Father Abraham Read online

  Eck and Admiral Dewey came without haste through the dust and mounted the veranda. “Hi, boys,” Eck said generally and without inflection, and they responded with grave monosyllables, and Eck and Admiral Dewey crossed the veranda and I.O. Snopes followed them into the odorous dusty store.

  “Yes, sir,” Suratt continued, “even ol’ Eck got trimmed. Not as bad as some, though: he was riskin’ one fer two of ’em. Looks like a feller wouldn’t trim his own blood kin, dont it, boys?” he added cunningly. The others glanced covertly at Flem again, but he sat unmoved in his tilted chair, shaving with slow absorption at his pine stick.

  Eck emerged again, with a paper sack, and he squatted against the wall and Admiral Dewey squatted in diminutive replica beside him, and he set the sack at his feet and took out his pocket knife and opened and stroked the blade on his thigh and took a segment of cheese from the sack and shaved off a piece and tendered it between the knife blade and his thumb. Admiral Dewey accepted it quietly, and Eck shaved off a piece for himself and took a handful of crackers from the paper bag and gave them to Admiral Dewey, and they squatted quietly against the wall and ate slowly and gravely and without selfconsciousness.

  The man chewing the peach spray removed it and spat. “Say, Eck, how many of them things was they in Miz Littlejohn’s house last night? V.K. Suratt says they was one in ever’ room and you and her was chasin’ two mo’ up and down the hall with wash-boa’ds.”

  “ ’Twarnt but one,” Eck answered, chewing. “Jest Ad’s and mine.”

  “Well, hit was the biggest drove to have jest one hoss in it I ever seen in my life,” Suratt said. “I’d a sworn they was a dozen, at least. Fer ten minutes, ever’ time I looked behind or in front of me, there was that blare-eyed pink faced spotted thing jest runnin’ over me er jest swirlin’ to run over Eck Snopes. And that boy there, he stayed right under hit fer five minutes, I know.”

  They laughed again, with sober and indolent appreciation. Admiral Dewey with a bitten cracker in his small hand watched Suratt roundly with his grave periwinkle eyes, chewing steadily and without haste. The man with the peach spray removed it again.

  “I wonder what that hoss thought Suratt was, a-jumpin’ out winders and runnin’ in do’s in his shirt tail? I wonder how many Suratts that hoss thinks he seen?”

  “I dont know,” Suratt answered. “But if he seen half as many of me as I seen of him, he was sho’ surrounded ever’ way he jumped. Gentlemen, that hoss was in my room and on the front porch and I could year Mis’ Littlejohn a-hittin’ him with a wash-boa’d in the back yard, all at the same time. Still, he seemed to miss ever’body all right ever’ time. I reckon that was what that feller meant by callin’ them hosses bargains: I reckon he meant a feller’d have to be powerful unlucky to git clost enough to one of ’em to git hurt. Like Henery Armstid. Feller with a wife and fo’ five chillen and not three pair o’ shoes amongst ’em. Flem ought to be ashamed, sellin’ him that hoss and lettin’ him git his leg bruck, a-ketchin’ hit. That was the last dollar Henery had in the world, I reckon, and him laid up in bed now, fixin’ to lose a whole year, and his wife settin’ up with him all night and he’pin’ Miz Littlejohn all day fer Henery’s and her keep. Yes, sir. Flem sho’ ought to be ashamed,” he repeated. The others sat gravely attentive. Flem chewed implacably, whittling at his stick.

  (Page 23 of manuscript is missing)

  Dewey his half and put his knife away. “Seen him run into hit after he met up with Vernon Turpin on the bridge. Knowed he couldn’t git out, and he’d have to turn eround er jump a eight foot fence, so me and Ad taken and tied our rope acrosst the end of the lane. And putty soon, yere he come, hell-fer-leatherin’ back down the lane wild as a mad dog and banged into that ’ere rope. He never seen it a-tall, I reckon.”

  “Stopped ’im, did it?”

  “Bruck his neck,” Eck replied laconically. Admiral Dewey delved into the sack and exhumed a final cracker, which he ate slowly.

