Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (22 page)

She would set the pail into the corner of the fence and then stand there for a time, motionless, the gray garment falling in rigid folds to her stained tennis shoes, her hands rolled together into a fold of the garment. She just stood there. She did not appear to look at Armstid, to look at anything. She was his wife; the pail she brought contained cold food.

She never stayed long. He never looked up when she came and they never spoke, and after a while she would return to the crazy wagon and get in and drive away. Then the spectators would begin to drift away, mounting their wagons and creaking also supperward, barnward, leaving Henry alone again, spading himself into the waxing twilight with the regularity of a mechanical toy and with something monstrous in his unflagging effort, as if the toy were too light for what it had been set to do, and too tightly wound.

In the long forenoons, squatting with their slow tobacco on the porch of Varner’s store two miles away, or in halted wagons along the quiet roads and lanes, or in the fields or at the cabin doors about the slow, laborious land, they talked about it.

“Still at it, is he?”

“Sho. Still at it.”

“Reckon he’s aiming to kill himself there in that garden.”

“Well, it won’t be no loss to her.”

“It’s a fact. Save her a trip ever’ day, toting him food.”

“I notice she don’t never stay long out there when she comes.”

“She has to get back home to get supper for them chaps of theirn and to take care of the stock.”

“I reckon she won’t be sorry.”

“Sho. It’s a fact.”

“That Flem Snopes. I’ll declare.”

“He’s a sight, sho. Yes, sir. Wouldn’t no other man but him done it.”

“Couldn’t no other man done it. Anybody might a-fooled Henry Armstid. But couldn’t nobody but Flem a-fooled Suratt.”

“That’s a fact, that’s a fact. Sho.”

Suratt was a sewing-machine agent. He traveled the country in a buckboard, to the rear of which was attached a sheet-iron dog kennel painted to resemble a house. It had two painted windows on each side, in each of which a painted woman’s face simpered above a painted sewing machine, and into the kennel a sewing machine neatly fitted.

On successive days and two counties apart, the buckboard and the sturdy mismatched team might be seen tethered in the nearest shade, and Suratt’s affable, ready face and neat, tieless blue shirt one of the squatting group on the porch of a crossroads store. Or—and still squatting—among the women surrounded by laden clotheslines and blackened wash pots at springs and wells, or decorous in a splint chair in cabin dooryards, talking and listening. He had a regular itinerary, selling perhaps three machines a year, and the rest of the time trading in land and livestock, in secondhand farm tools and musical instruments, or whatever came to his hand. He had an affable and impenetrable volubility, a gift for anecdote and gossip. He never forgot names and he knew everyone, man, mule and dog, in fifty miles. He was believed to be well fixed.

His itinerary brought him to Varner’s store every six weeks. One day he arrived two weeks ahead of schedule. While across the county he had bought, for twenty dollars, of a Northerner who was
establishing a ranch to breed native goats, a contract to sell the Northerner a hundred goats which Suratt knew to be owned near Varner’s store, in the Frenchman’s Bend country. Of the four or five men squatting along the porch of the store Suratt made his guarded inquiries, larding them skillfully into his anecdote, and got the information which he wanted. The next morning he drove out to the first goat owner.

“Wish you’d got here yesterday,” the man said. “I done already sold them goats.”

“The devil you have,” Suratt said. “Who to?”

“Flem Snopes.”

“Flem Snopes?”

Snopes was the man who ran Varner’s store. Varner himself—he was a politician, a veterinary, a Methodist lay preacher—was hardly ever seen about the store. Snopes had been running the store for two or three years—a squat man who might have been any age between twenty-five and fifty, with a round full face and dull eyes, who sat all day, between the infrequent customers, in a tilted chair in the door, chewing and whittling and saying no word. All that was known of him was known on hearsay, and that not his own; it was not even known what his exact relation to Varner and the store was, whether clerk, partner or what. He had been sitting in his usual chair, chewing and whittling, while Suratt was getting his information about the goats.

“He come out here last night and bought all I had,” the goat owner said.

“You mean, he come out here after dark?”

“About nine o’clock it was. I reckon he couldn’t leave the store sooner.”

“Sho,” Suratt said. “I reckon not.” The second goat owner lived four miles away. Suratt drove it in thirty-two minutes. “I come out to see if you sold your goats at ten o’clock last night, or was it half-past ten?”

