Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

by Faulkner, William

  Even before the war old Meadowfill had a reputation in Jefferson: he was so mean as to be solvent and retired even from the savings on a sawmill. He had been active as a mill owner and timber dealer for a year or so after he bought his little corner of the Compson place and built his little unwired unplumbinged house, until he sold his mill and retired into the house with his gray drudge of a wife and their one child; where, since it was obvious to anyone that a man retiring still alive and with all his limbs from a sawmill could not possibly possess one extra dollar for anyone to borrow or sell him anything for, he could devote his full time to gaining and holding the top name for curmudgeonry in all Jefferson and probably all Yoknapatawpha County too.

  Charles remembered the daughter—a quiet modest mousy girl nobody even looked at twice until suddenly in 1942 she graduated not only valedictorian of her high school class but with the highest grades ever made in it, plus a five-hundred-dollar scholarship offered by the president of the Bank of Jefferson (not Snopes’s bank: the other one) as a memorial to his only son, a navy pilot who had been killed in one of the first Pacific battles. She refused the scholarship. She went to Mr Holland and told him she had already taken a job with the telephone company and wouldn’t need the scholarship but instead she wanted to borrow five hundred dollars from the bank against her future salary, and, pressed, finally divulged the reason for it: to put a bathroom in her home; how once a week, on Saturday night, winter and summer, the mother would heat water on the kitchen stove and fill a round galvanised washtub in the middle of the floor, in which single filling all three of them bathed in turn: the father, then the child, then last of all the mother: at which point Mr Holland himself took over, had the bathroom installed despite old Meadowfill’s outraged fury (he didn’t intend to have his house meddled with at all by outsiders and strangers but if it was he wanted the cash money instead) and gave Essie a job for life in his bank.

  Whereupon, now that the only child was not only secure but was actually contributing to the family budget, old Meadowfill soared to heights of outrageousness of which even he hadn’t dreamed. Up to this time he had done the grocery shopping himself, walking to town each morning with an empty jute feed sack, to haggle in the small dingy back-and side-street stores which catered mostly to Negroes, for wilted and damaged leftovers of food which even Negroes would have scorned. The rest of the day he would spend, not lurking exactly but certainly in wait, ambushed, about his yard to shout and curse at the stray dogs which crossed his unfenced property, and the small boys who had a game of raiding the few sorry untended fruit trees which he called his orchard. Now he stopped that. He waited exactly one year, as though to be really sure Essie had her job for good. Then on the morning following the death of a paralytic old lady neighbor, he went and bought from the family the wheel chair she had inhabited for years, not even waiting until the funeral had left the house, and pushed the chair home along the street for his last appearance on it, and retired into the chair. Not completely at first. Although Charles’s uncle said that Essie now did the daily shopping, Meadowfill could still be seen in the yard, still snarling and cursing at the small boys or throwing rocks (he kept a small pile handy, like the cannon balls of a war memorial) at the stray dogs. But he never left his own premises any more and presently he seemed to have retired permanently into the wheel chair, sitting in it like it was a rocking chair in a window which looked out over the vegetable patch he no longer worked at all now, and the scraggy fruit trees he had always been either too stingy or too perverse to spray and tend enough to produce even an edible crop, let alone a salable one.

  Then Flem Snopes let Jason Compson overreach himself out of his ancestral acres, and Res Snopes built a hog lot along the boundary of old Meadowfill’s orchard and made a new man of old Meadowfill. Because the trespassing of little boys merely broke a limb now and then, and stray dogs merely dug up flower beds if he had had flower beds. But one rooting hog could foul and sour and make sterile the very dirt itself. So now Meadowfill had a reason for staying alive. He even abandoned the wheel chair temporarily, it would have been in his way now, spending all day while Res and a hired Negro built the wire fence along his boundary, watching the digging of every post hole and the setting and tamping of the post, grasping the post in both hands to shake and test it, on the verge of apoplexy, a little mad by this time, shouting at Snopes and his helper as they stretched the wire: “Tighter! Tighter! Hell fire, what do you figger you’re doing? hanging a hammock?” until Snopes—a lean gangling man with a cast in one sardonic eye—would say,

