“I was hoping to see you,” Varner said. “I hear your father has had a little trouble once or twice with landlords. Trouble that might have been serious.” The other chewed. “Maybe they never treated him right; I don’t know about that and I don’t care. What I’m talking about is a mistake, any mistake, can be straightened out so that a man can still stay friends with the fellow he ain’t satisfied with. Don’t you agree to that?” The other chewed steadily. His face was as blank as a pan of uncooked dough. “So he won’t have to feel that the only thing that can prove his rights is something that will make him have to pick up and leave the country next day,” Varner said. “So that there won’t come a time some day when he will look around and find out he has run out of new country to move to.” Varner ceased. He waited so long this time that the other finally spoke, though Varner was never certain whether this was the reason or not:
“There’s a right smart of country.”
“Sho,” Varner said pleasantly, bulging, bland. “But a man don’t want to wear it out just moving through it. Especially because of a matter that if it had just been took in hand and straightened out to begin with, wouldn’t have amounted to nothing. That could have been straightened out in five minutes if there had just been some other fellow handy to take a hold of a fellow that was maybe a little high-tempered to begin with say, and say to him, ‘Hold up here, now; that fellow don’t aim to put nothing on you. All you got to do is consult with him peaceable and it will be fixed up. I know that to be a fact because I got his promise to that effect.’ ” He paused again. “Especially if this here fellow we are speaking of, that could take a hold of him and tell him that, was going to get a benefit out of keeping him quiet and peaceable.” Varner stopped again. After a while the other spoke again:
“What benefit?”
“Why, a good farm to work. Store credit. More land if he felt he could handle it.”
“Ain’t no benefit in farming. I figure on getting out of it soon as I can.”
“All right,” Varner said. “Say he wanted to take up some other line, this fellow we’re speaking of. He will need the good will of the folks he aims to make his money off of to do it. And what better way — —”
“You run a store, don’t you?” the other said.
“ — better way — —” Varner said. Then he stopped. “What?” he said.
“I hear you run a store.”
Varner stared at him. Now Varner’s face was not bland. It was just completely still and completely intent. He reached to his shirt pocket and produced a cigar. He neither smoked nor drank himself, being by nature so happily metabolised that, as he might have put it himself, he could not possibly have felt better than he naturally did. But he always carried two or three. “Have a cigar,” he said.
“I don’t use them,” the other said.
“Just chew, hah?” Varner said.
“I chew up a nickel now and then until the suption is out of it. But I ain’t never lit a match to one yet.”
“Sho now,” Varner said. He looked at the cigar; he said quietly: “And I just hope to God you and nobody you know ever will.” He put the cigar back into his pocket. He expelled a loud hiss of breath. “All right,” he said. “Next fall. When he has made his crop.” He had never been certain just when the other had been looking at him and when not, but now he watched the other raise his arm and with his other hand pick something infinitesimal from the sleeve with infinitesimal care. Once more Varner expelled his breath through his nose. This time it was a sigh. “All right,” he said. “Next week then. You’ll give me that long, won’t you? But you got to guarantee it.” The other spat.
“Guarantee what?” he said.
Two miles farther on dusk overtook him, the shortening twilight of late April, in which the blanched dogwoods stood among the darker trees with spread raised palms like praying nuns; there was the evening star and already the whippoorwills. The horse, travelling supperward, was going well in the evening’s cool, when Varner pulled it to a stop and held it for a full moment. “Hell fire,” he said. “He was standing just exactly where couldn’t nobody see him from the house.”
CHAPTER TWO
1
RATLIFF, THE SEWING-MACHINE agent, again approaching the village, with a used music-box and a set of brand-new harrow teeth still fastened together by the factory shipping wire in the dog kennel box in place of the sewing-machine, saw the old white horse dozing on three legs at a fence post and, an instant later, Will Varner himself sitting in the home-made chair against the rise of shaggy lawns and overgrown gardens of the Old Frenchman place.
“Evening, Uncle Will,” he said in his pleasant, courteous, even deferent voice. “I hear you and Jody got a new clerk in the store.” Varner looked at him sharply, the reddish eyebrows beetling a little above the hard little eyes.
“So that’s done spread,” he said. “How far you been since yesterday?”
“Seven-eight miles,” Ratliff said.
“Hah,” Varner said. “We been needing a clerk.” That was true. All they needed was someone to come and unlock the store in the morning and lock it again at night — this just to keep stray dogs out, since even tramps, like stray negroes, did not stay in Frenchman’s Bend after nightfall. In fact, at times Jody Varner himself (Will was never there anyhow) would be absent from the store all day. Customers would enter and serve themselves and each other, putting the price of the articles, which they knew to a penny as well as Jody himself did, into a cigar box inside the circular wire cage which protected the cheese, as though it — the cigar box, the worn bills and thumb-polished coins — were actually baited.
“At least you can get the store swept out every day,” Ratliff said. “Ain’t everybody can get that included into a fire insurance policy.”
“Hah,” Varner said again. He rose from the chair. He was chewing tobacco. He removed from his mouth the chewed-out wad which resembled a clot of damp hay, and threw it away and wiped his palm on his flank. He approached the fence, where at his direction the blacksmith had contrived a clever passage which (neither the blacksmith nor Varner had ever seen one before or even imagined one) operated exactly like a modern turnstile, by the raising of a chained pin instead of inserting a coin. “Ride my horse on back to the store,” Varner said. “I’ll drive your rig. I want to sit down and ride.”
“We can tie the horse behind the buckboard and both ride in it,” Ratliff said.
“You ride the horse,” Varner said. “That’s close as I want you right now. Sometimes you are a little too smart to suit me.”
“Why, sho, Uncle Will,” Ratliff said. So he cramped the buckboard’s wheel for Varner to get in, and himself mounted the horse. They went on, Ratliff a little behind the buckboard, so that Varner talked to him over his shoulder, not looking back:
“This here fire-fighter — —”
“It wasn’t proved,” Ratliff said mildly. “Of course, that’s the trouble. If a fellow’s got to choose between a man that is a murderer and one he just thinks maybe is, he’ll choose the murderer. At least then he will know exactly where he’s at. His attention ain’t going to wander then.”
“All right, all right,” Varner said. “This here victim of libel and mis-statement then. What do you know about him?”
“Nothing to mention,” Ratliff said. “Just what I hear about him. I ain’t seen him in eight years. There was another boy then, besides Flem. A little one. He would be about ten or twelve now if he was there. He must a been mislaid in one of them movings.”
“Has what you have heard about him since them eight years ago caused you to think he might have changed his habits any?”
“Sho now,” Ratliff said. What dust the three horses raised blew lightly aside on the faint breeze, among the dogfennel and bitterweed just beginning to bloom in the roadside ditches. “Eight years. And before that it was fifteen more pretty near I never saw him. I growed up next to where he was living. I mean, he lived for about two years on the same place where I growed up. Him and my pap was both renting from old man Anse Holland. Ab was a horse-trader then. In fact, I was there the same time the horse-trading give out on him and left him just a farmer. He ain’t naturally mean. He’s just soured.”
“Soured,” Varner said. He spat. His voice was now sardonic, almost contemptuous: “Jody came in last night, late. I knowed it soon as I saw him. It was exactly like when he was a boy and had done something he knowed I was going to find out about tomorrow and so he would figure he better tell me first himself. ‘I done hired a clerk,’ he says.
