Yes, sir. Fate. The same fate that made Mammy taunt Pap into starting out with Beasley’s horse; the same fate that made it a hot morning in July for us to start out on. Because when we left home that morning we wasn’t even thinking about horse trading. We was thinking about horse, all right, because we were wondering if maybe we wasn’t fixing to come back home that night with Beasley’s horse riding in the wagon and me or Pap in the traces with the mule. Yes, sir.
Pap eased that team outen the lot at sunup and on down the road toward Frenchman’s Bend as slow and careful as arra horse and mule ever moved in this world, with me and Pap walking up ever hill that was slanted enough to run water down the ruts, and aiming to do that right on into Jefferson. It was the weather, the hot day, that done it. Because here we was, about a mile from Varner’s store, and Beasley’s horse kind of half walking and half riding on the double tree, and Pap’s face looking a little more and a little more concerned ever time our new horse failed to lift its feet high enough to make the next step, when all of a sudden that horse popped into a sweat.
It flung its head up like it had been teched with a hot poker and stepped up into the collar, teching the collar for the first time since the mule had taken the weight off the breast yoke when Pap’d shaken out the whip inside the lot; and so here we come down the last hill and up to Varner’s store and that horse of Beasley’s with its head up and blowing froth and its eyes white-rimmed like these here colored dinner plates and Pap sawing back on the reins, and I be dog if it not only hadn’t sweated into as pretty a blood bay as you ever see, but even the ribs didn’t seem to show so much.
And Pap, that had been talking about taking a back road so as to miss Varner’s store altogether, setting there on the wagon seat exactly like he would set on the lot fence where he knowed he would be safe from Pat Stamper, telling Jody Varner and them other men that Beasley’s horse come from Kentucky. Jody Varner never even laughed. “Kentucky, hey?” he says. “Sho, now. That explains why it taken it so long. Herman Short swapped Pat Stamper a buckboard and a set of harness for it five years ago, and Beasley Kemp give Herman eight dollars for it last summer. How much did you give Beasley? Fifty cents?”
That’s what done it. From then on, it was automatic. It wasn’t the horse, the trade. It was still a good trade, because in a sense you might say that all Pap give Beasley for it was the straight stock, since the bob-wire and the sorghum mill belonged to Old Man Anse. And it wasn’t the harness and the buckboard that Herman Short give Pat Stamper: it was that eight dollars that Beasley give Herman. That’s what rankled Pap.
Not that he held the eight dollars against Herman, because Herman had done already invested a buckboard and a set of harness. And besides, the eight dollars was still in the county, even if it was out of circulation, belonging to Herman Short, and so it didn’t actually matter whether Herman had it or Beasley had it. It was Pat Stamper that rankled Pap.
When a man swaps horse for horse, that’s one thing. But when cash money starts changing hands, that’s something else; and when a stranger comes into the country and starts actual cash money jumping from hand to hand, it’s like when a burglar breaks into your house and flings your clothes and truck from place to place even though he don’t take nothing: it makes you mad.
So it was not jest to unload Beasley’s horse back onto Pat Stamper. It was to get Beasley’s eight dollars back outen Pat some way. And so it was jest pure fate that had Pat Stamper camped right on the road we would take to Jefferson on the very day when me and Pap went to get Mammy’s separator.
So I reckon the rest of it don’t even hardly need to be told, except as a kind of sidelight on how, when a man starts out to plan to do something, he jest thinks he is planning: that what he is actually doing is giving the highball to misfortune, throwing open the switch and saying, “All right, Bad Luck; come right ahead.” So here was Pat Stamper and that nigger magician of hisn camped in Hoke’s pasture, right on the road we would have to pass to git to town, and here was Pap on the way to town with two live animals and twenty-seven dollars and sixty-five cents in cash, and feeling that the entire honor and pride of the science and pastime of horse trading in Yoknapatawpha County depended on him to vindicate it.
So the rest of it don’t even need to be told. I don’t need to tell whether me and Pap walked back home or not, because anybody that knows Pat Stamper knows that he never bought a horse or a mule outright in his life; that he swapped you something for it that could at least walk out of sight. So the only point that might interest you is, what was pulling the wagon when we got back home.
And what Mammy done when she said, “Where is my separator?” and Pap saying, “Now Vynie; now Vynie—” Yes, sir. When it come down to the trade, it wasn’t Pat Stamper after all that Pap was swapping horses with. It was the demon rum.
Because he was desperate. After the first swap he was desperate. Before that he was jest mad, like when you dream you are right in the middle of the track and the train a-coming; it’s right on you and you can’t run or dodge because all of a sudden you realize you are running in sand and so after a while it don’t even matter if the train catches you or not because all you can think about is being mad at the sand.
That’s how Pap was. For ever mile we made toward Jefferson, the madder Pap got. It wasn’t at Beasley’s horse, because we nursed it on toward town the same way we nursed it to Varner’s store until it begun to sweat. It was them eight cash dollars that that horse represented. I don’t even recollect just when and where we found out that Pat Stamper was at Jefferson that day. It might have been at Varner’s store.
Or it might have been that we never had to be told; that for Pap to carry out the fate that Mammy started when she taunted him about Beasley’s horse, Pat Stamper would jest have to be in Jefferson. Because Pap never even taken time to find out where Pat was camped, so that when we did roll into town we had done already swapped.
Yes, sir. We went up them long hills with Pap and me walking and Beasley’s horse laying into the collar the best it could but with the mule doing most of the pulling and Pap walking on his side of the wagon and cussing Pat Stamper and Herman Short and Beasley Kemp and Jody Varner, and we went down the hills with Pap holding the wagon broke with a sapling pole so it wouldn’t shove Beasley’s horse through the collar and turn it wrong-side-outward like a sock and Pap still a-cussing Pat Stamper and Herman and Beasley and Varner, until we come to the three-mile bridge and Pap turned off the road and druv into the bushes and taken the mule outen the harness and knotted one rein so I could ride it and give me the quarter and told me to git for town and git the dime’s worth of saltpeter and the nickel’s worth of tar and the number ten fish hook.
So we didn’t git to town until that afternoon. We went straight to Pat Stamper’s camp in Hoke’s pasture where I had done already passed it twice on the mule, with Beasley’s horse laying into the collar sho enough now and its eyes looking nigh as wild as Pap’s looked a hour later when we come outen McCaslin’s back door with the separator, and foaming a little at the mouth where Pap had rubbed the rest of the saltpeter into its gums and with a couple of as pretty tarred bob-wire cuts on its chest as you could want and another one on its flank where Pap had worked the fish hook under its hide where he could tech it by drooping the rein now and then; yes, sir, turning into Hoke’s pasture on two wheels and Pap sawing back on the reins and Pat Stamper’s nigger running up and grabbing the bridle to keep Beasley’s horse from running right into the tent where Pat slept and Pat hisself coming outen the tent with that ’ere cream-colored Stetson cocked over one eye and them eyes the color of a new plow point and jest about as warm. “That’s a pretty lively looking horse you got there,” Pat says.
“Hell fire, yes!” Pap says. “It durn nigh killed me and this boy both before I could git it into that ere
