“Don’t be a fool,” I said. “I never meant nothing. You couldn’t help it.” And Darl hung back too, but nothing wouldn’t suit Jewel.
“Shut your goddamn mouth,” he says.
“It’s got to be somewhere,” Darl said. “We’ll take out soon as pa gets back.”
“You won’t help me?” Jewel says, them white eyes of hisn kind of blaring and his face shaking like he had a aguer.
“No,” Darl said. “I won’t. Wait till pa gets back.”
So I stood in the door and watched him push and haul at that wagon. It was on a downhill, and once I thought he was fixing to beat out the back end of the shed. Then the dinner-bell rung. I called him, but he didn’t look around. “Come on to dinner,” I said. “Tell that boy.” But he didn’t answer, so I went on to dinner. The gal went down to get that boy, but she come back without him. About half through dinner we heard him yelling again, running that buzzard out.
“It’s a outrage,” Lula said; “a outrage.”
“He’s doing the best he can,” I said. “A fellow don’t trade with Snopes in thirty minutes. They’ll set in the shade all afternoon to dicker.”
“Do?” she says. “Do? He’s done too much, already.”
And I reckon he had. Trouble is, his quitting was just about to start our doing. He couldn’t buy no team from nobody, let alone Snopes, withouten he had something to mortgage he didn’t know would mortgage yet. And so when I went back to the field I looked at my mules and same as told them good-bye for a spell. And when I come back that evening and the sun shining all day on that shed, I wasn’t so sho I would regret it.
He come riding up just as I went out to the porch, where they all was. He looked kind of funny: kind of more hangdog than common, and kind of proud too. Like he had done something he thought was cute but wasn’t so sho now how other folks would take it.
“I got a team,” he said.
“You bought a team from Snopes?” I said.
“I reckon Snopes ain’t the only man in this country that can drive a trade,” he said.
“Sho,” I said. He was looking at Jewel, with that funny look, but Jewel had done got down from the porch and was going toward the horse. To see what Anse had done to it, I reckon.
“Jewel,” Anse says. Jewel looked back. “Come here,” Anse says. Jewel come back a little and stopped again.
“What you want?” he said.
“So you got a team from Snopes,” I said. “He’ll send them over to-night, I reckon? You’ll want a early start to-morrow, long as you’ll have to go by Mottson.”
Then he quit looking like he had been for a while. He got that badgered look like he used to have, mumbling his mouth.
“I do the best I can,” he said. “ ’Fore God, if there were ere a man in the living world suffered the trials and floutings I have suffered.”
“A fellow that just beat Snopes in a trade ought to feel pretty good,” I said. “What did you give him, Anse?”
He didn’t look at me. “I give a chattel mortgage on my cultivator and seeder,” he said.
“But they ain’t worth forty dollars. How far do you aim to get with a forty-dollar team?”
They were all watching him now, quiet and steady. Jewel was stopped, half-way back, waiting to go on to the horse. “I give other things,” Anse said. He begun to mumble his mouth again, standing there like he was waiting for somebody to hit him and him with his mind already made up not to do nothing about it.
“What other things?” Darl said.
“Hell,” I said. “You take my team. You can bring them back. I’ll get along some way.”
“So that’s what you were doing in Cash’s clothes last night,” Darl said. He said it just like he was reading it outen the paper. Like he never give a durn himself one way or the other. Jewel had come back now, standing there, looking at Anse with them marble eyes of hisn. “Cash aimed to buy that talking machine from Suratt with that money,” Darl said.
Anse stood there, mumbling his mouth. Jewel watched him. He ain’t never blinked yet.
“But that’s just eight dollars more,” Darl said, in that voice like he was just listening and never give a durn himself. “That still won’t buy a team.”
Anse looked at Jewel quick, kind of sliding his eyes that way, then he looked down again. “God knows, if there were ere a man,” he says. Still they didn’t say nothing. They just watched him, waiting, and him sliding his eyes toward their feet and up their legs but no higher. “And the horse,” he says.
“What horse?” Jewel said. Anse just stood there. I be durn, if a man can’t keep the upper hand of his sons, he ought to run them away from home, no matter how big they are. And if he can’t do that, I be durn if he oughtn’t to leave himself. I be durn if I wouldn’t. “You mean, you tried to swap my horse?” Jewel says.
Anse stands there, dangle-armed. “For fifteen years I ain’t had a tooth in my head,” he says. “God knows it. He knows in fifteen years I ain’t et the victuals He aimed for man to eat to keep his strength up, and me saving a nickel here and a nickel there so my family wouldn’t suffer it, to buy them teeth so I could eat God’s appointed food. I give that money. I thought that if I could do without eating, my sons could do without riding. God knows I did.”
Jewel stands with his hands on his hips, looking at Anse. Then he looks away. He looked out across the field, his face still as a rock, like it was somebody else talking about somebody else’s horse and him not even listening. Then he spit, slow, and said “Hell” and he turned and went on to the gate and unhitched the horse and got on it. It was moving when he come into the saddle and by the time he was on it they was tearing down the road like the Law might have been behind them. They went out of sight that way, the two of them looking like some kind of a spotted cyclone.
“Well,” I says. “You take my team,” I said. But he wouldn’t do it. And they wouldn’t even stay, and that boy chasing them buzzards all day in the hot sun until he was nigh as crazy as the rest of them. “Leave Cash here, anyway,” I said. But they wouldn’t do that. They made a pallet for him with quilts on top of the coffin and laid him on it and set his tools by him, and we put my team in and hauled the wagon about a mile down the road.
“If we’ll bother you here,” Anse says, “just say so.”
“Sho,” I said. “It’ll be fine here. Safe, too. Now let’s go back and eat supper.”
“I thank you,” Anse said. “We got a little something in the basket. We can make out.”
“Where’d you get it?” I said.
“We brought it from home.”
“But it’ll be stale now,” I said. “Come and get some hot victuals.”
But they wouldn’t come. “I reckon we can make out,” Anse said. So I went home and et and taken a basket back to them and tried again to make them come back to the house.
“I thank you,” he said. “I reckon we can make out.” So I left them there, squatting around a little fire, waiting; God knows what for.
I come on home. I kept thinking about them there, and about that fellow tearing away on that horse. And that would be the last they would see of him. And I be durn if I could blame him. Not for wanting to not give up his horse, but for getting shut of such a durn fool as Anse.
Or that’s what I thought then. Because be durn if there ain’t something about a durn fellow like Anse that seems to make a man have to help him, even when he knows he’ll be wanting to kick himself next minute. Because about a hour after breakfast next morning Eustace Grimm that works Snopes’ place come up with a span of mules, hunting Anse.
“I thought him and Anse never traded,” I said.
“Sho,” Eustace said. “All they liked was the horse. Like I said to Mr. Snopes, he was letting this team go for fifty dollars, because if his uncle Flem had a just kept them Texas horses when he owned them, Anse wouldn’t a never——”
“The horse?” I said. “Anse’s boy taken that horse and cleared out last night, probably half-way to Texas by now, and Anse——”
“I didn’t know who brung it,” Eustace said. “I never see them. I just found the horse in the barn this morning when I went to feed, and I told Mr. Snopes and he said to bring the team on over here.”
Well, that’ll be the last they’ll ever see of him now, sho enough. Come Christmas time they’ll maybe get a postal card from him in Texas, I reckon. And if it hadn’t a been Jewel, I reckon it’d a been me; I owe him that much, myself. I be durn if Anse don’t conjure a man, some way. I be durn if he ain’t a sight.
VARDAMAN
NOW there are seven of them, in little tall black circles.
“Look, Darl,” I say; “see?”
He looks up.
