest shade and Ratliff’s bland affable ready face and his neat tieless blue shirt one of the squatting group at a crossroads store, or—and still squatting and still doing the talking apparently though actually doing a good deal more listening than anybody believed until afterward—among the women surrounded by laden clotheslines and tubs and blackened wash pots beside springs and wells, or decorous in a splint chair on cabin galleries, pleasant, affable, courteous, anecdotal and impenetrable. He sold perhaps three machines a year, the rest of the time trading in land and livestock and secondhand farming tools and musical instruments or anything else which the owner did not want badly enough, retailing from house to house the news of his four counties with the ubiquity of a newspaper and carrying personal messages from mouth to mouth about weddings and funerals and the preserving of vegetables and fruit with the reliability of a postal service. He never forgot a name and he knew everyone, man mule and dog, within fifty miles. “Just say it was following along behind the wagon when Snopes druv up to the house De Spain had give him, with the furniture piled into the wagon bed like he had druv up to the house they had been living in at Harris’s or wherever it was and said ‘Get in here’ and the cookstove and beds and chairs come out and got in by their selves. Careless and yet good too, tight, like they was used to moving and not having no big help at it. And Ab and that big one, Flem they call him—there was another one too, a little one; I remember seeing him once somewhere. He wasn’t with them. Leastways he aint now. Maybe they forgot to tell him when to get outen the barn.—setting on the seat and them two hulking gals in the two chairs in the wagon bed and Miz Snopes and her sister, the widow, setting on the stuff in back like nobody cared much whether they come along or not either, including the furniture. And the wagon stops in front of the house and Ab looks at it and says, ‘Likely it aint fitten for hawgs.’ ”p>

  Sitting the horse, Varner glared down at Ratliff in protuberant and speechless horror. “All right,” Ratliff said. “Soon as the wagon stopped Miz Snopes and the widow got out and commenced to unload. Them two gals aint moved yet, just setting there in them two chairs, in their Sunday clothes, chewing sweet gum, till Ab turned round and cussed them outen the wagon to where Miz Snopes and the widow was wrastling with the stove. He druv them out like a pair of heifers just a little too valuable to hit hard with a stick, and then him and Flem set there and watched them two strapping gals take a wore-out broom and a lantern outen the wagon and stand there again till Ab leant out and snicked the nigh one across the stern with the end of the reins. ‘And then you come back and help your maw with that stove,’ he hollers after them. Then him and Flem got outen the wagon and went up to call on De Spain.”

  “To the barn?” Varner cried. “You mean they went right straight and—”

  “No no. That was later. The barn come later. Likely they never knowed just where it was yet. The barn burnt all regular and in due course; you’ll have to say that for him. This here was just a call, just pure friendship, because Snopes knowed where his fields was and all he had to do was to start scratching them, and it already the middle of May. Just like now,” he added in a tone of absolutely creamlike innocence. “But then I hear tell he always makes his rent contracts later than most.” But he was not laughing. The shrewd brown face was as bland and smooth as ever beneath the shrewd impenetrable eyes.

  “Well?” Varner said violently. “If he sets his fires like you tell about it, I reckon I dont need to worry until Christmas. Get on with it. What does he have to do before he starts lighting matches? Maybe I can recognise at least some of the symptoms in time.”

  “All right,” Ratliff said. “So they went up the road, leaving Miz Snopes and the widow wrastling at the cookstove and them two gals standing there now holding a wire rat-trap and a chamber pot, and went up to Major de Spain’s and walked up the private road where that pile of fresh horse manure was and the nigger said Ab stepped in it on deliberate purpose. Maybe the nigger was watching them through the front window. Anyway Ab tracked it right across the front porch and knocked and when the nigger told him to wipe it offen his feet, Ab shoved right past the nigger and the nigger said he wiped the rest of it off right on that ere hundred-dollar rug and stood there hollering ‘Hello. Hello, De Spain’ until Miz de Spain come and looked at the rug and at Ab and told him to please go away. And then De Spain come home at dinner time and I reckon maybe Miz de Spain got in behind him because about middle of the afternoon he rides up to Ab’s house with a nigger holding the rolled-up rug on a mule behind him and Ab setting in a chair against the door jamb and De Spain hollers ‘Why in hell aint you in the field?’ and Ab says, he dont get up or nothing, ‘I figger I’ll start tomorrow. I dont never move and start to work the same day,’ only that aint neither here nor there; I reckon Miz de Spain had done got in behind him good because he just set on the horse a while saying ‘Confound you Snopes, confound you Snopes’ and Ab setting there saying
‘If I had thought that much of a rug I dont know as I would keep it where folks coming in would have to tromp on it.’ ” Still he was not laughing. He just se in the buckboard, easy and relaxed, with his shrewd intelligent eyes in his smooth brown face, well-shaved and clean in his perfectly clean faded shirt, his voice pleasant and drawling and anecdotal, while Varner’s suffused swollen face glared down at him.

