Father Abraham Page 5

  “Git that ’ere boy outen yere,” he commanded.

  “Git in the wagon, Ad,” Eck directed, and Admiral Dewey obediently trotted on and climbed into the wagon bed.

  “Watch ’em clost, now boys,” some one advised. “Ef we kin jest git ’em into the barn—” But at that moment the herd broke without haste and parted, and flowed along the rear fence, gathering impetus. “Whooey,” one called, and he was answered from the other end of the fan, and another said: “Ther’s mine: ther’ he is!” and a third, earnestly: “Whooey, head ’em back, there!” They headed the beasts and turned them back, and they merged and slid and spun in short rushes, whirled again back upon themselves. “Whooey! Hold ’em, now! Dont let ’em git by, and we got ’em.”

  That one in Mrs Littlejohn’s yard gathered another garment and stood again, blanched in the gathering moon, swept down a third garment and paused again, and Eck looked behind him swiftly and remarked his son. “Aint I tole you to git in that waggin and stay ther’?” he demanded.

  “Look out, paw!” Admiral Dewey exclaimed, “Ther’ he is! See ’im?” It was the one Buck had given him: with mutual and unspoken design they had both delegated to temporary abeyance the one Eck had paid money for. “Ketch ’im, paw!”

  “Git outen my way, Ad,” Eck said. “Whooey.” The beasts milled and clotted. The fan contracted cautiously, forcing the beasts toward the splintered and gaping door of the barn. “Whooey. Watch ’em, fellers!” The animals gave back step by step. Occasionally one feinted to rush away but was shouted back, and slowly and gradually the seething huddle fell back into the barn. “Now we got ’em!” one said with repressed exultation, “Whooey! Git in ther’!”

  Then the shadow of the barn door fell upon the clotting of animals and an indescribable sound of desperation rose from among them and the men whirled and lept madly before the wild vomit of the yawning barn. But the tide overtook them before they could scatter and hurled two men to earth and rushed on and those aligned outside the fence turned and ran in both directions down the road and a voice rose hoarsely from the lot. “Who in hell lef’ that ’ere gate open?”

  But open it was, and the mad animals rushed through it and thundered among the somnolent patient beasts tethered to the motionless wagons across the road, and these too became imbued with the mad contagion and sprang and lunged and snapped their hitch-reins amid squeals and thudding blows, and the mass whirled and crashed indescribably among the wagons and eddied about that one where sat Henry’s wife like a timeless and symbolic figure out of Greek tragedy and rushed on and overtook the fleeing spectators who turned and threw things at it in wild and hopeless desperation and turned it temporarily.

  Eck picked himself from the dust and with Admiral Dewey behind him he ran to the gate and into the road and saw the horse Buck had given him whirl and dash back and whirl and rush up onto Mrs Littlejohn’s veranda. “Ther’ he goes, paw!” Admiral Dewey shouted thinly, “Into the house ther’!” and they galloped up onto the veranda in time to see the horse rush into a room containing a kerosene lamp and a sewing machine agent in his underclothes, neither of which the pony had probably ever seen before. The sewing machine agent was called V.K. Suratt and he now leaned from the window with one sock on and the other in his hand. He looked swiftly over his shoulder and he and the horse glared at each other for a wild instant, then he sprang out of the window and the pony whirled from the room and rushed on through the hall and onto the back porch just as Mrs Littlejohn, carrying an armful of yet damp clothing and a scrubbing board, mounted onto it.

  “Git out of here, you son of a bitch,” Mrs Littlejohn said immediately, and her scrubbing board divided neatly on the beast’s long evil face, and it whirled and rushed back into the hall, and upon Eck and Admiral Dewey.

  “Git to hell outen yere, Ad!” Eck roared in unwitting paraphrase and fell flat, and the pony soared over his prone body and over Admiral Dewey’s innocent yellow head and the round and azure astonishment of his eyes, and rushed on to the veranda, where it met V.K. Suratt in his underclothes and still carrying his sock, mounting the steps. It whirled without breaking its stride and rushed to the end of the veranda and soared like a bird outward and into the lot again and on through the open gate and among the disrupted wagons and down the road. The road gashed quietly across the spring-quick land, and crashings and brief thunders and cries and rumors of earnest alarm came across the land, retreating swiftly, and the beast galloped madly on trampling its shadow beneath the yet unleafed trees, rushed on down the road where it curved descending between fledged greening willows brooding tenderly in the moon, to the bridge over the creek.

