Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion

by William Faulkner

  Only this time Uncle Gavin didn’t have to say anything because this time Mr Hampton wasn’t going to hit him. He just stood there with his little hard eyes shut until Montgomery Ward stopped. Then he said to Uncle Gavin:

  “Is that right? We’ve got to have a federal officer? There’s nothing on our books to touch him with? Come on, think. Nothing on the city books even?” Now it was Uncle Gavin who said By God.

  “That automobile law,” he said. “That Sartoris law,” while Mr Hampton stood looking at him. “Hanging right there in that frame on the wall by your own office door? Didn’t you ever look at it? That you cant drive an automobile on the streets of Jefferson—”

  “What?” Montgomery Ward said.

  “Louder,” Uncle Gavin said. “Mr Hampton cant hear you.”

  “But that’s just inside the city!” Montgomery Ward said. “Hampton’s just County Sheriff; he cant make an arrest on just a city charge.”

  “So you say,” Mr Hampton said; now he did put his hand on Montgomery Ward’s shoulder; Uncle Gavin said if he had been Montgomery Ward, he’d just as soon Mr Hampton had slapped him again. “Tell your own lawyer, not ours.”

  “Wait!” Montgomery Ward said to Uncle Gavin. “You own a car too! So does Hampton!”

  “We’re doing this alphabetically,” Uncle Gavin said. “We’ve passed the H’s. We’re in S now, and S-n comes before S-t. Take him on, Hub.”

  So Montgomery Ward didn’t have anywhere to go then, he had run completely out; he just stood there now and Uncle Gavin watched Mr Hampton take his hand off Montgomery Ward and pick up the album of pictures and the envelopes that held the rest of them and carry them to the sink where Montgomery Ward really would develop a film now and then, and tumble them in and then start hunting among the bottles and cans of developer stuff on the shelf above it.

  “What are you looking for?” Uncle Gavin said.

  “Alcohol—coal oil—anything that’ll burn,” Mr Hampton said.

  “Burn?” Montgomery Ward said. “Hell, man, those things are valuable. Look, I’ll make a deal: give them back to me and I’ll get to hell out of your damned town and it’ll never see me again.—All right,” he said. “I’ve got close to a hundred bucks in my pocket. I’ll lay it on the table here and you and Stevens turn your backs and give me ten minutes—” “Do you want to come back and hit him again?” Uncle Gavin said. “Dont mind me. Besides, he’s already suggested we turn our backs so all you’ll have to do is just swing your arm.” But Mr Hampton just took another bottle down and took out the stopper and smelled. “You cant do that,” Uncle Gavin said. “They’re evidence.”

  “All we need is just one,” Mr Hampton said.

  “That depends,” Uncle Gavin said. “Do you just want to convict him, or do you want to exterminate him?” Mr Hampton stopped, the bottle in one hand and the stopper in the other. “You know what Judge Long will do to the man that just owns one of these pictures.” Judge Long was the Federal Judge of our district. “Think what he’ll do to the man that owns a wheelbarrow full of them.”

  So Mr Hampton put the bottle back and after a while a deputy came with a suitcase and they put the album and the envelopes into it and locked it and Mr Hampton locked the suitcase in his safe to turn over to Mr Gombault, the U. S. marshal, when he got back to town, and they locked Montgomery Ward up in the county jail for operating an automobile contrary to law in the city of Jefferson, with Montgomery Ward cussing a while then threatening a while then trying again to bribe anybody connected with the jail or the town that would take the money. And we wondered how long it would be before he sent for Mr de Spain because of that connection. Because we knew that the last person on earth he would hope for help from would be his uncle or cousin Flem, who had already got shut of one Snopes through a murder charge so why should he balk at getting rid of another one with just a dirty postcard.

