Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

by Faulkner, William

  “Now, mamma!” Tull said. He rose quickly. But Mrs Tull was still quiet, only quite rigid and breathing hard, until Tull spoke. Then she turned on him, not screaming: shouting; presently the bailiff was banging the table-top with his hand-polished hickory cane and roaring “Order! Order!” while the neat old man, thrust backward in his chair as though about to dodge and trembling with an old man’s palsy, looked on with amazed unbelief.

  “The horse!” Mrs Tull shouted. “We see it for five seconds, while it is climbing into the wagon with us and then out again. Then it’s gone, God dont know where and thank the Lord He dont! And the mules gone with it and the wagon wrecked and you laying there on the bridge with your face full of kindling-wood and bleeding like a hog and dead for all we knew. And he gives us the horse! Dont you hush me! Get on to that wagon, fool that would sit there behind a pair of young mules with the reins tied around his wrist! Get on to that wagon, all of you!”

  “I cant stand no more!” the old Justice cried. “I wont! This court’s adjourned! Adjourned!”

  There was another trial then. It began on the following Monday and most of those same faces watched it too, in the county courthouse in Jefferson when the prisoner entered between two officers and looking hardly larger than a child, in a suit of brand-new overalls, thin, almost frail-looking, the sombre violent face thin in repose and pallid from the eight months in jail, and was arraigned and then plead by the counsel appointed him by the Court—a young man graduated only last June from the State University’s law school and admitted to the Bar, who did what he could and overdid what he could not, zealous and, for all practical purposes and results, ignored, having exhausted all his challenges before the State had made one and in despite of which seeing himself faced by an authenticated jury in almost record time as if the State, the public, all rational mankind, possessed an inexhaustible pool of interchangeable faces and names all cradling one identical conviction and intention, so that his very challenges could have been discharged for him by the janitor who opened the courtroom, by merely counting off the first members of the panel corresponding to that number. And, if the defendant’s counsel had any detachment and objectivity left at all by then, he probably realised soon that it was not his client but himself who was embattled with that jury. Because his client was paying no attention whatever to what was going on. He did not seem to be interested in watching and listening to it as someone else’s trial. He sat where they had placed him, manacled to one of the officers, small, in the new iron-hard board-stiff overalls, the back of his head toward the Bar and what was going on there and his upper body shifting constantly until they realised that he was trying to watch the rear of the room, the doors and who entered them. He had to be spoken to twice before he stood up and plead and continued to stand, his back completely turned to the Court now, his face sombre, thin, curiously urgent and quite calm and with something else in it which was not even just hope but was actual faith, looking not at his wife who sat on the bench just behind him but out into the crowded room, among the ranked and intent faces some of which, most of which, he knew, until the officer he was handcuffed to pulled him down again. And he sat that way through the rest of the brief and record day-and-a-quarter of his trial, the small, neatly-combed, vicious and ironlike incorrigible head turning and craning constantly to see backward past the bulk of the two officers, watching the entrance while his attorney did what he could, talked himself frantic and at last voiceless before the grave impassivity of the jury which resembled a conclave of grown men self-delegated with the necessity (though for a definitely specified and limited time) of listening to prattle of a licensed child. And still the client listened to none of it, watching constantly the rear of the room while toward the end of the first day the faith went out of his face, leaving only the hope, and at the beginning of the second day the hope was gone too and there was only the urgency, the grim and intractable sombreness, while still he watched the door. The State finished in midmorning of the second day. The jury was out twenty minutes and returned with a ballot of murder in the second degree; the prisoner stood again and was sentenced by the Court to be transported to the State Penal Farm and there remain until he died. But he was not listening to that either; he had not only turned his back to the Court to look out into the crowded room, he was speaking himself even before the Judge had ceased, continuing to speak even while the Judge hammered the desk with his gavel and the two officers and three bailiffs converged upon the prisoner as he struggled, flinging them back and for a short time actually successful, staring out into the room. “Flem Snopes!” he said. “Flem Snopes! Is Flem Snopes in this room? Tell that son of a bitch——”

  CHAPTER TWO

  1

  Ratliff stopped the buckboard at Bookwright’s gate. The house was dark, but at once three or four of Bookwright’s dogs came yelling out from beneath it or behind it. Armstid swung his legs stiffly out and prepared to get down. “Wait,” Ratliff said. “I’ll go get him.”

