Читать книгу The Hamlet - William Faulkner - Страница 6

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Ratliff, the sewing-machine agent, again approaching the village, with a used music-box and a set of brand-new harrow teeth still fastened together by the factory shipping wire in the dog kennel box in place of the sewing-machine, saw the old white horse dozing on three legs at a fence post and, an instant later, Will Varner himself sitting in the home-made chair against the rise of shaggy lawns and overgrown gardens of the Old Frenchman place.

“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 that’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. “Ain’t 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 ain’t going to wander then.”

“All right, all right,” Varner said. “This here victim of libel and mis-statement then. What do you know about him?”

“Nothing to mention,” Ratliff said. “Just what I hear about him. I ain’t 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 bitterweed 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 ain’t 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. ‘Don’t 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 don’t 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 better about it. ‘He might even be useful,’ he says. ‘I don’t doubt it,’ I says. ‘But there’s a law against it. Besides, why not just tear them down instead? You could even sell the lumber then.’ And he looked at me a while longer. Only he was just waiting for me to stop; he had done figured it all out last night. ‘Take a man like that,’ he says. ‘A man that’s independent about protecting his self, his own rights and interests. Say the advantage of his own rights and interests is another fellow’s advantage and interest too. Say his benefits is the same benefits as the fellow that’s paying some of his kinfolks a salary to protect his business; say it’s a business where now and then—and you know it as well as I do,’ Jody says, ‘—say benefits is always coming up that the fellow that’s going to get the benefits just as lief not be actively mixed up in himself, why, a fellow that independent——’ ”

“He could have said ‘dangerous’ with the same amount of breath,” Ratliff said.

“Yes,” Varner said. “Well?”

Ratliff didn’t answer. Instead, he said: “That store ain’t in Jody’s name, is it?” Only he answered this himself, before the other could have spoken: “Sho now. Why did I need to ask that? Besides, it’s just—Flem that Jody’s mixed up with. Long as Jody keeps him, maybe old Ab will——”

“Out with it,” Varner said. “What do you think about it?”

“You mean what I really think?”

“What in damnation do you think I am talking about?”

“I think the same as you do,” Ratliff said quietly. “That there ain’t but two men I know can risk fooling with them folks. And just one of them is named Varner and his front name ain’t Jody.”

“And who’s the other one?” Varner said.

“That ain’t been proved yet neither,” Ratliff said pleasantly.