  So even Uncle Gavin, that Ratliff said made a kind of religion of never letting Jefferson see that a Snopes had surprised him, didn’t expect Mr Flem that afternoon when he walked into the office and laid his new black hat on the corner of the desk and sat there with the joints of his jaws working faint and steady like he was trying to chew without unclamping his teeth. You couldn’t see behind Mr Hampton’s eyes because they looked at you too hard; you couldn’t pass them like you couldn’t pass a horse in a lane that wasn’t big enough for a horse and a man both but just for the horse. You couldn’t see behind Mr Snopes’s eyes because they were not really looking at you at all, like a pond of stagnant water is not looking at you. Uncle Gavin said that was why it took him a minute or two to realise that he and Mr Snopes were looking at exactly the same thing: it just wasn’t with the same eye.

  “I’m thinking of Jefferson,” Mr Snopes said.

  “So am I,” Uncle Gavin said. “Of that damned Grover Winbush and every other arrested adolescent between fourteen and fifty-eight in half of north Mississippi with twenty-five cents to pay for one look inside that album.”

  “I forgot about Grover Winbush,” Mr Snopes said. “He wont only lose his job but when he does folks will want to know why and this whole business will come out.” That was Mr Snopes’s trouble. I mean, that was our trouble with Mr Snopes: there wasn’t anything to see even when you thought he might be looking at you. “I dont know whether you know it or not. His ma lives out at Whiteleaf. He sends her a dollar’s worth of furnish by the mail rider every Saturday morning.”

  “So to save one is to save both,” Uncle Gavin said. “If Grover Winbush’s mother is to keep on getting that dollar’s worth of fat-back and molasses every Saturday morning, somebody will have to save your cousin, nephew—which is he, anyway?—too.”

  Like Ratliff said, Mr Snopes probably missed a lot folks said to him behind his back, but he never missed what folks didn’t say to him to his face. Anyway, irony and sarcasm was not one of them. Or anyway it wasn’t this time. “That’s how I figgered it,” he said. “But you’re a lawyer. Your business is to know how to figger different.”

  Uncle Gavin didn’t miss much of what wasn’t quite said to his face either. “You’ve come to the wrong lawyer,” he said. “This case is in federal court. Besides, I couldn’t take it anyway; I draw a monthly salary to already be on the other side. Besides,” he said (while he was just City Attorney he talked Harvard and Heidelberg. But after that summer he and I spent travelling about the county running for County Attorney, he began to talk like the people he would lean on fences or squat against the walls of country stores with, saying “drug” for “dragged” and “me and you” instead of “you and I” just like they did, even saying figgered just like Mr Snopes just said it), “let’s you and me get together on this. I want him to go to the penitentiary.”

  And that’s when Uncle Gavin found out that he and Mr Snopes were looking at exactly the same thing: they were just standing in different places because Mr Snopes said, as quick and calm as Uncle Gavin himself: “So do I.” Because Montgomery Ward was his rival just like Wallstreet was, both of them alike in that there just wasn’t room in Jefferson for either one of them and Mr Snopes too. Because according to Ratliff, Uncle Gavin was missing it. “So do I,” Mr Snopes said. “But not this way. I’m thinking of Jefferson.”

  “Then it’s just too bad for Jefferson,” Uncle Gavin said. “He will get Judge Long and when Judge Long sees even one of those pictures, let alone a suitcase full of them, I will almost feel sorry even for Montgomery Ward. Have you forgotten about Wilbur Provine last year?”

  Wilbur Provine lived in Frenchman’s Bend too. Ratliff said he was really a Snopes; that when Providence realised that Eck Snopes was going to fail his lineage and tradition, it hunted around quick and produced Wilbur Provine to plug the gap. He ran a still in the creek bottom by a spring about a mile and a half from his house, with a path worn smooth as a ribbon and six inches deep from his back door to the spring where he had walked it twice a day for two years until they caught him and took him to federal court before Judge
Long, looking as surprised and innocent as if he did’t even know what the word “still” meant while the lawyer questioned him, saying No, he never had any idea there was a still within ten miles, let alone a path leading from his back door to it because he himself hadn’t been in that creek bottom in ten years, not even to hunt and fish since he was a Christian and he believed that no Christian should destroy God’s creatures, and he had burned out on fish when he was eight years old and hadn’t been able to eat it since