  “I can walk,” Armstid said harshly.

  “Sholy,” Ratliff said. “Besides, them dogs knows me.”

  “They’ll know me, after the first one runs at me once,” Armstid said.

  “Sholy,” Ratliff said. He was already out of the buckboard. “You wait here and hold the team.” Armstid swung his leg back into the buckboard, not invisible even in the moonless August darkness, but on the contrary, because of his faded overalls, quite distinct against the buckboard’s dark upholstery; it was only his features beneath his hatbrim which could not be distinguished. Ratliff handed him the reins and turned past the metal mailbox on its post in the starlight, toward the gate beyond it and the mellow uproar of the dogs. When he was through the gate he could see them—a yelling clump of blackness against the slightly paler earth which broke and spread fanwise before him, braced, yelling, holding him bayed—three black-and-tan hounds whose tan the starlight had transposed to black too so that, not quite invisible but almost and without detail, they might have been the three intact carbons of burned newspaper-sheets standing upright from the earth, yelling at him. He shouted at them. They should have recognised him already by smell. When he shouted, he knew that they already had, because for perhaps a second they hushed, then as he moved forward they retreated before him, keeping the same distance, baying. Then he saw Bookwright, pale too in overalls against the black house. When Bookwright shouted at the hounds, they did hush.

  “Git,” he said. “Shut up and git.” He approached, becoming black in his turn against the paler earth, to where Ratliff waited. “Where’s Henry?” he said.

  “In the buggy,” Ratliff said. He turned back toward the gate.

  “Wait,” Bookwright said. Ratliff stopped. The other came up beside him. They looked at one another, each face invisible to the other. “You aint let him persuade you into this, have you?” Bookwright said. “Between having to remember them five dollars every time he looks at his wife maybe, and that broke leg, and that horse he bought from Flem Snopes with it he aint even seen again, he’s plumb crazy now. Not that he had far to go. You aint just let him persuade you?”

  “I dont think so,” Ratliff said. “I know I aint,” he said. “There’s something there. I’ve always knowed it. Just like Will Varner knows there is something there. If there wasn’t, he wouldn’t never bought it. And he wouldn’t a kept it, selling the balance of it off and still keeping that old house, paying taxes on it when he could a got something for it, setting there in that flour-barrel chair to watch it and claiming he did it because it rested him to set there where somebody had gone to all that work and expense just to build something to sleep and eat and lay with his wife in. And I knowed it for sho when Flem Snopes took it. When he had Will Varner just where he wanted him, and then he sold out to Will by taking that old house and them ten acres that wouldn’t hardly raise goats. And I went with Henry last night. I saw it too. You dont have to come in, if you feel uncertain. I’d rather you wouldn’t.”

  “All right,” B
ookwright said. He moved on. “That’s all I wanted to know.” They returned to the buckboard. Henry moved to the middle of the seat and they got in. “Dont let me crowd your leg,” Bookwright said.

  “There aint anything wrong with my leg,” Armstid said in that harsh voice. “I can walk as far as you or any man any day.”

  “Sholy,” Ratliff said quickly, taking the reins. “Henry’s leg is all right now. You cant even notice it.”

  “Let’s get on,” Bookwright said. “Wont nobody have to walk for a while, if that team can.”

  “It’s shorter through the Bend,” Ratliff said. “But we better not go that way.”

  “Let them see,” Armstid said. “If anybody here is afraid, I dont need no help. I can——”

  “Sholy,” Ratliff said. “If folks sees us, we might have too much help. That’s what we want to dodge.” Armstid hushed. He said no more from then on, sitting between them in an immobility which was almost like a temperature, thinner, as though it had not been the sickness (after being in bed about a month, he had got up one day and broken the leg again; nobody ever knew how, what he had been doing, trying to do, because he never talked about it) but impotence and fury which had wasted him.

