Or he could have walked back home just in time to eat his noon meal and then walk back, since he would already have lost a whole day anyway. But They would certainly not miss that chance; as soon as he was out of sight, the buckboard would return from Punkin Creek and Varner would get out of it. So he waited, through noon when, as soon as Jody left to go home to dinner, Lump hacked off a segment of hoop cheese and took a handful of crackers from the barrel.
“Ain’t you going to eat no dinner?” Lump said. “Will won’t miss it.”
“No,” Mink said.
“I’ll put it on your furnish then, if you’re all that tender about one of Will Varner’s nickels,” Lump said.
“I’m not hungry,” he said. But there was one thing he could be doing, one preparation he could be making while he waited, since it was not far. So he went there, to the place he had already chosen, and did what was necessary since he already knew what Varner was going to tell him, and return to the store and yes, at exactly midafternoon, just exactly right to exhaust the balance of the whole working day, the buckboard came up and Varner got out and was tying the lines to the usual gallery post when Mink came up to him.
“All right,” Varner said. “Now what?”
“A little information about the Law,” he said. “This here pound-fee law.”
“What?” Varner said.
“That’s right,” he said, peaceful and easy, his face quiet and gentle as smiling. “I thought I had finished working out them thirty-seven and a half-bit days at sundown last night. Only when I went this morning to get my cow, it seems like I ain’t quite yet, that I owe two more days for the pound fee.”
“Hell fire,” Varner said. He stood over the smaller man, cursing. “Did Houston tell you that?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“Hell fire,” Varner said again. He dragged a huge worn leather wallet strapped like a suitcase from his hip pocket and took a dollar bill from it. “Here,” he said.
“So the Law does say I got to pay another dollar before I can get my cow.”
“Yes,” Varner said. “If Houston wants to claim it. Take this dollar—”
“I don’t need it,” he said, already turning. “Me and Houston don’t deal in money, we deal in post holes. I jest wanted to know the Law. And if that’s the Law, I reckon there ain’t nothing for a law-abiding feller like me to do but jest put up with it. Because if folks don’t put up with the Law, what’s the use of all the trouble and expense of having it?”
“Wait,” Varner said. “Don’t you go back there. Don’t you go near Houston’s place. You go on home and wait. I’ll bring your cow to you as soon as I get hold of Quick.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “Maybe I ain’t got as many post holes in me as Houston has dollars, but I reckon I got enough for just two more days.”
“Mink!” Varner said. “Mink! Come back here!” But he was gone. But there was no hurry now; the day was already ruined; until tomorrow morning, when he was in Houston’s new pasture until sundown. This time he hid the tools under a bush as he always did when he would return tomorrow, and went home and ate the sowbelly and flour gravy and undercooked biscuits; they had one timepiece, the tin alarm clock which he set for eleven and rose again then; he had left coffee in the pot and some of the meat cold in the congealed skillet and two biscuits so it was almost exactly midnight when the savage baying of the Bluetick hound brought the Negro to his door and he, Mink, said, “Hit’s Mister Snopes. Reporting for work. Hit’s jest gone exactly midnight for the record.” Because he would have to do this in order to quit at noon. And They — Houston — were still watching him because when the sun said noon and he carried the tools back to the fence corner, his cow was already tied there in a halter, which he removed and tied his ploughline around her horns and this time he didn’t lead her but, himself at a trot, drove her trotting before him by lashing her across the hocks with the end of the rope.
Because he was short for time, to get her back home and into the lot. Nor would he have time to eat his dinner, again today, with five miles still to do, even straight across country, to catch the mail carrier before he left Varner’s store at two o’clock for Jefferson, since Varner did not carry ten-gauge buckshot shells. But his wife and daughters were at the table, which at least saved argument, the necessity to curse them silent or perhaps even to have actually to strike, hit his wife, in order to go to the hearth and dig out the loose brick and take from the snuff tin behind it the single five-dollar bill which through all vicissitudes they kept there as the boat owner will sell or pawn or lose all his gear but will still cling on to one life preserver or ring buoy. Because he had five shells for the ancient ten-gauge gun, ranging from bird shot to one Number Two for turkey or geese. But he had had them for years, he did not remember how long; besides, even if he were guaranteed that they would fire, Houston deserved better than this.
So he folded the bill carefully into the fob pocket of his overalls and caught the mail carrier and by four that afternoon Jefferson was in sight across the last valley and by simple precaution, a simple instinctive preparatory gesture, he thrust his fingers into the fob pocket, then suddenly dug frantically, himself outwardly immobile, into the now vacant pocket where he knew he had folded and stowed carefully the bill, then sat immobile beside the mail carrier while the buckboard began to descend the hill. I got to do it he thought so I might as well and then said quietly aloud, “All right, I reckon I’ll take that-ere bill now.”
“What?” the carrier said.
“That-ere five-dollar bill that was in my pocket when I got in this buggy back yonder at Varner’s.”
“Why, you little son of a bitch,” the carrier said. He pulled the buckboard off to the side of the road and wrapped the lines around the whip stock and got out and came around to Mink’s side of the vehicle. “Get out,” he said.
Now I got to fight him Mink thought and I ain’t got no knife and likely he will beat me to ere a stick I try to grab. So I might jest as well get it over with and got out of the buckboard, the carrier giving him time to get his puny and vain hands up. Then a shocking blow which Mink didn’t even feel very much, aware instead rather merely of the hard ungiving proneness of the earth, ground against his back, lying there, peaceful almost, watching the carrier get back into the buckboard and drive on.
Then he got up. He thought I not only could a saved a trip, I might still had them five dollars. But for only a moment; he was already in the road, already walking steadily on toward town as if he knew what he was doing.
Which he did, he had already remembered: two, three years ago it was when Solon Quick or Vernon Tull or whoever it was had seen the bear, the last bear in that part of the country, when it ran across Varner’s mill dam and into the thicket, and how the hunt had been organised and somebody rode a horse in to Jefferson to get hold of Ike McCaslin and Walter Ewell, the best hunters in the country, and they came out with their buckshot big-game shells and the bear and deer hounds and set the standers and drove the bottom where the bear had been seen but it was gone by then.
So he knew what to do, or at least where to try, until he crossed the Square and entered the hardware store where McCaslin was junior partner and saw McCaslin’s eyes. Mink thought quietly Hit won’t do no good. He has done spent too much time in the woods with deer and bears and panthers that either are or they ain’t, right quick and now and not no shades between. He won’t know how to believe a lie even if I could tell him one. But he had to try.
“What do you want with two buckshot shells?” McCaslin said.
“A nigger came in this morning and said he seen that bear’s foot in the mud at Blackwater Slough.”
“No,” McCaslin said. “What do you want with buckshot shells?”
“I can pay you soon as I gin my cotton,” Mink said.
“No,” McCaslin said. “I ain’t going to let you have them. There ain’t anything out there at Frenchman’s Bend you need to shoot buckshot at.”
It was not that he was hungry so much, even though he hadn’t eaten since midnight: it was simply that he would have to pass the time some way until tomorrow morning when he would find out whether the mail carrier would take him back to Varner’s store or not. He knew a small dingy back-street eating place owned by the sewing machine agent, Ratliff, who was well known in Frenchman’s Bend,
