‘I was aiming to tell you yesterday to see if you could borrow some.’ He kept on cooking breakfast because he hadn’t expected her that soon, because that would make two twenty-eight mile trips in not much more than twenty-four hours. But we heard the wagon again and this time when she got out she had the separator. When we got to the barn we could see her toting it into the house. ‘You left that milk where she will see it, didn’t you?’ Ab says.
“ ’Yes, sir,’ I says.
“ ’Likely she will wait to put on her old wrapper first,’ Ab says. ‘I wish I had started breakfast sooner.’ Only I don’t think she even waited that long, because it seemed like we begun to hear it right away. It made a fine high sound, good and strong, like it would separate a gallon of milk in no time. Then it stopped. ‘It’s too bad she ain’t got but the one gallon,’ Ab says.
“ ’I can bring her another one in the morning,’ I said. But he wasn’t listening, watching the house.
“ ’I reckon you can go now and look in the door,’ he says. So I went and did. She was taking Ab’s breakfast offen the stove, onto two plates. I didn’t know she had even seen me till she turned and handed the two plates to me. Her face was all right now, quiet. It was just busy.
“ ’I reckon you can eat something more too,’ she said. ‘But eat it out yonder. I am going to be busy in here and I don’t want you and him in my way.’ So I taken the plates back and we set against the fence and et. And then we heard the separator again. I didn’t know it would go through but one time. I reckon he didn’t neither.
“ ’I reckon Cain showed her,’ he says, eating. ‘I reckon if she wants it to run through more than once, it will run through more than once.’ Then it stopped and she come to the door and hollered to us to bring the dishes up so she could wash them and I taken the plates back and set them on the step and me and Ab went back and set on the fence.
It looked like it would have held all Texas and Kansas too. ‘I reckon she just rode up to that damn tent and said, Here’s your team. You get my separator and get it quick because I got to catch a ride back home,’ he said. And then we heard it again, and that evening we walked up to Old Man Anse’s to borrow a mule to finish the far piece with, but he never had none to spare now.
So as soon as Old Man Anse had finished cussing, we come on back and set on the fence. And sho enough, we could hear the separator start up again. It sounded strong as ever, like it could make the milk fly, like it didn’t give a whoop whether that milk had been separated once or a hundred times. ‘There it goes again,’ Ab says. ‘Don’t forget that other gallon tomorrow.’
“ ’No, sir,’ I says. We listened to it. Because he wasn’t curdled then.
“ ’It looks like she is fixing to get a heap of pleasure and satisfaction outen it,’ he says.”
3
He halted the buckboard and sat for a moment looking down at the same broken gate which Jody Varner had sat the roan horse and looked at nine days ago — the weed-choked and grass-grown yard, the weathered and sagging house — a cluttered desolation filled already, even before he reached the gate and stopped, with the loud flat sound of two female voices.
They were young voices, talking not in shouts or screams but with an unhurried profundity of volume the very apparent absence from which of any discernible human speech or language seemed but natural, as if the sound had been emitted by two enormous birds; as if the aghast and amazed solitude of some inaccessible and empty marsh or desert were being invaded and steadily violated by the constant bickering of the two last survivors of a lost species which had established residence in it — a sound which stopped short off when Ratliff shouted. A moment later the two girls came to the door and stood, big, identical, like two young tremendous cows, looking at him.
“Morning, ladies,” he said. “Where’s your paw?”
They continued to contemplate him. They did not seem to breathe even, though he knew they did, must; bodies of that displacement and that apparently monstrous, that almost oppressive, wellness, would need air and lots of it. He had a fleeting vision of them as the two cows, heifers, standing knee-deep in air as in a stream, a pond, nuzzling into it, the level of the pond fleeing violently and silently to one inhalation, exposing in astounded momentary amaze the teeming lesser subaerial life about the planted feet. Then they spoke exactly together, like a trained chorus: “Down to the field.”
Sho now, he thought, moving on: Doing what? Because he did not believe that the Ab Snopes he had known would have more than two mules. And one of these he had already seen standing idle in the lot beyond the house; and the other he knew to be tied at this moment to a tree behind Varner’s store eight miles away, because only three hours ago he had left it there, tied where for six days now he had watched Varner’s new clerk ride up each morning and tie it. For an instant he actually halted the buckboard again. By God, he thought quietly, This would be exactly the chance he must have been waiting on for twenty-three years now to get his self that new un-Stampered start.
So when he came in sight of the field and recognised the stiff, harsh, undersized figure behind a plough drawn by two mules, he was not even surprised. He did not wait until he had actually recognised the mules to be a pair which until a week ago at least had belonged to Will Varner: he merely changed the tense of the possessing verb: Not had belonged, he thought. They still do. By God, he has done even better than that. He ain’t even trading horses now. He has done swapped a man for a span of them.
He halted the buckboard at the fence. The plough had reached the far end of the field. The man turned the team, their heads tossing and yawing, their stride breaking as he sawed them about with absolutely needless violence. Ratliff watched soberly. Just like always, he thought. He still handles a horse or a mule like it had done already threatened him with its fist before he even spoke to it. He knew that Snopes had seen and even recognised him too, though there was no sign of it, the team straightened out now and returning, the delicate mule-legs and narrow deer-like feet picking up swiftly and nervously, the earth shearing dark and rich from the polished blade of the plough.
Now Ratliff could even see Snopes looking directly at him — the cold glints beneath the shaggy ill-tempered brows as he remembered them even after eight years, the brows only a little greyer now — though once more the other merely swung the team about with that senseless savageness, canting the plough onto its side as he stopped it. “What you doing here?” he said.
“Just heard you were here and stopped by,” Ratliff said. “It’s been a while, ain’t it? Eight years.”
The other grunted. “It don’t show on you, though. You still look like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.”
“Sho now,” Ratliff said. “Speaking of mouths.” He reached beneath the seat cushion and produced a pint bottle filled apparently with water. “Some of McCallum’s best,” he said. “Just run off last week. Here.” He extended the bottle. The other came to the fence. Although they were now not five feet apart, still all that Ratliff could see were the two glints beneath the fierce overhang of brow.
“You brought it to me?”
“Sholy,” Ratliff said. “Take it.”
The other did not move. “What for?”
“Nothing,” Ratliff said. “I just brought it. Try a sup of it. It’s good.”
The other took the bottle. Then Ratliff knew that something had gone out of the eyes. Or maybe they were just not looking at him now. “I’ll wait till tonight,” Snopes said. “I don’t drink in the sun any more.”
“How about in the rain?” Ratliff said. And then he knew that Snopes was not looking at him, although the other had not moved, no change in the harsh knotted violent face as he stood holding the bottle. “You ought to settle down pretty good here,” Ratliff said. “You got a good farm now, and Flem seems to taken hold in the store like he was raised storekeeping.” Now the other did not seem to be listening either. He shook the bottle and raised it to the light as though testing the bead. “I hope you will,” Ratliff said.
Then he saw the eyes again, fierce and intractable and cold. “What’s it to you if I do or don’t?”
“Nothing,” Ratliff said, pleasantly, quietly. Snopes stooped and hid the bottle in the weeds beside the fence and returned to the plough and raised it.
“Go on to the house
