Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

By midafternoon he had broken the better part of an acre. When he swung the plow at the turn-row he saw the buckboard coming up the lane. It carried two this time, Varner and the constable, Quick, and it was moving at a snail’s pace because, on a lead rope at the rear axle, was his cow. He didn’t hurry; he ran out that furrow too, then unhitched the traces and tied the mule to the fence and only then walked on to where the two men still sat in the buckboard, watching him.

“I paid Houston the eighteen dollars and here’s your cow,” Varner said. “And if ever again I hear of you or anything belonging to you on Jack Houston’s land, I’m going to send you to jail.”

“And seventy-five cents,” he said. “Or maybe them six bits evaporated. That cow’s under a court judgment. I cant accept it until that judgment is satisfied.”

“Lon,” Varner said to the constable in a voice flat and almost gentle, “put that cow in the lot yonder and take that rope off it and get to hell back in this buggy.”

“Lon,” Mink said in a voice just as gentle and just as flat, “if you put that cow in my lot I’ll get my shotgun and kill her.”

Nor did he watch them. He went back to the mule and untied the lines from the fence and hooked uaid e traces and ran another furrow, his back now to the house and the lane, so that not until he swung the mule at the turn-row did he see for a moment the buckboard going back down the lane at that snail’s pace matched to the plodding cow. He plowed steadily on until dark, until his supper of the coarse fatback and cheap molasses and probably weevilly flour which, even after he had eaten it, would still be the property of Will Varner until he, Mink, had ginned and sold the cotton next fall which he had not even planted yet.

An hour later, with a coal-oil lantern to light dimly the slow lift and thrust of the digger, he was back at Houston’s fence. He had not lain down nor even stopped moving, working, since daylight this morning; when daylight came again he would not have slept in twenty-four hours; when the sun did rise on him he was back in his own field with the mule and plow, stopping only for dinner at noon, then back to the field again, plowing again—or so he thought until he waked to find himself lying in the very furrow he had just run, beneath the canted handles of the still-bedded plow, the anchored mule still standing in the traces and the sun just going down.

Then supper again like last night’s meal and this morning’s breakfast too, and carrying the lighted lantern he once more crossed Houston’s pasture toward where he had left the post-hole digger. He didn’t even see Houston sitting on the pile of waiting posts until Houston stood up, the shotgun cradled in his left arm. “Go back.” Houston said. “Dont never come on my land again after sundown. If you’re going to kill yourself, it wont be here. Go back now. Maybe I cant stop you from working out that cow by daylight but I reckon I can after dark.”

But he could stand that too. Because he knew the trick of it. He had learned that the hard way; himself taught that to himself through simple necessity: that a man can bear anything by simply and calmly refusing to accept it, be reconciled to it, give up to it. He could even sleep at night now. It was not so much that he had time to sleep now, as because he now had a kind of peace, freed of hurry and haste. He broke the rest of his rented land now, then opened out the middles while the weather held good, using the bad days on Houston’s fence, marking off one day less which meant fifty cents less toward the recovery of his cow. But with no haste now, no urgency; when spring finally came and the ground warmed for the reception of seed and he saw before him a long hiatus from the fence because of the compulsion of his own crop, he faced it calmly, getting his corn-and cottonseed from Varner’s store and planting his ground, making a better job of sowing than he had ever done before, since all he had to do now was to fill the time until he could get back to the fence and with his own sweat dissolve away another of the half-dollars. Because patience was his pride too: never to be reconciled since by this means he could beat Them; They might be stronger for a moment than he but nobody, no man, no nothing could wait longer than he could wait when nothing else but waiting would do, would work, would serve him.