Father Abraham Read online

  There was a polite noncommittal silence. The ponies slid and whipped back and forth along the fence, milling slowly and gradually bunching together. “What’ll you pay a feller to take one of ’em off your hands?” a voice asked from the dusk, and a small boy with a round yellow head burrowed among their legs saying, “Popper, popper, where’s popper?”

  “Who you lookin’ fer, sonny?” one asked, and another said: “Hit’s Eck Snopes’ boy. Eck aint got outen the wagon yit, is he? Oh, Eck!”

  Eck in the wagon thrust his head cautiously forth. “Maw’s a-waitin’ fer us to hitch up an’ take out,” his son called to him.

  That night, beneath the halfmoon, the ponies huddled in the corner of the lot or singly or in pairs rushed in fluid phantom shapes along the fence, returned and huddled again. The idlers lingered later than usual that night on Mrs Littlejohn’s veranda overlooking the lot and its splotched huddle from which rose at intervals high abrupt squeals and vicious thudding blows. Flem Snopes had disappeared just before supper time, at home doubtless with his wife and baby, and the stranger was also absent. In a new shirt and a corduroy coat and his pistol and a fresh carton of gingersnaps he was engaged in a poker game in the rear of the livery stable, where he won eleven dollars.

  So the loiterers sat in the moonlight and discussed the horses and the stranger and Flem Snopes in their slow grave idiom, speculating on the relations between the three. Meanwhile the moon rose higher, and across the way in an apple tree like a resurgent phantom of old forgotten springs and gustily delicate upon the air, a mockingbird sang.

  “First one I’ve hearn this year,” a voice said quietly from the shadowed veranda, and a sewing machine agent rose from his chair and yawned elaborately.

  “Well,” he said, “You folks can buy them plugs if you want to, but me, I’d jest as soon buy a tiger or a rattlesnake. Jest as soon.”

  The others sat courteously noncommittal, and the sewing machine agent went on into the house, and presently another man followed him, and then with muttered words the others rose and dispersed slowly through the gathering moon. The houses were all dark at this hour, and soon the last straggler had betaken his shadow away through the silver dust, and there was no sound anywhere in the land save an occasional abrupt squeal or thudding blow from the livery stable lot.

  The next morning Buck, the Texan, came to the boarding house door and yawned at the red and hill-nicked rim of the sun. About him the world waked ineffably fresh beneath the spring dawn, waked happily chill, as though not yet fully reassured; and the mockingbird returned to the apple tree across the way and sang again, and the sun heaved up like a captive balloon from beyond the ultimate horizon.

  Buck yawned again like a huge luxurious cat and crossed the veranda and approached the lot fence where already stood in patient relaxation three overalled adult figures and a small boy with a round yellow head, quietly watching the ponies as they scraped and snuffed at the dung and dust impregnated chaff of the barn yard.

  “Morning, boys,” said Buck cheerily, and the three adults turned slowly and responded with grave awkward courtesy, and the boy watched him quietly with two unwinking eyes blue as periwinkles. “Come to git a early pick, have you?” he continued heartily. “Well, they aint a one that aint worth fifteen dollars of any man’s money. See that there wall-eyed one with one white year and a rope burn on his off shoulder? And that fiddle headed one with most of his mane gone? Look at them shoulders and legs and pasterns. You know what I’d do in yo’ place? I’d snap them two ponies up at twenty-five dollars fer the pair before somebody else comes along and runs the price up at arction, that’s what I’d do.” He roved his bold inviting eye from one grave face to another, and one by one the faces’ owners turned them upon the ponies again.

  “We jest come to see ’em,” one explained at last. “We aint minded to buy right now.”

  “Better not put it off too long,” Buck said. “Hey, Bud?” The boy had moved quietly behind him and now gazed at the butt of the pistol that protruded from his pocket with rapt silent absorption. “Well, you boys are in time to see ’em eat breakfast, anyways,” Buck said. The three men watched him and he followed the fence to the gate and opened it and passed through and closed it again. The ponies immediately ceased snuffing at the ground and stared at him in premonitory alarm with their assorted eyes. Buck drew slowly nearer, and the herd began to disintegrate gaudily.

  “Yere, boys,” Buck called to the watchers, “Git over in here and help me drive ’em into the barn yonder.” The three adults spoke among themselves in low voices, then they moved slowly to the gate. The boy followed, and at the gate his father remarked him. “You stay outside, Ad. One of them things’ll bite your head off like it was a acorn.” Then the three men entered the lot with palpable reluctance.