  “Now, Mr Meadowfill, dont you worry a-tall. Before I would leave a old broke-down wheel-chair gentleman like you to have to climb this fence by hand, I aim to put slip bars in it that you could even get down and crawl under when you dont feel like opening them,” with Meadowfill almost past speech now, saying,

  “If ara one of them hogs—if jest ara durn one of then hogs—” and Snopes:

  “Then all you got to do is jest ketch it and shut it up in your kitchen or bedroom or any other handy place and the pound law will make me pay you a dollar for it. In fact, that might even be good easy work for a retired wheel-chair old gentleman—” By which time Meadowfill would be in such a state that Snopes would call toward the kitchen, from the window or door of which by this time the gray wife would be watching or anyway hovering: “Maybe you better come and git him away from here.”

  Which she would do—until the next day. But at last the fence was finished. Or at least Snopes was no longer where Meadowfill could curse at him: only the hogs rooting and rubbing along the new fence which did hold them, or anyway so far. But only so far, only up to the moment it got too dark to see the orchard last night. So now he had something to stay alive for, to get up in the morning for, hurry out of bed and across to the window as soon as darkness thinned, to see if perhaps darkness itself hadn’t betrayed him in which he couldn’t have seen a hog in his orchard even if he had been able to stay awake twenty-four hours a day watching for it; to get into his chair and wheel himself across to the window and see his orchard for one more night anyway unravished; for one more night at least he had been spared. Then to begrudge the very time he would have to spend at table eating, since this would leave the orchard unguarded, unwatched of course he meant. Because, as Charles’s uncle said, Meadowfill wasn’t worrying at all about what he would do next when he did look out the window and actually see a hog on his property—an old bastard who, as Charles himself remembered, had already alienated all his neighbors before he committed himself to invalidism and the wheel chair, so that not one of them would have raised a hand to eject the hog for him or do anything else for him except maybe hide the body if and when his gray drab of a wife did what she should have done years ago: murdered him some night. Meadowfill hadn’t thought about what to do with the hog at all. He didn’t need to. He was happy, for the first time in his life probably, Charles’s Uncle Gavin said: that you are happy when your life is filled, and any life is filled when it is so busy living from moment to moment that it has no time over to remember yesterday or dread tomorrow. Which of course couldn’t last, his uncle said. That in time Meadowfill would reach the point where if he didn’t look out that window some morning and see a hog in his orchard, he would die of simply hope unbearably deferred; and if he did some morning look out and see one, he would surely die because he would have nothing else left.

  The atom bomb saved him. Charles meant that at last the Japs quit too and now the troops could come home from all directions, back to the women they had begun to marry before the echo of the first Pearl Harbor bomb had died away, and had been marrying ever since whenever they could get two days’ leave, coming back home now either to already going families or to marry the rest of the women they hadn’t got around to yet, the blood money already in the hands of the government housing loan (as his Uncle Gavin put it: “The hero who a year ago was rushing hand grenades and Garand clips up to front-line foxholes, is now rushing baskets of soiled
didies out of side-and back-street Veterans Administration tenements.”) and now Jason Compson was undergoing an anguish which he probably believed not only no human should suffer, but no human could really bear. Because when Charles reached home in September of ’45, Jason’s old lost patrimony was already being chopped up into a subdivision of standardised Veterans’ Housing matchboxes; within the week Ratliff came to the office and told him and his uncle the official name of the subdivision: Eula Acres. Not Jason’s old triumphant jeering gibe of Snopes Field, Snopes’s Demolitional Jump-off, but Eula Acres, Eula’s Uxorious Nest-place. And Charles didn’t know whether old Flem Snopes had named it that himself or not but he would remember his uncle’s face while Ratliff was telling them. But even without that he, Charles, would still prefer to believe it was not really Flem but his builder and (the town assumed) partner Wat Snopes who thought of it, maybe because Charles still wanted to believe that there are some things, at least one thing, that even Flem Snopes wouldn’t do, even if the real reason was that Flem himself never thought of naming it anything because to him it couldn’t matter whether it had a name or not. By Christmas it was already dotted over with small brightly painted pristinely new hutches as identical (and about as permanent) as squares of gingerbread or tea cakes, the ex-soldier or -sailor or -marine with his ruptured duck pushing the perambulator with one hand and carrying the second (or third) infant in the other arm, waiting to get inside almost before the last painter could gather up his dropcloth. And by New Year’s a new arterial highway had been decreed and surveyed which would run the whole length of Mr Snopes’s subdivision, including the corner which old Meadowfill owned; whereupon there opened before Meadowfill a prospect of excitement and entertainment beside which the mere depredations of a hog would have been as trivial as the trespass of a frog or a passing bird. Because now one of the big oil companies wanted to buy the corner where Meadowfill’s lot and the old Compson (now Snopes) place joined—that is, a strip of Meadowfill’s orchard, with a contiguous strip of Res Snopes’s hog lot—to build a filling station on.

