It would probably take all of the thirteen dollars and eighty-five cents to buy a pistol even in a Memphis pawn shop. He had planned to beat his way to Memphis on a freight train, riding the rods underneath a boxcar or between two of them, as he had once or twice as a boy and a youth. But as soon as he was outside the gate, he discovered that he was afraid to. He had been shut too long, he had forgotten how; his muscles might have lost the agility and coordination, the simple bold quick temerity for physical risk. Then he thought of watching his chance to scramble safely into an empty car and found that he didn’t dare that either, that in thirty-eight years he might even have forgotten the unspoken rules of the freemasonry of petty lawbreaking without knowing it until too late.
So he stood beside the paved highway which, when his foot touched it last thirty-eight years ago, had not even been gravel but instead was dirt marked only by the prints of mules and the iron tires of wagons; now it looked and felt as smooth and hard as a floor, what time you could see it or risk feeling it either for the cars and trucks rushing past on it. In the old days any passing wagon would have stopped to no more than his raised hand. But these were not wagons so he didn’t know what the new regulations for this might be either; in fact if he had known anything else to do but this he would already be doing it instead of standing, frail and harmless and not much larger than a child in the new overalls and jumper still showing their off-the-shelf creases and the new shoes and the hat, until the truck slowed in toward him and stopped and the driver said, “How far you going, dad?”
“Memphis,” he said.
“I’m going to Clarksdale. You can hook another ride from there. As good as you can here, anyway.”
It was fall, almost October, and he discovered that here was something else he had forgotten about during the thirty-eight years: seasons. They came and went in the penitentiary too but for thirty-eight years the only right he had to them was the privilege of suffering because of them: from the heat and sun of summer whether he wanted to work in the heat of the day or not, and the rain and icelike mud of winter whether he wanted to be out in it or not. But now they belonged to him again: October next week, not much to see in this flat Delta country which he had misdoubted the first time he laid eyes on it from the train window that day thirty-eight years ago: just cotton stalks and cypress needles. But back home in the hills, all the land would be gold and crimson with hickory and gum and oak and maple, and the old fields warm with sage and splattered with scarlet sumac; in thirty-eight years he had forgotten that.
When suddenly, somewhere deep in memory, there was a tree, a single tree. His mother was dead; he couldn’t remember her nor even how old he was when his father married again. So the woman wasn’t even kin to him and she never let him forget it: that she was raising him not from any tie or claim and not because he was weak and helpless and a human being, but because she was a Christian. Yet there was more than that behind it. He knew that at once—a gaunt harried slattern of a woman whom he remembered always either with a black eye or holding a dirty rag to her bleeding where her husband had struck her. Because he could always depend on her, not to do anything for him because she always failed there, but for constancy, to be always there and always aware of him, surrounding him always with that shield which actually protected, defended him from nothing but on the contrary seemed actually to invite more pain and grief. But simply to be there, lachrymose, harassed, yet constant.
She was still in bed, it was midmorning; she should have been hours since immolated into the ceaseless drudgery which composed her days. She was never ill, so it must have been the man had beat her this time even harder than he knew, lying there in the bed talking about food—the fatback, the coarse meal, the molasses which as far as he knew was the only food all people ate except when they could catch or kill something else; evidently this new blow had been somewhere about her stomach. “I cant eat hit,” she whimpered. “I need to relish something else. Maybe a squirrel.” He knew now; that was the tree. He had to steal the shotgun: his father would have beat him within an inch of his life—to lug the clumsy weapon even taller than he was, into the woods, to the tree, the hickory, to ambush himself beneath it and crouch, waiting, in the drowsy splendor of the October afternoon, until the little creature appeared. Whereupon he began to tremble (he had but the one shell) and he remembered that too: the tremendous effort to raise the heavy gun long enough, panting against the stock, “Please God please God,” into the shock of the recoil and the reek of the black powder until he could drop the gun and run and pick up the still warm small furred body with hands that trembled and shook until he could barely hold it. And her hands trembling too as she fondled the carcass. “We’ll dress hit and cook hit now,” she said. “We’ll relish hit together right now.” The hickory itself was of course gone now, chopped into firewood or wagon spokes or single trees years ago; perhaps the very place where it had stood was eradicated now into plowed land—or so they thought who had felled and destroyed it probably. But he knew better: unaxed in memory and unaxeable, inviolable and immune, golden and splendid with October. Why yes he thought it aint a place a man wants to go back to; the place dont even need to be there no more. What aches a man to go back to is what he remembers.
