Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“But look here!” Varner said. Now he was shouting; he didn’t care. Then he stopped shouting. He stopped shouting because he stopped speaking because there was nothing else to say, though it was going through his mind fast enough: Hell fire. Hell fire. Hell fire. I dont dare say Leave here, and I aint got anywhere to say Go there. I dont even dare to have him arrested for barn-burning for fear he’ll set my barn a-fire. The other had begun to turn back to the fence when Varner spoke. Now he stood half-turned, looking up at Varner not courteously and not exactly patiently, but just waiting. “All right,” Varner said. “We can discuss the house. Because we’ll get along all right. We’ll get along. Anything that comes up, all you got to do is come down to the store. No, you dont even need to do that: just send me word and I’ll ride right up here as quick as I can get here. You understand? Anything, just anything you dont like—”

“I can get along with anybody,” the other said. “I been getting along with fifteen or twenty different landlords since I started farming. When I cant get along with them, I leave. That all you wanted?”

All, Varner thought. All. He rode back across the yard, the littered grassless desolation scarred with the ashes and charred stick-ends and blackened bricks where pots for washing clothes and scalding hogs had sat. I just wish I never had to have but just the little I do want now, he thought. He had been hearing the well-pulley again. This time it did not cease when he passed, the two broad faces, the one motionless, the other pumping up and down with metronome-like regularity to the wheel’s not-quite-musical complaint, turning slowly again as though riveted and synchronised to one another by a mechanical arm as he went on beyond the house and into the imperceptible lane which led to the broken gate which he knew would still be lying there in the weeds when he saw it next. He still had the contract in his pocket, which he had written out with that steady and deliberate satisfaction which, it now seemed to him, must have occurred in another time, or more likely, to another person altogether. It was still unsigned. I could put a fire-clause in it, he thought. But he did not even check the horse. Sho, he thought. And then I could use it to start shingling the new barn. So he went on. It was late, and he eased the horse into a rack which it would be able to hold nearly all the way home, with a little breathin on the hills, and he was travelling at a fair gait when he saw suddenly, leaning against a tree beside the road, the man whose face he had seen in the window of the house. One moment the road had been empty, the next moment the man stood there beside it, at the edge of a small copse—the same cloth cap, the same rhythmically chewing jaw materialised apparently out of nothing and almost abreast of the horse, with an air of the complete and purely accidental which Varner was to remember and speculate about only later. He had almost passed the other before he pulled the horse up. He did not shout now and now his big face was merely bland and extremely alert. “Howdy,” he said. “You’re Flem, aint you? I’m Varner.”

“That so?” the other said. He spat. He had a broad flat face. His eyes were the color of stagnant water. He was soft in appearance like Varner himself, though a head shorter, in a soiled white shirt and cheap gray trousers.

“I was hoping to see you,” Varner said. “I hear your father has had a little trouble once or twice with landlords. Trouble that might have been serious.” The other chewed. “Maybe they never treated him right; I dont know about that and I dont care. What I’m talking about is a mistake, any mistake, can be straightened out so that a man can still stay friends with the fellow he aint satisfied with. Dont you agree to that?” The other chewed steadily. His face was as blank as a pan of uncooked dough. “So he wont have to feel that the only thing that can prove his rights is something that will make him have to pick up and leave the country next day,” Varner said. “So that there wont come a time some day when he will look around and find out he has run out of new country to move to.” Varner ceased. He waited so long this time that the other finally spoke, though Varner was never certain whether this was the reason or not:

“There’s a right smart of country.”