“Don’t aim to sell unless I sell the whole place,” Snopes said. “Ain’t in no rush to sell that.”
“Yes?” Suratt said. “What was you asking Eustace Grimm for the whole place?”
“Ain’t asked him nothing yet. Just listened to him.”
“Well, what would you ask me, say?”
“Three thousand,” Snopes said.
“Three which?” Suratt said. He laughed, slapping his leg. He laughed for some time. “If you ain’t a sight. Three thousand.” They drove on. Grimm had reached Mrs. Littlejohn’s gate. Suratt quit laughing. “Well, I hope you get it. If Eustace can’t quite meet that, I might could find you a buyer at three hundred, if you get in a tight to sell.”
“Ain’t in no rush to sell,” Snopes said. “I’ll get out here.” Grimm had paused at the gate. He was looking back at them from beneath his hat brim, with a gaze at once attentive and veiled.
That afternoon Suratt, Vernon and Henry made Snopes three joint notes for one thousand dollars each. Vernon was good for his. Suratt gave a lien on his half of the restaurant which he and his brother-in-law owned in Jefferson. Henry gave a second mortgage on his farm and a chattel mortgage on his stock and fixtures, including a new stove which his wife had bought with her weaving money, and a mile of barbed-wire fence.
They reached their new property just before sundown. When they arrived a wagon, the mules still—or already—in the traces, stood on the lawn, and then Eustace Grimm came around the corner of the house and stood there, watching them. Henry ordered him off the place. He got into the wagon and they began to dig at once, though it was still light. They dug for some little time before they found that Grimm had not yet departed. He was sitting in the wagon in the road, watching them across the fence, until Henry rushed at him with his shovel. Then he drove on.
Vernon and Suratt had stopped also. Vernon watched Grimm’s back as he rattled on down the road in the slow wagon. “Ain’t he some kin to them Snopeses?” Vernon said. “A in-law or something?”
“What?” Suratt said. They watched the wagon disappear in the dusk. “I didn’t know that.”
“Come on,” Vernon said. “Henry’s getting ahead of us.” They began to dig again. It was dark soon, but they could still hear one another.
They dug steadily for two nights, two brief summer darks broken by the daylight intervals of fitful sleep on the bare floor of their house, where even to the ground floor the sunlight reached in patchy splashes at noon. In the sad light of the third dawn Suratt stopped and straightened his back. Twenty feet away, Henry, in his pit, moved up and down with the regularity of an automaton. He was waist-deep, as though he were digging himself tirelessly into that earth whose born thrall he was; as though he had been severed at the waist, the dead torso laboring on in measured stoop and recover, not knowing that it was dead. They had completely turned under the entire surface of the garden, and standing in the dark fresh loam, his muscles flinching and jerking with fatigue, Suratt watched Henry; and then he found that Vernon was watching him quietly in turn. Suratt laid his shovel carefully down and went to where Vernon stood. They stood looking at each other while the dawn grayed upon their gaunt faces. When they spoke their voices were quiet.
“You looked close at that money of yours yet?” Suratt said.
Vernon didn’t answer at once. They watched Henry as he rose and fell behind his pick. “I don’t reckon I dared to,” Vernon said. He laid his tool carefully on the earth also, and together he and Suratt turned and went to the house. It was still dark in the house, so they lit the lantern and took the two sacks from the hiding place in a chimney and set the lantern on the floor.
“I reckon we’d ought to thought it wouldn’t no cloth sack—” Suratt said.
“Sho,” Vernon said. “I reckon you can say that and leave off about the sack.”
They squatted, the lantern between them, opening the sacks. “Bet you a dollar I beat you,” Suratt said.
“All right,” Vernon said. They laid two coins aside and examined the others, one by one. Then they looked at each other. “1901,” Vernon said. “What you got?”
“1896,” Suratt said. “I beat you.”
“Yes,” Vernon said. “You beat me.” Suratt took up the wager and they hid the money again and blew the lantern out. It was lighter now, and they could see Henry quite well as he worked in his thigh-deep trench. Soon the sun; already three buzzards soared in it high against the yellow blue.