Suddenly he craned his neck to see out the window. “Hit looks like—” and stopped. But he was free; let all the earth know where he had been for thirty-eight years. “—Parchman,” he said.
“Yep,” the driver said. “P.O.W. camp.”
“What?” he said.
“Prisoners from the war.”
“From the war?”
“Where you been the last five years, dad?” the driver said. “Asleep?”
“I been away,” he said. “I mind one war they fit with the Spaniards when I was a boy, and there was another with the Germans after that one. Who did they fight this time?”
“Everybody.” The driver cursed. “Germans, Japanese, Congress too. Then they quit. If they had let us lick the Russians too, we might a been all right. But they just licked the Krauts and Japs and then decided to choke everybody else to death with money.”
He thought Money. He said: “If you had twenty-five dollars and found thirty-eight more, how much would you have?”
“What?” the driver said. “I wouldn’t even stop to pick up just thirty-eight dollars. What the hell you asking me? You mean you got sixty-three dollars and cant find nothing to do with it?”
Sixty-three he thought. So that’s how old I am. He thought quietly Not justice; I never asked that; jest fairness, that’s all. That was all; not to have anything for him: just not to have anything against him. That was all he wanted, and sure enough, here it was.
Linda
SIX
V. K. RATLIFF
“You aint even going to meet the train?” Chick says. Lawyer never even looked up, setting there at the desk with his attention (his nose anyway) buried in the papers in front of him like there wasn’t nobody else in the room. “Not just a new girl coming to town,” Chick says, “but a wounded female war veteran. Well, maybe not a new girl,” he says. “Maybe that’s the wrong word. In fact maybe ‘new’ is the wrong word all the way round. Not a new girl in Jefferson, because she was born and raised here. And even if she was a new girl in Jefferson or new anywhere else once, that would be just once because no matter how new you might have been anywhere once, you wouldn’t be very new anywhere any more after you went to Spain with a Greenwich Village poet to fight Hitler. That is, not after the kind of Greenwich Village poet that would get you both blown up by a shell anyhow. That is, provided you were a girl. So just say, not only an old girl that used to be new, coming back to Jefferson, but the first girl old or new either that Jefferson ever had to come home wounded from a war. Men soldiers yes, of course yes. But this is the first female girl soldier we ever had, not to mention one actually wounded by the enemy. Naturally we dont include rape for the main reason that we aint talking about rape.” Still his uncle didn’t move. “I’
d think you’d have the whole town down there at the depot to meet her. Out of simple sympathetic interest, not to mention pity: a girl that went all the way to Spain to a war and the best she got out of it was to lose her husband and have both eardrums busted by a shell. Mrs Cole,” he says.
Nor did Lawyer look up even then. “Kohl,” he says.
“That’s what I said,” Chick says. “Mrs Cole.”
This time Lawyer spelled it. “K-o-h-l,” he says. But even before he spelled it, it had a different sound from the way Chick said it. “He was a sculptor, not a poet. The shell didn’t kill him. It was an aeroplane.”
“Oh well, no wonder, if he was just a sculptor,” Chick says. “Naturally a sculptor wouldn’t have the footwork to dodge machine-gun bullets like a poet. A sculptor would have to stay in one place too much of his time. Besides, maybe it wasn’t Saturday so he didn’t have his hat on.”
“He was in the aeroplane,” Lawyer says. “It was shot down. It crashed and burned.”
“What?” Chick says. “A Greenwich Village sculptor named K-o-h-l actually in an aeroplane where it could get shot down by an enemy?” He was looking more or less at the top of his uncle’s head. “Not Cole,” he says: “K-o-h-l. I wonder why he didn’t change it. Dont they, usually?”
Now Lawyer closed the papers without no haste a-tall and laid them on the desk and pushed the swivel chair back and set back in it and clasped his hands behind his head. His hair had done already started turning gray when he come back from the war in France in 1919. Now it was pretty near completely white, and him setting there relaxed and easy in the chair with that white mop of it and the little gold key he got when he was at Harvard on his watch chain and one of the cob pipes stuck upside down in his shirt pocket like it was a pencil or a toothpick, looking at Chick for about a half a minute. “You didn’t find that at Harvard,” he says. “I thought that maybe after two years in Cambridge, you might not even recognise it again when you came back to Mississippi.”
