“It was pretty smart,” Charles said.
“It was worse. It was bad. Nobody would ever have believed any one except a Pacific veteran would have invented a booby trap, no matter how much he denied it.”
“It was still smart,” Charles said. “Even Smith will agree.”
“Yes,” his uncle said. “That’s why I wanted you along. You were a soldier too. I may need an interpreter to talk to him.”
“I was just a major,” Charles said. “I never had enough rank to tell anything to any sergeant, let alone a Marine one.”
“He was just a corporal,” his uncle said.
“He was still a Marine,” Charles said.
Only they didn’t go to Smith first; he would be in his cotton patch now anyway. And, Charles told himself, if Snopes had been him, there wouldn’t be anybody in Snopes’s house either. But there was. Snopes opened the door himself; he was wearing an apron and carrying a frying pan; there was even a fried egg in it. But there wasn’t anything in his face at all. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Come in.”
“No thanks,” Charles’s uncle said. “It wont take that long. This is yours, I think.” There was a table; his uncle laid the sack-wrapped bundle on it and flipped the edge of the sacking, the mutilated rifle sliding across the table. And still there was nothing whatever in Snopes’s face or voice:
“That-ere is what you lawyers call debatable, aint it?”
“Oh yes,” Charles’s uncle said. “Everybody knows about fingerprints now, just as they do about booby traps.”
“Yes,” Snopes said. “Likely you aint making me a present of it.”
“That’s right,” his uncle said. “I’m selling it to you. For a deed to Essie Meadowfill for that strip of your lot the oil company wants to buy, plus that thirteen feet that Mr Meadowfill thought he owned.” And now indeed Snopes didn’t move, immobile with the cold egg in the frying pan. “That’s right,” his uncle said. “In that case, I’ll see if McKinley Smith wants to buy it.”
Snopes looked at his uncle a moment. He was smart; you would have to give him that, Charles thought. “I reckon you would,” he said. “Likely that’s what I would do myself.”
“That’s what I thought,” his uncle said.
“I reckon I’ll have to go and see Cousin Flem,” Snopes said.
“I reckon not,” his uncle said. “I just came from the bank.”
“I reckon I would have done that myself too,” Snopes said. “What time will you be in your office?”
And he and his uncle could have met Smith at his house at sundown too. Instead, it was not even noon when Charles and his uncle stood at the fence and watched McKinley and the mule come up the long black shear of turning earth like the immobilised wake of the plow’s mold board. Then he was standing across the fence from them, naked from the waist up in his overalls and combat boots. Charles’s uncle handed him the deed. “Here,” his uncle said.
Smith read it. “This is Essie’s.”
“Then marry her,” his uncle said. “Then you can sell the lot and buy a farm. Aint that what you both want? Haven’t you got a shirt or a jumper here with you? Get it and you can ride back with me; the major here will bring the mule.”
“No,” Smith said; he was already shoving, actually ramming the deed into his pocket as he turned back to the mule. “I’ll bring him in. I’m going home first. I aint going to marry nobody without a necktie and a shave.”
Then they had to wait for the Baptist minister to wash his hands and put on his coat and necktie; Mrs Meadowfill was already wearing the first hat anybody had ever seen on her; it looked a good deal like the first hat anybody ever made. “But papa,” Essie said.
“Oh,” Charles’s uncle said. “You mean that wheel chair. It belongs to me now. It was a legal fee. I’m going to give it to you and McKinley for a christening present as soon as you earn it.”
Then it was two days later, in the office.
“You see?” his uncle said. “It’s hopeless. Even when you get rid of one Snopes, there’s already another one behind you even before you can turn around.”
“That’s right,” Ratliff said serenely. “As soon as you look, you see right away it aint nothing but jest another Snopes.”
FIFTEEN
Linda Kohl was already home too when Charles got back. From her war also: the Pascagoula shipyard where she finally had her way and became a riveter; his Uncle Gavin told him, a good one. At least her hands, fingernails, showed it: not bitten, gnawed down, but worn off. And now she had a fine, a really splendid dramatic white streak in her hair running along the top of her skull almost like a plume. A collapsed plume; in fact, maybe that was what it was, he thought: a collapsed plume lying flat athwart her skull instead of cresting upward first then back and over; it was the fall of 1945 now and the knight had run out of tourneys and dragons, the war itself had slain them, used them up, made them obsolete.