  The bridge was of wood, just wide enough for a single vehicle, and it was occupied at the moment by a farmer’s wagon drawn by two somnolent and rythmic mules and containing the farmer’s family and an odd cousin or so in split-bottom chairs, returning peacefully and drowsily through the moonlight from market-day in Jefferson. None of these awaked until the pony was upon them, nor did the beast check or swerve. It thundered once on the wooden planking of the bridge and rushed between the slumbering mules, and these waked madly in opposite directions, and the pony scrambled onto the wagon tongue and the mules whirled in unison and the farmer shouted hoarsely and struck at the pony with his whip and the bridge rail cracked forlornly amid tilting chairs and the pony scrambled on across the frenzied back of one of the mules and the farmer rose and kicked at its glaring long face. Then the wagon lurched downward and hurled the farmer backward among the stiff inverted finery of his wife and daughters and cousins and the pony plunged on and thundered on the plank flooring of the bridge again and the wagon lurched again and rose, its direction reversed, and the farmer clawed up the reins again, shouting, just as the mules finally kicked themselves free of the wagon and jerked him bodily out of it. He struck the bridge on his face and was dragged for a few yards before he could release the reins. Far up the road, swiftly distancing the high-eared frantic mules, the pony faded swiftly: a gaudy rushing phantom beneath the moon.

  While they were removing dirt and blood and bridge fragments from the farmer, one in overalls came up trotting and carrying a rope, and followed by a diminutive and weary but indefatigable replica of itself.

  “Wher’d he go?” asked Eck, panting a little.

  They gathered Henry gently out of the trampled chaff and carried him carefully across the lot and into Mrs Littlejohn’s back yard and across it beneath the moon drenched china-berry trees. Henry’s face was blanched and stony where death had brushed him with a casual feather, his eyes were closed and the lax weight of his head drew his throat in a long profundity from the torn collar of his shirt, and his teeth glinted dully beneath the lifted pallor of his lip. But he was not dead and they stumbled on with repressed breathing, kicking their own ankles awkwardly, and one trotted with short plunging steps to support his head, and Mrs Littlejohn’s house was sonorous with a fading thunder and then from the end of the veranda something soared into the moon like an unbelievable and wingless goblin in a nightmare.

  “Ther’s one mo’ of ’em,” the head-supporter panted, and they stumbled on with Henry across the blanched barren dooryard and onto the shadow of the back porch.

  Mrs Littlejohn paused and turned, with her broken scrubbing board in her hand and her armful of clothes. She laid the scrubbing board down and raised the hall lamp from its place on top of the yellow varnished melodeon. “Bring him in here,” she commanded, thrusting a door open with her knee and preceding them and they followed her with clumsy scufflings and laid Henry carefully and awkwardly on the bed, and Mrs Littlejohn set the lamp down and looked briefly at Henry’s bloodless face. “I’ll declare, you men,” she said and they stood quietly and she said: “Better tell his wife,” and went out, and they looked at Henry and shuffled their feet and muttered among themselves. You go. No, you better go. Let Ernest git her. Go tell her, Ernest.

  Ernest departed and they shifted clumsily, watching Henry’s calm face, and their m
onstrous shadows aped them on the wall and Mrs Littlejohn returned without her armful of clothes and with a blackened kettle and some cloths, and then Henry’s wife came into the room with her desolate dog’s eyes and stood at the foot of the bed with her worn hands clasped across her shapeless lank garment and her face in shadow.

  “Git outen the way,” Mrs Littlejohn said without heat, and they moved with clumsy footsounds and agitated their shapeless shadows on the wall, and Mrs Littlejohn set the kettle on a chair and shook out one of the cloths. “Git on outside,” she repeated. “See ef you cant find nothing to play with that wont kill none of ye.” The men moved obediently on awkward tiptoe. “Tell Will Varner to come over here,” she added. “I reckon a man aint so different from a mule, come long or short.”

  They tiptoed through the dark hallway and onto the veranda, into the pallid refulgence of the moon. The apple tree raised its virginal transience, haunting as a forgotten strain of music frozen into fragile and fleeting permanence, still as a dream, as austere and passionate and fine. From the immeasurable distance and sourceless, voices in indistinguishable sounds; the brief rushing thunder of hooves on a remote wooden bridge and a cry grave and earnest and clear as a far bell in falling suspense: “Whooey! Head ’im!”

