Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Beat,” Ratliff said. He did not raise his voice, and he did not speak further than that one word. The other face did not change either: the long, still nose, the fixed grimace, the eyes which partook of the life of neither. After a moment Snopes said:

“Beat?”

“Beat,” Ratliff said.

“Beat,” the other said. If it were not intelligence, Ratliff told himself, it was a good substitute. “Except as it happens, I ain’t—”

“Why?” Ratliff said. “When Caesar’s wife goes up to Will Varner next month to get that ere school job again, and he aint pure as a marble monument, what do you think is going to happen?” The face did not actually alter because the features were in a constant state of flux, having no relation to one another save that the same skull bore them, the same flesh fed them.

“Much obliged,” Snopes said. “What do you figure we better do?”

“We aint going to do nothing,” Ratliff said. “I dont want to teach school.”

“But you’ll help. After all, we was getting along all right until you come into it.”

“No,” Ratliff said harshly. “Not me. But I aim to do this much. I am going to stay here until I see if his folks are doing something about it. About letting them folks hang around that crack and watch, anyhow.”

“Sholy,” Snopes said. “That ere wont do. That’s it. Flesh is weak, and it wants but little here below. Because sin’s in the eye of the beholder; cast the beam outen your neighbors’ eyes and out of sight is out of mind. A man cant have his good name drug in the alleys. The Snopes name has done held its head up too long in this country to have no such reproaches against it like stock-diddling.”

“Not to mention that school,” Ratliff said.

“Sholy. We’ll have a conference. Family conference. We’ll meet at the shop this afternoonv height1D;

When Ratliff reached the shop that afternoon, they were both there—the smith’s apprentice and the schoolteacher, and a third man: the minister of the village church—a farmer and a father; a harsh, stupid, honest, superstitious and upright man, out of no seminary, holder of no degrees, functioning neither within nor without any synod but years ago ordained minister by Will Varner as he decreed his school teachers and commissioned his bailiffs. “It’s all right,” I. O. said when Ratliff entered. “Brother Whitfield has done solved it. Only—”

“I said I knowed of a case before where it worked,” the minister corrected. Then he told them—or the teacher did, that is:

“You take and beef the critter the fellow has done formed the habit with, and cook a piece of it and let him eat it. It’s got to be a authentic piece of the same cow or sheep or whatever it is, and the fellow has got to know that’s what he is eating; he cant be tricked nor forced to eating it, and a substitute wont work. Then he’ll be all right again and wont want to chase nothing but human women. Only—” and now Ratliff noticed it—something in the diffusive face at once speculative and annoyed: “—only Mrs Littlejohn wont let us have the cow. You told me Houston give it to him.”

“No I didn’t,” Ratliff said. “You told me that.”

“But didn’t he?”

“Mrs Littlejohn or Houston or your cousin will be the one to tell you that.”

“Well, no matter. Anyway, she wont. And now we got to buy it from her. And what I cant understand is, she says she dont know how much, but that you do.”

“Oh,” Ratliff said. But now he was not looking at Snopes. He was looking at the minister. “Do you know it will work, Reverend?” he said.

“I know it worked once,” Whitfield said.

“Then you have knowed it to fail.”

“I never knowed it to be tried but that once,” Whitfield said.

“All right,” Ratliff said. He looked at the two others—cousins, nephew and uncle, whatever they were. “It will cost you sixteen dollars and eighty cents.”

“Sixteen dollars and eighty cents?” I. O. said. “Hell fire.” The little quick pale eyes darted from face to face between them. Then he turned to the minister. “Look here. A cow is a heap of different things besides the meat. Yet it’s all that same cow. It’s got to be, because it’s some things that cow never even had when it was born, so what else can it be but the same thing? The horns, the hair. Why couldn’t we take a little of them and make a kind of soup; we could even take a little of the actual living blood so it wouldn’t be no technicality in it—”

“It was the meat, the flesh,” the minister said. “I taken the whole cure to mean that nt only the boy’s mind but his insides too, the seat of passion and sin, can have the proof that the partner of his sin is dead.”

“But sixteen dollars and eighty cents,” I. O. said. He looked at Ratliff. “I dont reckon you aim to put up none of it.”

“No,” Ratliff said.