“Why, yes,” the man said. “It was along about midnight when Flem got here. How did you know?”

“I knowed I had the best team,” Suratt said. “That’s how. Good-by.”

“What’s your hurry? I got a couple of shotes I might sell.”

“Sho, now,” Suratt said. “They wouldn’t do me no good. Soon
as they belonged to me they would get elephant-sized overnight, and bust. This here country’s too rich for me.”

He did not call on the other goat owner at all. He returned to Jefferson without passing Varner’s store. Three miles from town, a single goat balanced with somnolent precariousness upon the roof of a barn. Beside the fence a small boy in overalls watched Suratt draw up and stop.

“What did Flem Snopes offer you for that goat, bud?” Suratt said.

“Sir?” the boy said.

Suratt drove on. Three days later Snopes gave Suratt twenty-one dollars for the contract for which Suratt had paid twenty. He put the twenty dollars away in a tobacco sack and held the other dollar in his hand. He chucked it, caught it, the squatting men along the wall watching him. Snopes had sat again, whittling.

“Well, at least I ain’t skunked.” Suratt said. The others guffawed, save Snopes. Suratt looked about at them, bleak, sardonic, humorous too. Two children, a boy and a girl, mounted the steps, carrying a basket. Suratt gave them the dollar. “Here, chillens,” he said. “Here’s something Mr. Snopes sent you.”

It was three years after that when Suratt learned that Snopes had bought the Old Frenchman place from Varner. Suratt knew the place. He knew it better than anyone suspected. Perhaps once a year he drove three or four miles out of his way to pass the place, entering from the back. Why he took that precaution he could not have said; he probably would have believed it was not to be seen doing something by which he had no expectation of gaining anything. Once a year he halted his buckboard before the house and sat in the buckboard to contemplate the austere skeleton somnolent in the summer sunlight, a little sinister, thinking of the generations of men who had dug for gold there, contemplating the inscrutable desolation of cedar and brier and crapemyrtle and calycanthus gone lush and wild, sensing out of the sunny and sinister silence the ancient spent and hopeful lusts, the optimism, the effluvium of the defunct greed and despair, the spent and secret nocturnal sweat left upon the place by men as quiet now as the man who had unwittingly left behind him a monument more enduring than any obituary either carved or cast. “It’s bound to be there, somewhere,” Suratt told himself. “It’s bound to.” Then he would drive
on to Varner’s store two miles away or to Jefferson twelve miles away, having carried away with him something of that ancient air, that old splendor, confusing it though he did with the fleshly gratifications, the wherewith to possess them, in his peasant’s mind. “It’s bound to. Folks wouldn’t keep on digging for it if it wasn’t there somewhere. It wouldn’t be right to keep on letting them. No, sir.”

When he learned that Snopes had bought the place, Suratt was eating dinner in Jefferson in the restaurant which he and his brother-in-law owned. He sat on a backless and friction-smooth stool, his elbows on the friction-smooth counter, eating steak and potatoes. He became motionless, humped forward in the attitude of eating, the laden knife blade arrested halfway to his mouth, his eyes profoundly concentrant. “If Flem Snopes bought that place, he knows something about it that even Will Varner never knowed. Flem Snopes wouldn’t buy a nickel mousetrap withouten he knowed beforehand it would make him back a dime.”

He reached Varner’s store in mid-afternoon. Snopes was sitting in the chair, chewing, whittling minutely at a piece of soft pine. There was about him, his white shirt, his blue denim trousers braced thick and smooth, a profound inertia impervious to haste like that of a cow, to the necessity for haste like an idol. “That’s what makes me so mad about it,” Suratt told himself. “That he can set still and know what I got to work so hard to find out. That I got to work fast to learn it and ain’t got time to work fast because I don’t know if I got time to make a mistake by working fast. And him just setting still.” But when he mounted the steps there was upon his brown, lean face its usual expression—alert, quizzical, pleasant, impenetrable and immediate. He greeted in rotation the men who squatted along the wall.

“Well, boys,” he said, “I hear Flem has done bought himself a farm. You fixing to start a goat ranch of your own, Flem? Or maybe it’s just a home for the folks you trims trading.” Then he said, getting his sober and appreciative laugh while Snopes chewed slowly and trimmed minutely at the stick with the profound impenetrability of an idol or a cow, “Well, if Flem knowed any way to make anything offen that old place, he’d be too durn close-mouthed to tell himself about it.”

