“That’s right,” Stevens said. “If there should be any sort of hitch, you can call me at Jefferson collect.”
“I’ll call you anyway,” the Warden said. “You’re trying too hard not to sound serious.”
“No,” Stevens said. “Only if he refuses the money.”
“You mean the pardon, dont you?”
“What’s the difference?” Stevens said.
So when about midafternoon on the twenty-sixth he answered his telephone and Central said, “Parchman, Mississippi, calling Mr Gavin Stevens. Go ahead, Parchman,” and the faint voice said, “Hello. Lawyer?” Stevens thought rapidly So I am a coward, after all. When it happens two years from now, at least none of it will spatter on me. At least I can tell her now because this will prove it and said into the mouthpiece:
“So he refused to take the money.”
“Then you already know,” Ratliff’s voice said.
“… What?” Stevens said after less than a second actually. “Hello?”
“It’s me,” Ratliff said. “V.K. At Parchman. So they already telephoned you.”
“Telephoned me what?” Stevens said. “He’s still there? He refused to leave?”
“No, he’s gone. He left about eight this morning. A truck going north—”
“But you just said he didn’t take the money.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. We finally located the money about fifteen minutes ago. It’s still here. He—”
“Hold it,” Stevens said. “You said eight this morning. Which direction?”
“A Negro seen him standing by the highway until he caught a ride on a cattle truck going north, toward Tutwiler. At Tutwiler he could have went to Clarksdale and then on to Memphis. Or he could have went from Tutwiler to Batesville and on to Memphis that-a-way. Except that anybody wanting to go from Parchman to Jefferson could go by Batesville too lessen he jest wanted to go by way of Chicago or New Orleans for the trip. Otherwise he could be in Jefferson pretty close to now. I’m leaving right now myself but maybe you better—”
“All right,” Stevens said.
“And maybe Flem too,” Ratliff said.
“Damn it, I said all right,” Stevens said.
“But not her yet,” Ratliff said. “Aint no need to tell her yet that likely she’s jest finished killing her maw’s husband—”
But he didn’t even hear that, the telephone was already down; he didn’t even have his hat when he reached the Square, the street below, the bank where Snopes would be in one direction, the courthouse where the Sheriff would be in the other: not that it really mattered which one he saw first, thinking So I really am a coward after all the talk about destiny and fate that didn’t even sell Ratliff.
“You mean,” the Sheriff said, “he had already spent thirty-eight years in Parchman, and the minute somebody gets him out he’s going to try to do something that will send him straight back even if it dont hang him first this time? Dont be foolish. Even a fellow like they say he was would learn that much sense in thirty-eight years.”
“Ha,” Stevens said without mirth. “You expressed it exactly that time. You were probably not even a shirttail boy back in 1908. You were not in that courtroom that day and saw his face and heard him. I was.”
“All right,” the Sheriff said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Arrest him. What do you call them? roadblocks? Dont even let him get into Yoknapatawpha County.”
“On what grounds?”
“You just catch him, I’ll furnish you with grounds as fast as you need them. If necessary we will hold him for obtaining money under false pretences.”
“I thought he didn’t take the money.”
“I dont know what happened yet about the money. But I’ll figure out some way to use it, at least long enough to hold him on for a while.”
“Yes,” the Sheriff said. “I reckon you would. Let’s step over to the bank and see Mr Snopes; maybe all three of us can figure out something. Or maybe Mrs Kohl. You’ll have to tell her too, I reckon.”
Whereupon Stevens repeated almost verbatim what Ratliff had said into the telephone after he had put it down: “Tell a woman that apparently she just finished murdering her father at eight o’clock this morning?”
“All right, all right,” the Sheriff said. “You want me to come to the bank with you?”
“No,” Stevens said. “Not yet anyway.”
“I still think you have found a booger where there wasn’t one,” the Sheriff said. “If he comes back here at all, it’ll just be out at Frenchman’s Bend. Then all we’ll have to do is pick him up the first time we notice him in town and have a talk with him.”