In fact Charles thought how all the domestic American knights-errant liberal reformers would be out of work now, with even the little heretofore lost places like Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, fertilised to overflowing not only with ex-soldiers’ blood money but with the two or three or four dollars per hour which had been forced on the other ex-riveters and -bricklayers and -machinists like Linda Kohl Snopes, he meant Linda Snopes Kohl, so fast that they hadn’t had time to spend it. Even the two Finn communists, even the one that still couldn’t speak English, had got rich during the war and had had to become capitalists and bull-market investors simply because they had not yet acquired any private place large enough to put that much money down while they turned their backs on it. And as for the Negroes, by now they had a newer and better high school building in Jefferson than the white folks had. Plus an installment-plan automobile and radio and refrigerator full of canned beer down-paid with the blood money which at least drew no color line in every unwired unscreened plumbingless cabin: double-plus the new social-revolution laws which had abolished not merely hunger and inequality and injustice, but work too by substituting for it a new self-compounding vocation or profession for which you would need no schooling at all: the simple production of children. So there was nothing for Linda to tilt against now in Jefferson. Come to think of it, there was nothing for her to tilt against anywhere now, since the Russians had fixed the Germans and even they didn’t need her any more. In fact, come to think of it, there was really nothing for her in Jefferson at all any more, now that his Uncle Gavin was married—if she had ever wanted him for herself. Because maybe Ratliff was right and whatever she had ever wanted of him, it wasn’t a husband. So in fact you would almost have to wonder why she stayed in Jefferson at all now, with nothing to do all day long but wait, pass the time somehow until night and sleep came, in that Snopes-colonial mausoleum with that old son of a bitch that needed a daughter or anybody else about as much as he needed a spare bow tie or another hat. So maybe everybody was right this time and she wasn’t going to stay in Jefferson much longer, after all.
But she was here now, with her nails, his uncle said, not worn down from smithing but scraped down to get them clean (and whether his uncle added it or not: feminine) again, with no more ships to rivet, and that really dramatic white plume collapsed in gallantry across her skull, with all the dragons dead. Only, even blacksmithing hadn’t been enough. What he meant was, she wasn’t any older. No, that wasn’t what he meant: not just older. Something had happened to him during the three-plus years between December ’41 and April ’45 or at least he hoped it had or at least what had seemed suffering and enduring to him at least met the standards of suffering and enduring enough to enrich his spiritual and moral development whether it did anything for the human race or not, and if it had purified his soul it must show on his outside too or at least he hoped it did. But she hadn’t changed at all, least of all the white streak in her hair which it seemed that some women did deliberately to themselves. When he finally—All right, finally. So what if he did spend the better part of his first three
days at home at least hoping he didn’t look like he was hanging around the Square in case she did cross it or enter it. There were towns bigger than Jefferson that didn’t have a girl—woman—in it that the second you saw her eight years ago getting out of an airplane you were already wondering what she would look like with her clothes off except that she was too old for you, the wrong type for you, except that that was exactly backward, you were too young for her, the wrong type for her and so only your uncle that you had even spent some of the ten months in the Nazi stalag wondering if he ever got them off before he got married to Aunt Melisandre or maybe even after and if he didn’t, what happened, what was wrong. Because his uncle would never tell him himself whether he ever did or not but maybe after three years and a bit he could tell by looking at her, that maybe a woman really couldn’t hide that from another man who was … call it simpatico. Except that when he finally saw her on the street on the third day there was nothing at all, she had not changed at all, except for the white streak which didn’t count anyway—the same one that on that day eight years ago when he and his uncle had driven up to the Memphis airport to get her, was at that first look a little too tall and a little too thin for his type so that in that same second he was saying Well thats one anyway that wont have to take her clothes off on my account and then almost before he could get it out, something else was already saying Okay, buster, who suggested she was going to? and he had been right: not her for him, but rather not him for her: a lot more might still happen to him in his life yet (he hoped) but removing that particular skirt wouldn’t be one even if when you got the clothes off the too tall too thin ones sometimes they surprised you. And just as well; evidently his soul or whatever it was had improved some in the three years and a bit; anyway he knew now that if such had been his fate to get this particular one off, what would happen to him might, probably would, have several names but none of them would be surprise.
