“What could we do?” Tull said. “It ain’t right. But it ain’t none of our business.”
“I believe I would think of something if I lived there,” Ratliff said.
“Yes,” Bookwright said. He was eating his ham as he had the pie. “And wind up with one of them bow-ties in place of your buckboard and team. You’d have room to wear it.”
“Sho now,” Ratliff said. “Maybe you’re right.” He stopped looking at them now and raised his spoon, but lowered it again. “This here cup seems to have a draft in it,” he said to the counterman. “Maybe you better warm it up a little. It might freeze and bust, and I would have to pay for the cup too.”
The counterman swept the cup away and refilled it and slid it back. Ratliff spooned sugar into it carefully, his face still wearing that faint expression which would have been called smiling for lack of anything better. Bookwright had mixed his six eggs into one violent mess and was now eating them audibly with a spoon. He and Tull both ate with expedition, though Tull even contrived to do that with almost niggling primness. They did not talk, they just cleaned their plates and rose and went to the cigar case and paid their bills.
“Or maybe them tennis shoes,” Bookwright said. “He ain’t wore them in a year now. — No,” he said. “If I was you I would go out there nekid in the first place. Then you won’t notice the cold coming back.”
“Sho now,” Ratliff said mildly. After they left he drank his coffee again, sipping it without haste, talking again to the three or four listeners, finishing the story of his operation. Then he rose too and paid for his coffee, scrupulously, and put on his overcoat. It was now March but the doctor had told him to wear it, and in the alley now he stood for a while beside the buckboard and the sturdy little horses overfat with idleness and sleek with new hair after their winter coats, looking quietly at the dog kennel box where, beneath the cracked paint of their fading and incredible roses, the women’s faces smiled at him in fixed and sightless invitation.
It would need painting again this year; he must see to that. It will have to be something that will burn, he thought. And in his name. Known to be in his name. Yes, he thought, if my name was Will Varner and my partner’s name was Snopes I believe I would insist that some part of our partnership at least, that part of it that will burn anyway, would be in his name. He walked on slowly, buttoned into the overcoat. It was the only one in sight. But then the sick grow well fast in the sun; perhaps when he returned to town he would no longer need it.
And soon he would not need the sweater beneath it either — May and June, the summer, the long good days of heat. He walked on, looking exactly as he always had save for the thinness and the pallor, pausing twice to tell two different people that yes, he felt all right now, the Memphis doctor had evidently cut the right thing out whether by accident or design, crossing the Square now beneath the shaded marble gaze of the Confederate soldier, and so into the Court House and the Chancery Clerk’s office, where he found what he sought — some two hundred acres of land, with buildings, recorded to Flem Snopes.
Toward the end of the afternoon he was sitting in the halted buckboard in a narrow back road in the hills, reading the name on a mailbox. The post it sat on was new, but the box was not. It was battered and scarred; at one time it had apparently been crushed flat as though by a wagon wheel and straightened again, but the crude lettering of the name might have been painted on it yesterday.
It seemed to shout at him, all capitals, MINK SNOPES, sprawling, without any spacing between the two words, trailing off and uphill and over the curve of the top to include the final letters. Ratliff turned in beside it — a rutted lane now, at the end of it a broken-backed cabin of the same two rooms which were scattered without number through these remote hill sections which he travelled. It was built on a hill; below it was a foul muck-trodden lot and a barn leaning away downhill as though a human breath might flatten it.
A man was emerging from it, carrying a milk pail, and then Ratliff knew that he was being watched from the house itself though he had seen no one. He pulled the team up. He did not get down. “Howdy,” he said. “This Mr. Snopes? I brought your machine.”
“Brought my what?” the man in the lot said. He came through the gate and set the pail on the end of the sagging gallery. He was slightly less than medium height also but thin, with a single line of heavy eyebrow. But it’s the same eyes, Ratliff thought.
“Your sewing-machine,” he said pleasantly. Then he saw from the corner of his eye a woman standing on the gallery — a big-boned hard-faced woman with incredible yellow hair, who had emerged with a good deal more lightness and quickness than the fact that she was barefoot would have presaged. Behind her were two towheaded children. But Ratliff did not look at her. He watched the man, his expression bland courteous and pleasant.
“What’s that?” the woman said. “A sewing-machine?”
“No,” the man said. He didn’t look at her either. He was approaching the buckboard. “Get on back in the house.” The woman paid no attention to him. She came down from the gallery, moving again with that speed and co-ordination which her size belied. She stared at Ratliff with pale hard eyes.
“Who told you to bring it here?” she said.
Now Ratliff looked at her, still bland, still pleasant. “Have I done made a mistake?” he said. “The message come to me in Jefferson, from Frenchman’s Bend. It said Snopes. I taken it to mean you, because if your . . . cousin??” Neither of them spoke, staring at him. “Flem. If Flem had wanted it, he would have waited till I got there. He knowed I was due there tomorrow. I reckon I ought to make sho.” The woman laughed harshly, without mirth.
“Then take it on to him. If Flem Snopes sent you word about anything that cost more than a nickel it wasn’t to give away. Not to his kinfolks anyhow. Take it on to the Bend.”
“I told you to go in the house,” the man said. “Go on.” The woman didn’t look at him. She laughed harshly and steadily, staring at Ratliff.
“Not to give away,” she said. “Not the man that owns a hundred head of cattle and a barn and pasture to feed them in his own name.” The man turned and walked toward her. She turned and began to scream at him, the two children watching Ratliff quietly from behind her skirts as if they were deaf or as if they lived in another world from that in which the woman screamed, like two dogs might.
“Deny it if you can!” she cried at the man. “He’d let you rot and die right here and glad of it, and you know it! Your own kin you’re so proud of because he works in a store and wears a necktie all day! Ask him to give you a sack of flour even and see what you get. Ask him! Maybe he’ll give you one of his old neckties someday so you can dress like a Snopes too!”
The man walked steadily toward her. He did not even speak again. He was the smaller of the two of them; he walked steadily toward her with a curious sidling deadly, almost deferential, air until she broke, turned swiftly and went back toward the house, the herded children before her still watching Ratliff over their shoulders. The man approached the buckboard.
“You say the message came from Flem?” he said.
“I said it come from Frenchman’s Bend,” Ratliff said. “The name mentioned was Snopes.”
“Who was it seems to done all this mentioning about Snopes?”
“A friend,” Ratliff said pleasantly. “He seems to make a mistake. I ask you to excuse it. Can I follow this lane over to the Whiteleaf Bridge road?”
“If Flem sent you word to leave it here, suppose you leave it.”
“I just told you I thought I had made a mistake and ask you to excuse it,” Ratliff said. “Does this lane — —”
“I see,” the other said. “That means you aim to have a little cash down. How much?”
“You mean on the machine?”
“What do you think I am talking about?”
“Ten dollars,” Ratliff said. “A note for twenty more in six months. That’s gathering-time.”
“Ten dollars? With the message you got from — —”
“We ain’t talking about messages now,” Ratliff said. “We’re talking about a sewing-machine.”
“Make it five.”
“No,” Ratliff said pleasantly.
“All right,” the other
