It takes a light and a dark both to make one of them, and this one ain’t up until daylight tomorrow morning. Just take that cow back where you and Will Varner put it eighteen and a half days ago, and I’ll come in the morning and get it. And remind that nigger to feed early, so I won’t have to wait.”
But he heard nothing. And only then did he realise that he had actually expected the cow, had counted on its return you might say. He had a sudden quick shock of fear, terror, discovering now how spurious had been that peace he thought was his since his run-in with Houston and the shotgun at the fence line that night two months ago; so light a hold on what he had thought was peace that he must be constantly on guard now, since almost anything apparently could throw him back to that moment when Will Varner had told him he would have to work out eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents at fifty cents a day to gain possession of his own cow.
Now he would have to go to the lot and look to make sure Quick hadn’t put the cow in it unheard and then run, fled; he would have to light a lantern and go out in the dark to look for what he knew he would not find. And as if that was not enough, he would have to explain to his wife where he was going with the lantern.
Sure enough, he had to do it, using the quick hard unmannered word when she said, “Where you going? I thought Jack Houston warned you,” — adding, not for the crudeness but because she too would not let him alone:
“Lessen of course you will step outside and do it for me.”
“You nasty thing!” she cried. “Using words like that in front of the girls!”
“Sholy,” he said. “Or maybe you could send them. Maybe both of them together could make up for one a-dult. Though from the way they eat, ara one of them alone ought to do hit.”
He went to the barn. The cow was not there of course, as he had known. He was glad of it. The whole thing — realising that even if one of them brought the cow home, he would still have to go out to the barn to make sure — had been good for him, teaching him, before any actual harm had been done, just exactly what They were up to: to fling, jolt, surprise him off balance and so ruin him: Who couldn’t beat him in any other way: couldn’t beat him with money or its lack, couldn’t outwait him; could beat him only by catching him off balance and so topple him back into that condition of furious blind earless rage where he had no sense.
But he was all right now. He had actually gained; when he took his rope tomorrow morning and went to get his cow, it wouldn’t be Quick but Houston himself who would say, “Why didn’t you come last night? The eighteenth-and-a-half day was up at dark last night”; it would be Houston himself to whom he would answer:
“It takes a light and a dark both to make a day.
That-ere eighteenth-and-a-half day is up this morning — providing that delicate nigger of yourn has done finished feeding her.”
He slept. He ate breakfast; sunrise watched him walk without haste up the lane to Houston’s feed lot, the ploughline coiled on his arm, to lean his folded arms on the top rail of the fence, the coiled rope loosely dangling, watching the Negro with his pitchfork and Houston also for a minute or two before they saw him. He said:
“Mawnin, Jack. I come by for that-ere court-judgment cow if you’ll kindly have your nigger to kindly put this here rope on her if he’ll be so kindly obliging,” then still leaning there while Houston came across the lot and stopped about ten feet away.
“You’re not through yet,” Houston said. “You owe two more days.”
“Well well,” he said, easily and peacefully, almost gently. “I reckon a man with a lot full of paper bulls and heifers, not to mention a half a mile of new pasture fence he got built free for nothing, might get mixed up about a little thing not no more important than jest dollars, especially jest eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents of them. But I jest own one eight-dollar cow, or what I always thought was jest a eight-dollar cow. I ain’t rich enough not to be able to count up to eighteen seventy-five.”
“I’m not talking about eighteen dollars,” Houston said. “I’m—”
“And seventy-five cents,” Mink said.
“ — talking about nineteen dollars. You owe one dollar more.”
He didn’t move; his face didn’t change; he just said: “What one dollar more?”
“The pound fee,” Houston said. “The law says that when anybody has to take up a stray animal and the owner don’t claim it before dark that same day, the man that took it up is entitled to a one-dollar pound fee.”
He stood quite still; his hand did not even tighten on the coiled rope. “So that was why you were so quick that day to save Lon the trouble of taking her to his lot,” he said. “To get that extra dollar.”
“Damn the extra dollar,” Houston said. “Damn Quick too. He was welcome to her. I kept her instead to save you having to walk all the way to Quick’s house to get her. Not to mention I have fed her every day, which Quick wouldn’t have done. The digger and shovel and stretchers are in the corner yonder where you left them last night. Any time you want to—”
But he had already turned, already walking, peacefully and steadily, carrying the coiled rope, back down the lane to the road, not back toward his home but in the opposite direction toward Varner’s store four miles away.
He walked through the bright sweet young summer morning between the burgeoning woodlands where the dogwood and redbud and wild plum had long since bloomed and gone, beside the planted fields standing strongly with corn and cotton, some of it almost as good as his own small patches (obviously the people who planted these had not had the leisure and peace he had thought he had to sow in); treading peacefully the rife and vernal earth boiling with life — the frantic flash and glint and crying of birds, a rabbit bursting almost beneath his feet, so young and thin as to have but two dimensions, unless the third one could be speed — on to Varner’s store.
The gnawed wood gallery above the gnawed wood steps should be vacant now. The overalled men who after laying-by would squat or stand all day against the front wall or inside the store itself, should be in the field too today, ditching or mending fences or running the first harrows and shovels and cultivators among the stalks. The store was too empty, in fact.
He thought If Flem was jest here — because Flem was not there; he, Mink, knew if anyone did that that honeymoon would have to last until they could come back home and tell Frenchman’s Bend that the child they would bring with them hadn’t been born sooner than this past May at the earliest.
But even if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else; his cousin’s absence when he was needed was just one more test, harassment, enragement They tried him with, not to see if he would survive it because They had no doubt of that, but simply for the pleasure of watching him have to do something extra there was no reason whatever for him to have to do.
Only Varner was not there either. Mink had not expected that. He had taken it for granted that They certainly would not miss this chance: to have the whole store crammed with people who should have been busy in the field — loose idle ears all strained to hear what he had come to say to Will Varner. But even Varner was gone; there was nobody in the store but Jody Varner and Lump Snopes, the clerk Flem had substituted in when he quit to get married last summer.
“If he went to town, he won’t be back before night,” Mink said.
“Not to town,” Jody said. “He went over to look at a mill on Punkin Creek. He said he’ll be back by dinner time.”
“He won’t be back until night,” Mink said.
“All right,” Jody said. “Then you can go back home and come back tomorrow.”
So he had no choice. He could have walked the five miles back home and then the five more back to the store in just comfortable time before noon, if he had wanted a walk. Or he could stay near the store until noon and wait there until old Varner would finally turn up just about in time for supper, which he would do, since naturally They would not miss that chance to make him lose a whole day. Which would mean he would have to put in half of one night digging Houston’s post holes since he would have to complete the two days by noon of day after tomorrow in order to finish what he would need
