Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Then Bookwright went on, and he untied the team and drove the buckboard on into Mrs Littlejohn’s lot and unharnessed and carried the harness into the barn. He had not seen it since that afternoon in September either, and something, he did not know what, impelled and moved him; he hung the gear up and went on through the dim high ammoniac tunnel, between the empty stalls, to the last one and looked into it and saw the thick, female, sitting buttocks, the shapeless figure quiet in the gloom, the blasted face turning and looking up at him, and for a fading instant there was something almost like recotion even if there could have been no remembering, in the devastated eyes, and the drooling mouth slacking and emitting a sound, hoarse, abject, not loud. Upon the overalled knees Ratliff saw the battered wooden effigy of a cow such as children receive on Christmas.

He heard the hammer before he reached the shop. The hammer stopped, poised; the dull, open, healthy face looked up at him without either surprise or interrogation, almost without recognition. “Howdy, Eck,” Ratliff said. “Can you pull the old shoes off my team right after dinner and shoe them again? I got a trip to make tonight.”

“All right,” the other said. “Any time you bring them in.”

“All right,” Ratliff said. “That boy of yours. You changed his name lately, aint you?” The other looked at him, the hammer poised. On the anvil the ruby tip of the iron he was shaping faded slowly. “Wall street.”

“Oh,” the other said. “No, sir. It wasn’t changed. He never had no name to speak of until last year. I left him with his grandma after my first wife died, while I was getting settled down; I was just sixteen then. She called him after his grandpa, but he never had no actual name. Then last year after I got settled down and sent for him, I thought maybe he better have a name. I. O. read about that one in the paper. He figured if we named him Wallstreet Panic it might make him get rich like the folks that run that Wallstreet panic.”

“Oh,” Ratliff said. “Sixteen. And one kid wasn’t enough to settle you down. How many did it take?”

“I got three.”

“Two more beside Wallstreet. What—”

“Three more besides Wall,” the other said.

“Oh,” Ratliff said. The other waited a moment. Then he raised the hammer again. But he stopped it and stood looking at the cold iron on the anvil and laid the hammer down and turned back to the forge. “So you had to pay all that twenty dollars,” Ratliff said. The other looked back at him. “For that cow last summer.”

“Yes. And another two bits for that ere toy one.”

“You bought him that too?”

“Yes. I felt sorry for him. I thought maybe any time he would happen to start thinking, that ere toy one would give him something to think about.”

BOOK FOUR

THE PEASANTS

CHAPTER ONE1

A little while before sundown the men lounging about the gallery of the store saw, coming up the road from the south, a covered wagon drawn by mules d followed by a considerable string of obviously alive objects which in the levelling sun resembled vari-sized and -colored tatters torn at random from large billboards—circus posters, say—attached to the rear of the wagon and inherent with its own separate and collective motion, like the tail of a kite.

“What in the hell is that?” one said.

“It’s a circus,” Quick said. They began to rise, watching the wagon. Now they could see that the animals behind the wagon were horses. Two men rode in the wagon.

“Hell fire,” the first man—his name was Freeman—said. “It’s Flem Snopes.” They were all standing when the wagon came up and stopped and Snopes got down and approached the steps. He might have departed only this morning. He wore the same cloth cap, the minute bow tie against the white shirt, the same gray trousers. He mounted the steps.

“Howdy, Flem,” Quick said. The other looked briefly at all of them and none of them, mounting the steps. “Starting you a circus?”

“Gentlemen,” he said. He crossed the gallery; they made way for him. Then they descended the steps and approached the wagon, at the tail of which the horses stood in a restive clump, larger than rabbits and gaudy as parrots and shackled to one another and to the wagon itself with sections of barbed wire. Calico-coated, small-bodied, with delicate legs and pink faces in which their mismatched eyes rolled wild and subdued, they huddled, gaudy motionless and alert, wild as deer, deadly as rattlesnakes, quiet as doves. The men stood at a respectful distance, looking at them. At that moment Jody Varner came through the group, shouldering himself to the front of it.