Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Much obliged,” Ratliff said. “I ate breakfast late at Bookwright’s. I want to collect a machine note from Ike McCaslin this afternoon and be back here by dark.” He got into the buckboard and turned the team back down the road. Presently they had fallen into their road gait, trotting rapidly on their short legs in the traces though their forward motion was not actually fast, on until they had passed Varner’s house, beyond which the road turned off to McCaslin’s farm and so out of sight from the store. They entered this road galloping, the dust bursting from their shaggy backs in long spurts where the whip slashed them. He had three miles to go. After the first half mile it would be all winding and little-used lane, but he could do it in twenty minutes. And it was only a little after noon, and it had probably been at least nine oclock before Will Varner got his wife away from the Jefferson church-ladies’ auxiliary with which she was affiliated. He made it in nineteen minutes, hurtling and bouncing among the ruts ahead of his spinning dust, and slowed the now-lathered team and swung them into the Jefferson highroad a mile from the village, letting them trot for another half mile, slowing, to cool them out gradually. But there was no sign of the surrey yet, so he went on at a walk until he reached a crest from which he could see the road for some distance ahead, and pulled out of the road into the shade of a tree and stopped. Now he had had no dinner either. But he was not quite hungry, and although after he had put the old man out and turned back toward the village this morning he had had an almost irresistible desire to sleep, that was gone too now. So he sat in the buckboard, lax now, blinking painfully against the glare of noon, while the team (he never used check-reins) nudged the lines slack and grazed over the breast-yoke. People would probably pass and see him there; some might even be going toward the village, where they might tell of seeing him. But he would take care of that when it arose. It was as though he said to himself, Now I got a little while at least when I can let down.

Then he saw the surrey. was already in the road, going at that road-gait which the whole countryside knew, full of rapid little hooves which still did not advance a great deal faster than two big horses could have walked, before anyone in the surrey could have seen him. And he knew that they had already seen and recognised him when, still two hundred yards from it, he pulled up and sat in the buckboard, affable, bland and serene except for his worn face, until Varner stopped the surrey beside him. “Howdy, V.K.,” Varner said.

“Morning,” Ratliff said. He raised his hat to the two women in the back seat. “Mrs Varner. Mrs Snopes.”

“Where you headed?” Varner said. “Town?” Ratliff told no lie; he attempted none, smiling a little, courteous, perhaps even a little deferential.

“I come out to meet you. I want to speak to Flem a minute.” He looked at Snopes for the first time. “I’ll drive you on home,” he said.

“Hah,” Varner said. “You had to come two miles to meet him and then turn around and go two miles back, to talk to him.”

“That’s right,” Ratliff said. He was still looking at Snopes.

“You got better sense than to try to sell Flem Snopes anything,” Varner said. “And you sholy aint fool enough by God to buy anything from him, are you?”

“I dont know,” Ratliff said in that same pleasant and unchanged and impenetrable voice out of his spent and sleepless face, still looking at Snopes. “I used to think I was smart, but now I dont know. I’ll bring you on home,” he said. “You wont be late for dinner.”

“Go on and get out,” Varner said to his son-in-law. “He aint going to tell you till you do.” But Snopes was already moving. He spat outward over the wheel and turned and climbed down over it, backward, broad and deliberate in the soiled light-gray trousers, the white shirt, the plaid cap; the surrey went on. Ratliff cramped the wheel and Snopes got into the buckboard beside him and he turned the buckboard and again the team fell into their tireless and familiar road-gait. But this time Ratliff reined them back until they were walking and held them so while Snopes chewed steadily beside him. They didn’t look at one another again.

“That Old Frenchman place,” Ratliff said. The surrey went on a hundred yards ahead, pacing its own dust, as they themselves were now doing. “What are you going to ask Eustace Grimm for it?” Snopes spat tobacco juice over the moving wheel. He did not chew fast nor did he seem to find it necessary to stop chewing in order to spit or speak either.

“He’s at the store, is he?” he said.

“Aint this the day you told him to come?” Ratliff said. “How much are you going to ask him for?” Snopes told him. Ratliff made a short sound, something like Varner’s habitual ejaculation. “Do you reckon Eustace Grimm can get his hands on that much money?”