Faulkner William - Snopes - The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Nothing to mention,” Ratliff said. “Just what I hear about him. I aint seen him in eight years. There was another boy then, besides Flem. A little one. He would be about ten or twelve now if he was there. He must a been mislaid in one of them movings.”

“Has what you have heard about him since them eight years ago caused you to think he might have changed his habits any?”

“Sho now,” Ratliff said. What dust the three horses raised blew lightly aside on the faint breeze, among the dogfennel and bitter-weed just beginning to bloom in the roadside ditches. “Eight years. And before that it was fifteen more pretty near I never saw him. I growed up next to where he was living. I mean, he lived for about two years on the same place where I growed up. Him and my pap was both renting from Old Man Anse Holland. Ab was a horse-trader then. In fact, I was there the same time the horse-trading give out on him and left him just a farmer. He aint naturally mean. He’s just soured.”

“Soured,” Varner said. He spat. His voice was now sardonic, almost contemptuous: “Jody came in last night, late. I knowed it soon as I saw him. It was exactly like when he was a boy and had done something he knowed I was going to find out about tomorrow and so he would figure he better tell me first himself. ‘I done hired a clerk,’ he says. ‘What for?’ I says. ‘Dont Sam shine your shoes on Sunday no more to suit you?’ and he hollers, ‘I had to! I had to hire him! I had to, I tell you!’ And he went to bed without eating no supper. I dont 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 dont 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 hisself, his own rights and interests. Say the advantages 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 aint 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 aint but two men I know can risk fooling with them folks. And just one of them is named Varner and his front name aint Jody.”

“And who’s the other one?” Varner said.

“That aint been proved yet neither,” Ratliff said pleasantly.

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 ROOM 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 favor, was as unheard of as the presence of a hired white woman in one of their own kitchens. “Well,” one said, “I dont 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 aint 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 main-law, Miss Rosa Millard, that Ab had done went and formed a horse-and mule-partnership with in good faith and honor, not aiming to harm nobody blue or gray 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 hisself 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 double 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 color 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.