  Ratliff asked neither advice nor directions; there was little anybody could have told him about the back roads and lanes of that or any of the other country he travelled. They passed nobody; the dark and sleeping land was empty, the scattered and remote homesteads indicated only by the occasional baying of dogs. The lanes he followed ran pale between the broad spread of fields felt rather than seen, where the corn was beginning to fire and the cotton to bloom, then into tunnels of trees rising and feathered lushly with summer’s full leaf against the sky of August heavy and thick with stars. Then they were in the old lane which for years now had been marked by nothing save the prints of Varner’s old white horse and, for a brief time, by the wheels of the parasol-topped runabout—the old scar almost healed now, where nearly fifty years ago a courier (perhaps a neighbor’s slave flogging a mule taken out of the plow) had galloped with the news of Sumter, where perhaps the barouche had moved, the women swaying and pliant in hooped crinoline beneath parasols, the men in broadcloth riding the good horses at the wheels, talking about it, where the son and perhaps the master himself had ridden into Jefferson with his pistols and his portmanteau and a body-servant on the spare horse behind, talking of regiments and victory; where the Federal patrols had ridden the land peopled by women and Negro slaves about the time of the battle of Jefferson.

  There was nothing to show of that now. There was hardly a road; where the sand darkened into the branch and then rose again, there was no trace left of the bridge. Now the scar ran straight as a plumbline along a shaggy hedgerow of spaced cedars decreed there by the same nameless architect who had planned and built the house for its nameless master, now two and three feet thick, the boughs interlocked and massed now. Ratliff turned in among them. He seemed to know exactly where he was going. But then Bookwright remembered that he had been here last night.

  Armstid didn’t wait for them. Ratliff tied the team hurriedly and they overtook him—a shadow, still faintly visible because of his overalls faded pale with washing, hurrying stiffly on through the undergrowth. The earth yawned black before them, a long gash: a ravine, a ditch. Bookwright remembered that Armstid had been here for more than one night, nevertheless the limping shadow seemed about to hurl itself into the black abyss. “You better help him,” Bookwright said. “He’s going to break——”

  “Hush!” Ratliff hissed. “The garden is just up the hill yonder.”

  “—break that leg again,” Bookwright said, quieter now. “Then we’ll be into it.”

  “He’ll be all right,” Ratliff whispered. “It’s been this way every night. Just dont push him too close. But dont let him get too far ahead. Once last night while we were laying there I had to hold him.” They went on, just behind the figure which moved now in absolute silence and with surprising speed. They were in a ravine massed with honeysuckle and floored with dry sand in which they could hear the terrific laboring of the lame leg. Yet still they could hardly keep up with him. After about two hundred yards Armstid turned to climb up out of the ravine. Ratliff followed him. “Careful now,” he whispered back to Bookwright. “We’re right at it.” But Bookwright was watching Armstid. He wont never make it, he thought. He wont never climb that bank. But the other did it, dragging the stiffened and once-fragile and hence maybe twice-fragile leg at the almost sheer slope, silent and unaided and emanating that trigger-like readiness to repudiate assistance and to deny that he might possibly need it. Then on hands and knees Bookwright was crawling after the others in a path through a mass of man-tall briers and weeds and persimmon shoots, overtaking them where they lay flat at the edge of a vague slope which rose to the shaggy crest on which, among oaks, the shell of the tremendous house stood where it had been decreed too by the imported and nameless architect and its master whose anonymous dust lay with that of his blood and of the progenitors of saxophone players in Harlem honkytonks beneath the weathered and illegible headstones on another knoll four hundred yards away, with its broken roof and topless chimneys and one high rectangle of window through which he could see the stars in the opposite sky. The slope had probably been a rose-garden. None of them knew or cared, just as they, who had seen it, walked past and looked at it perhaps a hundred times, did not know that the fallen pediment in the middle of the slope had once been a sundial. Ratliff reached across Armstid’s body and gripped his arm, then, above the sound of their panting breath, Bookwright heard the steady and unhurried sigh of a shovel and the measured thud of spaded earth somewhere on the slope above them. “There!” Ratliff whispered.