  Because old Meadowfill didn’t even own thirteen feet of the strip of his land which the oil company wanted. In fact, as the town knew, the title to none of his land vested in him. During the early second Roosevelt days he had naturally been among the first to apply for relief, learning to his outraged and incredulous amazement that a finicking and bureaucratic federal government declined absolutely and categorically to let him be a pauper and a property owner at the same time. So he came to Gavin, choosing him from among the other Jefferson lawyers for the simple reason that he, Meadowfill, knew that in five minutes he would have Stevens so mad that very likely Stevens would refuse to accept any fee at all for drawing the deed transferring all his property to his nine-year-old (this was 1934) daughter. He was wrong only in his estimate of the time, since it required only two minutes for Stevens to reach the boil which carried him into the chancery clerk’s vault, where he discovered that the deed which Jason Compson’s father had executed to Meadowfill read “South to the road known as the Freedom Springs Road, thence East along said Road …” The Freedom Springs road being, by the time Meadowfill bought his corner, an eroded thicket-grown ditch ten feet deep with only a footpath in it: as ponderable and inescapable a geographical condition as the Grand Canyon, since this was before the era when the bulldozer and the dragline would not only alter but efface geography. Which was thirteen feet short of the actual survey line boundary which Mohataha, the Chickasaw matriarch, had granted to Quentin Compson in 1821, and Charles’s uncle said his first impulse was the ethical one to tell old Meadowfill how he actually owned thirteen feet more of the surface of the earth than he thought he did, provided he did something about it before somebody else did. But if he, Stevens, did that, he would be ethically bound to accept Meadowfill’s ten dollars for the title search, so he decided to let one ethic cancel the other and allow simple justice to prevail.

  That was the situation when the survey line for the new highway was run to follow the old Chickasaw line, and Meadowfill discovered that his property only extended to the ditch which was thirteen feet short of it. But rage was a mild term for his condition when the oil company approached him to buy his part of the corner and he found that his mortal enemy, the hog-raising Snopes, owned the thirteen feet without a clear title to which the oil company would buy none of his, Meadowfill’s, ground. There was rage in it too of course, since rage had been Meadowfill’s normal condition for a year now. But now it was triumph too. More: it was vindication, revenge. Revenge on the Compsons who had uttered a false deed to him, allowing him to buy in good faith. Revenge on the community which had badgered him for years with small boys and stray dogs, by holding up a new taxpaying industry (if he could, by stopping the new highway itself). Revenge on the man who for a year now had ruined his sleep and his digestion too by the constant threat of that hog lot. Because he simply declined to sell any part of his property, under any conditions, to anyone: which, since his was in front of Snopes’s, except for the thirteen-foot strip, would cut the oil company off from its proposed corner station as effectively as a toll gate, as a result of which the oil company declined to buy any part of Snopes’s.

