Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

But he was all right now. He had actually gained; when he took his rope tomorrow morning and went to get his cow, it wouldn’t be Quick but Houston himself who would say, “Why didn’t you come last night? The eighteenth-and-a-half day was up at dark last night”; it would be Houston himself to whom he would answer:

“It takes a light and a dark both to make a day. Thatere eighteen-and-a-half day is up this morning—providing that delicate nigger of yourn has done finished feeding her.”

He slept. He ate breakfast; sunrise watched him walk without haste up the lane to Houston’s feed lot, the plowline coiled on his arm, to lean his folded arms on the top rail of the fence, the coiled rope loosely dangling, watching the Negro with his pitchfork and Houston also for a minute or two before they saw him. He said:

“Mawnin, Jack. I come by for thatere court-judgment cow if you’ll kindly have your nigger to kindly put this here rope on her if he’ll be so kindly obliging,” then still leaning there while Houston came across the lot and stopped about ten feet away.

“You’re not through yet,” Houston said. “You owe two more days.”

“Well well,” he said, easily and peacefully, almost gently. “I reckon a man with a lot full of paper bulls and heifers, not to mention a half a mile of new pasture fence he got built free for nothing, might get mixed up about a little thing not no more important than jest dollars, especially jest eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents of them. But I jest own one eight-dollar cow, or what I always thought was jest a eight-dollar cow. I aint rich enough not to be able to count up to eighteen seventy-five.”

“I’m not talking about eighteen dollars,” Houston said. “I’m—”

“And seventy-five cents,” Mink said.

“—talking about nineteen dollars. You owe one dollar more.”

He didn’t move; his face didn’t change; he just said: “What one dollar more?”

“The pound fee,” Houston said. “The law says that when anybody has to take up a stray animal and the owner dont claim it before dark that same day, the man that took it up is entitled to a one-dollar pound fee.”

He stood quite still; his hand did not even tighten on the coiled rope. “So that was why you were so quick that day to save Lon the trouble of taking her to his lot,” he said. “To get that extra dollar.”

“Damn the extra dollar,” Houston said. “Damn Quick too. He was welcome to her. I kept her instead to save you having to walk all the way to Quick’s house to get her. Not to mention I have fed her every day, which Quick wouldn’t have done. The digger and shovel and stretchers are in the corner yonder where you left them last night. Any time you want to—”

But he had already turned, already walking, peacefully and steadily, carrying the coiled rope, back down the lane to the road, not back toward his home but in the opposite direction toward Varner’s store four miles away. He walked through the bright sweet young summer morning between the burgeoning woodlands where the dogwood and redbud and wild plum had long since bloomed and gone, beside the planted fields standing strongly with corn and cotton, some of it almost as good as his own small patches (obviously the people who planted these had not had the leisure and peace he had thought he had to sow in); treading peacefully the rife and vernal earth boiling with life—the frantic flash and glint and crying of birds, a rabbit bursting almost beneath his feet, so young and thin as to have but two dimensions, unless the third one could be speed—on to Varner’s store.

The gnawed wood gallery above the gnawed wood steps should be vacant now. The overalled men who after laying-by would squat or stand all day against the front wall or inside the store itself, should be in the field too today, ditching or mending fences or running the first harrows and shovels and cultivators among the stalks. The store was too empty, in fact. He thought If Flem was jest here—because Flem was not there; he, Mink, knew if anyone did that that honeymoon would have to last until they could come back home and tell Frenchman’s Bend that the child they would bring with them hadn’t been born sooner than this past May at the earliest. But even if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else; his cousin’s absence when he was needed was just one more test, harassment, enragement They tried him with, not to see if he would survive it because They had no doubt of that, but simply for the pleasure of watching him have to do something extra there was no reason whatever for him to have to do.