She must not marry at all yet. Which was difficult enough to prevent even while she was at home in Jefferson, what with half the football and baseball teams escorting her home from school in the afternoon and squiring her in gangs to the picture show during her junior and senior highschool years. Because at least she was living at home where her father could more or less control things either by being her father (oh yes, her father; she knew no different and in fact would have denied, repudiated the truth if anyone had tried to tell her it, since women are not interested in truth or romance but only in facts whether they are true or not, just so they fit all the other facts, and to her the fact was that he was her father for the simple fact that all the other girls, boys too of course, had fathers unless they were dead beneath locatable tombstones) or by threatening to call in or foreclose a usurious note or mortgage bearing the signature of the father or kin of the would-be bridegroom, or—if he, Flem, were lucky—that of the groom himself.
Then who must appear but this meddling whiteheaded outsider plying her with icecream sodas and out-of-state college catalogues and at last convincing her that not only her pleasure and interest but her duty too lay in leaving Jefferson, getting out of it the moment she graduated from high school. Upon which, she would carry that rich female provocation which had already drawn blood (ay, real blood once anyway) a dozen times in Jefferson, out into a world rifely teeming with young single men vulnerable to marriage whether they knew it or not before they saw her. Which he forestalled or rather stalled off for still another year which he compelled, persuaded (I dont know what he used; tears even perhaps; certainly tears if he could have found any to use) her to waste at the Academy (one of the last of those gentle and stubbornly fading anachronisms called Miss So-and-So’s or The So-and-So Female Academy or Institute whose curriculum included deportment and china-painting, which continue to dot the South though the rest of the United States knows them no more); this, while he racked his brain for how to eliminate this menace and threat to his wife’s inheritance which was the middle-aged country lawyer with his constant seduction of out-of-state school brochures. The same middle-aged lawyer in fact who had evicted the preceding menace of the Ohio garage mechanic. But none appeared to eliminate the lawyer save him, the embattled father, and the only tool he knew was money. So I can imagine this: Flem Snopes during all that year, having to remain on constant guard against any casual stranger like a drummer with a line of soap or hardware stopping off the train overnight, and at the same time wring and rack his harassed imagination for some means of compelling me to accept a loan of enough money at usurious enough interest to be under his control.
Which was what I expected of course. I had even reached the point of planning, dreaming what I would do with the money, what buy with the money for which I would continue to betray him. But he didn’t do that. He fooled me. Or perhaps he did me that honor too: not just to save my honor for me by withholding the temptation to sully it, but assuming that I would even sell honor before I would sully it and so temptation to do the one would be automatically refused because of the other. Anyway, he didn’t offer me the bribe. And I know why now. He had given up. I mean, he realised at last that he couldn’t possibly keep her from marriage even though he kept her in Jefferson, and that the moment that happened, he could kiss good-bye forever to old Will Varner’s money.
Because some time during that last summer—this last summer or fall rather, since school had opened again and she had even begun her second year at the Academy, wasting another year within the fading walls where Miss Melissa Hogganbeck still taught stubbornly to the dwindling few who were present, that not just American history but all history had not yet reached Christmas Day, 1865, since although General Lee (and other soldiers too, including her own grandfather) had surrendered, the war itself was not done and in fact the next ten years would show that even those token surrenders were mistakes—he sat back long enough to take stock. Indeed, he—or any other male—had only to look at her to know that this couldn’t go on much longer, even if he never let her out of the front yard—that girl (woman now; she will be nineteen this month) who simply by moving, being, promised and demanded and would have not just passion, not her mother’s fierce awkward surrender in a roadside thicket at night with a lover still bleeding from a gang fight; but love, something worthy to match not just today’s innocent and terrified and terrifying passion, but tomorrow’s strength and capacity for serenity and growth and accomplishment and the realisation of hope and at last the contentment of one mutual peace and one mutual conjoined old age. It—the worst, disaster, catastrophe, ruin, the last irrevocable chance to get his hands on any part of old Will Varner’s money—could happen at any time now; and who knows what relief there might have been in the simple realization that at any moment now he could stop worrying not only about the loss of the money but having to hope for it, like when the receptionist opens the door to the dentist’s torture-chamber and looks at you and says “Next” and it’s too late now, simple face will not let you leap up and flee.
You see? Peace. No longer to have to waste time hoping or even regretting, having canvassed all the means and rejected all, since who knows too if during that same summer while he racked his harassed and outraged brain for some means to compel me to accept a loan at a hundred percent interest he had not also toyed with the possibility of finding some dedicated enthusiast panting for martyrdom in the simple name of Man who would shoot old Will some night through his kitchen window and then rejected that too, relinquishing not hope so much as just worry.
And not just peace, but joy too since, now that he could relinquish forever that will-o’-the-wisp of his father-in-law’s money, he could go back to his original hope and dream of vengeance and revenge on the man responsible for the situation because of which he must give over all hope of his wife’s inheritance. In fact he knew now why he had deferred that vengeance so long, dodged like a coward the actual facing of old Will’s name in the canvass of possibilities. It was because he had known instinctively all the time that only Will could serve him, and once he had employed Will for his vengeance, by that same stroke he himself would have destroyed forever any chance of participating in that legacy.
