“I thought that’s what he wanted to be,” Varner said.
“No,” Labove said. “That was all he could learn in the summer school. I reckon you’ll laugh when you hear this. He says he wants to be Governor.”
“Sho now,” Varner said.
“You’ll laugh, I reckon.”
“No,” Varner said. “I aint laughing. Governor. Well well well. Next time you see him, if he would consider putting off the governor business for a year or two and teach school, tell him to come over to the Bend and see me.”
That was in July. Perhaps Varner did not actually expect Labove to come to see him. But he made no further effort to fill the vacancy, which he certainly could not have forgotten about. Even apart from his obligation as Trustee, he would have a child of his own ready to start to school within another year or so. One afternoon in early September he was lying with his shoes off in the barrel-stave hammock slung between two trees in his yard, when he saw approaching on foot across the yard the man whom he had never seen before but knew at once—a man who was not thin so much as actually gaunt, with straight black hair coarse as a horse’s tail and high Indian cheekbones and quiet pale hard eyes and the long nose of thought but with the slightly curved nostrils of pride and the thin lips of secret and ruthless ambition. It was a forensic face, the face of invincible conviction in the power of words as a principle worth dying for if necessary. A thousand years ago it would have been a monk’s, a militant fanatic who would have turned his uncompromising back upon the world with actual joy and gone to a desert and passed the rest of his days and nights calmly and without an instant’s self-doubt battling, not to save humanity about which he would have cared nothing, for whose sufferings he would have had nothing but contempt, but with his own fierce and unappeasable natural appetites.
“I came to tell you I cant teach for you this year,” he said. “I haven’t got time. I’ve got things fixed now so I can stay at the University the whole year.”
Varner did not rise. “That’s just one year. What about next year?”
“I have arranged about the sawmill too. I am going back to it next summer. Or something else.”
“Sho,” Varner said. “I been thinking about it some myself. Because the school here dont need to open until first of November. You can stay at Oxford until then and play your game. Then you can come and open the school and get it started. You can bring your books here from the University and keep up with the class and on the day you have to play the game again you can go back to Oxford and play it and let them find out whether you have kept up in the books or not or whether you have learned anything or whatever they would need to know. Then you could come back to the school; even a day or two wont matter. I will furnish you a horse that can make the trip in eight hours. It aint but forty miles to Oxford from here. Then when the time comes for the examination in January your pa was telling me about, you can shut up the school here and go back and stay until you are through with them. Then you can close the school here in March and go back for the rest of the year, until the last of next October if you wanted. I dont reckon a fellow that really wanted to would have much trouble keeping up with his class just forty miles away. Well?”
For some time now Varner knew that the other no longer saw him though he had not moved and his eyes were still open. Labove stood quite still, in a perfectly clean white shirt which had been washed so often that it now had about the texture of mosquito netting, in a coat and trousers absolutely clean too and which were not mates and the coat a little too small for him and which Varner knew were the only ones he owned and that he owned them only because he believed, or had been given to understand, that one could not wear overalls to a University classroom. He stood there enveloped in no waking incredulous joy and hope but in that consuming fury, the gaunt body not shaped by the impact of its environment but as though shrunken and leaned by what was within it, like a furnace. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be here the first of November.” He was already turning away.
“Dont you want to know what your pay will be?”
“All right,” Labove said, pausing. Varner told him. He (Varner) had not moved in the hammock, his home-knit socks crossed at the ankles.
“That game,” he said. “Do you like to play it?”
“No,” Labove said.
“I hear it aint much different from actual fighting.”
“Yes,” Labove said, again shortly, paused, courteous and waiting, looking at the lean shrewd shoeless old man prone and profoundly idle in the hammock, who seemed to have laid upon him already the curse of his own invincible conviction of the absolute unimportance of this or any other given moment or succession of them, holding him there and forcing him to spend time thinking about what he had never told anyone and did not intend to talk about since it did not matter now. It began just before the end of the summer term a year ago. He had intended to return home at the end of the term, as he had told his father he would, to help finish the crop. But just before the term ended he found a job. It was practically dropped into his lap. There would be two or three weeks yet before the cotton would be ready to pick and gin and he was already settled where he could stay on until the middle of September at little additional expense. So most of what the work would bring him would be clear profit. He took the job. It was grading and building a football field. He didn’t know then what a football field was and he did not care. To him it was merely an opportunity to earn so much additional money each day and he did not even stop his shovel when he would speculate now and then with cold sardonicism on the sort of game the preparation of ground for which demanded ad deal more care and expense both than the preparing of that same ground to raise a paying crop on; indeed, to have warranted that much time and money for a crop, a man would have had to raise gold at least. So it was still sardonicism and not curiosity when in September and before the field was finished, it began to be used, and he discovered that the young men engaged upon it were not even playing the game but just practising. He would watch them at it. He was probably watching them more closely or at least more often than he was aware and with something in his face, his eyes, which he did not know was there too, because one afternoon one of them (he had already discovered that the game had a paid teacher) said to him, “You think you can do it better, do you? All right. Come here.” That night he sat on the front steps of the coach’s house in the dry dusty September darkness, still saying No quietly and patiently.
“I aint going to borrow money just to play a game on,” he said.
“You wont have to, I tell you!” the coach said. “Your tuition will be paid. You can sleep in my attic and you can feed my horse and cow and milk and build the fires and I will give you your meals. Dont you understand?” It could not have been his face because that was in darkness, and he did not believe it had been in his voice. Yet the coach said, “I see. You dont believe it.”
“No,” he said. “I dont believe anybody will give me all that just for playing a game.”
“Will you try it and see? Will you stay here and do it until somebody comes to you and asks you for