  Until Judge Long himself asked him how he accounted for that path, and Wilbur blinked at Judge Long once or twice and said he didn’t have any idea, unless maybe his wife had worn it toting water from the spring; and Judge Long (he had the right name, he was six and a half feet tall and his nose looked almost a sixth of that) leaning down across the bench with his spectacles at the end of his nose, looking down at Wilbur for a while, until he said:

  “I’m going to send you to the penitentiary, not for making whiskey but for letting your wife carry water a mile and a half from that spring.” That was who Montgomery Ward would get when he came up for trial and you would have thought that everybody in Yoknapatawpha County, let alone just Jefferson, had heard the story by now. But you would almost thought Mr Snopes hadn’t. Because now even the hinges of his jaws had quit that little faint pumping.

  “I heard Judge Long gave him five years,” he said. “Maybe them extra four years was for the path.”

  “Maybe,” Uncle Gavin said.

  “It was five years, wasn’t it?” Mr Snopes said.

  “That’s right,” Uncle Gavin said.

  “Send that boy out,” Mr Snopes said.

  “No,” Uncle Gavin said.

  Now the hinges of Mr Snopes’s jaws were pumping again. “Send him out,” he said.

  “I’m thinking of Jefferson too,” Uncle Gavin said. “You’re vice president of Colonel Sartoris’s bank. I’m even thinking of you.”

  “Much obliged,” Mr Snopes said. He wasn’t looking at anything. He didn’t waste any time but he wasn’t hurrying either: he just got up and took the new black hat from the desk and put it on and went to the door and opened it and didn’t quite stop even then, just kind of changing feet to step around the opening door and said, not to anybody any more than he had ever been looking at anybody: “Good day,” and went out and closed the door behind him.

  Then I said, “What—” and then stopped, Uncle Gavin and I both watching the door as it opened again, or began to, opening about a foot with no sound beyond it until we saw Ratliff’s cheek and one of his eyes, then Ratliff came in, eased in, sidled in, still not making any sound.

  “Am I too late, or jest too soon?” he said.

  “Neither,” Uncle Gavin said. “He stopped, decided not to. Somethingpened. The pattern went wrong. It started out all regular. You know: this is not just for me, and least of all for my kinsman. Do you know what he said?”

  “How can I yet?” Ratliff said. “That’s what I’m doing now.”

  “I said ‘You and I should get together. I want him to go to the penitentiary.’ And he said, ‘So do I.’ ”

  “All right,” Ratliff said. “Go on.”

  “ ‘—not for me, my kinsman,’ ” Uncle Gavin said. “ ‘For Jefferson.’ So the next step should have been the threat. Only he didn’t—”

  “Why threat?” Ratliff said.

  “The pattern,” Uncle Gavin said. “First the soap, then the threat, then the bribe. As Montgomery Ward himself tried it.”

  “This aint Montgomery Ward,” Ratliff said. “If Montgomery Ward had been named Flem, them pictures wouldn’t a never seen Jefferson, let alone vice versa. But we dont need to worry about Flem being smarter than Montgomery Ward; most anybody around here is that. What we got to worry about is, who else around here may not be as smart as him too. Then what?”

  “He quit,” Uncle Gavin said. “He came right up to it. He even asked me to send Chick out. And when I said No, he just picked up his hat and said Much obliged and went out as if he had just stopped in here to borrow a match.”

  Ratliff blinked at Uncle Gavin. “So he wants Montgomery Ward to go to the penitentiary. Only he dont want him to go under the conditions he’s on his way there now. Then he changed his mind.”

  “Because of Chick,” Uncle Gavin said.

  “Then he changed his mind,” Ratliff said.

  “You’re right,” Uncle Gavin said. “It was because he knew that by refusing to send Chick out I had already refused to be bribed.”

  “No,” Ratliff said. “To Flem Snopes, there aint a man breathing that cant be bought for something; all you need to do is jest to find it. Only, why did he change his mind?”

  “All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “Why?”

  “What was the conversation about jest before he told you to send Chick out?”

  “About the penitentiary,” Uncle Gavin said. “I just told you.”

  “It was about Wilbur Provine,” I said.

  Ratliff looked at me. “Wilbur Provine?”