The three men crouched in the weeds along the ditch at the foot of the garden. The shaggy slope rose before them in the darkness to the crest where the broken roof and topless chimneys of the house stood sharp against the sky. In one of the windows a single star showed, like a feeble candle set upon the ledge. They lay in the weeds, listening to the sigh and recover of an invisible shovel halfway up the garden slope.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Suratt whispered. “Didn’t I? Is there e’er a man or woman in this country that don’t know Flem Snopes wouldn’t pay a nickel for nothing if he didn’t know all the time he would make a dime back?”

“How do I know it’s Flem?” the second said. His name was Vernon Tull. He was a well-to-do bachelor.

“Ain’t I watched him?” Suratt said. “Ain’t I laid here in these weeds two nights now and watched him come out here and dig? Ain’t I waited until he left, and crawled up there and found every place where he had done filled the hole up again and smoothed the dirt back to hide it?”

“But how do I know it’s Flem?” Vernon said.

“If you knowed, would you believe it was something buried there?” Suratt whispered. The third man was Henry Armstid. He lay between them, glaring up the dark slope; they could feel him trembling like a dog. Now and then he cursed in a dry whisper. He lived on a small mortgaged farm, which he and his wife worked like two men. During one season, having lost one of his mules, he and his wife did the plowing, working day about in the second trace beside the other mule. The land was either poor land or they were poor managers. It made for them less than a bare living, which the wife eked out by weaving by the firelight after dark. She wove fancy objects of colored string saved from packages and of bits of cloth given her by the women in Jefferson, where, in a faded gingham wrapper and sunbonnet and tennis shoes, she peddled the objects from door to door on the market days. They had four children, all under six years of age, the youngest an infant in arms.

They lay there in the weeds, the darkness, hearing the shovel. After a while it ceased. “He’s done found it,” Henry said. He
surged suddenly between them. They grasped his arms.

“Stop!” Suratt whispered. “Stop! Help hold him, Vernon.” They held him until he ceased and lay again between them, rigid, glaring, cursing. “He ain’t found it yet.” Suratt whispered. “He knows it’s there somewhere; he’s done found the paper maybe that tells. But he’s got to hunt for it same as we will. He knows it’s in that ’ere garden, but he’s got to hunt for it same as us. Ain’t we done watched him?” They spoke in hissing whispers, rigid, panting, glaring up the starlit slope.

“How do I know it’s Flem?” Vernon said.

“Just watch, that’s all,” Suratt whispered. They crouched; the shadowy, deliberate motion of the digger mounted the slope. It was the sound made by a lazy man rather than by a cautious one. Suratt gripped Henry. “Watch, now!” he whispered. They breathed with hissing exhalations, in passionate and dying sighs. Then the man came into sight. For a moment he came into relief against the sky upon the crest of the knoll, as though he had paused there for an instant. “There!” Suratt whispered. “Ain’t that Flem Snopes? Do you believe now?”

Vernon drew his breath quietly in like a man preparing to sleep. “It’s a fact,” he said. He spoke quietly, soberly. “It’s Flem.”

“Do you believe now?” Suratt whispered. “Do you? Do you believe now?” Between them, Henry lay cursing in a dry whisper. Beneath Vernon’s and Suratt’s arms his arms felt like wire cables vibrating faintly.

“All we got to do,” Suratt said, “is to find where it’s at tomorrow night, and then get it.”

“Tomorrow night, hell!” Henry said. “Let’s get up there now and find it. That’s what we got to do. Before he—”

They argued with him, violent, sibilant, expostulant. They held him flat on the ground between them, cursing. “We got to find where it is the first time and dig it up,” Suratt said. “We got to get Uncle Dick. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see we got to find it the first time? That we can’t be caught looking?”

“We got to get Uncle Dick,” Vernon said. “Hush, Henry. Hush, now.”

They returned the next night with Uncle Dick. When Vernon and Suratt, carrying the second shovel and the pick and half carrying Uncle Dick between them, climbed up out of the ditch at the
foot of the garden, they could hear Henry already digging. After concealing the buckboard in the branch bottom they had had to run to keep even within hearing of Henry, and so Uncle Dick could not yet stand alone. Yet they released him at once, whereupon he sank to the ground at their feet, from where his invisible breathing rose in reedy gasps, and as one Vernon and Suratt glared into the darkness toward the hushed, furious sound of Henry’s shovel.