That is, he wanted to go to the University. The father saw no point in it. The farm was clear and would belong to the son someday and it had always made them a living. But the son insisted. He could work at mills and such and save enough to attend the summer terms and learn to be a teacher anyway, since this was all they taught in the summer sessions. He would even be back home in the late summer in time to help finish the crop. So he earned the money— “Doing harder work than farming too,” the elder Labove said. “But he was almost twenty-one.
I couldn’t have stood in his way even if I would have” — and enrolled for the summer session, which would last eight weeks and so would have had him back in August but did not do so. When September arrived, he still had not returned. They did not know for certain where he was, though they were not worried so much as annoyed, concerned, even a little outraged that he should have deserted them with the remaining work on the crop — the picking and ginning of the cotton, the gathering and cribbing of the corn — to be done.
In mid-September the letter came. He was going to stay on longer at the University, through the fall. He had a job there; they must gather the crops without him. He did not say what kind of a job it was and the father took it for granted as being another sawmill, since he would never have associated any sort of revenue-producing occupation with going to school, and they did not hear from him again until in October, when the first package arrived.
It contained two pair of the curious cleated shoes. A third pair came early in November. The last two came just after Thanksgiving, which made five pair, although there were seven in the family. So they all used them indiscriminately, anyone who found a pair available, like umbrellas, four pair of them that is, Labove explained. The old lady (she was the elder Labove’s grandmother) had fastened upon the first pair to emerge from the box and would let no one else wear them at all.
She seemed to like the sound the cleats made on the floor when she sat in a chair and rocked. But that still left four pair. So now the children could go shod to school, removing the shoes when they reached home for whoever else needed to go out doors. In January the son came home. He told them about the game. He had been playing it all that fall. They let him stay at the University for the entire fall term for playing it. The shoes were provided them free of charge to play it in.
“How did he happen to get six pairs?” Varner asked.
Labove did not know. “Maybe they had a heap of them on hand that year,” he said. They had also given the son a sweater at the University, a fine heavy warm dark blue sweater with a big red M on the front of it. The great-grandmother had taken that too, though it was much too big for her. She would wear it on Sundays, winter and summer, sitting beside him on the seat of the churchward wagon on the bright days, the crimson accolade of the colour of courage and fortitude gallant in the sun, or on the bad days, sprawled and quiet but still crimson, still brave, across her shrunken chest and stomach as she sat in her chair and rocked and sucked the dead little pipe.
“So that’s where he is now,” Varner said. “Playing the football.”
No, Labove told him. He was at the sawmill now. He had calculated that by missing the current summer term and working instead, he could save enough money to stay on at the University even after they stopped letting him stay to play the football, thus completing a full year in the regular school instead of just the summer school in which they only taught people how to be schoolteachers.
“I thought that’s what he wanted to be,” Varner said.
“No,” Labove said. “That was all he could learn in the summer school. I reckon you’ll laugh when you hear this. He says he wants to be Governor.”
“Sho now,” Varner said.
“You’ll laugh, I reckon.”
“No,” Varner said. “I ain’t laughing. Governor. Well well well. Next time you see him, if he would consider putting off the governor business for a year or two and teach school, tell him to come over to the Bend and see me.”
That was in July. Perhaps Varner did not actually expect Labove to come to see him. But he made no further effort to fill the vacancy, which he certainly could not have forgotten about. Even apart from his obligation as Trustee, he would have a child of his own ready to start to school within another year or so.
One afternoon in early September he was lying with his shoes off in the barrel stave hammock slung between two trees in his yard, when he saw approaching on foot across the yard the man whom he had never seen before but knew at once — a man who was not thin so much as actually gaunt, with straight black hair coarse as a horse’s tail and high Indian cheekbones and quiet pale hard eyes and the long nose of thought but with the slightly curved nostrils of pride and the thin lips of secret and ruthless ambition. It was a forensic face, the face of invincible conviction in the power of words as a principle worth dying for if necessary.
A thousand years ago it would have been a monk’s, a militant fanatic who would have turned his uncompromising back upon the world with actual joy and gone to a desert and passed the rest of his days and nights calmly and without an instant’s self-doubt battling, not to save humanity about which he would have cared nothing, for whose sufferings he would have had nothing but contempt, but with his own fierce and unappeasable natural appetites.
“I came to tell you I can’t teach for you this year,” he said. “I haven’t got time. I’ve got things fixed now so I can stay at the University the whole year.”
Varner did not rise. “That’s just one year. What about next year?”
“I have arranged about the sawmill too. I am going back to it next summer. Or something else.”
“Sho,” Varner said. “I been thinking about it some myself. Because the school here don’t need to open until first of November. You can stay at Oxford until then and play your game. Then you can come and open the school and get it started.
You can bring your books here from the University and keep up with the class and on the day you have to play the game again you can go back to Oxford and play it and let them find out whether you have kept up in the books or not or whether you have learned anything or whatever they would need to know. Then you could come back to the school; even a day or two won’t matter.
I will furnish you a horse that can make the trip in eight hours. It ain’t but forty miles to Oxford from here. Then when the time comes for the examination in January your pa was telling me about, you can shut up the school here and go back and stay until you are through with them. Then you can close the school here in March and go back for the rest of the year, until the last of next October if you wanted. I don’t reckon a fellow that really wanted to would have much trouble keeping up with his class just forty miles away. Well?”
For some time now Varner knew that the other no longer saw him though he had not moved and his eyes were still open. Labove stood quite still, in a perfectly clean white shirt which had been washed so often that it now had about the texture of mosquito netting, in a coat and trousers absolutely clean too and which were not mates and the coat a little too small for him and which Varner knew were the only ones he owned and that he owned them only because he believed, or had been given to understand, that one could not wear overalls to a University classroom.
He stood there enveloped in no waking incredulous joy and hope but in that consuming fury, the gaunt body not shaped by the impact of its environment as though shrunken and leaned by what was within it, like a furnace. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be here the first of November.” He was already turning away.
“Don’t you want to know what your pay will be?”
“All right,” Labove said, pausing. Varner told him. He (Varner) had not moved in the hammock, his home-knit socks crossed at the ankles.
“That game,” he said. “Do you like to play it?”
“No,” Labove said.
“I hear it ain’t much different from actual fighting.”
“Yes,” Labove said, again shortly, paused, courteous and waiting, looking at the lean shrewd shoeless old man prone and profoundly idle in the hammock, who