  “Ther’s another of ’em,” one said, and they stood in their easy identical overalls, listening, hearing across the mysterious mooned land other cries and nameless sounds, sourceless and originless as bubbles in water. Then Henry screamed from the mellow subdued luminosity down the dark hall behind them and they remained motionless and with bent heads, and the scream sank to a harsh respiratory Ah. Ah. Ah. on a rising note that again became emasculate. We better git Varner they said among themselves. We better git Uncle Billy.

  They descended the steps quietly and together and went in a body through the blanched dust to Uncle Billy Varner’s house and Henry quit screaming and they reached Uncle Billy’s and stood in the moonlight in his front yard and called him. Presently he replied from a window and they explained their errand and Uncle Billy leaned outward on his braced nightshirted arm, gazing out across the moon-mad world wild and hushed and sad with spring.

  “Whooey. Head ’im, ther’.” Strophe and antistrophe; clear and remote; dramatic and sourcleess and without meaning.

  “Air they still a-tryin’ to ketch them dang rabbits?” Uncle Billy said, and he drew his head in and descended presently, buttoning his pants over his nightshirt and slipping on his coat from beneath which his braces dangled in twin loops.

  “Yes, sir, they’re still a-tryin’,” he said again, and they tramped their skulking shadows in the silver dust and leafless trees but no longer immaculate soared upward finely thinned and delicate. “Whooey.”

  “Well, hit’s a good night fer it,” he said again. “Bright as day. My, my, that ’ere apple ought to bear this year, sho’.”

  “Make cawn grow, too, ef hit’s planted right.”

  “Good fer ever’ growin’ thing. I mind—”

  “ ’Taint always. You got to know—”

  “—when me and my wife wuz expectin’ Eula,” Uncle Billy continued, “One spring, ’twas. Already had two boys, we did, and I wanted some mo’ gals. Raise a passel of boys, and they got to git out soon’s they’s wuth anything to a feller; got to set around and talk; but gals now: you kin keep ’em around the house and they’ll work. So I hearn—”

  “I mind, I wuz married in a April. Built my own house. They was a apple tree jest outside the winder. We used to lay there in the dark, a-watchin’ it. Smellin’ it, too.”

  “—that ef a woman laid in the moon, hit’d be a gal. So my wife taken and laid ever’ night with the moon on her nekkid belly. I could lay my year onto hit and year Eula a-scrougin’ inside her—”

  “Whooey.”

  Mrs Littlejohn’s house was dimensionless as cardboard. The veranda shadow gashed its face, and from the vague mellowness of the hall came Henry’s voice Ah. Ah. Ah. Uncle Billy went on in, but the others stood quietly in the shadow near the door.

  “Ther’s one on the creek bridge,” and they listened intently until the sound died away, and they moved one by one to the steps and sat down.

  “Eck Snopes ought to’ve caught his’n when it run in the house yere.”

  “Looks like he ought.”

  The earth dreamed on, mysterious, rapturous, like a chord hushed, like an unborn chord held in suspension: the grave and tragic rythm of the world.

  “Ther’s that mockin’bird again.”

  Then Henry screamed again and they turned and looked at the vague door of the house, and presently Mrs Littlejohn came to the door. “Uncle Billy needs some help,” she said.

  “Whooey.…‥” Clear and remote, reft by space of passion and indescribably sad, like the dying cadence of a bell: “Whooey.…‥goes.……” Henry’s scream consumed itself Ah. Ah. Ah. The mockingbird in the apple tree rippled tentatively, then swelled its throat and sang.

  “Yes, sir—” V.K. Suratt finished his humorous recital amid their sober appreciative guffaws and grave spittings. They squatted in their faded earthy clothing on their heels against the weathered wall, or sat with their backs against the supporting posts of the veranda, engaged in trivial and intense occupations. With pocket knives, usually, trimming minutely at slivers of wood or whetting the worn blades on their shoes, pausing to spit with occasional and deliberate care, bending once more above their quiet slow hands. One held between his teeth a spray of peach with three blooms on it like miniature doll skirts of pink tulle and he took from his overalls a small tin and uncapped it and shook into the cap a measure of snuff and removed his peach spray and tilted his head and drew his lower lip away from his stained teeth. Suratt leaned among them against the wall, his bland affable face raptly benignant as he recapitulated with the studied effectiveness of the professional humorist. “Yes, sir, when I looked over my shoulder and seen that thing in the do’ behind me, a-blarin’ hits eyes at me, I made sho’ Flem Snopes had brung a tiger back from Texas with him.”