  “Come on,” Buck said impatiently, “They wont stampede no more. They jest aint used to barns and may be a little skittish about goin’ in.”

  “I jest as lief see ’em stay out here, far’s I’m concerned,” Eck rejoined.

  “Well, we’ll jest drive ’em inside and give ’em a good bait of feed, and they’ll settle down gentle as a milk cow. Git you a stick of some sort—there’s a bunch of wagon stakes against the fence there—and if one of ’em tries to rush you, bust him right over the head with it: they’re used to being handled that way and they’ll know what you mean.”

  The men armed themselves with the wagon stakes, and the ponies huddled restively and rolled their eyes, and Eck’s son, Admiral Dewey, came unobserved into the lot. Smoke now rose from Mrs Littlejohn’s kitchen, and breakfastsounds came forth upon the immaculate morning air, and Mrs Littlejohn herself in an apron and an armful of stovewood stood in the kitchen yard and watched them, and other overalled men appeared from nowhere and leaned quietly against the fence.

  Buck distributed his helpers fanwise and they advanced upon the huddle which broke gradually into fluid gaudy individuals turning upon themselves ceaselessly though not yet running. Buck cursed them in a steady cheerful voice. “Dont hurry ’em, now. Git in there, you banjo-faced jack rabbit. Let ’em take their time, and they’ll go in all right. Whooey, now. Git in there.”

  Admiral Dewey brought his innocent yellow thatch and his azure eyes yet closer, raptly and profoundly entranced and yet unobserved. The ponies trembled and huddled and fell slowly back, still watching the men. At intervals one feinted to break away, but Buck immediately and skillfully hit him with a piece of dirt or a rock, whereupon he burrowed toward the center and thrust another horse into his former place. Then one in the rear of the huddle saw the barn door just behind him and whirled and snorted, and the others whirled also, but before they could break Buck tore the wagon stake from Eck’s hand and accompanied by the more valorous of Eck’s two friends, rushed forward and laid about him on heads and shoulders, so that when the break did come, it swept the herd into the barn in a rushing thunder of hooves that brought up against the rear wall with a crash.

  “Seems to’ve held, all right.” Buck and the other man slammed the half length doors to and they gazed over the door into the tunnel of the barn at the far end of which the ponies were a shapeless huddle of splotched phantom shapes in the obscurity. “Yep, it held, all right.” Eck and the third man came up and gazed over the door, and the boy followed quietly and glued his round yellow head to a crack and his father remarked him again.

  “Aint I tole you to keep outen here?” Eck demanded. “Them critters’ll kill you quicker’n you can say scat. You go on and git outside that fence, now.”

  “Lemme stay, paw,” the boy said. “I want to see them circus hosses too.”

  “Well,” Eck relented. “But you stay clost to me, now, you hear?”

  “Whyn’t you git yo’ paw to buy you one of ’em, Ad?” the second man suggested.

  “Me buy one of them critters,” Eck rejoined, “when I kin go to the creek anytime and ketch a snappin’ turtle or a moccasin fer nothin’?”

  Buck had opened th
e doors and slipped into the barn and the first man had shut the doors behind him and dropped the bar into the slots, and they could now hear Buck busy in the corn crib. The ponies huddled like gaudy ghosts in the remote gloom, passive and watchful. Then one by one they grew quieter and lowered their heads and nuzzled and sniffed into a long feeding trough worn silken smooth by generations of prehensile lips, that was attached to the rear wall. Buck reappeared in the door to the feed room. “I cant find nothing but shell corn,” he said. “Aint they got no year corn, you reckon?”

  “I reckon not,” Eck said after a while. “Boatner dont usually use no year corn. Wont they eat shell corn?”

  “I reckon they’ll eat it all right, when they get used to it,” Buck answered. “They aint never seen no shelled corn before.” He retired into the feed room and presently sounds of labor came therefrom, and a dry rattling of grain into metal receptacles, and he reappeared once more with a metal bucket full of shelled corn in either hand and retreated into the gloom toward the particolored rumps of his charges. The three men stood quietly gazing over the door.

