“What are you doing here? Did he send you?”
“I don’t know,” the other said. “It was my cousin hired me. He told me to be here this morning and get the fire started and tend to the business till he come. But everytime I put that ere coal oil — —”
“Who is your cousin?” Houston said. At that moment a gaunt aged horse came up rapidly, drawing a battered and clattering buggy one of whose wheels was wired upright by two crossed slats, which looked as if its momentum alone held it intact and that the instant it stopped it would collapse into kindling. It contained another stranger — a frail man none of whose garments seemed to belong to him, with a talkative weasel’s face — who halted the buggy, shouting at the horse as if they were a good-sized field apart, and got out of the buggy and came into the shop, already (or still) talking.
“Morning, morning,” he said, his little bright eyes darting. “Want that horse shod, hey? Good, good: save the hoof and save all. Good-looking animal. Seen a considerable better one in a field a-piece back. But no matter; love me, love my horse, beggars can’t be choosers, if wishes was horseflesh we’d all own thoroughbreds. What’s the matter?” he said to the man in the apron.
He paused, though still he seemed to be in violent motion, as though the attitude and position of his garments gave no indication whatever of what the body within them might be doing — indeed, if it were still inside them at all. “Ain’t you got that fire started yet?
Here.” He darted to the ledge; he seemed to translate himself over beneath it without increasing his appearance of violent motion at all, and had taken the can down and sniffed at it and then prepared to empty it onto the coals in the forge before anyone could move. Then Houston intercepted him at the last second and took the can from him and flung it out the door.
“I just finished taking that damn hog piss away from him,” Houston said. “What the hell’s happened here? Where’s Trumbull?”
“Oh, you mean the fellow that used to be here,” the newcomer said. “His lease has done been cancelled. I’m leasing the shop now. My name’s Snopes. I. O. Snopes. This here’s my young cousin, Eck Snopes. But it’s the old shop, the old stand; just a new broom in it.”
“I don’t give a damn what his name is,” Houston said. “Can he shoe a horse?” Again the newcomer turned upon the man in the apron, shouting at him as he had shouted at the horse:
“All right. All right. Get that fire started.” After watching a moment, Houston took charge and they got the fire going. “He’ll pick it up though,” the newcomer said. “Just give him time.
He’s handy with tools, even though he ain’t done no big sight of active blacksmithing. But give a dog a good name and you don’t need to hang him. Give him a few days to practise up and he’ll shoe a horse quick as Trumbull or any of them.”
“I’ll shoe this one,” Houston said. “Just let him keep pumping that bellows. He looks like he ought to be able to do that without having to practise.” Nevertheless, the shoe shaped and cooled in the tub, the newcomer darted in again.
It was as if he took not only Houston but himself too by complete surprise — that weasel-like quality of existing independent of his clothing so that although you could grasp and hold that you could not restrain the body itself from doing what it was doing until the damage had been done — a furious already dissipating concentration of energy vanishing the instant after the intention took shape, the newcomer darting between Houston and the raised hoof and clapping the shoe onto it and touching the animal’s quick with the second blow of the hammer on the nail and being hurled, hammer and all, into the shrinking-tub by the plunging horse which Houston and the man in the apron finally backed into a corner and held while Houston jerked nail and shoe free and flung them into the corner and backed the horse savagely out of the shop, the hound rising and resuming its position quietly at proper heeling distance behind the man. “And you can tell Will Varner — if he cares a damn, which evidently he don’t,” Houston said, “that I have gone to Whiteleaf to have my horse shod.”
The shop and the store were just opposite, only the road between. There were several men already on the gallery, who watched Houston, followed by the big quiet regal dog, lead the horse away. They did not even need to cross the road to see one of the strangers, because presently the smaller and older one crossed to the store, in the clothes which would still appear not to belong to him on the day they finally fell off his body, with his talkative pinched face and his bright darting eyes. He mounted the steps, already greeting them.
Still talking, he entered the store, his voice voluble and rapid and meaningless like something talking to itself about nothing in a deserted cavern. He came out again, still talking: “Well, gentlemen, off with the old and on with the new.
Competition is the life of trade, and though a chain ain’t no stronger than its weakest link, I don’t think you’ll find the boy yonder no weak reed to have to lean on once he catches onto it.
It’s the old shop, the old stand; it’s just a new broom in it and maybe you can’t teach a old dog new tricks but you can teach a new young willing one anything. Just give him time; a penny on the waters pays interest when the flood turns. Well, well; all pleasure and no work, as the fellow says, might make Jack so sharp he might cut his self.
I bid you good morning, gentlemen.” He went on and got into the buggy, still talking, now to the man in the shop and now to the gaunt horse, all in one breath, without any break to indicate to the hearers which he addressed at any time. He drove away, the men on the gallery looking after him, completely expressionless. During the day they crossed to the shop, one by one, and looked at the second stranger — the quiet empty open face which seemed to have been a mere afterthought to the thatching of the skull, like the binding of a rug, harmless.
A man brought up a wagon with a broken hound. The new smith even repaired it, though it took him most of the forenoon, working steadily but in a dreamlike state in which what actually lived inside him apparently functioned somewhere else, paying no heed to and having no interest in, not even in the money he would earn, what his hands were doing; busy, thick-moving, getting nowhere seemingly though at last the job was finished.
That afternoon Trumbull, the old smith, appeared. But if they had waited about the store to see what would happen when he arrived who until last night anyway must have still believed himself the incumbent, they were disappointed. He drove through the village with his wife, in a wagon loaded with household goods. If he even looked toward his old shop nobody saw him do it — an old man though still hale, morose and efficient, who would have invited no curiosity even before yesterday. They never saw him again.
A few days later they learned that the new smith was living in the house where his cousin (or whatever the relationship was: nobody ever knew for certain) Flem lived, the two of them sleeping together in the same bed.
Six months later the smith had married one of the daughters of the family where the two of them boarded. Ten months after that he was pushing a perambulator (once — or still — Will Varner’s, like the cousin’s saddle) about the village on Sundays, accompanied by a five-or six-year-old boy, his son by a former wife which the village did not know either he had ever possessed — indicating that there was considerably more force and motion to his private life, his sex life anyway, than would appear on the surface of his public one.
But that all appeared later. All they saw now was that they had a new blacksmith — a man who was not lazy, whose intentions were good and who was accommodating and unfailingly pleasant and even generous, yet in whom there was a definite limitation of physical co-ordination beyond which design and plan and pattern all vanished, disintegrated into dead components of pieces of wood and iron straps and vain tools.
Two months later Flem Snopes built a new blacksmith shop in the village. He hired it done, to be sure, but he was there most of the day, watching it going up. This was not only the first of his actions in the village which he was ever seen in physical juxtaposition to, but the first which he not only admitted but affirmed, stating calmly and flatly that he was doing it so that people could get decent work done again. He bought completely new equipment at cost price through the store and hired the young farmer who during the slack of planting and harvesting time had been Trumbull’s apprentice.
Within a month the new shop had got all the trade which Trumbull had had
