He didn’t need to say, “Look at me, Flem.” His cousin was already doing that, his head turned over his shoulder. Otherwise he hadn’t moved, only the jaws ceased chewing in midmotion. Then he moved, leaned slightly forward in the chair and he had just begun to lower his propped feet from the ledge, the chair beginning to swivel around, when Mink from about five feet away stopped and raised the toad-shaped iron-rust-colored weapon in both hands and cocked and steadied it, thinking Hit’s got to hit his face: not I’ve got to but It’s got to and pulled the trigger and rather felt than heard the dull foolish almost inattentive click. Now his cousin, his feet now flat on the floor and the chair almost swiveled to face him, appeared to sit immobile and even detached too, watching too Mink’s grimed shaking child-sized hands like the hands of a pet coon as one of them lifted the hammer enough for the other to roll the cylinder back one notch so that the shell would come again under the hammer; again that faint something out of the past nudged, prodded: not a warning nor even really a repetition: just faint and familiar and unimportant still since, whatever it had been, even before it had not been strong enough to alter anything nor even remarkable enough to be remembered; in the same second he had dismissed it. Hit’s all right he thought Hit’ll go this time: Old Moster dont play jokes and cocked and steadied the pistol again in both hands, his cousin not moving at all now though he was chewing faintly again, as though he too were watching the dull point of light on the cock of the hammer when it flicked away.
It made a tremendous sound though in the same instant Mink no longer heard it. His cousin’s body was now making a curious half-stifled convulsive surge which in another moment was going to carry the whole chair over; it seemed to him, Mink, that the report of the pistol was nothing but that when the chair finished falling and crashed to the floor, the sound would wake all Jefferson. He whirled; there was a moment yet when he tried to say, cry, “Stop! Stop! You got to make sho he’s dead or you will have throwed away ever thing!” but he could not, he didn’t remember when he had noticed the other door in the wall beyond the chair but it was there; where it led to didn’t matter just so it led on and not back. He ran to it, scrabbling at the knob, still shaking and scrabbling at it even after he realised it was locked, still shaking the knob, quite blind now, even after the voice spoke behind him and he whirled again and saw the woman standing in the hall door; for an instant he thought So she could hear all the time before he knew better: she didn’t need to hear; it was the same power had brought her here to catch him that by merely pointing her finger at him could blast, annihilate, vaporise him where he stood. And no time to cock and aim the pistol again even if he had had another bullet so even as he whirled he flung, threw the pistol at her, nor even able to follow that because in the same second it seemed to him she already had the pistol in her hand, holding it toward him, saying in that quacking duck’s voice that deaf people use:
“Here. Come and take it. That door is a closet. You’ll have to come back this way to get out.”
EIGHTEEN
Stop the car,” Stevens said. Ratliff did so. He was driving though it was Stevens’s car. They had left the highway at the crossroads—Varner’s store and gin and blacksmith shop, and the church and the dozen or so dwellings and other edifices, all dark now though it was not yet ten o’clock, which composed the hamlet—and had now traversed and left behind the rest of the broad flat rich valley land on which old Varner—in his eighties now, his hair definitely gray, twelve years a widower until two years ago when he married a young woman of twenty-five or so who at the time was supposed to be engaged to, anyway courted by, his grandson—held liens and mortgages where he didn’t own it outright; and now they were approaching the hills: a section of small wornout farms tilted and precarious among the eroded folds like scraps of paper. The road had ceased some time back to be even gravel and at any moment now it would cease to be passable to anything on wheels; already, in the fixed glare (Ratliff had stopped the car) of the headlights, it resembled just one more eroded ravine twisting up the broken rise crested with shabby and shaggy pine and worthless blackjack. The sun had crossed the equator, in Libra now; and in the cessation of motion and the quiet of the idling engine, there was a sense of autumn after the slow drizzle of Sunday and the bright spurious cool which had lasted through Monday almost; the jagged rampart of pines and scrub oak was a thin dike against the winter and rain and cold, under which the wornout fields overgrown with sumac and sassafras and persimmon had already turned scarlet, the persimmons heavy with fruit waiting only for frost and the baying of potlicker possum hounds. “What makes you think he will be there even if we can get there ourselves?” Stevens said.
“Where else would he be?” Ratliff said. “Where else has he got to go? Back to Parchman, after all this recent trouble and expense it taken him to get out? What else has he got but home?”
“He hasn’t even got that home any more,” Stevens said. “When was it—three years ago—that day we drove out here about that boy—what was his name?—”
“Turpin,” Ratliff said.
