“Yes,” she said. She dried her hands on her apron and took the money and folded the bills carefully about the silver and stood holding it. She didn’t count it. “I’ll keep it for him. Don’t you worry. You going on to town now?”
“Yes,” he said. “I got to get busy. No telling when I will run into another starving and eager young fellow that ain’t got no way to get money but to cut meat for it.” He turned, then paused again, not quite looking back at her, with that faint quizzical expression on his face that was smiling now, sardonic, humorous. “I got a message I would like to get to Will Varner. But it don’t matter especially.”
“I’ll give it to him,” Mrs. Littlejohn said. “If it ain’t too long I will remember it.”
“It don’t matter,” Ratliff said. “But if you happen to think of it. Just tell him Ratliff says it ain’t been proved yet neither. He’ll know what it means.”
“I’ll try to remember it,” she said.
He went out to the buckboard and got into it. He would not need the overcoat now, and next time he would not even have to bring it along. The road began to flow beneath the flickering hooves of the small hickory-tough horses. I just never went far enough, he thought. I quit too soon.
I went as far as one Snopes will set fire to another Snopeses barn and both Snopeses know it, and that was all right. But I stopped there. I never went on to where that first Snopes will turn around and stomp the fire out so he can sue that second Snopes for the reward and both Snopeses know that too.
3
Those who watched the clerk now saw, not the petty dispossession of a blacksmith, but the usurpation of an heirship. At the next harvest the clerk not only presided at the gin scales but when the yearly settling of accounts between Varner and his tenants and debtors occurred, Will Varner himself was not even present. It was Snopes who did what Varner had never even permitted his son to do — sat alone at the desk with the cash from the sold crops and the accountbooks before him and cast up the accounts and charged them off and apportioned to each tenant his share of the remaining money, one or two of them challenging his figures as they had when he first entered the store, on principle perhaps, the clerk not even listening, just waiting in his soiled white shirt and the minute tie, with his steady thrusting tobacco and his opaque still eyes which they never knew whether or not were looking at them, until they would finish cease; then, without speaking a word, taking pencil and paper and proving to them that they were wrong.
Now it was not Jody Varner who would come leisurely to the store and give the clerk directions and instructions and leave him to carry them out; it was the ex-clerk who would enter the store, mounting the steps and jerking his head at the men on the gallery exactly as Will Varner himself would do, and enter the store, from which presently the sound of his voice would come, speaking with matter-of-fact succinctness to the bull-goaded bafflement of the man who once had been his employer and who still seemed not to know just exactly what had happened to him.
Then Snopes would depart, to be seen no more that day, for Will Varner’s old fat white horse had a companion now. It was the roan which Jody had used to ride, the white and the roan now tied side by side to the same fence while Varner and Snopes examined fields of cotton and corn or herds of cattle or land boundaries, Varner cheerful as a cricket and shrewd and bowelless as a tax-collector, idle and busy and Rabelaisian; the other chewing his steady tobacco, his hands in the pockets of the disreputable bagging grey trousers, spitting now and then his contemplative bullet-like globules of chocolate saliva.
One morning he came to the village carrying a brand-new straw suitcase. That evening he carried it up to Varner’s house. A month after that Varner bought a new runabout buggy with bright red wheels and a fringed parasol top, which, the fat white horse and the big roan in new brass-studded harness and the wheels glinting in vermilion and spokeless blurs, swept all day long along back country roads and lanes while Varner and Snopes sat side by side in outrageous paradox above a spurting cloud of light dust, in a speeding aura of constant and invincible excursion.
And one afternoon in that same summer Ratliff again drove up to the store, on the gallery of which was a face which he did not recognise for a moment because he had only seen it once before and that two years ago, though only for a moment, for almost at once he said, “Howdy. Machine still running good?” and sat looking with an expression quite pleasant and absolutely impenetrable at the fierce intractable face with its single eyebrow, thinking Fox? cat? oh yes, mink.
“Howdy,” the other said. “Why not? Ain’t you the one that claims not to sell no other kind?”
“Sholy,” Ratliff said, still quite pleasant, impenetrable. He got out of the buckboard and tied it to a gallery post and mounted the steps and stood among the four men who sat and squatted about the gallery. “Only it ain’t quite that, I would put it.
I would say, folks named Snopes don’t buy no other kind.” Then he heard the horse and turned his head and saw it, coming up fast, the fine hound running easily and strongly beside it as Houston pulled up, already dismounting, and dropped the loose reins over its head as a Western rider does and mounted the steps and stopped before the post against which Mink Snopes squatted.
“I reckon you know where that yearling is,” Houston said.
“I can guess,” Snopes said.
“All right,” Houston said. He was not shaking, trembling, anymore than a stick of dynamite does. He didn’t even raise his voice. “I warned you. You know the law in this country. A man must keep his stock up after ground’s planted or take the consequences.”
“I would have expected you to have fences that would keep a yearling up,” Snopes said. Then they cursed each other, hard and brief and without emphasis, like blows or pistol-shots, both speaking at the same time and neither moving, the one still standing in the middle of the steps, the other still squatting against the gallery post.
“Try a shotgun,” Snopes said. “That might keep it up.” Then Houston went on into the store and those on the gallery stood or squatted quietly, the man with his single eyebrow no less quiet than any, until Houston came out again and passed without looking at any of them and mounted and galloped off, the hound following again, strong, high-headed, indefatigable, and after another moment or so Snopes rose too and went up the road on foot.
Then one leaned and spat carefully over the gallery-edge, into the dust, and Ratliff said,
“I don’t quite understand about that fence. I gathered it was Snopes’s yearling in Houston’s field.”
“It was,” the man who had spat said. “He lives on a piece of what used to be Houston’s land. It belongs to Will Varner now. That is, Varner foreclosed on it about a year ago.”
“That is, it was Will Varner Houston owed the money to,” a second said. “It was the fences on that he was talking about.”
“I see,” Ratliff said. “Just conversational remarks. Unnecessary.”
“It wasn’t losing the land that seems to rile Houston,” a third said. “Not that he don’t rile easy.”
“I see,” Ratliff said again. “It’s what seems to happened to it since. Or who it seems Uncle Will has rented it to. So Flem’s got some more cousins still. Only this here seems to be a different kind of Snopes like a cotton-mouth is a different kind of snake.” So that wasn’t the last time this one is going to make his cousin trouble, he thought. But he did not say it, he just said, absolutely pleasant, easy, inscrutable: “I wonder where Uncle Will and his partner would be about now. I ain’t learned the route good yet like you folks.”
“I passed them two horses and the buggy tied to the Old Frenchman fence this morning,” the fourth man said. He too leaned and spat carefully over the gallery-edge. Then he added, as if in trivial afterthought: “It was Flem Snopes that was setting in the flour barrel.”
BOOK TWO. EULA
CHAPTER ONE
1
WHEN FLEM SNOPES came to clerk in her father’s store, Eula Varner was not quite thirteen. She was the last of the sixteen children, the baby, though she had overtaken and passed her mother in height in her tenth year. Now, though not yet thirteen years old, she was already bigger than most grown women and even her breasts were no longer the little, hard, fiercely-pointed cones of puberty or even maidenhood.
On the contrary, her entire appearance suggested some symbology out of the old
