I’m trying to find out what it must have felt like to be the fool that would need all this” — he did not move, he did not so much as indicate with his head the rise of old brick and tangled walks topped by the columned ruin behind him— “just to eat and sleep in.” Then he said — and he gave Ratliff no further clue to which might have been the truth— “For a while it looked like I was going to get shut of it, get it cleared up.
But by God folks have got so lazy they won’t even climb a ladder to pull off the rest of the boards. It looks like they will go into the woods and even chop up a tree before they will reach above eye-level for a scantling of pine kindling. But after all, I reckon I’ll just keep what there is left of it, just to remind me of my one mistake. This is the only thing I ever bought in my life I couldn’t sell to nobody.”
The son, Jody, was about thirty, a prime bulging man, slightly thyroidic, who was not only unmarried but who emanated a quality of invincible and inviolable bachelordom as some people are said to breathe out the odour of sanctity or spirituality.
He was a big man, already promising a considerable belly in ten or twelve years, though as yet he still managed to postulate something of the trig and unattached cavalier. He wore, winter and summer (save that in the warm season he dispensed with the coat) and Sundays and weekdays, a glazed collarless white shirt fastened at the neck with a heavy gold collar-button beneath a suit of good black broadcloth.
He put on the suit the day it arrived from the Jefferson tailor and wore it every day and in all weathers thereafter until he sold it to one of the family’s negro retainers, so that on almost any Sunday night one whole one or some part of one of his old suits could be met — and promptly recognised — walking the summer roads, and replaced it with the new succeeding one.
In contrast to the unvarying overalls of the men he lived among he had an air not funereal exactly but ceremonial — this because of that quality of invincible bachelorhood which he possessed: so that, looking at him you saw, beyond the flabbiness and the obscuring bulk, the perennial and immortal Best Man, the apotheosis of the masculine Singular, just as you discern beneath the dropsical tissue of the ‘09 half-back the lean hard ghost which once carried a ball.
He was the ninth of his parents’ sixteen children. He managed the store of which his father was still titular owner and in which they dealt mostly in foreclosed mortgages, and the gin, and oversaw the scattered farm holdings which his father at first and later the two of them together had been acquiring during the last forty years.
One afternoon he was in the store, cutting lengths of plough-line from a spool of new cotton rope and looping them in neat seamanlike bights onto a row of nails in the wall, when at a sound behind him he turned and saw, silhouetted by the open door, a man smaller than common, in a wide hat and a frock-coat too large for him, standing with a curious planted stiffness. “You Varner?” the man said, in a voice not harsh exactly, or not deliberately harsh so much as rusty from infrequent use.
“I’m one Varner,” Jody said, in his bland, hard, quite pleasant voice. “What can I do for you?”
“My name is Snopes. I heard you got a farm to rent.”
“That so?” Varner said, already moving so as to bring the other’s face into the light. “Just where did you hear that?” Because the farm was a new one, which he and his father had acquired through a foreclosure sale not a week ago, and the man was a complete stranger. He had never even heard the name before.
The other did not answer. Now Varner could see his face — a pair of eyes of a cold opaque grey between shaggy greying irascible brows and a short scrabble of iron-grey beard as tight and knotted as a sheep’s coat. “Where you been farming?” Varner said.
“West.” He did not speak shortly. He merely pronounced the one word with a complete inflectionless finality, as if he had closed a door behind himself.
“You mean Texas?”
“No.”
“I see. Just west of here. How much family you got?”
“Six.” Now there was no perceptible pause, nor was there any hurrying on into the next word. But there was something. Varner sensed it even before the lifeless voice seemed deliberately to compound the inconsistency: “Boy and two girls. Wife and her sister.”
“That’s just five.”
“Myself,” the dead voice said.
“A man don’t usually count himself among his own field hands,” Varner said. “Is it five or is it seven?”
“I can put six hands into the field.”
Now Varner’s voice did not change either, still pleasant, still hard: “I don’t know as I will take on a tenant this year. It’s already almost first of May. I figure I might work it myself, with day labour. If I work it at all this year.”
“I’ll work that way,” the other said. Varner looked at him.
“Little anxious to get settled, ain’t you?” The other said nothing. Varner could not tell whether the man was looking at him or not. “What rent were you aiming to pay?”
“What do you rent for?”
“Third and fourth,” Varner said. “Furnish out of the store here. No cash.”
“I see. Furnish in six-bit dollars.”
“That’s right,” Varner said pleasantly. Now he could not tell if the man were looking at anything at all or not.
“I’ll take it,” he said.
Standing on the gallery of the store, above the half-dozen overalled men sitting or squatting about it with pocket-knives and slivers of wood, Varner watched his caller limp stiffly across the porch, looking neither right nor left, and descend and from among the tethered teams and saddled animals below the gallery choose a gaunt saddleless mule in a worn plough bridle with rope reins and lead it to the steps and mount awkwardly and stiffly and ride away, still without once looking to either side. “To hear that ere foot, you’d think he weighed two hundred pounds,” one of them said. “Who’s he, Jody?”
Varner sucked his teeth and spat into the road. “Name’s Snopes,” he said.
“Snopes?” a second man said. “Sho now. So that’s him.” Now not only Varner but all the others looked at the speaker — a gaunt man in absolutely clean though faded and patched overalls and even freshly shaven, with a gentle, almost sad face until you unravelled what were actually two separate expressions — a temporary one of static peace and quiet overlaying a constant one of definite even though faint harriedness, and a sensitive mouth which had a quality of adolescent freshness and bloom until you realised that this could just as well be the result of a lifelong abstinence from tobacco — the face of the breathing archetype and protagonist of all men who marry young and father only daughters and are themselves but the eldest daughter of their own wives. His name was Tull. “He’s the fellow that wintered his family in a old cottonhouse on Ike McCaslin’s place. The one that was mixed up in that burnt barn of a fellow named Harris over in Grenier County two years ago.”
“Huh?” Varner said. “What’s that? Burnt barn?”
“I never said he done it,” Tull said. “I just said he was kind of involved in it after a fashion you might say.”
“How much involved in it?”
“Harris had him arrested into court.”
“I see,” Varner said. “Just a pure case of mistaken identity. He just hired it done.”
“It wasn’t proved,” Tull said. “Leastways, if Harris ever found any proof afterward, it was too late then. Because he had done left the country. Then he turned up at McCaslin’s last September. Him and his family worked by the day, gathering for McCaslin, and McCaslin let them winter in a old cottonhouse he wasn’t using. That’s all I know. I ain’t repeating nothing.”
“I wouldn’t,” Varner said. “A man don’t want to get the name of a idle gossip.” He stood above them with his broad bland face, in his dingy formal black-and-white — the glazed soiled white shirt and the bagging and uncared-for trousers — a costume at once ceremonial and negligée. He sucked his teeth briefly and noisily. “Well well well,” he said. “A barn burner. Well well well.”
That night he told his father about it at the supper table. With the exception of the rambling half-log half-sawn plank edifice known as Littlejohn’s hotel, Will Varner’s was the only house in the country with more than one story. They had a cook too, not only the only negro servant but the only servant of any sort in the whole district.
They had had her for years yet Mrs. Varner still said and apparently believed that she could not be trusted even to boil water unsupervised. He told it that evening while his mother, a plump cheery bustling woman who had born sixteen children and already outlived five of them and who still won prizes for preserving fruits and vegetables at the annual county fair, bustled back and forth between dining-room and kitchen, and his sister, a soft ample girl with definite breasts even at thirteen and eyes like cloudy