“All right,” Chick says. “I’m sorry.” But Lawyer just sat there easy in the chair, looking at him. “Damn it,” Chick says, “I said I’m sorry.”
“Only you’re not sorry yet,” Lawyer says. “You’re just ashamed.”
“Aint it the same thing?” Chick says.
“No,” Lawyer says. “When you are just ashamed of something, you dont hate it. You just hate getting caught.”
“Well, you caught me,” Chick says. “I am ashamed. What more do you want?” Only Lawyer didn’t even need to answer that. “Maybe I cant help it yet, even after two years at Harvard,” Chick says. “Maybe I just lived too long a time among what us Mississippi folks call white people before I went there. You cant be ashamed of me for what I didn’t know in time, can you?”
“I’m not ashamed of you about anything,” Lawyer says.
“All right,” Chick says. “Sorry, then.”
“I’m not sorry over you about anything either,” Lawyer says.
“Then what the hell is all this about?” Chick says.
So a stranger that never happened to be living in Jefferson or Yoknapatawpha County ten or twelve years ago might have thought it was Chick that was the interested party. Not only interested enough to be jealous of his uncle, but interested enough to already be jealous even when the subject or bone of contention not only hadn’t even got back home yet, he wouldn’t even seen her since ten years ago. Which would make him jealous not only over a gal he hadn’t even seen in ten years, but that he wasn’t but twelve or thirteen years old and she was already nineteen, a growed woman, when he seen her that last time—a insurmountable barrier of difference in age that would still been a barrier even with three or four more years added onto both of them, providing of course it was the gal that still had the biggest number of them. In fact you would think how a boy jest twelve or thirteen years old couldn’t be man-jealous yet; wouldn’t have enough fuel yet to fire jealousy and keep it burning very long or even a-tall over a gal nineteen years old or any other age between eight and eighty for that matter, except that how young does he have to be before he can dare to risk not having that fuel capable of taking fire and combusting? Jest how young must he be to be safe for a little while longer yet, as the feller says, from having his heart strangled as good as any other man by that one strand of Lilith’s hair? Or how old either, for the matter of that. Besides, this time when she come back, even though she would still be the same six or seven years older, this time they would be jest six or seven years older than twenty-two or twenty-three instead of six or seven years older than twelve or thirteen, and that aint no barrier a-tall. This time he wouldn’t be no innocent infantile bystanding victim of that loop because this time he would be in there fighting for the right and privilege of being lassoed; fighting not jest for the right and privilege of being strangled too, but of being strangled first.
Which was exactly what he looked like he was trying to do: nudging and whetting at his uncle, reaching around for whatever stick or club or brickbat come to his hand like he was still jest twelve or thirteen years old or even less than that, grabbing up that one about Linda’s husband being a Jew for instance, because even at jest twelve, if he had stopped long enough to think, he would a knowed that that wouldn’t even be a good solid straw as far as his present opponent or rival was concerned.
Maybe that—swinging that straw at his uncle about how Lawyer had been the main one instrumental in getting Linda up there in New York where couldn’t no homefolks look after her and so sho enough she had went and married a Jew—was what give Chick away. Because he aint even seen her again yet; he couldn’t a knowed all that other yet. I mean, knowed that even at jest twelve he already had all the jealousy he would ever need at twenty-two or eighty-two either. He would need to actively see her again to find out he had jest as much right as any other man in it to be strangled to death by this here new gal coming to town, and wasn’t no man wearing hair going to interfere in the way and save him. When he thought about her now, he would have to remember jest what that twelve-or thirteen-year-old boy had seen: not a gal but a woman growed, the same general size and shape of his own maw, belonging to and moving around in the same alien human race the rest of the world except twelve-year-old boys belonged to. And, if it hadn’t been for his uncle finally stopping long enough hisself to look at her and then you might say ketching Chick by the scruff of the neck and grinding his attention onto her by conscripting up half his out-of-school time toting notes back and forth to her for them after-school icecream-parlor dates her and Lawyer started to having, nowhere near as interesting.