But now that was all done, finished, behind him. He was free. Now there remained only the method to compel, force, cajole, persuade, trick—whichever was handiest or quickest or most efficient—the voting power of old Will’s stock, plus the weight of that owned by others who were too afraid of old Will to resist him, in addition to his—Flem’s—own stock and his corps of one-gallused depositors and their whispering campaign, to remove De Spain’s bank from under him by voting him out of its presidency.
All that remained was how, how to handle in a word, lick—Will Varner. And who to dispute that he already knew that too, that plan already tested and retested back in the very time while he was still dodging the facing of old Will’s name. Because apparently once his mind was made up and he had finally brought himself to cut out and cauterise with his own hand that old vain hope of his wife’s inheritance, he didn’t hesitate. Here was the girl, the one pawn which could wreck his hopes of the Varner money, whom he had kept at home where he could delay to that extent at least the inevitable marriage which would ruin him, keeping her at home not only against her own wishes but against those of her mother too (not to mention the meddling neighbor); keeping her at home even when to him too probably it meant she was wasting her time in that anachronistic vacuum which was the Female Academy. This for one entire year and up to the Christmas holidays in the second one; then suddenly, without warning, overnight, he gives his permission for her to go, leave Jefferson and enter the State University; only fifty miles away to be sure, yet they were fifty miles, where it would be impossible for her to report back home every night and where she would pass all her waking hours among a thousand young men, all bachelors and all male.
Why? It’s obvious. Why did he ever do any of the things he did? Because he got something
in return more valuable to him than what he gave. So you dont really need to imagine this: he and his wife talking together (of course they talked sometimes; they were married, and you have to talk some time to someone even when you’re not married)—or four of them that is since there would be two witnesses waiting in the synthetic hall until she should take up the pen: Sign this document guaranteeing me one half of whatever you will inherit under your father’s will, regardless of whatever your and my status in respect to one another may be at that time, and I will give my permission for Linda to go away from Jefferson to school. All right, granted it could be broken, abrogated, set aside, would not hold. She would not know that. And even if she had never doubted it would hold, had the actual inheritance in her hand at the moment, would she have refused to give him half of it for that in return? Besides, it wasn’t her it was to alarm, spook out of the realm of cool judgment.
That was the “how.” Now remained only the “when”; the rest of the winter and she away at the University now and he still about town, placid, inscrutable, unchanged, in the broad black planter’s hat and the minute bow tie seen somewhere about the Square at least once during the day as regular as the courthouse clock itself, on through the winter and into the spring, until yesterday morning.
That’s right. Just gone. So you will have to imagine this too since there would be no witnesses even waiting in a synthetic hall this time: once more the long, already summer-dusty gravel road (it had been simple dirt when he traversed it that first time eighteen years ago) out to Varner’s store. And in an automobile this time, it was that urgent, “how” and “when” having at last coincided. And secret; the automobile was a hired one. I mean, an imported hired one. Although most of the prominent people in Jefferson and the county too owned automobiles now, he was not one of them. And not just because of the cost, of what more men than he in Yoknapatawpha County considered the foolish, the almost criminal immobilisation of that many dollars and cents in something which, even though you ran it for hire, would not pay for itself before it wore out, but because he was not only not a prominent man in Jefferson yet, he didn’t even want to be: who would have defended as he did his life the secret even of exactly how solvent he really was.
But this was so urgent that he must use one for speed, and so secret that he would have hired one, paid money for the use of one, even if he had owned one, so as not to be seen going out there in his own; too secret even to have ridden out with the mail carrier, which he could have done for a dollar, too secret even to have commandeered from one of his clients a machine which he actually did own since it had been purchased with his money secured by one of his myriad usurious notes. Instead, he hired one. We would never know which one nor where: only that it would not bear Yoknapatawpha County license plates, and drove out there in it, out to Varner’s Crossroads once more and for the last time, dragging, towing a fading cloud of yellow dust along the road which eighteen years ago he had travelled in the mule-drawn wagon containing all he owned: the wife and her bastard daughter, the few sticks of furniture Mrs Varner had given them, the deed to Ratliff’s half of the little back-street Jefferson restaurant and the few dollars remaining from what Henry Armstid (now locked up for life in a Jackson asylum) and his wife had scrimped and hoarded for ten years, which Ratliff and Armstid had paid him for the Old Frenchman place where he had buried the twenty-five silver dollars where they would find them with their spades.
For the last time, completing that ellipsis which would contain those entire eighteen years of his life, since Frenchman’s Bend and Varner’s Crossroads and Varner’s store would be one, perhaps the one, place to which he would never go again as long as he lived, since win or lose he would not need to, and win or lose he certainly would not dare to. And who knows, thinking even then what a shame that he must go to the store and old Will instead of to Varner’s house where at this hour in the forenoon there would be nobody but Mrs Varner and the Negro cook,—must go to the store and beard and beat down by simple immobility and a scrap of signed and witnessed paper that violent and choleric old brigand instead. Because women are not interested in romance or morals or sin and its punishment, but only in facts, the immutable facts necessary to the living of life while you are in it and which they are going to damned well see themselves dont fiddle and fool and back and fill and mutate. How simple to have gone straight to her, a woman (the big hard cold gray woman who never came to town any more now, spending all her time between her home and her church, both of which she ran exactly alike: herself self-appointed treasurer of the collections she browbeat out of the terrified congregation, herself selecting and choosing and hiring the ministers and firing them too when they didn’t suit her; legend was that she chose one of them out of a cotton field while passing in her buggy, hoicked him from between his plow-handles and ordered him to go home and bathe and change his clothes and followed herself thirty minutes later and ordained him).
