Because I done already looked at it, he thought. I looked at it three days ago. Then it began to be dawn. In the wan beginning of that light he put his shovel down and straightened up.
Bookwright’s pick rose and fell steadily in front of him; twenty feet beyond, he could now see Armstid waist-deep in the ground as if he had been cut in two at the hips, the dead torso, not even knowing it was dead, labouring on in measured stoop and recover like a metronome as Armstid dug himself back into that earth which had produced him to be its born and fated thrall forever until he died.
Ratliff climbed out of the pit and stood in the dark fresh loam which they had thrown out of it, his muscles flinching and jerking with fatigue, and stood looking quietly at Bookwright until Bookwright became aware of him and paused, the pick raised for the next stroke, and looked up at him. They looked at each other — the two gaunt, unshaven, weary faces. “Odum,” Ratliff said, “who was Eustace Grimm’s wife?”
“I don’t know,” Bookwright said.
“I do,” Ratliff said. “She was one of them Calhoun County Dosheys. And that ain’t right. And his ma was a Fite. And that ain’t right either.” Bookwright quit looking at him. He laid the pick down carefully, almost gently, as if it were a spoon level-full of soup or of that much nitro-glycerine, and climbed out of the pit, wiping his hands on his trousers.
“I thought you knew,” he said. “I thought you knew everything about folks in this country.”
“I reckon I know now,” Ratliff said. “But I reckon you’ll still have to tell me.”
“Fite was his second wife’s name. She wasn’t Eustace’s ma. Pa told me about it when Ab Snopes first rented that place from the Varners five years ago.”
“All right,” Ratliff said. “Tell me.”
“Eustace’s ma was Ab Snopes’s youngest sister.” They looked at one another, blinking a little. Soon the light would begin to increase fast.
“Sholy now,” Ratliff said. “You finished?”
“Yes,” Bookwright said. “I’m finished.”
“Bet you one of them I beat you,” Ratliff said. They mounted the slope and entered the house, the room where they slept. It was still dark in the room, so while Ratliff fumbled the two bags out of the chimney, Bookwright lit the lantern and set it on the floor and they squatted facing each other across the lantern, opening the bags.
“I reckon we ought to knowed wouldn’t no cloth sack . . .” Bookwright said. “After thirty years . . .” They emptied the bags onto the floor. Each of them took up a coin, examined it briefly, then set them one upon the other like a crowned king in checkers, close to the lantern. Then one by one they examined the other coins by the light of the dingy lantern. “But how did he know it would be us?” Bookwright said.
“He didn’t,” Ratliff said. “He didn’t care. He just come out here every night and dug for a while. He knowed he couldn’t possibly dig over two weeks before somebody saw him.” He laid his last coin down and sat back on his heels until Bookwright had finished. “1871,” he said.
“1879,” Bookwright said. “I even got one that was made last year. You beat me.”
“I beat you,” Ratliff said. He took up the two coins and they put the money back into the bags. They didn’t hide them. They left each bag on its owner’s quilt and blew out the lantern. It was lighter now and they could see Armstid quite well where he stooped and rose and stooped in his thigh-deep pit. The sun would rise soon; already there were three buzzards soaring against the high yellow-blue. Armstid did not even look up when they approached; he continued to dig even while they stood beside the pit, looking down at him. “Henry,” Ratliff said.
Then Ratliff leaned down and touched his shoulder. He whirled, the shovel raised and turned edgewise and glinting a thin line of steel-coloured dawn as the edge of an axe would.
“Get out of my hole,” he said. “Get outen it.”
2
The wagons containing the men, the women and the children approaching the village from that direction, stopped, and the men who had walked up from the store to stand along Varner’s fence, watched, while Lump and Eck Snopes and Varner’s negro, Sam, loaded the furniture and the trunks and the boxes into the wagon backed up to the edge of the veranda.
It was the same wagon drawn by the same mules which had brought Flem Snopes back from Texas in April, and the three men came and went between it and the house, Eck or the negro backing clumsily through the door with the burden between them and Lump Snopes scuttling along beside it in a constant patter of his own exhortations and commands, holding to it, to be sure, but carrying no weight, to load that into the wagon and return, pausing at the door and stepping aside as Mrs. Varner bustled out with another armful of small crocks and hermetic jars of fruit and vegetables.
The watchers along the fence checked the objects off — the dismantled bed, the dresser, the washstand with its flowered matching bowl and ewer and slop-jar and chamber-pot, the trunk which doubtless contained the wife’s and the child’s clothing, the wooden box which the women at least knew doubtless contained dishes and cutlery and cooking vessels, and lastly a tightly roped mass of brown canvas. “What’s that?” Freeman said. “It looks like a tent.”
“It is a tent,” Tull said. “Eck brought it out from the express office in town last week.”
“They ain’t going to move to Jefferson and live in a tent, are they?” Freeman said.
“I don’t know,” Tull said. At last the wagon was loaded; Eck and the negro bumped through the door for the last time, Mrs. Varner bustled out with the final hermetic jar; Lump Snopes re-entered the house and emerged with the straw suitcase which they all knew, then Flem Snopes and then his wife came out.
She was carrying the baby which was too large to have been born at only seven months but which had certainly not waited until May, and stood there for a moment, Olympus-tall, a head taller than her mother or husband either, in a tailored suit despite the rich heat of summer’s full maturing, whose complexion alone showed that she was not yet eighteen since the unseeing and expressionless mask-face had no age, while the women in the wagons looked at her and thought how that was the first tailored suit ever seen in Frenchman’s Bend and how she had got some clothes out of Flem Snopes anyway because it would not be Will Varner that bought them now, and the men along the fence looked at her and thought of Hoake McCarron and how any one of them would have bought the suit or anything else for her if she had wanted it.
Mrs. Varner took the child from her and they watched her sweep the skirts inward into one hand with the gesture immemorial and female and troubling, and climb the wheel to the seat where Snopes already sat with the reins, and lean down and take the child from Mrs. Varner.
The wagon moved, lurched into motion, the team swinging to cross the yard toward the open gate into the lane, and that was all. If farewell was said, that was it, the halted wagons along the road creaking into motion again though Freeman and Tull and the other four men merely turned, relaxed again, their backs against the picket fence now, their faces identically grave, a little veiled and perhaps even sober, not quite watching the laden wagon as it turned out of the lane and approached and then was passing them — the plaid cap, the steady and deliberate jaw, the minute bow and the white shirt; the other face calm and beautiful and by its expression carven or even corpse-like, looking not at them certainly and maybe not at anything they knew.
“So long, Flem,” Freeman said. “Save me a steak when you get your hand in at cooking.” He didn’t answer. He might not have heard even. The wagon went on. Watching it, not moving yet, they saw it turn into the old road which until two weeks ago had been marked only by the hooves of Varner’s fat white horse for more than twenty years.
“He’ll have to drive three extra miles to get back into the road to town that way,” Tull said in an anxious voice.
“Maybe he aims to take them three miles on into town with him and swap them to Aaron Rideout for the other half of that restaurant,” Freeman said.
“Maybe he’ll swap them to Ratliff and Bookwright and Henry Armstid for something else,” a third man — his name was Rideout also, a brother of the other one, both of whom were Ratliff’s cousins — said. “He’ll find Ratliff in town too.”
“He’ll find Henry Armstid without having to go that far,” Freeman said.
That road was no longer a fading and almost healed scar. It was rutted now, because there had been rain a week ago, and now the untroubled grass and weeds of almost thirty years bore four distinct paths: the two outer ones where iron wheel-rims had run, the two inner ones where the harnessed teams had walked daily since that first