So when Chick remembered her now, he would still have to see what twelve or thirteen years old had seen: Hell fire, she’s durn nigh old as maw. He would have to actively look at her again to see what twenty-two or twenty-three would see: Hell fire, suppose she is a year or two older than me, jest so it’s me that’s the man of the two of us. So you and that stranger both would a thought how maybe it taken a boy of twelve or thirteen; maybe only a boy of twelve or thirteen is capable of pure and undefiled, what you might call virgin, jealousy toward a man of thirty over a gal of nineteen—or of any other age between eight and eighty for that matter, jest as it takes a boy of twelve or thirteen to know the true anguish and passion and hope and despair of love; you and that stranger both thinking that right up to that last final moment when Chick give hisself away free-for-nothing by grabbing up that one about Linda’s husband being not only a poet but a Jew too to hit at his uncle with. Then even that stranger would a realised Chick wasn’t throwing it at Linda a-tall: he was throwing it at his uncle; that it wasn’t his uncle he was jealous of over Linda Snopes: he was jealous of Linda over his uncle. Then even that stranger would a had to say to Chick in his mind: Maybe you couldn’t persuade me onto your side at first, but we’re sholy in the same agreement now.
Leastways if that stranger had talked to me a little. Because I could remember, I was actively watching it, that time back there when Lawyer first
got involved into Linda’s career as the feller says. I dont mean when Lawyer thought her career got mixed up into hisn, nor even when he first thought he actively noticed her. Because she was already twelve or thirteen herself then and so Lawyer had already knowed her all her life or anyway since she was them one or two years old or whenever it is when hit’s folks begin to bring it out into the street in a baby buggy or toting it and you first notice how it not only is beginning to look like a human being, hit even begins to look a little like some specific family of folks you are acquainted with. And in a little town like Jefferson where not only ever body knows ever body else but ever body has got to see ever body else in town at least once in the twenty-four hours whether he wants to or not, except for the time Lawyer was away at the war likely he had to see her at least once a week. Not to mention having to know even before he could recognise her to remember, that she was Eula Varner’s daughter that all Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County both that had ever seen Eula Varner first, couldn’t help but look at Eula Varner’s child with a kind of amazement, like at some minute-sized monster, since anybody, any man anyhow, that ever looked at Eula once couldn’t help but believe that all that much woman in jest one simple normal-sized chunk couldn’t a possibly been fertilised by anything as frail and puny in comparison as jest one single man, that it would a taken that whole generation of young concentrated men to seeded them, as the feller says, splendid—no: he would a said magnificent—loins.
And I dont mean when Lawyer voluntarily went outen his way and adopted Linda’s career into a few spare extra years of hisn like he thought he was doing. What I mean is, when Eula Varner taken that first one look of hern at Lawyer—or let him take that first one look of hisn at her, whichever way you want to put it—and adopted the rest of his life into that of whatever first child she happened to have, providing of course it’s a gal. Like when you finally see the woman that had ought to been yourn all the time, only it’s already too late. The woman that ought to been sixteen maybe at this moment and you not more than nineteen (which at that moment when he first seen Eula Lawyer actively was; it was Eula that was out of focus, being as she was already a year older than Lawyer to start with) and you look at her that first one time and in the next moment says to her: “You’re beautiful. I love you. Let’s dont never part again,” and she says, “Yes, of course”—no more concerned than that: “Of course I am. Of course you do. Of course we wont.” Only it’s already too late. She is already married to somebody else. Except it wasn’t too late. It aint never too late and wont never be, providing, no matter how old you are, you still are that-ere nineteen-year-old boy that said that to that sixteen-year-old gal at that one particular moment outen all the moments you might ever call yourn. Because how can it ever be too late to that nineteen-year-old boy, because how can that sixteen-year-old gal you had to say that to ever be violated, it dont matter how many husbands she might a had in the meantime, providing she actively was the one that had to say “Of course” right back at you? And even when she is toting the active proof of that violation around in her belly or even right out in plain sight on her arm or dragging at the tail of her skirt, immolating hit and her both back into virginity wouldn’t be no trick a-tall to that nineteen-year-old boy, since naturally that sixteen-year-old gal couldn’t possibly be fertilised by no other seed except hisn, I dont care who would like to brag hisself as being the active instrument.
Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion Page 89