  “I hear somebody digging,” Bookwright whispered. “How do I know it’s Flem Snopes?”

  “Hasn’t Henry been laying here every night since ten days ago, listening to him? Wasn’t I right here last night with Henry myself, listening to him? Didn’t we lay right here until he quit and left and then we crawled up there and found every place where he had dug and then filled the hole back up and smoothed the dirt to hide it?”

  “All right,” Bookwright whispered. “You and Armstid have been watching somebody digging. But how do I know it is Flem Snopes?”

  “All right,” Armstid said, with a cold restrained violence, almost aloud; both of them could feel him trembling where he lay between them, jerking and shaking through his gaunt and wasted body like a leashed dog. “It aint Flem Snopes then. Go on back home.”

  “Hush!” Ratliff hissed. Armstid had turned, looking toward Bookwright. His face was not a foot from Bookwright’s, the features more indistinguishable than ever now.

  “Go on,” he said. “Go on back home.”

  “Hush, Henry!” Ratliff whispered. “He’s going to hear you!” But Armstid had already turned his head, glaring up the dark slope again, shaking and trembling between them, cursing in a dry whisper. “If you knowed it was Flem, would you believe then?” Ratliff whispered across Armstid’s body. Bookwright didn’t answer. He lay there too, with the others, while Armstid’s thin body shook and jerked beside him, listening to the steady and unhurried whisper of the shovel and to Armstid’s dry and furious cursing. Then the sound of the shovel ceased. For a moment nobody moved. Then Armstid said, “He’s done found it!” He surged suddenly and violently between them. Bookwright heard or felt Ratliff grasp him.

  “Stop!” Ratliff whispered. “Stop! Help hold him, Odum!” Bookwright grasped Armstid’s other arm. Between them they held the furious body until Armstid ceased and lay again between them, rigid, glaring, cursing in that dry whisper. His arms felt no larger than sticks; the strength in them was unbelievable. “He aint found it yet!” Ratliff whispered at him. “He just knows it’s there somewhere; maybe he found a paper somewhere in the house telling where it is. But he’s got to hunt to find it same as we will. He knows it’s somewhere in that garden, but he’s got to hunt to find it same as us.
Aint we been watching him hunting for it?” Bookwright could hear both the voices now speaking in hissing whispers, the one cursing, the other cajoling and reasoning while the owners of them glared as one up the starlit slope. Now Ratliff was speaking to him. “You dont believe it’s Flem,” he said. “All right. Just watch.” They lay in the weeds; they were all holding their breaths now, Bookwright too. Then he saw the digger—a shadow, a thicker darkness, moving against the slope, mounting it. “Watch,” Ratliff whispered. Bookwright could hear him and Armstid where they lay glaring up the slope, breathing in hissing exhalations, in passionate and dying sighs. Then Bookwright saw the white shirt; an instant later the figure came into complete relief against the sky as if it had paused for a moment on the crest of the slope. Then it was gone. “There!” Ratliff whispered. “Wasn’t that Flem Snopes? Do you believe now?” Bookwright drew a long breath and let it out again. He was still holding Armstid’s arm. He had forgotten about it. Now he felt it again under his hand like a taut steel cable vibrating.

  “It’s Flem,” he said.

  “Certainly it’s Flem,” Ratliff said. “Now all we got to do is find out tomorrow night where it’s at and——”

  “Tomorrow night, hell!” Armstid said. He surged forward again, attempting to rise. “Let’s get up there now and find it. That’s what we got to do. Before he—” They both held him again while Ratliff argued with him, sibilant and expostulant. They held him flat on the ground again at last, cursing.

  “We got to find where it is first,” Ratliff panted. “We got to find exactly where it is the first time. We aint got time just to hunt. We got to find it the first night because we cant afford to leave no marks for him to find when he comes back. Cant you see that? that we aint going to have but one chance to find it because we dont dare be caught looking?”