And ten minutes after that the District Attorney who had prosecuted the case was in the room too, saying (to the lawyer): “So now you want a suspended sentence, and a motion for a new trial. Why didn’t you think of this before?”
“You saw him too,” the lawyer said, cried. “You were in that courtroom with him all day long for three days too!”
“That’s right,” the District Attorney said. “That’s why I’m asking you why now.”
“Then you haven’t seen him since!” the lawyer said. “Come up to that cell and look at him now, like I did thirty minutes ago!”
But the Judge was an old man, he wouldn’t go then so it was the next morning when the turnkey unlocked the cell and let the three of them in where the frail-looking fleshless small figure in the patched and faded overalls and shirt and the sockless iron-stiff brogans got up from the cot. They had shaved him this morning and his hair was combed too, parted and flattened down with water across his skull.
“Come in, gentle-men,” he said. “I aint got no chair but likely you aint fixing to stay long enough to set nohow. Well, Judge, you not only brought me my wrote-out paper, you brought along two witnesses to watch you hand it to me.”
“Wait,” the lawyer said rapidly to the Judge. “Let me.” He said to Mink: “You wont need that paper. They—the Judge—is going to give you another trial.”
Now Mink stopped. He looked at the lawyer. “What for?” he said. “I done already had one that I never got much suption out of.”
“Because that one was wrong,” the lawyer said. “That’s what we’ve come to tell you about.”
“If that un was wrong, what’s the use of wasting time and money having another one? Jest tell that feller there to bring me my hat and open that door and I’ll go back hand get back to my crop, providing I still got one.”
“No, wait,” the lawyer said. “That other trial was wrong because it sent you to Parchman. You wont have to go to Parchman now, where you’ll have to work out in the hot sun all day long in a crop that isn’t even yours.” And now, with the pale faded gray eyes watching him as if not only were they incapable of blinking but never since birth had they ever needed to, the lawyer found himself babbling, not even able to stop it: “Not Parchman: Jackson, where you’ll have a nice room to yourself—nothing to do all day long but just rest—doctors—” and stopped then; not he that stopped his babbling but the fixed unwinking pale eyes that did it.
“Doctors,” Mink said. “Jackson.” He stared at the lawyer. “That’s where they send crazy folks.”
“Hadn’t you rather—” the District Attorney began. That was as far as he got too. He had been an athlete in college and still kept himself fit. Though even then he managed to grasp the small frantic creature only after it had hurled itself on the lawyer and both of them had gone to the floor. And even then it took him and the turnkey both to drag Mink up and away and hold him, frantic and frothing and hard to hold as a cat, panting,
“Crazy, am I? Crazy, am I? Aint no son a bitch going to call me crazy, I dont care how big he is or how many of them.”
“You damn right, you little bastard,” the District Attorney panted. “You’re going to Parchman. That’s where they’ve got the kind of doctors you need.”
So he went to Parchman, handcuffed to a deputy sheriff, the two of them transferring from smoking car to smoking car of local trains, this one having left the hills which he had known all his life, for the Delta which he had never seen before—the vast flat alluvial swamp of cypress and gum and brake and thicket lurked with bear and deer and panthers and snakes, out of which man was still hewing savagely and violently the rich ragged fields in which cotton stalks grew ranker and taller than a man on a horse, he, Mink, sitting with his face glued to the window like a child.
“This here’s all swamp,” he said. “It dont look healthy.”
“It aint healthy,” the deputy said. “It aint intended to be. This is the penitentiary. I cant imagine no more unhealth a man can have than to be locked up inside a bobwire pen for twenty or twenty-five years. Besides, a good unhealthy place ought to just suit you; you wont have to stay so long.”