  “So after a while Ab hollers back into the house and one of them strapping gals comes out and Ab says, ‘Take that ere rug and wash it.’ And so next morning the nigger found the rolled-up rug throwed onto the front porch against the door and there was some more tracks across the porch too only it was just mud this time and it was said how when Miz de Spain unrolled the rug this time it must have been hotter for De Spain than before even—the nigger said it looked like they had used brickbats instead of soap on it—because he was at Ab’s house before breakfast even, in the lot where Ab and Flem was hitching up to go to the field sho enough, setting on the mare mad as a hornet and cussing a blue streak, not at Ab exactly but just sort of at all rugs and all horse manure in general and Ab not saying nothing, just buckling hames and choke strops until at last De Spain says how the rug cost him a hundred dollars in France and he is going to charge Ab twenty bushels of corn for it against his crop that Ab aint even planted yet. And so De Spain went back home. And maybe he felt it was all neither here nor there now. Maybe he felt that long as he had done something about it Miz de Spain would ease up on him and maybe come gathering time he would a even forgot about that twenty bushels of corn. Only that never suited Ab. So here, it’s the next evening I reckon, and Major laying with his shoes off in the barrel-stave hammock in his yard and here comes the bailiff hemming and hawing and finally gets it out how Ab has done sued him—”

  “Hell fire,” Varner murmured. “Hell fire.”

  “Sho,” Ratliff said. “That’s just about what De Spain hisself said when he finally got it into his mind that it was so. So it come Sat-dy and the wagon druv up to the store and Ab got out in that preacher’s hat and coat and tromps up to the table on that clubfoot where Uncle Buck McCaslin said Colonel John Sartoris his-self shot Ab for trying to steal his clay-bank riding stallion during the war, and the Judge said, ‘I done reviewed your suit, Mr Snopes, but I aint been able to find nothing nowhere in the law bearing on rugs, let alone horse manure. But I’m going to accept it because twenty bushels is too much for you to have to pay because a man as busy as you seem to stay aint going to have time to make twenty bushels of corn. So I am going to charge you ten bushels of corn for ruining that rug.’ ”

  “And so he burnt it,” Varner said. “Well well well.”

  “I dont know as I would put it just that way,” Ratliff said, repeated. “I would just put it that that same night Major de Spain’s barn taken fire and was a total loss. Only somehow or other De Spain got there on his mare about the same time, because somebody heard him passing in the road. I dont mean he got there in time to put it out but he got there in time to find something else already there that he felt entitled to consider enough of a foreign element to justify shooting at it, setting there on the mare and blasting away at it or them three or four times until it run into a ditch on him where he couldn’t follow on the mare. And he couldn’t say neither who it was because any animal can limp if it wants to and any man is liable to have a white shirt, withhe exception that when he got to Ab’s house (and that couldn’t a been long, according to the gait the fellow heard him passing in the road) Ab and Flem wasn’t there, wasn’t nobody there but the four women and De Spain never had time to look under no beds and such because there was a cypress-roofed corn crib right next to that barn. So he rid back to where his niggers had done fetched up the water barrels and was soaking tow-sacks to lay on the crib, and the first person he see was Flem standing there in a white-colored shirt, watching it with his hands in his pockets, chewing tobacco. ‘Evening,’ Flem says. ‘That ere hay goes fast’ and De Spain setting on the horse hollering ‘Where’s your paw? Where’s that—’ and Flem says, ‘If he aint here somewhere he’s done went back home. Me and him left at the same time when we see the blaze.’ And De Spain knowed where they had left from too and he knowed why too. Only that wasn’t neither here nor there neither because, as it was just maintained, any two fellows anywhere might have a limp and a white shirt between them and it was likely the coal oil can he seen one of them fling into the fire when he shot the first time. And so here the next morning he’s setting at breakfast with a right smart of his eyebrows and hair both swinged off when the nigger comes in and says it’s a fellow to see him and he goes to the office and it’s Ab, already in the preacher hat and coat and the wagon done already loaded again too, only Ab aint brought that into the house where it could be seen. ‘It looks like me and you aint going to get along together,’ Ab says, ‘so I reckon we better quit trying before we have a misunderstanding over something. I’m moving this morning.’ And De Spain says, ‘What about your contract?’ And Ab says, ‘I done cancelled it.’ and De Spain setting there saying ‘Cancelled. Cancelled’ and then he says, ‘I would cancel it and a hundred more like it and throw in that barn too just to know for sho if it was you I was shooting at last night.’ And Ab says, ‘You might sue me and find out. Justices of the Peace in this country seems to be in the habit of finding for plaintiffs.’ ”