Henry did not look up at them when they reached him. “Henry,” Suratt said. Henry did not pause. “When was your oldest dollar minted, Henry?” Suratt said. Henry did not falter. Suratt came nearer and touched his shoulder. “Henry,” he said.
Henry whirled, raising the shovel, the blade turned edgewise, glinting a thin line of steel-colored dawn such as an ax would have.
“Git outen my hole,” he said. “Git outen hit.”
The Hound
To Cotton the shot was the loudest thing he had ever heard in his life. It was too loud to be heard all at once. It continued to build up about the thicket, the dim, faint road, long after the hammerlike blow of the ten-gage shotgun had shocked into his shoulder and long after the smoke of the black powder with which it was charged had dissolved, and after the maddened horse had whirled twice and then turned galloping, diminishing, the empty stirrups clashing against the empty saddle.
It made too much noise. It was outrageous, unbelievable—a gun which he had owned for twenty years. It stunned him with amazed outrage, seeming to press him down into the thicket, so that when he could make the second shot, it was too late and the hound too was gone.
Then he wanted to run. He had expected that. He had coached himself the night before. “Right after it you’ll want to run,” he told himself. “But you can’t run. You got to finish it. You got to clean it up. It will be hard, but you got to do it. You got to set there in the bushes and shut your eyes and count slow until you can make to finish it.”
He did that. He laid the gun down and sat where he had lain behind the log. His eyes were closed. He counted slowly, until he had stopped shaking and until the sound of the gun and the echo of the galloping horse had died out of his ears. He had chosen his place well. It was a quiet road, little used, marked not once in three months save by that departed horse; a short cut between the house where the owner of the horse lived and Varner’s store; a quiet, fading, grass-grown trace along the edge of the river bottom, empty save for the two of them, the one squatting in the bushes, the other lying on his face in the road.
Cotton was a bachelor. He lived in a chinked log cabin floored with clay on the edge of the bottom, four miles away. It was dusk when he reached home. In the well-house at the back he drew water and washed his shoes. They were not muddier than usual, and he did not wear them save in severe weather, but he washed them carefully. Then he cleaned the shotgun and washed it too, barrel and stock; why, he could not have said, since he had never heard of finger prints, and immediately afterward he picked up the gun again and carried it into the house and put it away. He kept firewood, a handful of charred pine knots, in the chimney corner. He built a fire on the clay hearth and cooked his supper and ate and went to bed. He slept on a quilt pallet on the floor; he went to bed by barring the door and removing his overalls and lying down. It was dark after the fire burned out; he lay in the darkness. He thought about nothing at all save that he did not expect to sleep. He felt no triumph, vindication, nothing. He just lay there, thinking about nothing at all, even when he began to hear the dog. Usually at night he would hear dogs, single dogs ranging alone in the bottom, or coon- or cat-hunting packs. Having nothing else to do, his life, his heredity, and his heritage centered within a five-mile radius of Varner’s store. He knew almost any dog he would hear by its voice, as he knew almost any man he would hear by his voice. He knew this dog’s voice. It and the galloping horse with the flapping stirrups and the owner of the horse had been inseparable: where he saw one of them, the other two woul
d not be far away—a lean, rangy brute that charged savagely at anyone who approached its master’s house, with something of the master’s certitude and overbearance; and to-day was not the first time he had tried to kill it, though only now did he know why he had not gone through with it. “I never knowed my own luck,” he said to himself, lying on the pallet. “I never knowed. If I had went ahead and killed it, killed the dog.…”
He was still not triumphant. It was too soon yet to be proud, vindicated. It was too soon. It had to do with death. He did not believe that a man could pick up and move that irrevocable distance at a moment’s notice. He had completely forgotten about the body. So he lay with his gaunt, underfed body empty with waiting, thinking of nothing at all, listening to the dog. The cries came at measured intervals, timbrous, sourceless, with the sad, peaceful, abject quality of a single hound in the darkness, when suddenly he found himself sitting bolt upright on the pallet.