“—that didn’t answer his draft call and we came out looking for him. There wasn’t anything left of the house then but the shell. Part of the roof, and what was left of the walls above the height convenient to pull off for firewood. This road was better then too.”
“Yes,” Ratliff said. “Folks kept it kind of graded and scraped up dragging out that kindling.”
“So there’s not even the shell any more.”
“There’s a cellar under it,” Ratliff said.
“A hole in the ground?” Stevens said. “A den like an animal?”
“He’s tired,” Ratliff said. “Even if he wasn’t sixty-three or -four years old. He’s been under a strain for thirty-eight years, let alone the last—this is Thursday, aint it?—seven days. And now he aint got no more strain to prop him up. Jest suppose you had spent thirty-eight years waiting to do something, and sho enough one day you finally done it. You wouldn’t have much left neither. So what he wants now is jest to lay down in the dark and the quiet somewhere for a spell.”
“He should have thought of that last Thursday,” Stevens said. “It’s too late to do that now.”
“Aint that exactly why we’re out here?” Ratliff said.
“All right,” Stevens said. “Drive on.” Instead, Ratliff switched off the engine. Now indeed they could sense, feel the change of the season and the year. Some of the birds remained but the night was no longer full of the dry loud cacophony of summer nocturnal insects. There were only the crickets in the dense hedgerows and stubble of mown hayfields, where at noon the dusty grasshoppers would spurt, frenetic and random, going nowhere. And now Stevens knew what was coming, what Ratliff was going to talk about.
“You reckon she really never knowed what that durn little rattlesnake was going to do the minute they turned him loose?” Ratliff said.
“Certainly not,” Stevens said, quickly, too quickly, too late. “Drive on.”
But Ratliff didn’t move. Stevens noticed that he still held his hand over the switch key so that Stevens himself couldn’t have started the engine. “I reckon she’ll stop over in Memphis tonight,” Ratliff said. “With that-ere fancy brand-new automobile and all.”
Stevens remembered all that. His trouble was, to forget it. She had told him herself—or so he believed then—this morning after she had given him the necessary information to draw the deed: how she wasn’t going to accept her so-called father’s automobile either but instead had ordered a new one from Memphis, which would be delivered in time for her to leave directly after the funeral; he could bring the deed to the house for her signature when they said good-bye, or what they—she and he—would have of good-bye.
It was a big funeral: a prominent banker and financier who had not only died in his prime (financial anyway) of a pistol wound but from the wrong pistol wound, since by ordinary a banker dying of a pistol in his own bedroom at nine o’clock in the evening should have just sai
d good night to a state or federal (maybe both) bank inspector. He (the deceased) had no auspices either: fraternal, civic, nor military: only finance; not an economy—cotton or cattle or anything else which Yoknapatawpha County and Mississippi were established on and kept running by, but belonging simply to Money. He had been a member of a Jefferson church true enough, as the outward and augmented physical aspect of the edifice showed, but even that had been not a subservience nor even an aspiration nor even really a confederation nor even an amnesty, but simply an armistice temporary between two irreconcilable tongues.
Yet not just the town but the county too came to it. He (Stevens) sat, a member of the cast itself, by the (sic) daughter’s request, on the front row in fact and next her by her insistence: himself and Linda and her Uncle Jody, a balding man who had added another hundred pounds of jowl and belly to his father’s long skeleton; and yes, Wallstreet Snopes, Wallstreet Panic Snopes, who not only had never acted like a Snopes, he never had even looked like one: a tall dark man except for the eyes of an incredible tender youthful periwinkle blue, who had begun as the delivery boy in a side-street grocery to carry himself and his younger brother, Admiral Dewey, through school, and went from there to create a wholesale grocery supply house in Jefferson serving all the county; and now, removed with his family to Memphis, owned a chain of wholesale grocery establishments blanketing half of Mississippi and Tennessee and Arkansas too; all of them facing the discreetly camouflaged excavation beside the other grave over which not her husband (who had merely ordained and paid for it) but Stevens himself had erected the outrageous marble lie which had been the absolution for Linda’s freedom nineteen years ago. As it would be he who would erect whatever lie this one would postulate; they—he and Linda—had discussed that too this morning.
“No. Nothing,” she said.
Yes he wrote.
“No,” she said. He merely raised the tablet and held the word facing her; he could not have written Its for your sake Then he didn’t need to. “You’re right,” she said. “You will have to do another one too.”
He wrote We will
“No,” she said. “You will. You always have for me. You always will for me. I know now I’ve never really had anybody but you. I’ve never really even needed anybody else but you.”