  I.O. Snopes, Flem’s successor, sitting with his false merry eyes and his nutcracker face, tilted proprietorially in the single chair in the odorous broad door, slapped his thighs, cackling. “I reckon he’d a brung some ef he’d a knowed you fellers’d snap up them hosses so quick,” he said. “Him and Buck’d a brung monkeys too, I reckon.”

  “And I reckon we’d a bought ’em,” Suratt agreed sourly. The others sat in their slow sober preoccupations. “Say,” Suratt asked, “How much did Flem make offen them hosses?”

  “He made a plenty, I reckon,” I.O. Snopes said. He cackled again, wisely: his mean little features clotted in the middle of his face like the plucking gesture of a hand. “Flem’s putty cute, he is.” The others sat in quiet absorption. One said, without raising his head:

  “Flem claims he never had no interest in them hosses.”

  Suratt emitted a crude abrupt sound of disparagement. “Does anybody yere believe that?”

  The man with the peach spray removed it and spat. “Will anybody yere ever know no better? Flem haint a-goin’ to tell.”

  I.O. Snopes cackled again, with a kind of secretive glee. “Aint he a beatin’ feller, now?” he said with frank admiration. “Yes, sir, Flem aint a-goin’ to tell how much he made on them hosses.”

  “And you needn’t to pretend like you knowed, neither,” Suratt told I.O. Snopes. “Flem aint a-goin’ to tell you no quicker’n anybody else.” I.O. Snopes continued to shake with niggard secretive mirth, rubbing his palms on his thighs. “Yes, sir,” Suratt continued fretfully, “They wont nobody ever know how much he made on them hosses, but I got my opinion of a feller that’ll bring a herd of wild cattymounts into a place and sell ’em to his neighbors, and ef I was.……” his voice ceased and they watched Flem Snopes quietly as he came up the road whittling a bit of pine board and mounted the steps. He greeted them generally and his slow opaque eyes moved from one to another, and I.O. Snopes rose with deference but delibe
rately and surrendered the chair and went to lean in the opposite side of the door.

  “I was jest a-tellin’ Suratt,” I.O. said, “that ef you’d a knowed how these fellers’d snap up them hosses, you’d a brung some monkeys and tigers back from Texas, too.”

  Flem hooked his toes backward about the chair legs and chewed with his slow thrusting detachment. “Buck mought,” he said briefly, and trimmed a sliver from his stick. I.O. cackled again, with unction.

  “Yes, sir,” he repeated, “You boys cant git ahead of Flem.”

  “Dont look like it,” Suratt agreed. “Aint nobody ever even caught up with him since last night. ‘Cep’ Henery Armstid. And Vernon Turpin. Eck Snopes’ hoss made Vernon’s mules run away on the bridge last night. Snatched Vernon outen the waggin and skun him up some. Vernon says he’s a-goin’ to law you fer it, Flem.”

  Flem chewed his steady tobacco and trimmed at his stick with delicate preoccupation. The others glanced at him covertly and quietly. Except Suratt. Suratt looked at Flem with a blend of curiosity and respect.

  “Say, Flem,” he said, and the others all listened without ostentation, “How much did you and that Texas feller make off of them hosses?”

  “Better ask him,” Flem answered. “ ’Twarnt my hosses.”

  I.O. Snopes guffawed again, and V.K. Suratt joined him, but more temperately.

  “Dont he beat ’em all,” I.O. chortled. “Y’all might jes’ well quit tryin’ to git around Flem.”

  “That’s right,” Suratt agreed. “We all taken a back seat to Flem. Well, he sho’ livened things up fer us, even if him and that Texas feller did skin us outen sixty or seventy dollars.”

  “How many’d you buy, V.K.?” he of the peach spray asked, and the others laughed with sober appreciation.

  “I bought one less’n a lot of folks I know,” Suratt rejoined. “Two less’n Eck Snopes yonder. I hearn fellers still after them hosses at ten o’clock last night. But Eck Snopes aint been home a-tall. Hi, Eck.”