There would be a few loungers though not many since this was planting time and even the ones there should have been in the field, which they would realise, already starting in an alarmed surge of guilt when they saw her, though not fast enough.
“Get out of here,” she would say while they were already moving. “I want to talk to Will. — Wait. One of you go to the sawmill and tell Jody I want his automobile and hurry.” And they would say “Yessum Miz Varner,” which she would not hear either, standing over old Will now in his rawhide-bottomed chair. “Get up from there. Flem has finally caught Eula, or says he has. He hasn’t filed the suit yet so you will have time before the word gets all over the county. I dont know what he’s after, but you go in there and stop it. I wont have it. We had enough trouble with Eula twenty years ago. I aint going to have her back in my house worrying me now.”
But he couldn’t do that. It wasn’t that simple. Because men, especially one like old Will Varner, were interested in facts too, especially a man like old Will in a fact like the one he, Flem, had signed and witnessed and folded inside his coat pocket. So he had to go, walk himself into that den and reach his own hand and jerk the unsuspecting beard and then stand while the uproar beat and thundered about his head until it spent itself temporarily to where his voice could be heard: “That’s her signature. If you dont know it, them two witnesses do. All you got to do is help me take that bank away from Manfred de Spain — transfer your stock to my name, take my postdated check if you want, the stock to be yourn again as soon as Manfred de Spain is out, or you to vote the stock yourself if you had druther — and you can have this paper. I’ll even hold the match while you burn it.”
That was all. And here was Ratliff again (oh yes, Jefferson could do without Ratliff, but not I — we — us; not I nor the whole damned tribe of Snopes could do without him), all neat and clean and tieless in his blue shirt, blinking a little at me. “Uncle Billy rid into town in Jody’s car about four oclock this morning and went straight to Flem’s. And Flem aint been to town today. What you reckon is fixing to pop now?” He blinked at me. “What do you reckon it was?”
“What what was?” I said.
“That he taken out there to Miz Varner yesterday that was important enough to have Uncle Billy on the road to town at four oclock this morning?”
“To Mrs Varner?” I said. “He gave it to Will.”
“No no,” Ratliff said. “He never seen Will. I know. I taken him out there. I had a machine to deliver to Miz Ledbetter at Rockyford and he suh-jested would I mind going by Frenchman’s Bend while he spoke to Miz Varner a minute and we did, he was in the house about a minute and come back out and we went on and et dinner with Miz Ledbetter and set up the machine and come on back to town.” He blinked at me. “Jest about a minute. What do you reckon he could a said or handed to Miz Varner in one minute that would put Uncle Billy on the road to Jefferson that soon after midnight?”
EIGHTEEN
V. K. Ratliff
NO NO, NO no, no no. He was wrong. He’s a lawyer, and to a lawyer, if it aint complicated it dont matter whether it works or not because if it aint complicated up enough it aint right and so even if it works, you dont believe it. So it wasn’t that — a paper phonied up on the spur of the moment, that I dont care how many witnesses signed it, a lawyer not nowhere near as smart as Lawyer Stevens would a been willing to pay the client for the fun he would have breaking it wide open.
It wasn’t that. I dont know what it was, coming up to me on the Square that evening and saying, “I hear Miz Ledbetter’s sewing machine come in this morning. When you take it out to her, I’ll make the run out and back with you if you wont mind going by Frenchman’s Bend a minute.” Sho. You never even wondered how he heard about things because when the time come around to wonder how he managed to hear about it, it was already too late because he had done already made his profit by that time. So I says,
“Well, a feller going to Rockyford could go by Frenchman’s Bend. But then, a feller going to Memphis could go by Birmingham too. He wouldn’t have to, but he could.” — You know: jest to hear him dicker. But he fooled me.
“That’s right,” he says. “It’s a good six miles out of your way. Would four bits a mile pay for it?”
“It would more than pay for it,” I says. “To ride up them extra three dollars, me and you wouldn’t get back to town before sunup Wednesday. So I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You buy two cigars, and if you’ll smoke one of them yourself, I’ll carry you by Frenchman’s Bend for one minute jest for your company and conversation.”
“I’ll give them both to you,” he says. So we done that. Oh sho, he beat me out of my half of that little café me and Grover Winbush owned, but who can say jest who lost then? If he hadn’t a got it, Grover might a turned it into a French postcard peepshow too, and then I’d be out there where Grover is now: nightwatchman at that brick yard.
So I druv him by Frenchman’s Bend. And we had the conversation too, provided you can call the monologue you have with Flem Snopes a conversation. But you keep on trying. It’s because you hope to learn. You know silence is valuable because it must be, there’s so little of it. So each time you think Here’s my chance to find out how a expert uses it.
Of course you wont this time and never will the next neither, that’s how come he’s a expert. But you can always hope you will. So we druv on, talking about this and that, mostly this of course, with him stopping chewing ever three or four miles to spit out the window and say “Yep” or “That’s right” or “Sounds like it” until finally — there was Varner’s Crossroads jest over the next rise — he says, “Not the store.
The house,” and I says,
“What? Uncle Billy wont be home now. He’ll be at the store this time of morning.”
“I know it,” he says. “Take this road here.” So we taken that road; we never even seen the store, let alone passed it, on to the house, the gate.
“You said one minute,” I says. “If it’s longer than that, you’ll owe me two more cigars.”
“All right,” he says. And he got out and went on, up the walk and into the house, and I switched off the engine and set there thinking What? What? Miz Varner. Not Uncle Billy: MIZ Varner. That Uncle Billy jest hated him because Flem beat him fair and square, at Uncle Billy’s own figger, out of that Old Frenchman place, while Miz Varner hated him like he was a Holy Roller or even a Baptist because he had not only condoned sin by marrying her daughter after somebody else had knocked her up, he had even made sin pay by getting the start from it that wound him up vice president of a bank. Yet it was Miz Varner he had come all the way out here to see, was willing to pay me three extra dollars for it. (I mean, offered. I know now I could a asked him ten.)
No, not thinking What? What? because what I was thinking was Who, who ought to know about this, trying to think in the little time I would have, since he his-self had volunteered that-ere one minute so one minute it was going to be, jest which who that was. Not me, because there wasn’t no more loose dangling Ratliff-ends he could need; and not Lawyer Stevens and Linda and Eula and that going-off-to-school business that had been the last what you might call Snopes uproar to draw attention on the local scene, because that was ended too now, with Linda at least off at the University over at Oxford even if it wasn’t one of them Virginia or New England colleges Lawyer was panting for. I didn’t count Manfred de Spain because I wasn’t on Manfred de Spain’s side. I wasn’t against him neither; it was jest like Lawyer Stevens his-self would a said: the feller that