  “His still,” I said. “That path and Judge Long.”

  “Oh,” Ratliff said. “Then what?”

  “That’s all,” Uncle Gavin said. “He just said ‘Send that boy out’ and I said—”

  “That wasn’t next,” I said. “The next was what Mr Snopes said about the five years, that maybe the extra four years was for the path, and you said Maybe and Mr Snopes said again, ‘It was five years, wasn’t it?’ and you said Yes and then he said to send me out.”

  “All right, all right,” Uncle Gavin said. But he was looking at Ratliff. “Well?” he said.

  “I dont know neither,” Ratliff said. “All I know is, I’m glad I aint Montgomery Ward Snopes.”

  “Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “When Judge Long sees that suitcase.”

  “Sho,” Ratliff said. “That’s jest Uncle Sam. It’s his Uncle Flem that Montgomery Ward wants to worry about, even if he dont know it yet. And us too. As long as all he wanted was jest money, at least you knowed which way to guess even if you knowed you couldn’t guess first. But this time—” He looked at us, blinking.

  “All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “How?”

  “You mind that story about how the feller found his strayed dog? He jest set down and imagined where he would be if he was that dog and got up and went and got it and brung it home. All right. We’re Flem Snopes. We got a chance to get shut of our—what’s that old-timey word? unsavory—unsavory nephew into the penitentiary. Only we’re vice president of a bank now and we cant afford to have it knowed even a unsavory nephew was running a peep show of French postcards. And the judge that will send him there is the same judge that told Wilbur Provine he was going to Parchman not for making whiskey but for letting his wife tote water a mile and a half.” He blinked at Uncle Gavin. “You’re right. The question aint ‘what’ a-tall: it’s jest ‘how.’ And since you wasn’t interested in money, and he has got better sense than to offer it to Hub Hampton, we dont jest know what that ‘how’ is going to be. Unless maybe since he got to be a up-and-coming feller in the Baptist church, he is depending on Providence.”

  Maybe he was. Anyway, it worked. It was the next morning, about ten oclock; Uncle Gavin and I were just leaving the office to drive up to Wyott’s Crossing where they were having some kind of a squabble over a drainage tax suit, when Mr Hampton came in. He was kind of blowing through his teeth, light and easy like he was whistling except that he wasn’t making any noise and even less than that of tune. “Morning,” he said. “Yesterday morning when we were in that studio and I was hunting through them bottles on that shelf for alcohol or something that would burn.”

  “All right,” Uncle Gavin said.

  “How many of them bottles and jugs did I draw the cork or unscrew the cap and smell? You were there. You were watching.”

  “I thought all of them,” Uncle Gavin said. “Why?”

  “So did I,” Mr Hampton said. “I could be wrong.” He looked at Uncle Gavin with his hard
little eyes, making that soundless whistling between his teeth.

  “You’ve prepared us,” Uncle Gavin said. “Got us into the right state of nervous excitement. Now tell us.”

  “About six this morning, Jack Crenshaw telephoned me.” (Mr Crenshaw was the Revenue field agent that did the moonshine still hunting in our district.) “He told me to come on to that studio as soon as I could. They were already inside, two of them. They had already searched it. Two of them gallon jugs on that shelf that I opened and smelled yesterday that never had nothing but Kodak developer in them, had raw corn whiskey in them this morning, though like I said I could have been wrong and missed them. Not to mention five gallons more of it in a oil can setting behind the heater, that I hadn’t got around to smelling yesterday when you stopped me for the reason that I never seen it there when I looked behind the heater yesterday or I wouldn’t been smelling at the bottles on that shelf for something to burn paper with. Though, as you say, I could be wrong.”

  “As you say,” Uncle Gavin said.

  “You may be right,” Mr Hampton said. “After all, I’ve been having to snuff out moonshine whiskey in this county ever since I first got elected. And since 1919, I have been so in practice that now I dont even need to smell: I just kind of feel it the moment I get where some of it aint supposed to be. Not to mention that five-gallon coal oil can full of it setting where you would have thought I would have fell over it reaching my hand to that shelf.”

  “All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “Go on.”