With no more ships to rivet now, and what was worse: no need any more for ships to rivet. So not just he, Charles, but all the town in time sooner or later would see her—or be told about it by the ones who had—walking, striding, most of the time dressed in what they presumed was the same army-surplus khaki she had probably riveted the ships in, through the back streets and alleys of the town or the highways and lanes and farm roads and even the fields and woods themselves within two or three miles of town, alone, walking not fast so much as just hard, as if she were walking off insomnia or perhaps even a hangover. “Maybe that’s what it is,” Charles said. Again his uncle looked up, a little impatiently, from the brief.
“What?” he said.
“You said maybe she has insomnia. Maybe it’s hangover she’s walking off.”
“Oh,” his uncle said. “All right.” He went back to the brief. Charles watched him.
“Why dont you walk with her?” he said.
This time his uncle didn’t look up. “Why dont you? Two ex-soldiers, you could talk about war.”
“She couldn’t hear me. I wouldn’t have time to write on a pad while we were walking.”
“That’s what I mean,” his uncle said. “My experience has been that the last thing two ex-soldiers under fifty years old want to talk about is war. You two even cant.”
“Oh,” he said. His uncle read the brief. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. His uncle read the brief. “Is it all right with you if I try to lay her?” His uncle didn’t move. Then he closed the brief and sat back in the chair.
“Certainly,” he said.
“So you think I cant,” Charles said.
“I know you cant,” his uncle said. He added quickly: “Dont grieve; it’s not you. Just despair if you like. It’s not anybody.”
“So you know why,” Charles said.
“Yes,” his uncle said.
“But you’re not going to tell me.”
“I want you to see for yourself. You will probably never have the chance again. You read and hear and see about it in all the books and pictures and music, in Harvard and Heidelberg both. But you are afraid to believe it until you actually see it face to face, because you might be wrong and you couldn’t bear that, and be happy. What you cant bear is to doubt it.”
“I never got to Heidelberg,” Charles said. “All I had was Harvard and Stalag umpty-nine.”
“All right,” his uncle said. “The high school and the Jefferson Academy then.”
Anyway he, Charles, knew the answer now. He said so. “Oh, that. Even little children know all that nowadays. She’s frigid.”
“Well, that’s as good a Freudian term as another to cover chastity or discretion,” his uncle said. “Beat it now. I’m busy. Your mother invited me to dinner so I’ll see you at noon.”
So it was more than that, and his uncle was not going to tell him. And his uncle had used the word “discretion” also to cover something he had not said. Though Charles at least knew what that was because he knew his uncle well enough to know that the discretion applied not to Linda but to him. If he had never been a soldier himself, he would not have bothered, let alone waited, to ask his uncle’s leave: he would probably already have waylaid her at some suitably secluded spot in the woods on one of her walks, on the innocent assumption of those who have never been in a war that she, having come through one, had been wondering for days now what in hell was wrong with Jefferson, why he or any other personable male had wasted all this time. Because he knew now why young people rushed so eagerly to war was their belief that it was one endless presanctioned opportunity for unlicensed rapine and pillage; that the tragedy of war was that you brought nothing away from it but only left something valuable there; that you carried into war things which, except for the war, you could have lived out your life in peace with without ever having to know they were inside you.