Sitting there while the Baptist minister did his glib and rapid office, he (Stevens) looked around at the faces, town faces and country faces, the citizens who represented the town because the town should be represented at this obsequy; the ones who represented simply themselves because some day they would be where Flem Snopes now lay, as friendless and dead and alone too; the diffident anonymous hopeful faces who had owed him or his bank money and, as people will and can, hoped, were even capable of believing that, now that he was dead, the debt might, barely might become lost or forgotten or even simply undemanded, uncollected. Then suddenly he saw something else. There were not many of them: he distinguished only three, country faces also, looking no different from the other country faces diffident, even effacing, in the rear of the crowd; until suddenly they leaped, sprang out, and he knew who they were. They were Snopeses; he had never seen them before but they were incontrovertible: not alien at all: simply identical, not so much in expression as in position, attitude; he thought rapidly, in something like that second of simple panic when you are violently wakened They’re like wolves come to look at the trap where another bigger wolf the boss wolf, the head wolf, what Ratliff would call the bull wolf, died; if maybe there was not a shred or scrap of hide still snared in it.
Then that was gone. He could not keep on looking behind him and now the minister had finished and the undertaker signalled for the select, the publicly bereaved, to depart; and when he looked, could look again, the faces were gone. He left Linda there. That is, her uncle would drive her home, where by this time the new automobile she had told him she had telephoned to Memphis for after she decided yesterday afternoon to drive alone to New York as soon as the funeral was over, would be waiting; she would probably be ready to leave, the new car packed and all, by the time he got there with the deed for her to sign.
So he went to the office and picked it up—a deed of gift (with the usual consideration of one dollar) returning the house and its lot to the De Spains. She had done it all herself, she hadn’t even informed him in the process, let alone beforehand. She had been unable to locate Manfred, whom Snopes had dispossessed of it along with the bank and the rest of his, Manfred’s, name and dignity in Jefferson, but she had found at last what remained of his kin—the only sister of old Major de Spain, Manfred’s father, and her only child: a bedridden old woman living in Los Angeles with her spinster daughter of sixty, the retired principal of a suburban Los Angeles grammar school; she, Linda, tracing, running them down herself without even consulting her lawyer: an outrage really, when the Samaritan, the philanthropist, the benefactor, begins not only to find but even to invent his own generosities, not only without recourse to but even ignoring the lawyers and secretaries and public relations counsellors; outrageous, antisocial in fact, taking the very cake out of that many mouths.
The papers wanted only her signature; it had not been fifteen minutes yet when he slowed his car in toward the curb before the house, not even noticing the small group—men, boys, a Negro or so—in front of him except to say, “The local committee validating her new automobile,” and parked his own and got out with the briefcase and had even turned, his glance simply passing across the group because it was there, when he said with a quick, faint, not really yet surprise, “It’s a British Jaguar. It’s brand new,” and was even walking on when suddenly it was as if a staircase you are mounting becomes abruptly a treadmill, you still walking, mounting, expending energy and motion but without progress; so abrupt and sudden in fact that you are only your aura, your very momentum having carried your corporeality one whole step in advance of you; he thought Noplace on earth from which a brand-new Jaguar could be delivered to Jefferson, Mississippi, since even noon yesterday, let alone not even telephoned for until last night thinking, desperately now No! No! It is possible! They could have had one, found one in Memphis last night or this morning—this ramshackle universe which has nothing to hold it together but coincidence and walked smartly up and paused beside it, thinking So she knew she was going to leave after last Thursday; she just didn’t know until Tuesday night exactly what day that would be. It was spanking unblemished new, the youngish quite decent-looking agent or deliverer stood beside it and at that moment the Negro houseman came out the front door carrying some of her luggage.
“Afternoon,” Stevens said. “Damned nice car. Brand new, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” the young man said. “Never even touched the ground until Mrs Kohl telephoned for it yesterday.”
“Lucky you had one on hand for her,” Stevens said.
“Oh, we’ve had it since the tenth of this month. When she ordered it last July she just told us to keep it when it came in, until she wanted it. I suppose her father’s … death changed her plans some.”
“Things like that do,” Stevens said. “She ordered it in July.”
“That’s right. They haven’t caught the fellow yet, I hear.”
“Not yet,” Stevens said. “Damned nice car. Would like to afford one myself,” and went on, into the open door and up the stairs which knew his feet, into the sitting room which knew him too. She stood watching him while he approached, dressed for the drive in a freshly laundered suit of the faded khaki coveralls, her face and mouth heavily made up against the wind of motion; on a chair lay the stained burberry and her purse and heavy gloves and a scarf for her head; she said, At least I didn’t lie to you. I could have hidden it in the garage until you had come and gone, but I didn’t. Though not in words: she said,
Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion Page 121