“Notice, hell,” Stevens said. “Aint that what I’m trying to tell you? that you dont notice him. That was the mistake Jack Houston made thirty-eight years ago: he didn’t notice him either until he stepped out from behind that bush that morning with that shotgun—if he even stepped out of the bushes before he shot, which I doubt.”
He recrossed the Square rapidly, thinking Yes, I really am a coward, after all when that quantity, entity with which he had spent a great deal of his life talking or rather having to listen to (his skeleton perhaps, which would outlast the rest of him by a few months or years—and without doubt would spend that time moralising at him while he would be helpless to answer back) answered immediately Did anyone ever say you were not? Then he But I am not a coward: I am a humanitarian. Then the other You are not even an original; that word is customarily used as a euphemism for it.
The bank would be closed now. But when he crossed the Square to the sheriff’s office the car with Linda behind the wheel had not been waiting so this was not the day of the weekly whiskey run. The shades were drawn but after some knob-rattling at the side door one of the bookkeepers peered out and recognised him and let him in; he passed on through the machine-clatter of the day’s recapitulation—the machines themselves sounding immune and even inattentive to the astronomical sums they reduced to staccato trivia—and knocked at the door on which Colonel Sartoris had had the word PRIVATE lettered by hand forty years ago, and opened it.
Snopes was sitting not at the desk but with his back to it, facing the cold now empty fireplace, his feet raised and crossed against the same heel scratches whose initial inscribing Colonel Sartoris had begun. He was not reading, he was not doing anything: just sitting there with his black planter’s hat on, his lower jaw moving faintly and steadily as though he were chewing something, which as the town knew also he was not; he didn’t even lower his feet when Stevens came to the desk (it was a broad flat table littered with papers in a sort of neat, almost orderly way) and said almost in one breath:
“Mink left Parchman at eight o’clock this morning. I dont know whether you know it or not but we—I had some money waiting to be given to him at the gate, under condition that in accepting it he had passed his oath to leave Mississippi without returning to Jefferson and never cross the state line again. He didn’t take the money; I dont know yet how since he was not to be given the pardon until he did. He caught a ride in a passing truck and has disappeared. The truck was headed north.”
“How much was it?” Snopes said.
“What?” Stevens said.
“The money,” Snopes said.
“Two hundred and fifty dollars,” Stevens said.
“Much obliged,” Snopes said.
“Good God, man,” Stevens said. “I tell you a man left Parchman at eight o’clock this morning on his way here to murder you and all you say is Much obliged?”
The other didn’t move save for the faint chewing motion; Stevens thought with a kind of composed and seething rage If he would only spit now and then. “Then all he had was that ten dollars they give them when they turn them loose,” Snopes said.
“Yes,” Stevens said. “As far as we—I know. But yes.” Or even just go through the motions of spitting now and then he thought.
“Say a man thought he had a grudge against you,” Snope
s said. “A man sixty-three years old now with thirty-eight of that spent in the penitentiary and even before that wasn’t much, not much bigger than a twelve-year-old boy—”
That had to use a shotgun from behind a bush even then Stevens thought. Oh yes, I know exactly what you mean: too small and frail even then, even without thirty-eight years in jail, to have risked a mere knife or bludgeon. And he cant go out to Frenchman’s Bend, the only place on earth where someone might remember him enough to lend him one because even though nobody in Frenchman’s Bend would knock up the muzzle aimed at you, they wouldn’t lend him theirs to aim with. So he will either have to buy a gun for ten dollars, or steal one. In which case, you might even be safe: the ten-dollar one wont shoot and in the other some policeman might save you honestly. He thought rapidly Of course. North. He went to Memphis. He would have to. He wouldn’t think of anywhere else to go to buy a gun with ten dollars. And, since Mink had only the ten dollars, he would have to hitchhike all the way, first to Memphis, provided he got there before the pawnshops closed, then back to Jefferson. Which could not be before tomorrow, since anything else would leave simple destiny and fate too topheavy with outrageous hope and coincidence for even Ratliff’s sanguine nature to pass. “Yes,” he said. “So do I. You have at least until tomorrow night.” He thought rapidly And now for it. How to persuade him not to tell her without letting him know that was what he agreed to, promised, and that it was me who put it into his mind. So suddenly he heard himself say: “Are you going to tell Linda?”