So that’s how he saw Parchman, the penitentiary, his destination, doom, his life the Judge had said; for the rest of his life as long as he lived. But the lawyer had told him different, even if he couldn’t really trust him: only twenty-five, maybe only twenty years, and even a lawyer a man couldn’t trust could at least be trusted to know his own business that he had even went to special law school to be trained to know it, where all a judge had to do to get to be a judge was just to win a election vote-race for it. And even if the Judge hadn’t signed a paper saying only twenty or twenty-five years, that didn’t matter either since the Judge was on the other side awould naturally lie to a man coming up against him, where a lawyer, a man’s own lawyer, wouldn’t. More: his own lawyer couldn’t lie to him, because there was some kind of rule somebody had told him about that if the client didn’t lie to his lawyer, the Law itself wouldn’t let the lawyer lie to his own client.
And even if none of that was so, that didn’t matter either because he couldn’t stay in Parchman all his life, he didn’t have time, he would have to get out before then. And looking at the tall wire stockade with its single gate guarded day and night by men with shotguns, and inside it the low grim brick buildings with their barred windows, he thought, tried to remember, with a kind of amazement of the time when his only reason for wanting to get out was to go back home and farm, remembering it only for a moment and then no more, because now he had to get out.
He had to get out. His familiar patched faded blue overalls and shirt were exchanged now for the overalls and jumper of coarse white barred laterally with black which, according to the Judge, would have been his fate and doom until he died, if the lawyer hadn’t known better. He worked now—gangs of them—in the rich black cotton land while men on horses with shotguns across the pommels watched them, doing the only work he knew how to do, had done all his life, in a crop which would never be his for the rest of his life if the Judge had his way, thinking And that’s all right too. Hit’s even better. If a feller jest wants to do something, he might make it and he might not. But if he’s GOT to do something, cant nothing stop him.
And in the wooden bunk at night too, sheetless, with a cheap coarse blanket and his rolled-up clothing for a pillow, thinking, dinning it into himself since he was now having to change overnight and forever for twenty or twenty-five years his whole nature and character and being: To do whatever they tell me to do. Not to talk back to nobody. Not to get into no fights. That’s all I got to do for jest twenty-five or maybe even jest twenty years. But mainly not to try to escape.
Nor did he even count off the years as they accomplished. Instead, he simply trod them behind him into oblivion beneath the heavy brogan shoes in the cotton middles behind the mule which drew the plow and then the sweep, then with the chopping and thinning hoe and at last with the long dragging sack into which he picked, gathered the cotton. He didn’t need to count them; he was in the hands of the Law now and as long as he obeyed the four rules set down by the Law for his side, the Law would have to obey its single rule of twenty-five years or maybe even just twenty.
He didn’t know how many years it had been when the letter came, whether it was two or three as he stood in the Warden’s office, turning the stamped pencil-addressed envelope in his hand while the Warden watched him. “You cant read?” the Warden said.
“I can read reading, but I cant read writing good.”
“You want me to open it?” the Warden said.
“All right,” he said. So the Warden did.
“It’s from your wife. She wants to know when you want her to come to see you, and if you want her to bring the girls.”
Now he held the letter himself, the page of foolscap out of a school writing pad, pencilled over, spidery and hieroglyph, not one jot less forever beyond him than Arabic or Sanscrit. “Yettie cant even re
ad reading, let alone write writing,” he said. “Miz Tull must a wrote it for her.” “Well?” the Warden said. “What do you want me to tell her?”
“Tell her it aint no use in her coming all the way here because I’ll be home soon.”
“Oh,” the Warden said. “You’re going to get out soon, are you?” He looked at the small frail creature not much larger than a fifteen-year-old boy, who had been one of his charges for three years now without establishing an individual entity in the prison’s warp. Not a puzzle, not an enigma: he was not anything at all; no record of run-in or reprimand with or from any guard or trusty or official, never any trouble with any other inmate. A murderer, in for life, who in the Warden’s experience fell always into one of two categories: either an irreconcilable, with nothing more to lose, a constant problem and trouble to the guards and the other prisoners; or a sycophant, sucking up to whatever of his overlords could make things easiest for him. But not this one: who assumed his assigned task each morning and worked steady and unflagging in the cotton as if it was his own crop he was bringing to fruit. More: he worked harder for this crop from which he would not derive one cent of profit than, in the Warden’s experience, men of his stamp and kind worked in their own. “How?” the Warden said.
