Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“All right,” Ratliff said. “So they went up the road, leaving Miz Snopes and the widow wrastling at the cookstove and them two gals standing there now holding a wire rat-trap and a chamber pot, and went up to Major de Spain’s and walked up the private road where that pile of fresh horse manure was and the nigger said Ab stepped in it on deliberate purpose. Maybe the nigger was watching them through the front window. Anyway Ab tracked it right across the front porch and knocked and when the nigger told him to wipe it offen his feet, Ab shoved right past the nigger and the nigger said he wiped the rest of it off right on that ere hundred-dollar rug and stood there hollering ‘Hello. Hello, De Spain’ until Miz de Spain come and looked at the rug and at Ab and told him to please go away. And then De Spain come home at dinner time and I reckon maybe Miz de Spain got in behind him because about middle of the afternoon he rides up to Ab’s house with a nigger holding the rolled-up rug on a mule behind him and Ab setting in a chair against the door jamb and De Spain hollers ‘Why in hell aint you in the field?’ and Ab says, he dont get up or nothing, ‘I figger I’ll start tomorrow. I dont never move and start to work the same day,’ only that aint neither here nor there; I reckon Miz de Spain had done got in behind him good because he just set on the horse a while saying ‘Confound you Snopes, confound you Snopes’ and Ab setting there saying ‘If I had thought that much of a rug I dont know as I would keep it where folks coming in would have to tromp on it.’ ” Still he was not laughing. He just se in the buckboard, easy and relaxed, with his shrewd intelligent eyes in his smooth brown face, well-shaved and clean in his perfectly clean faded shirt, his voice pleasant and drawling and anecdotal, while Varner’s suffused swollen face glared down at him.

“So after a while Ab hollers back into the house and one of them strapping gals comes out and Ab says, ‘Take that ere rug and wash it.’ And so next morning the nigger found the rolled-up rug throwed onto the front porch against the door and there was some more tracks across the porch too only it was just mud this time and it was said how when Miz de Spain unrolled the rug this time it must have been hotter for De Spain than before even—the nigger said it looked like they had used brickbats instead of soap on it—because he was at Ab’s house before breakfast even, in the lot where Ab and Flem was hitching up to go to the field sho enough, setting on the mare mad as a hornet and cussing a blue streak, not at Ab exactly but just sort of at all rugs and all horse manure in general and Ab not saying nothing, just buckling hames and choke strops until at last De Spain says how the rug cost him a hundred dollars in France and he is going to charge Ab twenty bushels of corn for it against his crop that Ab aint even planted yet. And so De Spain went back home. And maybe he felt it was all neither here nor there now. Maybe he felt that long as he had done something about it Miz de Spain would ease up on him and maybe come gathering time he would a even forgot about that twenty bushels of corn. Only that never suited Ab. So here, it’s the next evening I reckon, and Major laying with his shoes off in the barrel-stave hammock in his yard and here comes the bailiff hemming and hawing and finally gets it out how Ab has done sued him—”

“Hell fire,” Varner murmured. “Hell fire.”

“Sho,” Ratliff said. “That’s just about what De Spain hisself said when he finally got it into his mind that it was so. So it come Sat-dy and the wagon druv up to the store and Ab got out in that preacher’s hat and coat and tromps up to the table on that clubfoot where Uncle Buck McCaslin said Colonel John Sartoris hisself shot Ab for trying to steal his clay-bank riding stallion during the war, and the Judge said, ‘I done reviewed your suit, Mr Snopes, but I aint been able to find nothing nowhere in the law bearing on rugs, let alone horse manure. But I’m going to accept it because twenty bushels is too much for you to have to pay because a man as busy as you seem to stay aint going to have time to make twenty bushels of corn. So I am going to charge you ten bushels of corn for ruining that rug.’ ”

“And so he burnt it,” Varner said. “Well well well.”