“Why?” Snopes said.
“Yes,” Stevens said. Then heard himself say in his turn: “Much obliged.” Then, suddenly indeed this time: “I’m responsible for this, even if I probably couldn’t have stopped it. I just talked to Eef Bishop. What else do you want me to do?” If he would just spit once he thought.
“Nothing,” Snopes said.
“What?” Stevens said.
“Yes,” Snopes said. “Much obliged.”
At least he knew where to start. Only, he didn’t know how. Even if—when—he called the Memphis police, what would—could—he tell them: a city police force a hundred miles away, who had never heard of Mink and Flem Snopes and Jack Houston, dead these forty years now, either. When he, Stevens, had already failed to move very much the local sheriff who at least had inherited the old facts. How to explain what he himself was convinced Mink wanted in Memphis, let alone convince them that Mink was or would be in Memphis. And even if he managed to shake them that much, how to describe whom they were supposed to look for: whose victim forty years ago had got himself murdered mainly for the reason that the murderer was the sort of creature whom nobody, even his victim, noticed enough in time to pay any attention to what he was or might do.
Except Ratliff. Ratliff alone out of Yoknapatawpha County would know Mink on sight. To be unschooled, untravelled, and to an extent unread, Ratliff had a terrifying capacity for knowledge or local information or acquaintanceship to match the need of any local crisis. Stevens admitted to himself now what he was waiting, dallying, really wasting time for: for Ratliff to drive back in his pickup truck from Parchman, to be hurried on to Memphis without even stopping, cutting the engine, to reveal Mink to the Memphis police and so save Mink’s cousin, kinsman, whatever Flem was, from that just fate; knowing—Stevens—better all the while: that what he really wanted with Ratliff was to find out how Mink had not only got past the Parchman gate without that absolutely contingent money, but had managed it in such a way that apparently only the absolutely unpredicted and unwarranted presence of Ratliff at a place and time that he had no business whatever being, revealed the fact that he hadn’t taken it.
It was not three o’clock when Ratliff phoned; it would be almost nine before he reached Jefferson. It was not that the pickup truck wouldn’t have covered the distance faster. It was that no vehicle owned by Ratliff (provided he was in it and conscious, let alone driving it) was going to cover it faster. Besides, at some moment not too long after six o’clock he was going to stop to eat at the next dreary repetitive little cotton-gin hamlet, or (nowadays) on the highway itself, drawing neatly in and neatly parking before the repetitive Dixie Cafes or Mac’s or Lorraine’s, to eat, solitary, neatly and without haste the meat a little too stringy to chew properly and too overcooked to taste at all, the stereotyped fried potatoes and the bread you didn’t chew but mumbled, like one of the paper napkins, the machine-chopped prefrozen lettuce and tomatoes like (except for the tense inviolate color) something exhumed by paleontologists from tundras, the machine-made prefrozen pie and what they would call coffee—the food perfectly pure and perfectly tasteless except for the dousing of machine-made tomato ketchup.
He (Stevens) could, perhaps should, have had plenty of time to drive out to Rose Hill and eat his own decent evening meal. Instead, he telephoned his wife.
“I’ll come in and we can eat at the Holston House,” she said.
“No, honey. I’ve got to see Ratliff as soon as he gets back from Parchman.”
“All right. I think I’ll come in and have supper with Maggie” (Maggie was his sister) “and maybe we’ll go to the picture show and I’ll see you tomorrow. I can come in to town, cant I, if I promise to stay off the streets?”
“You see, you dont help me. How can I resist togetherness if you wont fight back?”
