‘Put it on the Book,’ Ratcliffe said — the Book: not a ledger, but the ledger, since it was probably the only thing of its kind between Nashville and Natchez, unless there might happen to be a similar one a few miles south at the first Choctaw agency at Yalo Busha — a ruled, paper-backed copybook such as might have come out of a schoolroom, in which accrued, with the United States as debtor, in Mohataha’s name (the Chickasaw matriarch, Ikkemotubbe’s mother and old Issetibbeha’s sister, who — she could write her name, or anyway make something with a pen or pencil which was agreed to be, or at least accepted to be, a valid signature — signed all the conveyances as her son’s kingdom passed to the white people, regularising it in law anyway) the crawling tedious list of calico and gunpowder, whiskey and salt and snuff and denim pants and osseous candy drawn from Ratcliffe’s shelves by her descendants and subjects and Negro slaves.
That was all the settlement had to do: add the lock to the list, the account. It wouldn’t even matter at what price they entered it. They could have priced it on Pettigrew’s scale of fifteen pounds times the distance not just to Carolina but to Washington itself, and nobody would ever notice it probably; they could have charged the United States with seventeen thousand five hundred dollars’ worth of the fossilised and indestructible candy, and none would ever read the entry. So it was solved, done, finished, ended. They didn’t even have to discuss it.
They didn’t even think about it any more, unless perhaps here and there to marvel (a little speculatively probably) at their own moderation, since they wanted nothing — least of all, to escape any just blame — but a fair and decent adjustment of the lock. They went back to where old Alec still sat with his pipe in front of his dim hearth. Only they had overestimated him; he didn’t want any money at all, he wanted his lock. Whereupon what little remained of Compson’s patience went too.
‘Your lock’s gone,’ he told old Alec harshly. ‘You’ll take fifteen dollars for it,’ he said, his voice already fading, because even that rage could recognise impasse when it saw it. Nevertheless, the rage, the impotence, the sweating, the too much — whatever it was — forced the voice on for one word more: ‘Or — —’ before it stopped for good and allowed Peabody to fill the gap:
‘Or else?’ Peabody said, and not to old Alec, but to Compson. ‘Or else what?’ Then Ratcliffe saved that too.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Uncle Alec’s going to take fifty dollars for his lock. A guarantee of fifty dollars. He’ll give us the name of the blacksmith back in Cal’lina that made it for him, and we’ll send back there and have a new one made. Going and coming and all’ll cost about fifty dollars. We’ll give Uncle Alec the fifty dollars to hold as a guarantee. Then when the new lock comes, he’ll give us back the money.
All right, Uncle Alec?’ And that could have been all of it. It probably would have been, except for Pettigrew. It was not that they had forgotten him, nor even assimilated him. They had simply sealed — healed him off (so they thought) — him into their civic crisis as the desperate and defenceless oyster immobilises its atom of inevictable grit. Nobody had seen him move yet he now stood in the centre of them where Compson and Ratcliffe and Peabody faced old Alec in the chair.
You might have said that he had oozed there, except for that adamantine quality which might (in emergency) become invisible but never insubstantial and never in this world fluid; he spoke in a voice bland, reasonable and impersonal, then stood there being looked at, frail and child-sized, impermeable as diamond and manifest with portent, bringing into that backwoods room a thousand miles deep in pathless wilderness, the whole vast incalculable weight of federality, not just representing the government nor even himself just the government; for that moment at least, he was the United States.
‘Uncle Alec hasn’t lost any lock,’ he said. ‘That was Uncle Sam.’
After a moment someone said, ‘What?’
‘That’s right,’ Pettigrew said. ‘Whoever put that lock of Holston’s on that mail bag either made a voluntary gift to the United States, and the same law covers the United States Government that covers minor children; you can give something to them, but you can’t take it back, or he or they done something else.’
They looked at him. Again after a while somebody said something; it was Ratcliffe. ‘What else?’ Ratcliffe said. Pettigrew answered, still bland, impersonal, heatless and glib: ‘Committed a violation of act of Congress as especially made and provided for the defacement of government property, penalty of five thousand dollars or not less than one year in a Federal jail or both.
For whoever cut them two slits in the bag to put the lock in, act of Congress as especially made and provided for the injury or destruction of government property, penalty of ten thousand dollars or not less than five years in a Federal jail or both.’ He did not move even yet; he simply spoke directly to old Alec: ‘I reckon you’re going to have supper here same as usual sooner or later or more or less.’
‘Wait,’ Ratcliffe said. He turned to Compson. ‘Is that true?’
‘What the hell difference does it make whether it’s true or not?’ Compson said. ‘What do you think he’s going to do as soon as he gets to Nashville?’ He said violently to Pettigrew: ‘You were supposed to leave for Nashville yesterday. What were you hanging around here for?’
‘Nothing to go to Nashville for,’ Pettigrew said. ‘You don’t want any mail. You ain’t got anything to lock it up with.’
‘So we ain’t,’ Ratcliffe said. ‘So we’ll let the United States find the United States’ lock.’ This time Pettigrew looked at no one. He wasn’t even speaking to anyone, any more than old Alec had been when he decreed the return of his lock:
‘Act of Congress as made and provided for the unauthorised removal and or use or wilful or felonious use or misuse or loss of government property, penalty the value of the article plus five hundred to ten thousand dollars or thirty days to twenty years in a Federal jail or both. They may even make a new one when they read where you have charged a post-office department lock to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.’ He moved; now he was speaking to old Alec again: ‘I’m going out to my horse. When this meeting is over and you get back to cooking, you can send your nigger for me.’
Then he was gone. After a while Ratcliffe said, ‘What do you reckon he aims to get out of this? A reward?’ But that was wrong; they all knew better than that.
‘He’s already getting what he wants,’ Compson said, and cursed again. ‘Confusion. Just damned confusion.’ But that was wrong too; they all knew that too, though it was Peabody who said it:
‘No. Not confusion. A man who will ride six hundred miles through this country every two weeks, with nothing for protection but a foxhorn, ain’t really interested in confusion any more than he is in money.’ So they didn’t know yet what was in Pettigrew’s mind. But they knew what he would do. That is, they knew that they did not know at all, either what he would do, or how, or when, and that there was nothing whatever that they could do about it until they discovered why.
And they saw now that they had no possible means to discover that; they realised now that they had known him for three years now, during which, fragile and inviolable and undeviable and preceded for a mile or more by the strong sweet ringing of the horn, on his strong and tireless horse he would complete the bi-monthly trip from Nashville to the settlement and for the next three or four days would live among them, yet that they knew nothing whatever about him, and even now knew only that they dared not, simply dared not, take any chance, sitting for a while longer in the darkening room while old Alec still smoked, his back still squarely turned to them and their quandary too; then dispersing to their own cabins for the evening meal — with what appetite they could bring to it, since presently they had drifted back through the summer darkness when by ordinary they would have been already in bed, to the back room of Ratcliffe’s store now, to sit again while Ratcliffe recapitulated in his mixture of bewilderment and alarm (and something else which they recognised was respect as they realised that he — Ratcliffe — was unshakably convinced that Pettigrew’s aim was money; that Pettigrew had invented or evolved a scheme so richly rewarding that he — Ratcliffe — had