  Buck vanished into the gloom and a subdued intimation of alarm, uttering soothing and profane words. Then again a dry rattling of hard pellets on a wood surface, a sound broken by a snort of purest emotion, and the obscurity of the barn became abruptly thunderous and a plank cracked with a sharp report, and as the three peered across the door the dark interior evolved into mad tossing shapes like gaudy flames downrushing.

  “Come on yere, Ad,” Eck roared, and his two companions turned with him and fled to the refuge of the wagon bed. The barn door disintegrated into matchwood before the tide, and the beasts rushed forth like a towering parti-colored wave full of glaring eyes and wild yellow teeth, rushed forth and whelmed and utterly obscured Admiral Dewey where he yet stood in the middle of the doorway, rushed on and became single atoms whirling and dashing about the lot, revealing at last Admiral Dewey’s yellow astonished head and his diminutive faded overalls still motionless and untouched in the center of the doorway.

  “You, Ad!” his father roared again, and Admiral Dewey turned and ran toward the wagon, and two of the frenzied beasts rushed up quartering and galloped all over him without touching him and he came on and his father leaned down and snatched him into the wagon by one arm and slammed him bottom upward across his knees and fumbled for a coiled hitching rope in the bottom of the wagon bed with a hand that trembled. “Aint I told you not to come in here? Aint I told you?” Eck’s suntanned skin was a sickly white and his voice shook with fear and relief and rage and he picked up the hitchrein and doubled it.

  “Ow, paw; ow, paw,” Admiral Dewey protested, writhing his hands palm outward across his young behind, “Ow, paw!”

  “Aint I told you?” Eck repeated whitely, laying on Admiral Dewey with the doubled rope, “Aint I told you?” Admiral Dewey lifted his voice and wept, and his father presently exhausted his justified paternal relief and the boy wriggled free and tenderly caressed his diminutive overalls with two dirty hands, and presently his tribulation had passed away and beneath his pale golden thatch his periwinkle eyes were like two patches of spring sky after rain. Buck stood in the shattered door and shook a gingersnap into his hand and tossed the carton away. The mad rushing of the ponies had diminished and they now trotted about on high stiff legs, tossing their rolling various eyes. “I doubted that there shelled corn right along,” he said generally and Mrs Littlejohn came onto her veranda and rang a heavy hand bell.

  “Chuck wagon,” Buck said. “You boys stick around: arction begins right after breakfast.” He strode across the lot and the horses watched him and slid from his path in gaudy fluid flashes, and those in the wagon descended hurriedly and Eck caught up his son and they followed Buck briskly across the lot. The fence was fairly well lined with quiet overalled figures in patient restful attitudes and along the road wagons stood, with their teams reversed and tied to the wagon wheels and saddled horses nibbled at the trunk of the apple tree. “Arction begins right after breakfast,” Buck repeated to them and he closed the gate and went on into Mrs Littlejohn’s house. As he passed from sight another wagon drove up and a man descended and joined the spectators where they stood or squatted along the fence, talking quietly among themselves.

  “Yere, Buddy—” Buck sitting on top of the gate post dug terrifically into his corduroy pants and then creased his flourishing belly toward Admiral Dewey’s innocent straw-thatched admiration “—run over to the sto’ and git me a box of gingersnaps. Now, boys, who’ll start her off with a bid? Come on, now, step right up: they’s plenty fer ever’body, but the fust ones gits the best pick. Take your choice and make yo’ bid, boys. They aint a hoss in that lot that aint worth fifteen dollars. Young, sound in wind and limb, good fer saddle or work stock; outlast fo’ ordinary hosses: you cant kill one of ’em with a axel tree. Look at that one with three sock feet and the frost bit years; watch ’im now when they passes here again. Look at that there shoulder action. That hoss is worth twenty dollars if he’s worth a cent. Now, who’ll make me a bid on him to start the ball a-rollin’? Come on, boys, who’ll—” (an unidentified voice: “Fo’ bits”) “—make me a bid on ’im? Watch ’im good; look at the way he totes his head: lively as any stable-raised hoss anywher’. Or if he dont suit, how about that there fiddle-headed one without no mane—how about him? Fer a feller that wants a good saddle pony, I’d ruther have him than the other’n. Come on now: I heard somebody say fifty cents jest then. Hey, brother, you meant five dollars, didn’t you? Do I year five—Much obliged, buddy.” He bent and received his paper tube from Admiral Dewey. “—five dollars? Speak up, brother. Do I year five dollars?” Buck cupped his ear toward the grave noncommittal spectators standing along the fence. The ponies clotted at the far side of the lot, watching the people with flying vari-colored eyes, broke into stiffly trotting nervous shapes, huddled again.

