That would never have been for him, not even at the prime summer peak of what he and Varner both would have called his tomcatting’s heyday.
He knew that without regret or grief, he would not have wanted it to be (It would have been like giving me a pipe organ, that never had and never would know any more than how to wind up the second-hand music-box I had just swapped a mailbox for, he thought) and he even thought of the cold and froglike victor without jealousy: and this not because he knew that, regardless of whatever Snopes had expected or would have called what it was he now had, it would not be victory.
What he felt was outrage at the waste, the useless squandering; at a situation intrinsically and inherently wrong by any economy, like building a log dead-fall and baiting it with a freshened heifer to catch a rat; or no, worse: as though the gods themselves had funnelled all the concentrated bright wet-slanted unparadised June onto a dung-heap, breeding pismires.
Beyond the white horse, beyond the corner of the picket fence, the faint, almost overgrown lane turned off which led to the Old Frenchman place. The horse attempted to turn into it until Varner hauled it roughly back. Not to mention the poorhouse, Ratliff thought. But then, he wouldn’t have been infested. He shook his own reins slightly. “Boys,” he said, “advance.”
The team, the buckboard, went on in the thick dust of the spent summer. Now he could see the village proper — the store, the blacksmith shop, the metal roof of the gin with a thin rapid shimmer of exhaust above the stack. It was now the third week in September; the dry, dust-laden air vibrated steadily to the rapid beat of the engine, though so close were the steam and the air in temperature that no exhaust was visible but merely a thin feverish shimmer of mirage. The very hot, vivid air, which seemed to be filled with the slow laborious plaint of laden wagons, smelled of lint; wisps of it clung among the dust-stiffened roadside weeds and small gouts of cotton lay imprinted by hoof- and wheel-marks into the trodden dust.
He could see the wagons too, the long motionless line of them behind the patient, droop-headed mules, waiting to advance a wagon-length at a time, onto the scales and then beneath the suction pipe where Jody Varner would now be again, what with a second new clerk in the store — the new clerk exactly like the old one but a little smaller, a little compacter, as if they had both been cut with the same die but in inverse order to appearance, the last first and after the edges of the die were dulled and spread a little — with his little, full, bright-pink mouth like a kitten’s button and his bright, quick, amoral eyes like a chipmunk and his air of merry and incorrigible and unflagging conviction of the inherent constant active dishonesty of all men, including himself.
Jody Varner was at the scales; Ratliff craned his turkey’s neck in passing and saw the heavy bagging broadcloth, the white collarless shirt with a yellow halfmoon of sweat at each armpit, the dusty, lint-wisped black hat. So I reckon maybe everybody is satisfied now, he thought.
Or everybody except one, he added to himself because before he reached the store Will Varner came out of it and got onto the white horse which someone had just untied and held for him, and on the gallery beyond Ratliff now saw the eruption of men whose laden wagons stood along the road opposite, waiting for the scales, and as he drove up to the gallery in his turn, Mink Snopes and the other Snopes, the proverbist, the school-teacher (he now wore a new frock-coat which, for all its newness, looked no less like it belonged to him than the old one in which Ratliff had first seen him did) came down the steps.
Ratliff saw the intractable face now cold and still with fury behind the single eyebrow; beside it the rodent’s face of the teacher, the two of them seeming to pass him in a whirling of flung unco-ordinated hands and arms out of the new, black, swirling frock-coat, the voice that, also like the gestures, seemed to be not servant but master of the body which supplied blood and wind to them:
“Be patient; Cæsar never built Rome in one day; patience is the horse that runs steadiest; justice is the right man’s bread but poison for the evil man if you give it time. I done looked the law up; Will Varner has misread it pure and simple. We’ll take a appeal.
We will — —” until the other turned his furious face with its single violent emphasis of eyebrow upon him and said fiercely: “ —— t!” They went on. Ratliff moved up to the gallery. While he was tying his team, Houston came out, followed by the big hound, and mounted and rode away. Ratliff mounted to the gallery where now at least twenty men were gathered, Bookwright among them.
“The plaintiff seems to had legal talent,” he said. “What was the verdict?”
“When Snopes pays Houston three dollars pasturage, he can get his bull,” Quick said.
“Sho now,” Ratliff said. “Wasn’t his lawyer even allowed nothing by the court?”
“The lawyer was fined what looked like the considerable balance of one uncompleted speech,” Bookwright said. “If that’s what you want to know.”
“Well well,” Ratliff said. “Well well well. So Will couldn’t do nothing to the next succeeding Snopes but stop him from talking. Not that anymore would have done any good. Snopes can come and Snopes can go, but Will Varner looks like he is fixing to Snopes forever. Or Varner will Snopes forever — take your pick. What is it the fellow says? off with the old and on with the new; the old job at the old stand, maybe a new fellow doing the jobbing but it’s the same old stern getting reamed out?” Bookwright was looking at him.
“If you would stand closer to the door, he could hear you a heap better,” he said.
“Sholy,” Ratliff said. “Big ears have little pitchers, the world beats a track to the rich man’s hog-pen but it ain’t every family has a new lawyer, not to mention a prophet. Waste not want not, except that a full waist don’t need no prophet to prophesy a profit and just whose.” Now they were all watching him — the smooth, impenetrable face with something about the eyes and the lines beside the mouth which they could not read.
“Look here,” Bookwright said. “What’s the matter with you?
“Why, nothing,” Ratliff said. “What could be wrong with nothing nowhere nohow in this here best of all possible worlds? Likely the same folks that sells him the neckties will have a pair of long black stockings too. And any sign-painter can paint him a screen to set up alongside the bed to look like looking up at a wall full of store shelves of canned goods — —”
“Here,” Bookwright said.
“ — so he can know to do what every man and woman that ever seen her between thirteen and Old Man Hundred-and-One McCallum has been thinking about for twenty-nine days now. Of course, he could fix it with a shed roof to climb up on and a window to crawl through too. But that ain’t necessary; that ain’t his way. No, sir.
This here man ain’t no trifling eavecat. This here man — —” A little boy of eight or ten came up, trotting, in overalls, and mounted the steps and gave them a quick glance out of eyes as blue and innocent as periwinkles and trotted intently into the store. “ — this here man that all he needs is just to set back there in the store until after a while one comes in to get a nickel’s worth of lard, not buy it: come and ax Mr. Snopes for it, and he gives it to her and writes in a book about it and her not knowing no more about what he wrote in that book and why then she does how that ere lard got into that tin bucket with the picture of a hog on it that even she can tell is a hog, and he puts the bucket back and puts the book away and goes and shuts the door and puts the bar up and she has done already went around behind the counter and laid down on the floor because maybe she thinks by now that’s what you have to do, not to pay for the lard because that’s done already been wrote down in the book, but to get out of that door again — —”
Ratliff moved toward the steps. He began to descend. He was still talking. He continued to talk as he went down the steps, not looking back; nobody could have told whether he was actually talking to the men behind him or not,
