“You already contracted with him?” Will Varner said.
“I hadn’t aimed to at all till Vernon Tull told me what he did. Now I figure I’ll take the paper up there tomorrow and let him sign.”
“Then you can point out to him which house to burn too. Or are you going to leave that to him?”
“Sho,” Jody said. “We’ll discuss that too.” Then he said — and now all levity was gone from his voice, all poste and riposte of humour’s light whimsy, tierce quarto and prime: “All I got to do is find out for sho about that barn. But then it will be the same thing, whether he actually did it or not. All he’ll need will be to find out all of a sudden at gathering-time that I think he did it. Listen. Take a case like this.” He leaned forward now, over the table, bulging, protuberant, intense.
The mother had bustled out, to the kitchen, where her brisk voice could be heard scolding cheerfully at the negro cook. The daughter was not listening at all. “Here’s a piece of land that the folks that own it hadn’t actually figured on getting nothing out of this late in the season. And here comes a man and rents it on shares that the last place he rented on a barn got burnt up. It don’t matter whether he actually burnt that barn or not, though it will simplify matters if I can find out for sho he did. The main thing is, it burnt while he was there and the evidence was such that he felt called on to leave the country.
So here he comes and rents this land we hadn’t figured on nothing out of this year nohow and we furnish him outen the store all regular and proper. And he makes his crop and the landlord sells it all regular and has the cash waiting and the fellow comes in to get his share and the landlord says, ‘What’s this I heard about you and that barn?’ That’s all. ‘What’s this I just heard about you and that barn?’ ” They stared at one another — the slightly protuberant opaque eyes and the little hard blue ones. “What will he say? What can he say except ‘All right. What do you aim to do?’ ”
“You’ll lose his furnish bill at the store.”
“Sho. There ain’t no way of getting around that. But after all a man that’s making you a crop free gratis for nothing, at least you can afford to feed him while he’s doing it. — Wait,” he said. “Hell fire, we won’t even need to do that; I’ll just let him find a couple of rotten shingles with a match laid across them on his doorstep the morning after he finishes laying-by and he’ll know it’s all up then and ain’t nothing left for him but to move on. That’ll cut two months off the furnish bill and all we’ll be out is hiring his crop gathered.” They stared at one another. To one of them it was already done, accomplished: he could actually see it; when he spoke it was out of a time still six months in the future yet: “Hell fire, he’ll have to! He can’t fight it! He don’t dare!”
“Hmph,” Will said. From the pocket of his unbuttoned vest he took a stained cob pipe and began to fill it. “You better stay clear of them folks.”
“Sho now,” Jody said. He took a toothpick from the china receptacle on the table and sat back. “Burning barns ain’t right. And a man that’s got habits that way will just have to suffer the disadvantages of them.”
He did not go the next day nor the one after that either. But early in the afternoon of the third day, his roan saddle-horse hitched and waiting at one of the gallery posts, he sat at the roll-top desk in the rear of the store, hunched, the black hat on the back of his head and one broad black-haired hand motionless and heavy as a ham of meat on the paper and the pen in the other tracing the words of the contract in his heavy deliberate sprawling script. An hour after that and five miles from the village, the contract blotted and folded neatly into his hip-pocket, he was sitting the horse beside a halted buckboard in the road. It was battered with rough usage and caked with last winter’s dried mud, it was drawn by a pair of shaggy ponies as wild and active-looking as mountain goats and almost as small. To the rear of it was attached a sheet-iron box the size and shape of a dog kennel and painted to resemble a house, in each painted window of which a painted woman’s face simpered above a painted sewing-machine, and Varner sat his horse and glared in shocked and outraged consternation at its occupant, who had just said pleasantly, “Well, Jody, I hear you got a new tenant.”
“Hell fire!” Varner cried. “Do you mean he set fire to another one? even after they caught him, he set fire to another one?”
“Well,” the man in the buckboard said, “I don’t know as I would go on record as saying he set ere a one of them a-fire. I would put it that they both taken fire while he was more or less associated with them. You might say that fire seems to follow him around, like dogs follows some folks.” He spoke in a pleasant, lazy, equable voice which you did not discern at once to be even more shrewd than humorous.
This was Ratliff, the sewing-machine agent. He lived in Jefferson and he travelled the better part of four counties with his sturdy team and the painted dog kennel into which an actual machine neatly fitted.
On successive days and two counties apart the splashed and battered buckboard and the strong mismatched team might be seen tethered in the nearest shade and Ratliff’s bland affable ready face and his neat tieless blue shirt one of the squatting group at a crossroads store, or — and still squatting and still doing the talking apparently though actually doing a good deal more listening than anybody believed until afterward — among the women surrounded by laden clotheslines and tubs and blackened wash pots beside springs and wells, or decorous in a splint chair on cabin galleries, pleasant, affable, courteous, anecdotal and impenetrable.
He sold perhaps three machines a year, the rest of the time trading in land and livestock and second-hand farming tools and musical instruments or anything else which the owner did not want badly enough, retailing from house to house the news of his four counties with the ubiquity of a newspaper and carrying personal messages from mouth to mouth about weddings and funerals and the preserving of vegetables and fruit with the reliability of a postal service.
He never forgot a name and he knew everyone, man mule and dog, within fifty miles. “Just say it was following along behind the wagon when Snopes druv up to the house De Spain had give him, with the furniture piled into the wagon bed like he had druv up to the house they had been living in at Harris’s or wherever it was and said ‘Get in here’ and the cookstove and beds and chairs come out and got in by their selves.
Careless and yet good too, tight, like they was used to moving and not having no big help at it. And Ab and that big one, Flem they call him — there was another one too, a little one; I remember seeing him once somewhere. He wasn’t with them. Leastways he ain’t now. Maybe they forgot to tell him when to get outen the barn — setting on the seat and them two hulking gals in the two chairs in the wagon bed and Miz Snopes and her sister, the widow, setting on the stuff in back like nobody cared much whether they come along or not either, including the furniture. And the wagon stops in front of the house and Ab looks at it and says, ‘Likely it ain’t fitten for hawgs.’ ”
Sitting the horse, Varner glared down at Ratliff in protuberant and speechless horror. “All right,” Ratliff said. “Soon as the wagon stopped Miz Snopes and the widow got out and commenced to unload. Them two gals ain’t moved yet, just setting there in them two chairs, in their Sunday clothes, chewing sweet gum, till Ab turned round and cussed them outen the wagon to where Miz Snopes and the widow was wrastling with the stove. He druv them out like a pair of heifers just a little too valuable to hit hard with a stick, and then him and Flem set there and watched them two strapping gals take a wore-out broom and a lantern outen the wagon and stand there again till Ab lent out and snicked the nigh one across the stern with the end of the reins. ‘And then you come back and help your maw with that stove,’ he hollers after them. Then him and Flem got outen the wagon and went up to call on De Spain.”
“To the barn?” Varner cried. “You mean they went right straight and — —”
“No no. That was later. The barn come later. Likely they never knowed just where it
