“Then what does he want?” the Prince hollers. “What does he want? Paradise?” And the old one looks at him and at first the Prince thinks it’s because he ain’t forgot that sneer. But he finds out different.
“No,” the old one says. “He wants hell.”
And now for a while there ain’t a sound in that magnificent kingly hall hung about with the proud battle-torn smokes of the old martyrs but the sound of frying and the faint constant screams of authentic Christians. But the Prince was the same stock and blood his pa was. In a flash the sybaritic indolence and the sneers was gone; it might have been the old Prince his self that stood there. “Bring him to me,” he says. “Then leave us.”
So they brought him in and went away and closed the door. His clothes was still smoking a little, though soon he had done brushed most of it off. He come up to the Throne, chewing, toting the straw suitcase.
“Well?” the Prince says.
He turned his head and spit, the spit frying off the floor quick in a little blue ball of smoke. “I come about that soul,” he says.
“So they tell me,” the Prince says. “But you have no soul.”
“Is that my fault?” he says.
“Is it mine?” the Prince says. “Do you think I created you?”
“Then who did?” he says. And he had the Prince there and the Prince knowed it. So the Prince set out to bribe him his self. He named over all the temptations, the gratifications, the satieties; it sounded sweeter than music the way the Prince fetched them up in detail.
But he didn’t even stop chewing, standing there holding the straw suitcase. Then the Prince said, “Look yonder,” pointing at the wall, and there they was, in order and rite for him to watch, watching his self performing them all, even the ones he hadn’t even thought about inventing to his self yet, until they was done, the last unimaginable one. And he just turned his head and spit another scorch of tobacco on to the floor and the Prince flung back on the throne in very exasperation and baffled rage.
“Then what do you want?” the Prince says. “What do you want? Paradise?”
“I hadn’t figured on it,” he says. “Is it yours to offer?”
“Then whose is it?” the Prince says. And the Prince knowed he had him there. In fact, the Prince knowed he had him all the time, ever since they had told him how he had walked in the door with his mouth already full of law; he even leaned over and rung the firebell so the old one could be there to see and hear how it was done, then he leaned back on the Throne and looked down at him standing there with his straw suitcase, and says, “You have admitted and even argued that I created you.
Therefore your soul was mine all the time. And therefore when you offered it as security for this note, you offered that which you did not possess and so laid yourself liable to — —”
“I have never disputed that,” he says.
“ — criminal action. So take your bag and — —” the Prince says. “Eh?” the Prince says. “What did you say?”
“I have never disputed that,” he says.
“What?” the Prince says. “Disputed what?” Except that it don’t make any noise, and now the Prince is leaning forward, and now he feels that ere hot floor under his knees and he can feel his self grabbing and hauling at his throat to get the words out like he was digging potatoes outen hard ground. “Who are you?” he says, choking and gasping and his eyes a-popping up at him setting there with that straw suitcase on the Throne among the bright, crown-shaped flames.
“Take Paradise!” the Prince screams. “Take it! Take it!” And the wind roars up and the dark roars down and the Prince scrabbling across the floor, clawing and scrabbling at that locked door, screaming. . . .
BOOK THREE. THE LONG SUMMER
CHAPTER ONE
1
SITTING IN THE halted buckboard, Ratliff watched the old fat white horse emerge from Varner’s lot and come down the lane beside the picket fence, surrounded and preceded by the rich sonorous organ-tone of its entrails. So he’s back to the horse again, he thought. He’s got to straddle his legs at least once to keep on moving. So he had to pay that too.
Not only the deed to the land and the two-dollar wedding licence and them two tickets to Texas and the cash, but the riding in that new buggy with somebody to do the driving, to get that patented necktie out of his store and out of his house. The horse came up and stopped, apparently of its own accord, beside the buckboard in which Ratliff sat neat, decorous, and grave like a caller in a house of death.
“You must have been desperate,” he said quietly. He meant no insult. He was not even thinking of Varner’s daughter’s shame or of his daughter at all. He meant the land, the Old Frenchman place. He had never for one moment believed that it had no value. He might have believed this if anyone else had owned it.
But the very fact that Varner had ever come into possession of it and still kept it, apparently making no effort to sell it or do anything else with it, was proof enough for him. He declined to believe that Varner ever had been or ever would be stuck with anything; that if he acquired it, he got it cheaper than anyone else could have, and if he kept it, it was too valuable to sell.
In the case of the Old Frenchman place he could not see why this was so, but the fact that Varner had bought it and still had it was sufficient. So when Varner finally did let it go, Ratliff believed it was because Varner had at last got the price for which he had been holding it for twenty years, or at least some sufficient price, whether it was in money or not. And when he considered who Varner had relinquished possession to, he believed that the price had been necessity and not cash.
Varner knew that Ratliff was thinking it. He sat the old horse and looked down at Ratliff, the little hard eyes beneath their bushy rust-coloured brows glinting at the man who was a good deal nearer his son in spirit and intellect and physical appearance too than any of his own get. “So you think pure liver ain’t going to choke that cat,” he said.
“Maybe with that ere little piece of knotted-up string in it?” Ratliff said.
“What little piece of knotted-up string?”
“I don’t know,” Ratliff said.
“Hah,” Varner said. “You going my way?”
“I reckon not,” Ratliff said. “I’m going to mosey down to the store.” Unless maybe he even feels he can set around it too again now, he thought.
“So am I,” Varner said. “I got that damn trial this morning. That damn Jack Houston and that What’s-his-name. Mink. About that durned confounded scrub yearling.”
“You mean Houston sued him?” Ratliff said. “Houston?”
“No, no. Houston just kept the yearling up. He kept it up all last summer and Snopes let him pasture and feed it all winter, and it run in Houston’s pasture all this spring and summer too. Then last week for some reason he decided to go and get it. I reckon he figured to beef it. So he went to Houston’s with a rope.
He was in Houston’s pasture, trying to catch it, when Houston come up and stopped him. He finally had to draw his pistol, he claims. He says Snopes looked at the pistol and said, ‘That’s what you’ll need. Because you know I ain’t got one.’
And Houston said all right, they would lay the pistol on a fence post and back off one post a-piece on each side and count three and run for it.”
“Why didn’t they?” Ratliff said.
“Hah,” Varner said shortly. “Come on. I want to get it over with. I got some business to tend to.”
“You go on,” Ratliff said. “I’ll mosey on slow. I ain’t got no yearling calf nor trial neither today.”
So the old fat clean horse (it looked always as if it had just come back from the dry-cleaner’s; you could almost smell the benzene) moved on again, with a rich preliminary internal chord, going on along the gapped and weathered picket fence.
Ratliff sat in the still-motionless buckboard and watched it and the lean, loose-jointed figure which, with the exception of the three-year runabout interval, had bestridden it, the same saddle between them, for twenty-five years, thinking how if, as dogs do, the white horse or his own two either had snuffed along that fence for yellow-wheeled buggies now, they would not have found them, thinking: And all the other two-legged feice in this country between thirteen and eighty can pass here now without feeling no urge to stop and raise one of them against it. And yet those buggies were still there. He could see them, sense them.
Something was; it was too much to have vanished that quickly and completely — the air polluted and rich and fine which had flowed over and shaped that abundance and munificence, which had done the hydraulic office to that almost unbroken progression of chewed food, which had held intact the constant impact of those sixteen years of sitting down: so why should not that body at the last have been the unscalable sierra,
