And he went to bed without eating no supper. I don’t know how he slept; I never listened to see. But this morning he seemed to feel a little better about it. He seemed to feel considerable better about it. ‘He might even be useful,’ he says. ‘I don’t doubt it,’ I says. ‘But there’s a law against it. Besides, why not just tear them down instead? You could even sell the lumber then.’ And he looked at me a while longer. Only he was just waiting for me to stop; he had done figured it all out last night.
‘Take a man like that,’ he says. ‘A man that’s independent about protecting his self, his own rights and interests. Say the advantage of his own rights and interests is another fellow’s advantage and interest too. Say his benefits is the same benefits as the fellow that’s paying some of his kinfolks a salary to protect his business; say it’s a business where now and then — and you know it as well as I do,’ Jody says, ‘ — say benefits is always coming up that the fellow that’s going to get the benefits just as lief not be actively mixed up in himself, why, a fellow that independent — —’ ”
“He could have said ‘dangerous’ with the same amount of breath,” Ratliff said.
“Yes,” Varner said. “Well?”
Ratliff didn’t answer. Instead, he said: “That store ain’t in Jody’s name, is it?” Only he answered this himself, before the other could have spoken: “Sho now. Why did I need to ask that? Besides, it’s just — Flem that Jody’s mixed up with. Long as Jody keeps him, maybe old Ab will — —”
“Out with it,” Varner said. “What do you think about it?”
“You mean what I really think?”
“What in damnation do you think I am talking about?”
“I think the same as you do,” Ratliff said quietly. “That there ain’t but two men I know can risk fooling with them folks. And just one of them is named Varner and his front name ain’t Jody.”
“And who’s the other one?” Varner said.
“That ain’t been proved yet neither,” Ratliff said pleasantly.
2
Besides Varner’s store and cotton gin and the combined grist mill and blacksmith shop which they rented to the actual smith, and the schoolhouse and the church and the perhaps three dozen dwellings within sound of both bells, the village consisted of a livery barn and lot and a contiguous shady though grassless yard in which sat a sprawling rambling edifice partly of sawn boards and partly of logs, unpainted and of two storeys in places and known as Littlejohn’s hotel, where behind a weathered plank nailed to one of the trees and lettered ROOMƧ AND BORD drummers and livestock-traders were fed and lodged.
It had a long veranda lined with chairs. That night after supper, the buckboard and team in the stable, Ratliff was sitting here with five or six other men who had drifted in from the adjacent homes within walking distance.
They would have been there on any other night, but this evening they were gathered even before the sun was completely gone, looking now and then toward the dark front of Varner’s store as people will gather to look quietly at the cold embers of a lynching or at the propped ladder and open window of an elopement, since the presence of a hired white clerk in the store of a man still able to walk and with intellect still sound enough to make money mistakes at least in his own favour, was as unheard of as the presence of a hired white woman in one of their own kitchens. “Well,” one said, “I don’t know nothing about that one Varner hired. But blood’s thick. And a man that’s got kinfolks that stays mad enough all the time to set fire to a man’s barn — —”
“Sho now,” Ratliff said. “Old man Ab ain’t naturally mean. He’s just soured.”
For a moment nobody spoke. They sat or squatted along the veranda, invisible to one another. It was almost full dark, the departed sun a pale greenish stain in the northwestern sky. The whippoorwills had begun and fireflies winked and drifted among the trees beyond the road.
“How soured?” one said after a while.
“Why, just soured,” Ratliff said pleasantly, easily, readily. “There was that business during the War. When he wasn’t bothering nobody, not harming or helping either side, just tending to his own business, which was profit and horses — things which never even heard of such a thing as a political conviction — when here comes somebody that never even owned the horses even and shot him in the heel.
And that soured him. And then that business of Colonel Sartoris’s ma-in-law, Miss Rosa Millard, that Ab had done went and formed a horse- and mule-partnership with in good faith and honour, not aiming to harm nobody blue or grey but just keeping his mind fixed on profit and horses, until Miz Millard had to go and get herself shot by that fellow that called his self Major Grumby, and then Colonel’s boy Bayard and Uncle Buck McCaslin and a nigger caught Ab in the woods and something else happened, tied up to a tree or something and maybe even a doubled bridle rein or maybe even a heated ramrod in it too though that’s just hearsay.
Anyhow, Ab had to withdraw his allegiance to the Sartorises, and I hear tell he skulked for a considerable back in the hills until Colonel Sartoris got busy enough building his railroad for it to be safe to come out. And that soured him some more. But at least he still had horse-trading left to fall back on. Then he run into Pat Stamper. And Pat eliminated him from horse-trading. And so he just went plumb curdled.”
“You mean he locked horns with Pat Stamper and even had the bridle left to take back home?” one said. Because they all knew Stamper. He was a legend, even though still alive, not only in that country but in all North Mississippi and West Tennessee — a heavy man with a stomach and a broad pale expensive Stetson hat and eyes the colour of a new axe blade, who travelled about the country with a wagon carrying camping equipment and played horses against horses as a gambler plays cards against cards, for the pleasure of beating a worthy opponent as much as for gain, assisted by a negro hostler who was an artist as a sculptor is an artist, who could take any piece of horseflesh which still had life in it and retire to whatever closed building or shed was empty and handy and then, with a quality of actual legerdemain, reappear with something which the beast’s own dam would not recognise, let alone its recent owner; the two of them, Stamper and the negro, working in a kind of outrageous rapport like a single intelligence possessing the terrific advantage over common mortals of being able to be in two places at once and directing two separate sets of hands and fingers at the same time.
“He done better than that,” Ratliff said. “He come out exactly even. Because if it was anybody that Stamper beat, it was Miz Snopes. And even she never considered it so. All she was out was just having to make the trip to Jefferson herself to finally get the separator and maybe she knowed all the time that sooner or later she would have to do that. It wasn’t Ab that bought one horse and sold two to Pat Stamper. It was Miz Snopes. Her and Pat just used Ab to trade through.”
Once more for a moment no one spoke. Then the first speaker said: “How did you find all this out? I reckon you was there too.”
“I was,” Ratliff said. “I went with him that day to get the separator. We lived about a mile from them. My pap and Ab were both renting from Old Man Anse Holland then, and I used to hang around Ab’s barn with him. Because I was a fool about a horse too, same as he was. And he wasn’t curdled then. He was married to his first wife then, the one he got from Jefferson, that one day her pa druv up in a wagon and loaded her and the furniture into it and told Ab that if he ever crossed Whiteleaf Bridge again he would shoot him.
They never had no children and I was just turning eight and I would go down to his house almost every morning and stay all day with him, setting on the lot fence with him while the neighbours would come up and look through the fence at whatever it was he had done swapped some more of Old Man Anse’s bob-wire or busted farm tools for this time, and Ab lying to just exactly the right amount about how old it was and how much he give for it.
He was a fool about a horse; he admitted it, but he wasn’t the kind of a fool about a horse Miz Snopes claimed he was that day when we brought Beasley
