It was not until the store closed that afternoon that they realised that Jody Varner had been inside it all day. But even then they attached little importance to this. They thought that without doubt Jody himself had sent the clerk to superintend the opening of the gin, which Jody himself had used to do, out of laziness, assuming himself the temporary onus of tending store so he could sit down.
It took the actual firing-up of the gin and the arrival of the first loaded wagons to disabuse them. Then they saw that it was Jody who was now tending store again, fetching and carrying for the nickels and dimes, while the clerk sat all day long on the stool behind the scale-beam as the wagons moved in turn onto it and so beneath the suction pipe. Jody had used to do both.
That is, he was mostly behind the scales, letting the store take care of itself, as it always had, though now and then, just to rest himself, he would keep a wagon standing upon the scales, blocking them for fifteen minutes or even forty-five minutes, while he was in the store; maybe there would not even be any customers during that time, just loungers, listeners for him to talk to. But that was all right. Things got along just as well.
And now that there were two of them, there was no reason why one should not remain in the store while the other did the weighing, and there was no reason why Jody should not have designated the weighing to the clerk. The cold surmise which now began to dawn upon them was that ——
“Sho,” Ratliff said. “I know. That Jody should have stayed there a tall. Just who it was that told him to stay there.” He and Bookwright looked at each other. “It wasn’t Uncle Will. That store and that gin had been running themselves at the same time for nigh forty years all right, with just one fellow between them. And a fellow Uncle Will’s age ain’t likely to change his notions. Sho now. All right. Then what?”
They could watch them both from the gallery. They would come in on their laden wagons and draw into line, mule-nose to tail gate, beside the road, waiting for their turn to move onto the scales and then under the suction pipe, and dismount and wrap the reins about a stanchion and cross to the gallery, from which they could watch the still, impenetrable, steadily-chewing face throned behind the scale-beam, the cloth cap, the minute tie, while from within the store they could hear now and then the short surly grunts with which Varner answered when his customers forced him to speak at all.
Now and then they would even go in themselves and buy sacks or plugs of tobacco or tins of snuff which they did not actually need yet, or maybe just to drink from the cedar water bucket. Because there was something in Jody’s eyes that had not been there before either — a shadow, something between annoyance and speculation and purest foreknowledge, which was not quite bafflement yet but was certainly sober.
This was the time they referred to later, two and three years later, when they told one another: “That was when he passed Jody,” though it was Ratliff who amended it: “You mean, that was when Jody begun to find it out.”
But that was to be sometime in the future yet. Now they just watched, missing nothing. During that month the air was filled from daylight until dark with the whine of the gin; the wagons stood in line for the scales and moved up one by one beneath the suction pipe. Now and then the clerk would cross the road to the store, the cap, the trousers, even the tie wisped with cotton; the men lounging upon the gallery while they waited their turns at the suction pipe or the scales would watch him enter the store now and a moment later hear his voice this time, murmuring, matter-of-fact, succinct.
But Jody Varner would not come to the door with him to stand for a moment as before, and they would watch the clerk return to the gin — the thick squat back, shapeless, portentous, without age. After the crops were in and ginned and sold, the time came when Will Varner made his yearly settlement with his tenants and debtors. He had used to do this alone, not even allowing Jody to help him. This year he sat at the desk with the iron cash box while Snopes sat on a nail keg at his knee with the open ledgers.
In the tunnel-like room lined with canned food and cluttered with farming implements and now crowded with patient earth-reeking men waiting to accept almost without question whatever Varner should compute he owed them for their year’s work, Varner and Snopes resembled the white trader and his native parrot-taught headman in an African outpost.
That headman was acquiring the virtues of civilisation fast. It was not known what the Varners paid him, except that Will Varner had never been known to pay very much for anything. Yet this man who five months ago was riding eight miles back and forth to work on a plough mule and a cast-off saddle with a tin pail of cold turnip greens or field pease tied to it, was now not only sleeping in a rented bed and eating from a furnished table like a drummer, he had also made a considerable cash loan, security and interest not specified, to a resident of the village, and before the last of the cotton was ginned it was generally known that any sum between twenty-five cents and ten dollars could be borrowed from him at any time, if the borrower agreed to pay enough for the accommodation.
In the next spring Tull, in Jefferson with a drove of cattle for shipping on the railroad, came to see Ratliff who was sick in bed in the house which he owned and which his widowed sister kept for him, with a recurrent old gallbladder trouble. Tull told him of a considerable herd of scrub cattle which had passed the winter in pasture on the farm which Snopes’s father had rented from the Varners for another year — a herd which, by the time Ratliff had been carried to a Memphis hospital and operated on and returned home and once more took an interest in what went on about him, had increased gradually and steadily and then overnight vanished, its disappearance coincident with the appearance of a herd of good Herefords in a pasture on another place which Varner owned and kept himself as his home farm, as though transmogrified, translated complete and intact save for their altered appearance and obviously greater worth, it only later becoming known that the cattle had reached the pasture via a foreclosed lien nominally held by a Jefferson bank. Bookwright and Tull both came to see him and told him of this.
“Maybe they was in the bank vault all the time,” Ratliff said weakly. “Who did Will say they belonged to?”
“He said they was Snopeses,” Tull said. “He said, ‘Ask that son-of-a-gun of Jody’s.’ ”
“And did you?” Ratliff said.
“Bookwright did. And Snopes said, ‘They’re in Varner’s pasture.’ And Bookwright said, ‘But Will says they are yourn.’ And Snopes turned his head and spit and says, ‘They’re in Varner’s pasture.’ ”
And Ratliff, ill, did not see this either. He only heard it second-hand, though by that time he was mending, well enough to muse upon it, speculate, curious, shrewd, and inscrutable himself, sitting up now in a chair propped with pillows in a window where he could watch the autumn begin, feel the bright winy air of October noons: How one morning in that second spring a man named Houston, heeled by a magnificent grave blue-ticked Walker hound, led a horse up to the blacksmith shop and saw, stooping over the forge and trying to start a fire in it with liquid from a rusty can, a stranger — a young, well-made, muscle-bound man who, turning, revealed an open equable face beginning less than an inch below his hairline, who said, “Howdy.
I can’t seem to get this here fire started. Everytime I put this here coal oil onto it, it just goes further out. Watch.” He prepared to pour from the can again.
“Hold on,” Houston said. “Is that coal oil you’ve got?”
“It was setting on that ere ledge yonder,” the other said. “It looks like the kind of a can coal oil would be in. It’s a little rusty, but I never heard tell of even rusty coal oil that wouldn’t burn before.” Houston came and took the can from him and sniffed it. The other watched him. The splendid hound sat in the doorway and watched them both. “It don’t smell exactly like coal oil, does it?”
“ —— t,” Houston said. He set the can back on the sooty ledge above the forge. “Go on. Haul that mud out. You’ll have to start over. Where’s Trumbull?” Trumbull was the smith who had been in the shop for almost twenty years, until this morning.
“I don’t know,” the