  “What you goin’ to do with ’im?” I.O. Snopes asked with interest.

  “Dunno yit,” Eck answered. “I already skun ’im. Dunno what I’ll do with ’im yit.”

  “Give ’im to me, paw,” Admiral Dewey said.

  “Which one was it?” Flem asked. “The one you bought, er the one Buck guv you?”

  “The one he guv me,” Eck answered. “I never knowed which way the one I bought went.”

  “Give ’im to me, paw,” Admiral Dewey repeated. “I holp to ketch ’im.”

  “You kin have the other’n, ef you kin ketch ’im,” his father said.

  Jody Varner had called by Mrs Littlejohn’s to inquire after Henry Armstid, and from there he took a short cut across Mrs Littlejohn’s back yard and entered his store from the rear, where he paused in midstride like a bird dog pointing. Then he moved again, with astonishing secrecy for one of his flourishing bulk, and through the near obscurity he stole swiftly and passed behind the counter and sped on and savagely exhumed a hulking half grown boy from the glass case where he kept his gaudy candy.

  The boy emitted a choked sound of astonishment and alarm, and struggled. But he stopped almost at once, and became slack in Jody’s grasp and Jody dragged him unresisting around the counter as I.O. Snopes entered. Those sitting and squatting on the veranda craned their necks quietly. “You, Cla’ence,” I.O. Snopes said.

  “Aint I tole you and tole you to keep this dam’ boy outen yere?” Jody said, shaking his lax captive. “He’s dang near et that candy case clean. Stan’ up!” The boy stood, chewing, with a kind of static fatalism, without looking at anything exactly. “Look at that ’ere candy case!” Jody repeated. “Nigh cleaned out. Next thing I know, he’ll graze on back ther’ and work through that lace leather and them ringbolts and eat me and you and him right on out the back do’.” Jody released him. “Stan’ up, boy!”

  “Git on home, Cla’ence,” I.O. said, and the boy moved toward the back door.

  “Yere,” Jody said. “This way,” and jerked his head toward the front entrance, and the boy obeyed. “And if I ketch him hangin’ around yere again, I’m a-goin’ to set a bear trap fer him.”

  The boy crossed the veranda, and Admiral Dewey watched him quietly, and descended the steps and went on up the road. His scanty overalls undulated tightly across his slow flabby thighs, and he put his hand into his pocket and then lifted it to his mouth.

  Jody Varner came to the door. “Morning, gentlemen,” he said, breathing heavily, and sawed at a plug of tobacco with his knife and thrust a piece into his mouth. “Year you caught one o’ yer hosses, Eck.”

  III

  Twilight in these latitudes, in late April, accomplishes itself promptly. Not suddenly, yet without any Yankee reluctance. You walk through the dust toward Mrs Littlejohn’s imminent supper bell; there is no longer any sun on the dust and it is of a simple tone and unemphatic as shallow water about your shoe soles, but there is yet a mellow slant of it like a ruined column of Dorian marble across the ridged hills beyond Jody Varner’s store, and in the apple tree opposite Mrs Littlejohn’s veranda a sourceless and tattered scrap of it is caught like a lady’s hasty and anonymous veil. The recurrent virginity of the apple tree, mid-moons couched between by lusty embrace of the year, has doffed its blooms; in the adjacent barnyard the sparrows are still garrulous in a final chorus, like refugees alarmed and sibilant above the mounting tide of violet shadows; about chimneys swallows yet in erratic indecision.

  But supper over, you emerged into a different world. A world of lilac peace, in which Varner’s store and the blacksmith shop were like sunken derelicts in the motionless and forgotten caverns of the sea. No sound, no movement; no tide to knock their sleeping bones together. And yet it was not quite night. The west was green and tall and without depth, like a pane of glass; through it a substance that was not light seeped in sourceless diffusion, like the sound of an organ.

  Suratt’s buckboard stood at the hitching rail.

  Facsimile section of William Faulkner’s manuscr
ipt of Father Abraham