“Nigger talk,” he said. He had heard (he had never known a negro himself, because of the antipathy, the economic jealousy, between his kind and negroes) how negroes claimed that a dog would howl at the recent grave of its master. “Hit’s nigger talk,” he said all the time he was putting on his overalls and his recently cleaned shoes. He opened the door. From the dark river bottom below the hill on which the cabin sat the howling of the dog came, bell-like and mournful. From a nail just inside the door he took down a coiled plowline and descended the slope.
Against the dark wall of the jungle fireflies winked and drifted; from beyond the black wall came the booming and grunting of frogs. When he entered the timber he could not see his own hand. The footing was treacherous with slime and creepers and bramble. They possessed the perversity of inanimate things, seeming to spring out of the darkness and clutch him with spiky tentacles. From the musing impenetrability ahead the voice of the hound came steadily. He followed the sound, muddy again; the air was chill, yet he was sweating. He was quite near the sound. The hound ceased. He plunged forward, his teeth drying under his dry lip, his hands clawed and blind, toward the ceased sound, the faint phosphorescent glare of the dog’s eyes. The eyes vanished. He stopped, panting, stooped, the plowline in his hand, looking for the eyes. He cursed the dog, his voice a dry whisper. He could hear silence but nothing else.
He crawled on hands and knees, telling where he was by the shape of the trees on the sky. After a time, the brambles raking and slashing at his face, he found a shallow ditch. It was rank with rotted leaves; he waded ankle-deep in the pitch darkness, in something not earth and not water, his elbow crooked before his face. He stumbled upon something; an object with a slack feel. When he touched it, something gave a choked, infantlike cry, and he started back, hearing the creature scuttle away. “Just a possum,” he said. “Hit was just a possum.”
He wiped his hands on his flanks in order to pick up the shoulders. His flanks were foul with slime. He wiped his hands on his shirt, across his breast, then he picked up the shoulders. He walked backward, dragging it. From time to time he would stop and wipe his hands on his shirt. He stopped beside a tree, a rotting cypress shell, topless, about ten feet tall. He had put the coiled plowline into his bosom. He knotted it about the body and climbed the stump. The top was open, rotted out. He was not a large man, not as large as the body, yet he hauled it up to him hand over hand, bumping and scraping it along the stump, until it lay across the lip like a half-filled meal sack. The knot in the rope had slipped tight. At last he took out his knife and cut the rope and tumbled the body into the hollow stump.
It didn’t fall far. He shoved at it, feeling around it with his hands for the obstruction; he tied the rope about the stub of a limb and held the end of it in his hands and stood on the body and began to jump up and down upon it, whereupon it fled suddenly beneath him and left him dangling on the rope.
He tried to climb the rope, rasping off with his knuckles the rotten fiber, a faint, damp powder of decay like snuff in his nostrils. He heard the stub about which the rope was tied crack and felt it begin to give. He leaped upward from nothing, scrabbling at the rotten wood, and got one hand over the edge. The wood crumbled beneath his fingers; he climbed perpetually without an inch of gain, his mouth cracked upon his teeth, his eyes glaring at the sky.
The wood stopped crumbling. He dangled by his hands, breathing. He drew himself up and straddled the edge. He sat there for a while. Then he climbed down and leaned against the hollow trunk.
When he reached his cabin he was tired, spent. He had never been so tired. He stopped at the door. Fireflies still blew along the dark band of timber, and owls hooted and the frogs still boomed and grunted. “I ain’t never been so tired,” he said, leaning against the house, the wall which he had built log by log. “Like ever thing had got outen hand. Climbing that stump, and the noise that shot made. Like I had got to be somebody else without knowing it, in a place where noise was louder, climbing harder to climb, without knowing it.” He went to bed. He took off the muddy shoes, the overalls, and lay down; it was late then. He could tell by a summer star that came into the square window at two o’clock and after.
Then, as if it had waited for him to get settled and comfortable, the hound began to howl again. Lying in the dark, he heard the first cry come up from the river bottom, mournful, timbrous, profound.
