“Me and Homer ain’t,” Solon said. “We was here.” This time him and Homer didn’t set on the cuts. They squatted on their heels. Then I seen that Homer was whittling on a stick. I hadn’t noticed it before. “I make it two hours and a little over,” Solon said. “More or less.”
Pap was still about half stooped over, holding the ax. “It’s nigher one,” he said. “But call it two for the sake of the argument. What about it?”
“What argument?” Homer said.
“All right,” pap said. “Two hours then. What about it?”
“Which is three man-hour units a hour, multiplied by two hours,” Solon said. “Or a total of six work units.” When the WPA first come to Yoknapatawpha County and started to giving out jobs and grub and mattresses, Solon went in to Jefferson to get on it. He would drive his school-bus truck the twenty-two miles in to town every morning and come back that night. He done that for almost a week before he found out he would not only have to sign his farm off into somebody else’s name, he couldn’t even own and run the school bus that he had built himself. So he come back that night and never went back no more, and since then hadn’t nobody better mention WPA to him unless they aimed to fight, too, though every now and then he would turn up with something all figured down into work units like he done now. “Six units short.”
“Four of which you and Homer could have already worked out while you was setting here waiting on me,” pap said.
“Except that we didn’t!” Solon said. “We promised Whitfield two units of twelve three-unit hours toward getting some new shingles on the church roof. We been here ever since sunup, waiting for the third unit to show up, so we could start. You don’t seem to kept up with these modern ideas about work that’s been flooding and uplifting the country in the last few years.”
“What modren ideas?” pap said. “I didn’t know there was but one idea about work until it is done, it ain’t done, and when it is done, it is.”
Homer made another long, steady whittle on the stick. His knife was sharp as a razor.
Solon taken out his snuffbox and filled the top and tilted the snuff into his lip and offered the box to Homer, and Homer shaken his head, and Solon put the top back on the box and put the box back into his pocket.
“So,” pap said, “jest because I had to wait two hours for a old seventy-year man to get back from fox hunting that never had no more business setting out in the woods all night than he would a had setting all night in a highway juke joint, we all three have got to come back here tomorrow to finish them two hours that you and Homer…”
“I ain’t,” Solon said. “I don’t know about Homer. I promised Whitfield one day. I was here at sunup to start it. When the sun goes down, I will consider I have done finished it.”
“I see,” pap said. “I see. It’s me that’s got to come back. By myself. I got to break into a full morning to make up them two hours that you and Homer spent resting. I got to spend two hours of the next day making up for the two hours of the day before that you and Homer never even worked.”
“It’s going to more than jest break into a morning,” Solon said. “It’s going to wreck it. There’s six units left over. Six one-man-hour units. Maybe you can work twice as fast as me and Homer put together and finish them in four hours, but I don’t believe you can work three times as fast and finish in two.”
Pap was standing up now. He was breathing hard. We could hear him. “So,” he said. “So.” He swung the ax and druv the blade into one of the cuts and snatched it up onto its flat end, ready to split. “So I’m to be penalized a half a day of my own time, from my own work that’s waiting for me at home right this minute, to do six hours more work than the work you fellers lacked two hours of even doing atall, purely and simply because I am jest a average hard-working farmer trying to do the best he can, instead of a durn froe-owning millionaire named Quick or Bookwright.”
They went to work then, splitting the cuts into bolts and riving the bolts into shingles for Tull and Snopes and the others that had promised for tomorrow to start nailing onto the church roof when they finished pulling the old shingles off. They set flat on the ground in a kind of circle, with their legs spraddled out on either side of the propped-up bolt, Solon and Homer working light and easy and steady as two clocks ticking, but pap making every lick of hisn like he was killing a moccasin. If he had jest swung the maul half as fast as he swung it hard, he would have rove as many shingles as Solon and Homer together, swinging the maul up over his head and holding it there for what looked like a whole minute sometimes and then swinging it down onto the blade of the froe, and not only a shingle flying off every lick but the froe going on into the ground clean up to the helve eye, and pap setting there wrenching at it slow and steady and hard, like he jest wished it would try to hang on a root or a rock and stay there.
“Here, here,” Solon said. “If you don’t watch out you won’t have nothing to do neither during them six extra units tomorrow morning but rest.”
Pap never even looked up. “Get out of the way,” he said.
And Solon done it. If he hadn’t moved the water bucket, pap would have split it, too, right on top of the bolt, and this time the whole shingle went whirling past Solon’s shin jest like a scythe blade.
“What you ought to do is to hire somebody to work out them extra overtime units,” Solon said.
“With what?” Pap said. “I ain’t had no WPA experience in dickering over labor. Get out of the way.”
But Solon had already moved this time. Pap would have had to change his whole position or else made this one curve.
So this one missed Solon, too, and pap set there wrenching the froe, slow and hard and steady, back out of the ground.
“Maybe there’s something else besides cash you might be able to trade with,” Solon said. “You might use that dog.”
That was when pap actually stopped. I didn’t know it myself then either, but I found it out a good long time before Solon did. Pap set there with the maul up over his head and the blade of the froe set against the block for the next lick, looking up at Solon. “The dog?” he said.
It was a kind of mixed hound, with a little bird dog and some collie and maybe a considerable of almost anything else, but it would ease through the woods without no more noise than a hant and pick up a squirrel’s trail on the ground and bark jest once, unless it knowed you was where you could see it, and then tiptoe that trail out jest like a man and never make another sound until it treed, and only then when it knowed you hadn’t kept in sight of it. It belonged to pap and Vernon Tull together. Will Varner give it to Tull as a puppy, and pap raised it for a half interest; me and him trained it and it slept in my bed with me until it got so big maw finally run it out of the house, and for the last six months Solon had been trying to buy it. Him and Tull had agreed on two dollars for Tull’s half of it, but Solon and pap was still six dollars apart on ourn, because pap said it was worth ten dollars of anybody’s money and if Tull wasn’t going to collect his full half of that, he was going to collect it for him.
“So that’s it,” pap said. “Them things wasn’t work units atall. They was dog units.”
“Jest a suggestion,” Solon said. “Jest a friendly offer to keep them runaway shingles from breaking up your private business for six hours tomorrow morning. You sell me your half of that trick overgrown fyce and I’ll finish these shingles for you.”
“Naturally including them six extra units of one dollars,” pap said.
“No, no,” Solon said. “I’ll pay you the same two dollars for your half of that dog that me and Tull agreed on for his half of it. You meet me here tomorrow morning with the dog and you can go on back home or wherever them urgent private affairs are located, and forget about that church roof.”
For about ten seconds more, pap set there with the maul up over his head, looking at Solon. Then for about three seconds he wasn’t looking at Solon or at nothing else. Then he was looking at Solon again. It was jest exactly like after about two and nine-tenths seconds he found out he wasn’t looking at Solon, so he looked back at him as quick as he could.
“Hah,” he said. Then he began to laugh. It was laughing all right, because his mouth was open and that’s what it sounded like. But it never went no further back than his teeth and it never come nowhere near reaching as high up as his eyes.
And he never said “Look out” this time neither. He jest shifted fast on his hips and swung the maul down, the froe done already druv through the bolt and into the ground while the shingle was still whirling off to slap Solon across the shin.
Then they went back at it again. Up to this time I could tell pap’s licks from Solon’s and Homer’s, even with my back turned, not because they was louder or steadier, because Solon and Homer worked steady, too, and the