  Of course, as the town knew, Snopes (Charles meant of course Res Snopes) had already approached Essie Meadowfill, in whose name the deed lay, who answered, as the town knew too: “You’ll have to see papa.” Because Snopes was under a really impossible handicap: his hog lot had forever interdicted him from approaching old Meadowfill in person, of having any sort of even momentary civilised contact with him. In fact, Snopes was under two insurmountable handicaps: the second one being the idea, illusion, dream that mere money could move a man who for years now had become so accustomed to not having or wanting one extra dollar, that the notion of a thousand could not even tempt him. So Snopes misread his man. But he didn’t quit trying. (That’s right. A stranger might have wondered what Flem Snopes was doing all this time, who owned the land in the first place. But they in the town were not strangers.) He went to the oil company’s purchasing agent and said, “Tell him if he’ll sign his deed, I’ll give him ten percent of what you pay me for them thirteen feet.” Then he said, “All right. Fifty percent then. Half of it.” Then he said, “All right. How much will he take?” Then he said—and according to the oil company man, bland and affable and accommodating was no description for his voice: “All right. A good citizen cant stand in the way of progress, even if it does cost him money. Tell him if he will sign he can have them thirteen feet.”

  This time apparently Meadowfill didn’t even bother to say No, sitting in his wheel chair at the window where he could look out upon the land which he wouldn’t sell and the adjoining land which its owner couldn’t sell because of him. So in a way, Snopes had a certain amount of local sympathy in his next move, which he made shortly before something happened to Essie Meadowfill which revealed her to be, underneath anyway, anything but mousy; and although demure might still be one word for her, the other wasn’t quietness but determination.

  One morning when Meadowfill wheeled his chair from the breakfast table to the window and looked out, he saw what he had been waiting to see for over a year now: a loose hog rooting among the worthless peaches beneath his worthless and untended trees; and even as he sat bellowing for Mrs Meadowfill, Snopes himself crossed the yard with an ear of corn and a loop of rope and snared the hog by one foot and half-drove half-led it back across the yard and out of sight, old Meadowfill leaning from the chair into the open window, bellowing curses at both of them even after they had disappeared.

  The next morning he was already seated at the window when he actually saw the hog come at a steady trot up the lane and into his orchard; he was still leaning in the open window bellowing and cursing when the drab wife emerged from the house, clutching a shawl about her head, and hurried up the lane to knock at Snopes’s locked front door until Meadowfill’s bellowing, which had never stopped, drew her back home. By that time most
of the neighbors were there watching what followed: the old man still bellowing curses from the wheel chair in the window while his wife tried single-handed to drive the hog out of the unfenced yard, when Snopes himself appeared (from where everybody knew now he had been concealed watching), innocent, apologetic and amazed, with his ear of corn and his looped plowline, and caught the hog and removed it.

  Next, Meadowfill had the rifle—an aged, battered single-shot .22. That is, it looked secondhand simply by being in his possession, though nobody knew when he had left the wheel chair and the window (not to mention the hog) long enough to have hunted down the small boy owner and haggled or browbeat him out of it; the town simply could not imagine him ever having been a boy passionate and proud to own a single-shot .22 and to have kept it all these long years as a memento of that pure and innocent time. But he had it, cartridges too—not solid bullets but loaded with tiny shot such as naturalists use: incapable of killing the hog at all and even of hurting it much at this distance. In fact, Charles’s uncle said Meadowfill didn’t even really want to drive the hog away: he simply wanted to shoot it every day as other old people play croquet or bingo.

  He would rush straight from the breakfast table, to crouch in his wheeled ambush at the window until the hog appeared. Then (he would have to rise from the chair to do this) he would stand up and slowly and quietly raise the window sash and the screen (he kept the grooves of both greased for speed and silence, and had equipped both of them with handles at the bottom so that he could raise either one with a single jerk) and deliver the shot, the hog giving its convulsive start and leap, until, forgetting, it would settle down again and receive the next shot, until at last its dim processes would connect the sting with the report and after the next shot it would go home, to return no more until tomorrow morning. Until finally it even connected the scattered peaches themselves with the general inimicality and for a whole week it didn’t return at all; then the neighborhood legend rose that Meadowfill had contracted with the boy who delivered the Memphis and Jackson papers (he didn’t take a paper himself, not being interested in any news which cost a dollar a month) to scavenge the neighborhood garbage cans and bait his orchard at night.