  “Fo’ bits fer the lot,” the unidentified voice repeated. Buck laughed with theatrical gusto.

  “Har, har, that’s a good ’un,” he said. “Fifty cents fer the dried mud off of ’em, he means. Who’ll give a dollar mo’ fer the genu-wine Texas cuckleburrs? Har, har, that’s a good ’un.” Then his voice became pleading, confidential: “Look a yere, boys, is that any way to talk about them hosses? Look at ’em, and tell me if this country ever seen a better collection of livestock at dirt cheap prices. Hey, Grampaw,”—he bent and shouted hoarsely at a bearded ancient with a gutta-percha ear-trumpet coiled like an inert serpent about his neck—“tell ’em if you ever seen a better looking bunch of stock at public arction in this town?” A bystander attracted the ancient’s attention, and he uncoiled his black tube with deliberation and inserted one end into his ear. But Buck’s attention had flown on and he embraced them all with his hoarse exhortation. “Come on, boys: start her off, now. Who’ll pick a hoss and make a bid? Yere, Eck, you been helpin’ me and you know them hosses. How about makin’ a bid on that there wall-eyed one with the rope-burn you picked out this mawnin’? Look at that hawss, boys: watch ’im now when he comes by again. Yere, wait a minute.” Buck slid easily into the pen. The ponies broke before his approach and slid stiffly away along the fence, but Buck with his quenchless faith in his invulnerability rushed without haste among them and efficiently cut out the wall-eyed one and drove it into the fence corner, and when it whirled and rushed at him with a kind of wild and fatal desperation, he struck it between the eyes with the butt of his pistol and felled it and lept immediately upon its prone and lolling head.

  The pony recovered almost at once and pawed its gaudy body to its knees and heaved at its prisoned head and fought itself erect and dragged Buck up also and waved him violently like a rag. The commotion enveloped itself in dust and it moved terrifically along the fence through which the overalled spectators watched with a passive and sober interest, then Buck brought the beast to a standstill and held it with one hand clamping its nostrils and its muzzle twisted backward across its scarred neck, while labored
groans rumbled hollowly within it.

  “Look him over, boys,” Buck panted, turning his suffused face and the popping glare of his eyes toward the spectators, “Look him over, quick. Them shoulders and hocks—” the pony’s trembling rigidity exploded again “—and laigs you bastard I’ll tear yo’ face right look ’im over quick boys yere yere goddam wuth fifteen dollars of lemme git a holt of my whoa Whoa who’ll make me a bid for God’s Whoa you blare-eyed jack rabbit!” Buck’s voice rose in an unbroken stream from the center of a calico maelstrom upon whose ceaseless orbit his suspender metals gleamed in fleeting glints. Then his clay-colored Stetson soared deliberately, and immediately afterward, Buck himself, though not so deliberately, and the pony shot free in mad stag-like bounds. Buck picked up his hat and returned, dusting himself off, and mounted his post again, breathing heavily.

  “Now, boys,” he said, and a wagon with a man and a woman in it stopped in the road and the man descended and joined the throng. “Come up, brother, you’re in plenty of time,” Buck greeted him heartily. “Now, boys, who says that hoss aint worth fifteen dollars? Why you couldn’t buy that much dynamite fer fifteen dollars. Look a yere, boys, they aint a one of ’em cant do a mile in fo’ minutes; work ’em like hell all day, then turn ’em into the pasture and they’ll boa’d themselves; whenever you think about it, lay ’em over the head with a single tree, and after a couple of days every bastard one’ll be so gentle you’ll have to put ’em outen the house at night like a cat.” He refreshed himself with a gingersnap and raised his voice again, and the woman sitting in the wagon descended gauntly in faded calico and a man’s broken shoes and came among them and touched her husband’s arm.

  “Henery,” she said in a flat voice.

  The man turned his head over his shoulder. “Git back to that waggin,” he said.

  “Yere, Missis,” Buck said, “Henry’s a-goin’ to git the bargain of his life, in a minute now. Yere, boys, let missis git up to the fence wher’ she kin see. Come on, now, Henry, yere’s yo’ chance to pick out missis that saddle hoss she’s been a-wantin’. Who says fifteen—”