He went on to Mrs. Littlejohn’s and tied his team to the fence and went and sat on the veranda, where he could see the store. He could smell food cooking in the kitchen behind him and soon the men on the store’s gallery began to rise and disperse, noonward, though the saddled roan still stood there. Yes, he thought, He has passed Jody. A man takes your wife and all you got to do to ease your feelings is to shoot him. But your horse.
Mrs. Littlejohn spoke behind him: “I didn’t know you were back. You going to want some dinner, ain’t you?”
“Yessum,” he said. “I want to step down to the store first. But I won’t be long.” She went back into the house. He took the two notes from his wallet and separated them, putting one into his inside coat pocket, the other into the breast pocket of his shirt, and walked down the road in the March noon, treading the noon-impacted dust, breathing the unbreathing suspension of the meridian, and mounted the steps and crossed the now deserted gallery stained with tobacco and scarred with knives.
The store, the interior, was like a cave, dim, cool, smelling of cheese and leather; it needed a moment for his eyes to adjust themselves. Then he saw the grey cap, the white shirt, the minute bow-tie. The face looked up at him, chewing. “You beat me,” Ratliff said. “How much?” The other turned his head and spat into the sand-filled box beneath the cold stove.
“Fifty cents,” he said.
“I paid twenty-five for my contract,” Ratliff said. “All I am to get is seventy-five. I could tear the contract up and save hauling them to town.”
“All right,” Snopes said. “What’ll you give?”
“I’ll trade you this for them,” Ratliff said. He drew the first note from the pocket where he had segregated it. And he saw it — an instant, a second of a new and completer stillness and immobility touch the blank face, the squat soft figure in the chair behind the desk. For that instant even the jaw had stopped chewing, though it began again almost at once. Snopes took the paper and looked at it. Then he laid it on the desk and turned his head and spat into the sand-box.
“You figure this note is worth fifty goats,” he said. It was not a question, it was a statement.
“Yes,” Ratliff said. “Because there is a message goes with it. Do you want to hear it?”
The other looked at him, chewing. Otherwise he didn’t move, he didn’t even seem to breathe. After a moment he said, “No.” He rose, without haste. “All right,” he said. He took his wallet from his hip and extracted a folded paper and gave it to Ratliff. It was Quick’s bill-of-sale for the fifty goats. “Got a match?” Snopes said. “I don’t smoke.” Ratliff gave him the match and watched him set fire to the note and hold it, blazing, then drop it still blazing into the sand-box and then crush the carbon to dust with his toe.
Then he looked up; Ratliff had not moved. And now just for another instant Ratliff believed he saw the jaw stop. “Well?” Snopes said. “What?” Ratliff drew the second note from his pocket.
And then he knew that the jaw had stopped chewing. It did not move at all during the full minute while the broad impenetrable face hung suspended like a balloon above the soiled dog-eared paper, front back then front again. The face looked at Ratliff again with no sign of life in it, not even breathing, as if the body which belonged to it had learned somehow to use over and over again its own suspirations. “You want to collect this too,” he said. He handed the note back to Ratliff. “Wait here,” he said. He crossed the room to the rear door and went out. What, Ratliff thought.
He followed. The squat reluctant figure was going on, in the sunlight now, toward the fence to the livery lot. There was a gate in it. Ratliff watched Snopes pass through the gate and go on across the lot, toward the barn. Then something black blew in him, a suffocation, a sickness, nausea. They should have told me! he cried to himself. Somebody should have told me! Then, remembering: Why, he did! Bookwright did tell me. He said Another one.
It was because I have been sick, was slowed up, that I didn’t —— He was back beside the desk now. He believed he could hear the dragging block long before he knew it was possible, though presently he did hear it as Snopes entered and turned, moving aside, the block thumping against the wooden step and the sill, the hulking figure in the bursting overalls blotting the door, still looking back over its shoulder, entering, the block thumping and scraping across the floor until it caught and lodged behind the counter leg where a three-year-old child would have stooped and lifted it clear though the idiot himself merely stood jerking fruitlessly at the string and beginning a wet whimpering moaning at once pettish and concerned and terrified and amazed until Snopes kicked the block free with his toe.
They came on to the desk where Ratliff stood — the mowing and bobbing head, the eyes which at some instant, some second once, had opened upon, been vouchsafed a glimpse of, the Gorgon-face of that primal injustice which man was not intended to look at face to face and had been blasted empty and clean forever of any thought, the slobbering mouth in its mist of soft gold hair. “Say what your name is,” Snopes said. The creature looked at Ratliff, bobbing steadily, drooling. “Say it,” Snopes said, quite patiently. “Your name.”
“Ike H-mope,” the idiot said hoarsely.
“Say it again.”
“Ike H-mope.” Then he began to laugh, though almost at once it stopped being laughing and Ratliff knew that it had never been laughing, cachinnant, sobbing, already beyond the creature’s power to stop it, galloping headlong and dragging breath behind it like something still alive at the galloping heels of a cossack holiday, the eyes above the round mouth fixed and sightless.
“Hush,” Snopes said. “Hush.” At last he took the idiot by the shoulder, shaking him until the sound began to fall, bubbling and gurgling away. Snopes led him toward the door, pushing him on ahead, the other moving obediently, looking backward over his shoulder at the block with its two raked snuff tins dragging at the end of the filthy string, the block about to lodge again behind the same counter leg though this time Snopes kicked it free before it stopped.
The hulking shape — the backlooking face with its hanging mouth and pointed faun’s ears, the bursting overalls drawn across the incredible female thighs — blotted the door again and was gone. Snopes closed the door and returned to the desk. He spat again into the sand-box. “That was Isaac Snopes,” he said. “I’m his guardian. Do you want to see the papers?”
Ratliff didn’t answer. He looked down at the note where he had laid it on the desk when he returned from the door, with that same faint, quizzical, quiet expression which his face had worn when he looked at his coffee-cup in the restaurant four days ago. He took up the note, though he did not look at Snopes yet.
“So if I pay him his ten dollars myself, you will take charge of it as his guardian. And if I collect the ten dollars from you, you will have the note to sell again. And that will make three times it has been collected. Well well well.” He took another match from his pocket and extended it and the note to Snopes. “I hear tell you said once you never set fire to a piece of money. This here’s your chance to see what it feels like.” He watched the second note burn too and drift, still blazing, onto the stained sand in the box, curling into carbon which vanished in its turn beneath the shoe.
He descended the steps, again into the blaze of noon upon the pocked quiet dust of the road actually it was not ten minutes later. Only thank God men have done learned how to forget quick what they ain’t brave enough to try to cure, he told himself, walking on. The empty road shimmered with mirage, the pollen-wroiled chiaroscuro of spring. Yes, he thought, I reckon I was sicker than I knowed. Because I missed it, missed it clean. Or maybe when I have et I will feel better. Yet, alone in the dining-room where Mrs. Littlejohn had set a plate for him, he could not eat.
He could feel what he had thought was appetite ebbing with each mouthful becoming heavy and tasteless as dirt. So at last he pushed the plate aside and onto the table he counted the five dollars profit he had made — the thirty-seven-fifty he would get for the goats, less the twelve-fifty his contract had cost him, plus the twenty of the first note.
With a chewed pencil stub he calculated the three years’ interest on the ten-dollar note, plus the principal (that ten dollars would have been his commission on the machine, so it was no actual loss anyway) and added to the five dollars the