  “Hell fire,” Varner said quietly again. “Hell fire.”

  “So Ab turned and went stomping out on that stiff foot and went back ”

  “And burnt the tenant house,” Varner said.

  “No no. I aint saying he might not a looked back at it with a certain regret, as the fellow says, when he druv off. But never nothing else taken all of a sudden on fire. Not right then, that is. I dont—”

  “That’s so,” Varner said. “I recollect you did say he had to throw the balance of the coal oil into the fire when De Spain started shooting at him. Well well well,” he said, bulging, slightly apoplectic. “And now, out of all the men in this country, I got to pick him to make a rent contract with.” He began to laugh. That is, he began to say “Ha. Ha. Ha.” rapidly, but just from the teeth, the lungs: no higher, nothing of it in the eyes. Then he stopped. “Well, I cant be setting here, no matter how pleasant it is. Maybe I can get there in time to get him to cancel with me for just a old cottonhouse.”

  “Or at least maybe for a empty barn,” Ratliff called after him.

  An hour later Varner was sitting the halted horse again, this time before a gate, or a gap that is, in a fence of sagging and rusted wire. The gate itself or what remained of it lay unhinged to one side, the interstices of the rotted palings choked with grass and weeds like the ribs of a forgotten skeleton. He was breathing hard but not because he had been galloping. On the contrary, since he had approached near enough to his destination to believe he could have seen smoke if there had been smoke, he had ridden slower and slower. Nevertheless he now sat the horse before the gap in the fence, breathing hard through his nose and even sweating a little, looking at the sagging broken-backed cabin set in its inevitable treeless and grassless plot and weathered to the color of an old beehive, with that expression of tense and rapid speculation of a man approaching a dud howitzer shell. “Hell fire,” he said again quietly. “Hell fire. He’s been here three days now and he aint even set the gate up. And I dont even dare to mention it to him. I dont even dare to act like I knowed there was even a fence to hang it to.” He twitched the reins savagely. “Come up!” he said to the horse. “You hang around here very long standing still and you’ll be a-fire too.”

  The path (it was neither road nor lane: just two parallel barely discernible tracks where wagon wheels had run, almost obliterated by this year’s grass and weeds) went up to the sagging and stepless porch of the perfectly blank house which he now watched with wire-taut wariness, as if he were approaching an ambush. He was watching it with such intensity as to be oblivious to detail. He saw suddenly in one of the sashless windows and without
knowing when it had come there, a face beneath a gray cloth cap, the lower jaw moving steadily and rhythmically with a curious sidewise thrust, which even as he shouted “Hello!” vanished again. He was about to shout again when he saw beyond the house the stiff figure which he recognised even though the frock coat was missing now, doing something at the gate to the lot. He had already begun to hear the mournful measured plaint of a rusted well-pulley, and now he began to hear two flat meaningless loud female voices. When he passed beyond the house he saw it—the narrow high frame like an epicene gallows, two big absolutely static young women beside it, who even in that first glance postulated that immobile dreamy solidarity of statuary (this only emphasised by the fact that they both seemed to be talking at once and to some listener—or perhaps just circumambience—at a considerable distance and neither listening to the other at all) even though one of them had hold of the well-rope, her arms extended at full reach, her body bent for the down pull like a figure in a charade, a carved piece symbolising some terrific physical effort which had died with its inception, though a moment later the pulley began again its rusty plaint but stopped again almost immediately, as did the voices also when the second one saw him, the first one paused now in the obverse of the first attitude, her arms stretched downward on the rope and the two broad expressionless faces turning slowly in unison as he rode past.