If he had lived in Frenchman’s Bend itself during that spring and summer, he would have known no more — a little lost village, nameless, without grace, forsaken, yet which wombed once by chance and accident one blind seed of the spendthrift Olympian ejaculation and did not even know it, without tumescence conceived, and bore — one bright brief summer, concentric, during which three fairly well-horsed buggies stood in steady rotation along a picket fence or spun along adjacent roads between the homes and the crossroads stores and the schoolhouses and churches where people gathered for pleasure or at least for escape, and then overnight and simultaneously were seen no more; then eccentric:
buggies gone, vanished — a lean, loose-jointed, cotton-socked, shrewd, ruthless old man, the splendid girl with her beautiful masklike face, the froglike creature which barely reached her shoulder, cashing a cheque, buying a licence, taking a train — a word, a single will to believe born of envy and old deathless regret, murmured from cabin to cabin above the washing pots and the sewing, from wagon to horseman in roads and lanes or from rider to halted plough in field furrows; the word, the dream and wish of all male under sun capable of harm — the young who only dreamed yet of the ruins they were still incapable of; the sick and the maimed sweating in sleepless beds, impotent for the harm they willed to do;
the old, now-glandless earth-creeping, the very buds and blossoms, the garlands of whose yellowed triumphs had long fallen into the profitless dust, embalmed now and no more dead to the living world if they were sealed in buried vaults, behind the impregnable matronly calico of others’ grandchildren’s grandmothers — the word, with its implications of lost triumphs and defeats of unimaginable splendour — and which beast: to have that word, that dream and hope for future, or to have had need to flee that word and dream, for past. Even one of the actual buggies remained.
Ratliff was to see it, discovered a few months afterward, standing empty and with propped shafts in a stable shed a few miles from the village, gathering dust; chickens roosted upon it, steadily streaking and marring the once-bright varnish with limelike droppings, until the next harvest, the money-time, when the father of its late driver sold it to a negro farmhand, after which it would be seen passing through the village a few times each year perhaps recognised, perhaps now, while its new owner married and began to get a family and then turn grey, spilling children, no longer glittering, its wheels wired upright in succession by crossed barrel staves until staves and delicate wheels both vanished, translated apparently in motion at some point into stout, not new, slightly smaller wagon wheels, giving it a list, the list too interchangeable, ranging from quarter to quarter between two of its passing appearances behind a succession of spavined and bony horses and mules in wire- and rope-patched harness, as if its owner had horsed it ten minutes ago out of a secret boneyard for this particular final swan-song’s apotheosis which, woefully misinformed as to its own capacities, was each time not the last.
But when he at last turned his little tough team toward Frenchman’s Bend again, Bookwright and Tull had long since returned home and told it. It was now September. The cotton was open and spilling into the fields; the very air smelled of it. In field after field as he passed along the pickers, arrested in stooping attitudes, seemed fixed amid the constant surf of bursting bolls like piles in surf, the long, partly-filled sacks streaming away behind them like rigid frozen flags. The air was hot, vivid and breathless — a final fierce concentration of the doomed and dying summer.
The feet of the small horses twinkled rapidly in the dust and he sat, loose and easy to the motion, the reins loose in one hand, inscrutable of face, his eyes darkly impenetrable, quizzical and bemused, remembering, still seeing them — the bank, the courthouse, the station; the calm beautiful mask seen once more beyond a moving pane of glass, then gone. But that was all right, it was just meat, just galmeat, he thought, and God knows there was a plenty of that, yesterday and tomorrow too.
Of course there was the waste, not wasted on Snopes but on all of them, himself included —— Except was it waste? he thought suddenly, seeing the face again for an instant as though he had recalled not only the afternoon but the train too — the train itself, which had served its day and schedule and so, despite the hard cars, the locomotive, no more existed.
He looked at the face again. It had not been tragic, and now it was not even damned, since from behind it there looked out only another mortal natural enemy of the masculine race.
And beautiful: but then, so did the highwayman’s daggers and pistols make a pretty shine on him; and now as he watched, the lost calm face vanished. It went fast; it was as if the moving glass were in retrograde, it too merely a part, a figment, of the concentric flotsam and jetsam of the translation, and there remained only the straw bag, the minute tie, the constant jaw:
Until at last, baffled, they come to the Prince his self. “Sire,” they says. “He just won’t. We can’t do nothing with him.”
“What?” the Prince hollers.
“He says a bargain is a bargain. That he swapped in good faith and honour, and now he has come to redeem it, like the law says. And we can’t find it,” they says. “We done looked everywhere. It wasn’t no big one to begin with nohow, and we was specially careful in handling it. We sealed it up in a asbestos matchbox and put the box in a separate compartment to itself. But when we opened the compartment, it was gone. The matchbox was there and the seal wasn’t broke. But there wasn’t nothing in the matchbox but a little kind of dried-upsmear under one edge. And now he has come to redeem it. But how can we redeem him into eternal torment without his soul?”
“Damn it,” the Prince hollers. “Give him one of the extra ones. Ain’t there souls turning up here everyday, banging at the door and raising all kinds of hell to get in here, even bringing letters from Congressmen, that we never even heard of? Give him one of them?”
“We tried that,” they says. “He won’t do it. He says he don’t want no more and no less than his legal interest according to what the banking and the civil laws states in black and white is hisn. He says he has come prepared to meet his bargain and signature, and he sholy expects you of all folks to meet yourn.”
“Tell him he can go then. Tell him he had the wrong address. That there ain’t nothing on the books here against him. Tell him his note was lost — if there ever was one. Tell him we had a flood, even a freeze.”
“He won’t go, not without his — —”
“Turn him out. Eject him.”
“How?” they says. “He’s got the law.”
“Oho,” the Prince says. “A sawmill advocate. I see. All right,” he says. “Fix it. Why bother me?” And he set back and raised his glass and blowed the flames offen it like he thought they was already gone. Except they wasn’t gone.
“Fix what?” they says.
“His bribe!” the Prince hollers. “His bribe! Didn’t you just tell me he come in here with his mouth full of law? Did you expect him to hand you a wrote-out bill for it?”
“We tried that,” they says. “He won’t bribe.”
Then the Prince set up there and sneered at them with his sharp litter tongue and no talkback, about how likely what they thought was a bribe would be a cash discount with maybe a trip to the Legislature throwed in, and them standing there and listening and taking it because he was the Prince. Only there was one of them that had been there in the time of the Prince’s pa.
He used to dandle the Prince on his knee when the Prince was a boy; he even made the Prince a little pitchfork and learned him how to use it practising on Chinees and Dagoes and Polynesians, until his arms would get strong enough to handle his share of white folks.
He didn’t appreciate this and he drawed his self up and he looked at the Prince and he says,
“Your father made, unreproved, a greater failure. Though maybe a greater man tempted a greater man.”
“Or you have been reproved by a lesser,” the Prince snaps back. But he remembered them old days too, when the old fellow was smiling fond and proud on his crude youthful inventions with BB size lava and brimstone and such, and bragging to the old Prince at night about how the boy done that day, about what he invented to do to that little Dago or Chinee that even the grown folks hadn’t thought of yet. So he apologised and got the old fellow smoothed down, and says, “What did you offer him?”
“The gratifications.”
“And —— ?”
“He has them. He says that for a man that only chews, any spittoon will do.”
“And then?”
“The vanities.”
“And —— ?”
“He has them. He brought a gross with
