Varner stared at him. Now Varner’s face was not bland. It was just completely still and completely intent. He reached to his shirt pocket and produced a cigar. He neither smoked nor drank himself, being by nature so happily metabolised that, as he might have put it himself, he could not possibly have felt better than he naturally did. But he always carried two or three. “Have a cigar,” he said.
“I dont use them,” the other said.
“Just chew, hah?” Varner said.
“I chew up a nickel now and then until the suption is out of it. But I aint never lit a match to one yet.”
“Sho now,” Varner said. He looked at the cigar; he said quietly: “And I just hope to God you and nobody you know ever will.” He put the cigar back into his pocket. He expelled a loud hiss of breath. “All right,” he said. “Next fall. When he has made his crop.” He had never been certain just when the other had been looking at him and when not, but now he watched the other raise his arm and with his other hand pick something infinitesimal from the sleeve with infinitesimal care. Once more Varner expelled his breath through his nose. This time it was a sigh. “All right,” he said. “Next week then. You’ll give me that long, wont you? But you got to guarantee it.” The other spat.
“Guarantee what?” he said.
Two miles further on dusk overtook him, the shortening twilight of late April, in which the blanched dogwoods stood among the darker trees with spread raised palms like praying nuns; there was the evening star and already the whippoorwills. The horse, travelling supperward, was going well in the evening’s cool, when Varner pulled it to a stop and held it for a full moment. “Hell fire,” he said. “He was standing just exactly where couldn’t nobody see him from the house.”
CHAPTER TWO
1
“Evening, Uncle Will,” he said in his pleasant, courteous, even deferent voice. “I hear you and Jody got a new clerk in the store.” Varner looked at him sharply, the reddish eyebrows beetling a little above the hard little eyes.
“So thatht,s done spread,” he said. “How far you been since yesterday?”
“Seven-eight miles,” Ratliff said.
“Hah,” Varner said. “We been needing a clerk.” That was true. All they needed was someone to come and unlock the store in the morning and lock it again at night—this just to keep stray dogs out, since even tramps, like stray Negroes, did not stay in Frenchman’s Bend after nightfall. In fact, at times Jody Varner himself (Will was never there anyhow) would be absent from the store all day. Customers would enter and serve themselves and each other, putting the price of the articles, which they knew to a penny as well as Jody himself did, into a cigar box inside the circular wire cage which protected the cheese, as though it—the cigar box, the worn bills and thumb- polished coins—were actually baited.
“At least you can get the store swept out every day,” Ratliff said. “Aint everybody can get that included into a fire insurance policy.”
“Hah,” Varner said again. He rose from the chair. He was chewing tobacco. He removed from his mouth the chewed-out wad which resembled a clot of damp hay, and threw it away and wiped his palm on his flank. He approached the fence, where at his direction the blacksmith had contrived a clever passage which (neither the blacksmith nor Varner had ever seen one before or even imagined one) operated exactly like a modern turnstile, by the raising of a chained pin instead of inserting a coin. “Ride my horse on back to the store,” Varner said. “I’ll drive your rig. I want to sit down and ride.”
“We can tie the horse behind the buckboard and both ride in it,” Ratliff said.
“You ride the horse,” Varner said. “That’s close as I want you right now. Sometimes you are a little too smart to suit me.”
“Why, sho, Uncle Will,” Ratliff said. So he cramped the buckboard’s wheel for Varner to get in, and himself mounted the horse. They went on, Ratliff a little behind the buckboard, so that Varner talked to him over his shoulder, not looking back:
“This here fire-fighter—”
“It wasn’t proved,” Ratliff said mildly. “Of course, that’s the trouble. If a fellow’s got to choose between a man that is a murderer and one he just thinks maybe is, he’ll choose the murderer. At least then he will know exactly where he’s at. His attention aint going to wander then.”
“All right, all right,” Varner said. “This here victim of libel and misstatement then. What do you know about him?”
“Nothing to mention,” Ratliff said. “Just what I hear about him. I aint seen him in eight years. There was another boy then, besides Flem. A little one. He would be about ten or twelve now if he was there. He must a been mislaid in one of them movings.”
“Has what you have heard about him since them eight years ago caused you to think he might have changed his habits any?”
“Sho now,” Ratliff said. What dust the three horses raised blew lightly aside on the faint breeze, among the dogfennel and bitter-weed just beginning to bloom in the roadside ditches. “Eight years. And before that it was fifteen more pretty near I never saw him. I growed up next to where he was living. I mean, he lived for about two years on the same place where I growed up. Him and my pap was both renting from Old Man Anse Holland. Ab was a horse-trader then. In fact, I was there the same time the horse-trading give out on him and left him just a farmer. He aint naturally mean. He’s just soured.”
“Soured,” Varner said. He spat. His voice was now sardonic, almost contemptuous: “Jody came in last night, late. I knowed it soon as I saw him. It was exactly like when he was a boy and had done something he knowed I was going to find out about tomorrow and so he would figure he better tell me first himself. ‘I done hired a clerk,’ he says. ‘What for?’ I says. ‘Dont Sam shine your shoes on Sunday no more to suit you?’ and he hollers, ‘I had to! I had to hire him! I had to, I tell you!’ And he went to bed without eating no supper. I dont know how he slept; I never listened to see. But this morning he seemed to feel a little better about it. He seemed to feel considerable