Five men in overalls squatted against the wall of Varner’s store. Cotton made the sixth. He sat on the top step, his back against a gnawed post which supported the wooden awning of the veranda. The seventh man sat in the single splint chair; a fat, slow man in denim trousers and a collarless white shirt, smoking a cob pipe. He was past middle-age. He was sheriff of the county. The man about whom they were talking was named Houston.
“He hadn’t no reason to run off,” one said. “To disappear. To send his horse back home with a empty saddle. He hadn’t no reason. Owning his own land, his house. Making a good crop ever year. He was as well-fixed as ere a man in the county. A bachelor too. He hadn’t no reason to disappear. You can mark it. He never run. I don’t know what; but Houston never run.”
“I don’t know,” a second said. “You can’t tell what a man has got in his mind. Houston might a had reason that we don’t know, for making it look like something had happened to him. For clearing outen the country and leaving it to look like something had happened to him. It’s been done before. Folks before him has had reason to light out for Texas with a changed name.”
Cotton sat a little below their eyes, his face lowered beneath his worn, stained, shabby hat. He was whittling at a stick, a piece of pine board.
“But a fellow can’t disappear without leaving no trace,” a third said. “Can he, Sheriff?”
“Well, I don’t know,” the Sheriff said. He removed the cob pipe and spat neatly across the porch into the dust. “You can’t tell what a man will do when he’s pinched. Except it will be something you never thought of. Never counted on. But if you can find just what pinched him you can pretty well tell what he done.”
“Houston was smart enough to do ere a thing he taken a notion to,” the second said. “If he’d wanted to disappear, I reckon we’d a known about what we know now.”
“And what’s that?” the third said.
“Nothing,” the second said.
“That’s a fact,” the first said. “Houston was a secret man.”
“He wasn’t the only secret man around here,” a fourth said. To Cotton it sounded sudden, since the fourth man had said no word before. He sat against the post, his hat slanted forward so that his face was invisible, believing that he could feel their eyes. He watched the sliver peel slow and smooth from the stick, ahead of his worn knife-blade. “I got to say something,” he told himself.
“He warn’t no smarter than nobody else,” he said. Then he wished he had not spoken. He could see their feet beneath his hat-brim. He trimmed the stick, watching the knife, the steady sliver. “It’s got to trim off smooth,” he told himself. “It don’t dast to break.” He was talking; he could
hear his voice: “Swelling around like he was the biggest man in the county. Setting that ere dog on folks’ stock.” He believed that he could feel their eyes, watching their feet, watching the sliver trim smooth and thin and unhurried beneath the knife blade. Suddenly he thought about the gun, the loud crash, the jarring shock. “Maybe I’ll have to kill them all,” he said to himself—a mild man in worn overalls, with a gaunt face and lack-luster eyes like a sick man, whittling a stick with a thin hand, thinking about killing them. “Not them; just the words, the talk.” But the talk was familiar, the intonation, the gestures; but so was Houston. He had known Houston all his life: that prosperous and overbearing man. “With a dog,” Cotton said, watching the knife return and bite into another sliver. “A dog that et better than me. I work, and eat worse than his dog. If I had been his dog, I would not have … We’re better off without him,” he said, blurted. He could feel their eyes, sober, intent.
“He always did rile Ernest,” the first said.
“He taken advantage of me,” Cotton said, watching the infallible knife. “He taken advantage of ever man he could.”
“He was a overbearing man,” the Sheriff said.
Cotton believed that they were still watching him, hidden behind their detached voices.
“Smart, though,” the third said.
“He wasn’t smart enough to win that suit against Ernest over that hog.”
“That’s so. How much did Ernest get outen that lawing? He ain’t never told, has he?”
Cotton believed that they knew how much he had got from the suit. The hog had come into his lot one October. He penned it up; he tried by inquiry to find the owner. But none claimed it until he had wintered it on his corn. In the spring Houston claimed the hog. They went to court. Houston was awarded the hog, though he was assessed a sum for the wintering of it, and one dollar as pound-fee for a stray. “I reckon that’s Ernest’s business,” the Sheriff said after a time.