How simple to ride up to the gate and say to the hired driver: “Wait here. I wont be long,” and go up the walk and enter his ancestral halls (all right, his wife’s; he was on his way now to dynamite his own equity in them) and on through them until he found Mrs Varner wherever she was, and say to her: “Good morning, Ma-in-law. I just found out last night that for eighteen years now our Eula’s been sleeping with a feller in Jefferson named Manfred de Spain. I packed up and moved out before I left town but I aint filed the divorce yet because the judge was still asleep when I passed his house. I’ll tend to that when I get back tonight,” and turn and go back to the car and say to the driver: “All right, son. Back to town,” and leave Mrs. Varner to finish it, herself to enter the lair where old Will sat among the symbolical gnawed bones—the racks of hames and plow-handles, the rank side meat and flour and cheap molasses and cheese and shoes and coal oil and work gloves and snuff and chewing tobacco and flyspecked candy and the liens and mortgages on crops and plow-tools and mules and horses and land—of his fortune. There would be a few loungers though not many since this was planting time and even the ones there should have been in the field, which they would realise, already starting in an alarmed surge of guilt when they saw her, though not fast enough.
“Get out of here,” she would say while they were already moving. “I want to talk to Will.—Wait. One of you go to the sawmill and tell Jody I want his automobile and hurry.” And they would say “Yessum, Miz Varner,” which she would not hear either, standing over old Will now in his rawhide-bottomed chair. “Get up from there. Flem has finally caught Eula, or says he has. He hasn’t filed the suit yet so you will have time before the word gets all over the county. I dont know what he’s after, but you go in there and stop it. I wont have it. We had enough trouble with Eula twenty years ago. I aint going to have her back in my house worrying me now.”
But he couldn’t do that. It wasn’t that simple. Because men, especially one like old Will Varner, were interested in facts too, especially a man like old Will in a fact like the one he, Flem, had signed and witnessed and folded inside his coat pocket. So he had to go, walk himself into that den and reach his own hand and jerk the unsuspecting beard and then stand while the uproar beat and thundered about his head until it spent itself temporarily to where his voice could be heard: “That’s her signature. If you dont know it, them two witnesses do. All you got to do is help me take that bank away from Manfred de Spain—transfer your stock to my name, take my postdated check if you want, the stock to be yourn again as soon as Manfred de Spain is out, or you to vote the stock yourself if you had druther—and you can have this paper. I’ll even hold the match while you burn it.”
That was all. And here was Ratliff again (oh yes, Jefferson could do without Ratliff, but not I—we—us; not I nor the whole damned tribe of Snopes could do without him), all neat and clean and tieless in his blue shirt, blinking a little at me. “Uncle Billy rid into town in Jody’s car about four o’clock this morning and went straight to Flem’s. And Flem aint been to town today. What you reckon is
fixing to pop now?” He blinked at me. “What do you reckon it was?”
“What what was?” I said.
“That he taken out there to Miz Varner yesterday that was important enough to have Uncle Billy on the road to town at four o’clock this morning?”
“To Mrs Varner?” I said. “He gave it to Will.”
“No no,” Ratliff said. “He never seen Will. I know. I taken him out there. I had a machine to deliver to Miz Ledbetter at Rockyford and he suh-jested would I mind going by Frenchman’s Bend while he spoke to Miz Varner a minute and we did, he was in the house about a minute and come back out and we went on and et dinner with Miz Ledbetter and set up the machine and come on back to town.” He blinked at me. “Jest about a minute. What do you reckon he could a said or handed to Miz Varner in one minute that would put Uncle Billy on the road to Jefferson that soon after midnight?
EIGHTEEN
V. K. RATLIFF
No no, no no, no no. He was wrong. He’s a lawyer, and to a lawyer, if it aint complicated it dont matter whether it works or not because if it aint complicated up enough it aint right and so even if it works, you dont believe it. So it wasn’t that—a paper phonied up on the spur of the moment, that I dont care how many witnesses signed it, a lawyer not nowhere near as smart as Lawyer Stevens would a been willing to pay the client for the fun he would have breaking it wide open.
It wasn’t that. I dont know what it was, coming up to me on the Square that evening and saying, “I hear Miz Ledbetter’s sewing machine come in this morning. When you take it out to her, I’ll make the run out and back with you if you wont mind going by Frenchman’s Bend a minute.” Sho. You never even wondered how he heard about things because when the time come around to wonder how he managed to hear about it, it was already too late because he had done already made his profit by that time. So I says,
Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion Page 70
