Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“And Mink aint, not to mention after that law verdict Will Varner put on him this morning,” the other said fretfully. “And Lump. If anything, Lump is going to be put out considerable with what after all wasn’t a whole heap of your business,” he told Ratliff. “And Flem aint in town. So that leaves me and Eck here. Unless Brother Whitfield would like to help us out for moral reasons. After all, what reflects on one, reflects on all the members of a flock.”

“But he dont,” Ratliff said. “He cant. Come to think of it, I’ve heard of this before myself. It’s got to be done by the fellow’s own blood kin, or it wont work.” The little bright quick eyes went constantly between his face and the minister’s.

“You never said nothing about that,” he said.

“I just told you what I know happened,” Whitfield said. “I dont know how they got the cow.”

“But sixteen-eighty,” I. O. said. “Hell fire.” Ratliff watched him—the eyes which were much shrewder than they appeared—not intelligent; he revised that: shrewd. Now he even looked at his cousin or nephew for the first time. “So it’s me and you, Eck.” And the cousin or nephew spoke for the first time.

“You mean we got to buy it?”

“Yes,” I. O. said. “You sholy wont refuse a sacrifice for the name you bear, will you?”

“All right,” Eck said. “If we got to.” From beneath the leather apron he produced a tremendous leather purse and opened it and held it in one grimed fist as a child holds the paper sack which it is about to inflate with its breath. “How much?”

“I’m a single man, unfortunately,” I. O. said. “But you got three children—”

“Four,” Eck said. “One coming.”

“Four. So I reckon the only way to figure it is to divide it according to who will get the most benefits from curing him. You got yourself and four children to consider. That will be five to one. So that will be I pay the one-eighty and Eck pays the fifteen because five goes into fifteen three times and three times five is fifteen dollars. And Eck can have the hide and the rest of the beef.”

“But a beef and hide aint worth fifteen dollars,” Eck said. “And even if it was, I dont want it. I dont want fifteen dollars worth of beef.”

“It aint the beef and the hide. That’s just a circumstance. It’s the moral value we are going to get out of it.”

“How do I need fifteen dollars worth of moral value when all you need is a dollar and eighty cents?”

“The Snopes name. Cant you understand that? That aint never been aspersed yet by no living man. That’s got to be kept pure as a marble monument for your children to grow up under.”

“But I still dont see why I got to pay fifteen dollars, when all you got to pay is—”

“Because you got four children. And you make five. And five times three is fifteen.”

“I aint got but three yet,” Eck said.

“Aint that just what I said? five times three? If that other one was already here, it would make four, and five times four is twenty dollars, and then I wouldn’t have to pay anything.”

“Except that somebody would owe Eck three dollars and twenty cents change,” Ratliff said.

“What?” I. O. said. But he immediately turned back to his cousin or nephew. “And you got the meat and the hide,” he said. “Cant you even try to keep from forgetting that?”

CHAPTER TWO1

The woman Houston married was not beautiful. She had neither wit nor money. An orphan, a plain girl, almost homely and not even very young (she was twenty-four) she came to him out of the home of the remote kinswoman who had raised her, with the domestic skill of her country heritage and blood and training and a small trunk of neat, plain, dove-colored clothes and the hand-stitched sheets and towels and table-linen which she had made herself and an infinite capacity for constancy and devotion, and no more. And they were married and six months later she died and he grieved for her for four years in black, savage, indomitable fidelity, and that was all.

They had known one another all their lives. They were both only children, born of the same kind of people, on farms not three miles apart. They belonged to the same country congregation and attended the same one-room country school, where, although five years his junior, she was already one class ahead of him when he entered and, although he failed twice during the two years he attended it, she was still one class ahead of him when he quit, vanished, not only from his father’s house but from the country too, fleeing even at sixteen the immemorial trap, and was gone for thirteen years and then as suddenly returned, knowing (and perhaps even cursing himself) on the instant he knew he was going to return, that she would still be there and unmarried; and she was.