So it would not be him. He had been a soldier too even if he had brought back no wound to prove it. So if it would take physical assault on her to learn what his uncle said he didn’t know existed, he would never know it; he would just have to make one more in the town who believed she was simply walking off one hangover to be ready for the next one, having evidence to go on, or at least a symptom. Which was that once a week, Wednesday or Thursday afternoon (the town could set its watches and calendars by this too) she would be waiting at the wheel of her father’s car outside the bank when it closed and her father came out and they would drive up to what Jakeleg Wattman euphemiously called his fishing camp at Wyott’s Crossing, and lay in her next week’s supply of bootleg whiskey. Not her car: her father’s car. She could have owned a covey of automobiles out of that fund his uncle was trustee of from her grandfather, old Will Varner rich out at Frenchman’s Bend, or maybe from Varner and her father together as a part of or maybe a result of that old uproar and scandal twenty years ago when her mother had committed suicide and the mother’s presumed lover had abandoned the bank and his ancestral home both to her father, not to mention the sculptor she married being a New York Jew and hence (as the town was convinced) rich. And driven it—them—too, even stone deaf, who could have afforded to hire somebody to sit beside her and do nothing else but listen. Only she didn’t. Evidently she preferred walking, sweating out the hard way the insomnia or hangover or whatever the desperate price she paid for celibacy—unless of course Lawyer Gavin Stevens had been a slicker and smoother operator for the last eight years than anybody suspected; though even he had a wife now.
And her supply: not her father’s. Because the town, the county, knew that too: Snopes himself never drank, never touched it. Yet he would never let his daughter make the trip alone. Some were satisfied with the simple explanation that Wattman, like everybody else nowadays, was making so much money that he would have to leave some of it somewhere, and Snopes, a banker, figured it might as well be in his bank and so he called on Jakeleg once a week exactly as he would and did look in socially on any other merchant or farmer or cotton ginner of the bank’s profitable customers or clients. But there were others, among them his Uncle
Gavin and his uncle’s special crony, the sewing machine agent and rural bucolic grass-roots philosopher and Cincinnatus, V. K. Ratliff, who went a little further: it was for respectability, the look of things: that on those afternoons Snopes was not just a banker, he was a leading citizen and father; and even though his widowed only daughter was pushing forty and had spent the four years of the war working like a man in a military shipyard where unspinsterish things had a way of happening to women who were not even widows, he still wasn’t going to let her drive alone fifteen miles to a bootlegger’s joint and buy a bottle of whiskey.
Or a case of it; since it was hangover she walked off, she would need, or anyway need to have handy, a fresh bottle every day. So presently even the town would realise it wasn’t just hangover since people who can afford a hangover every day dont want to get rid of it, walk it off, even if they had time to. Which left only jealousy and rage; what she walked four or five miles every day to conquer or anyway contain was the sleepless frustrated rage at his Uncle Gavin for having jilted her while she was away riveting ships to save Democracy, to marry Melisandre Harriss Backus that was as Thackeray says, thinking (Charles) how he could be glad it wasn’t him that got the clothes off since if what was under them—provided of course his uncle had got them off—had driven his uncle to marry a widow with two grown children, one of them already married too, so that his Uncle Gavin might already have been a grandfather before he even became a bride.
Then apparently jealousy and frustrated unforgiving rage were wrong too. Christmas came and went and the rest of that winter followed it, into spring. His uncle was not only being but even acting the squire now. No boots and breeks true enough and although a squire might have looked like one behind a Phi Beta Kappa key even in Mississippi, he never could under a shock of premature white hair like a concert pianist or a Hollywood Cadillac agent. But at least he behaved like one, once each month and sometimes oftener, sitting at the head of the table out at Rose Hill with Charles’s new Aunt Melisandre opposite him and Linda and Charles across from each other while his uncle interpreted for Linda from the ivory tablet. Or rather, interpreted for himself into audible English to Charles and his new Aunt Em. Because Linda didn’t talk now any more than she ever had: just sitting there with that white streak along the top of her head like a collapsed plume, eating like a man; Charles didn’t mean eating grossly: just soundly, heartily, and looking … yes, by God, that was exactly the word: happy. Happy, satisfied, like when you have accomplished something, produced, created, made something: gone to some—maybe a lot—trouble and expense, stuck your neck out maybe against your own better judgment; and sure enough, be damned if it didn’t work, exactly as you thought it would, maybe even better than you had dared hope it would. Something you had wanted for yourself only you missed it so you began to think it wasn’t so, was impossible, until you made one yourself, maybe when it was too late for you to want it any more but at least you had proved it could be.
Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion Page 114