“I’ll see you tomorrow then,” she said. “Good night.” So they ate at the Holston House; he didn’t feel quite up to his sister and brother-in-law and his nephew Charles tonight. The Holston House still clung to the old ways, not desperately nor even gallantly: just with a cold and inflexible indomitability, owned and run by two maiden sisters (that is, one of them, the younger, had been married once but so long ago and so briefly that it no longer counted) who were the last descendants of the Alexander Holston, one of Yoknapatawpha County’s three original settlers, who had built the log ordinary which the modern edifice had long since swallowed, who had had his part—been in fact the catalyst—in the naming of Jefferson over a century ago; they still called the dining room simply the dining room and (nobody knew how) they still kept Negro men waiters, some of whose seniority still passed from father to son; the guests still ate the table d’hôte meals mainly at two long communal tables at the head of each of which a sister presided; no man came there without a coat and necktie and no woman with her head covered (there was a dressing room with a maid for that purpose), not even if she had a railroad ticket in her hand.
Though his sister did pick his wife up in time for the picture show. So he was back in the office when a little after eight-thirty he heard Ratliff on the stairs and said, “All right. What happened?” Then he said, “No. Wait. What were you doing at Parchman?”
“I’m a—what do you call it? optimist,” Ratliff said. “Like any good optimist, I dont expect the worst to happen. Only, like any optimist worth his salt, I like to go and look as soon as possible afterward jest in case it did. Especially when the difference between the best and the worst is liable to reach all the way back up here to Jefferson. It taken a little doing, too. This was about ten o’clock this morning; he had been gone a good two hours by then, and they was a little impatient with me. They had done done their share, took him and had him for thirty-eight years all fair and regular, like the man said for them to, and they felt they had done earned the right to be shut of him. You know: his new fresh pardon and them new fresh two hundred and fifty dollars all buttoned up neat and safe and secure in his new fresh overhalls and jumper and the gate locked behind him again jest like the man said too and the official Mink Snopes page removed outen the ledger and officially marked Paid in Full and destroyed a good solid two hours back, when here comes this here meddling out-of-town son-of-a-gun that aint even a lawyer saying Yes yes, that’s jest fine, only let’s make sho he actively had that money when he left.
“The Warden hisself had tended to the money in person: had Mink in alone, with the table all ready for him, the pardon in one pile and them two hundred a
nd fifty dollars that Mink hadn’t never seen that much at one time before in his life, in the other pile; and the Warden hisself explaining how there wasn’t no choice about it: to take the pardon he would have to take the money too, and once he teched the money he had done give his sworn word and promise and Bible oath to strike for the quickest place outside the state of Missippi and never cross the line again as long as he lived. ‘Is that what I got to do to get out?’ Mink says. ‘Take the money?’ ‘That’s it,’ the Warden says, and Mink reached and taken the money and the Warden hisself helped him button the money and the pardon both inside his jumper and the Warden shaken his hand and the trusty come to take him out to where the turnkey was waiting to unlock the gate into liberty and freedom—”
“Wait,” Stevens said. “Trusty.”
“Aint it?” Ratliff said with pleased, almost proud approval. “It was so simple. Likely that’s why it never occurred to none of them, especially as even a Parchman deserving any name a-tall for being well conducted, aint supposed to contain nobody eccentric and antisocial enough to behave like he considered anything like free-will choice to even belong in the same breath with two hundred and fifty active dollars give him free for nothing so he never even had to say Much obliged for them. That’s what I said too: ‘That trusty. He left here for the gate with them two hundred and fifty dollars. Let’s jest see if he still had them when he went outen it.’ So that’s what I said too: ‘That trusty.’
“‘A lifer too,’ the Warden says. ‘Killed his wife with a ball-peen hammer, was converted and received salvation in the jail before he was even tried and has one of the best records here, is even a lay preacher.’
“‘Than which, if Mink had had your whole guest list to pick from and time to pick in, he couldn’t a found a better feller for his purpose,’ I says. ‘So it looks like I’m already fixing to begin to have to feel sorry for this here snatched brand even if he was too impatient to think of a better answer to the enigma of wedlock than a garage hammer. That is, I reckon you still got a few private interrogation methods for reluctant conversationalists around here, aint you?’
Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion Page 117