Mink told him; it was automatic now after three years; he had only to open his mouth and breathe: “By doing what they tell me to. Not talking back and not fighting. Not to try to escape. Mainly that: not to try to escape.”
“So in either seventeen or twenty-two years you’ll go home,” the Warden said. “You’ve already been here three.”
“Have I?” he said. “I aint kept count.—No,” he said. “Not right away. There’s something I got to attend to first.”
“What?” the Warden said.
“Something private. When I finish that, then I’ll come on home. Write her that.” Yes sir he thought. It looks like I done bad to come all the way to Parchmanjest to turn right around and go back home and kill Flem.
THREE
V. K. RATLIFF
Likely what bollixed Montgomery Ward at first, and for the next two or three days too, was exactly why Flem wanted him specifically in Parchman. Why wouldn’t no other equally secure retired place do, such as Atlanta or Leavenworth or maybe even Alcatraz two thousand miles away out in California, where old Judge Long would a already had him on the first train leaving Jefferson while he was still looking at the top one of them French postcards; jest exactly why wouldn’t no other place do Flem to have Montgomery Ward sent to but Parchman, Missippi.
Because even in the initial excitement, Montgomery Ward never had one moment’s confusion about what was actively happening to him. The second moment after Lawyer and Hub walked in the door, he knowed that at last something was happening that he had been expecting ever since whenever that other moment was when Flem found out or suspected that whatever was going on up that alley had a money profit in it. The only thing that puzzled him was, why Flem was going to all that extra trouble and complication jest to usurp him outen that nekkid-picture business. That was like the story about the coon in the tree that asked the name of the feller aiming the gun at him and when the feller told him, the coon says, “Hell fire, is that who you are? Then you dont need to waste all this time and powder jest on me. Stand to one side and I’ll climb down.”
Not to mention reckless. Having Flem Snopes take his business away from him was all right. He had been expecting that: that sooner or later his turn would come too, running as he did the same risk with ever body else in Yoknapatawpha County owning a business solvent enough for Flem to decide he wanted it too. But to let the county attorney and the county sheriff get a-holt of them pictures, the two folks of all the folks in Yoknapatawpha County that not even Grover Winbush would a been innocent enough to dream would ever turn them loose again—Lawyer Stevens, so dedicated to civic improvement and the moral advancement of folks that his purest notion of duty was browbeating twelve-year-old boys into running five-mile foot races when all they really wanted to do was jest to stay at home and set fire to the barn; and Hub Hampton, a meat-eating Hard-Shell-Baptist deacon whose purest notion of pleasure was counting off the folks he personally knowed was already bound for hell.
Why, in fact, Montgomery Ward had to go anywhere, if all his uncle or cousin wanted was jest to take his business away from him, except maybe jest to stay outen sight for a week or maybe a month or two to give folks time to forget about them nekkid pictures, or anyway that anybody named Snopes was connected with them, Flem being a banker now and having to deal not jest in simple usury but in respectability too.
No, what really should a puzzled Montgomery Ward, filled him in fact with delighted surprise, was how he had managed to last even this long. It never needed the Law nor Flem Snopes neither to close out that studio, pull the blinds down (or rather up) for good and all on the French-postcard industry in Jefferson, Missippi. Grover Winbush done that when he let whoever it was ketch him slipping outen that alley at two oclock that morning. No: Grover Winbush had done already wrecked and ruined that business in Jefferson at the same moment when he found out there was a side door in a Jefferson alley with what you might call a dry whorehouse behind it. No, that business was wrecked in Jefferson the same moment Grover Cleveland got appointed night marshal, Grover having jest exactly enough sense to be a night policeman providing the town wasn’t no bigger and never stayed awake no later than Jefferson, Missippi, since that would be the one job in all paid laborious endeavor—leaning all night against a lamppost looking at the empty Square—you would a thought he could a held indefinitely, providing the influence of whoever got it for him or give it to him lasted that long, without stumbling over anything he could do any harm with, to his-self or the job or a innocent bystander or maybe all three; and so naturally he would be caught by somebody, almost anybody, the second or third time he come slipping outen that alley.
Which was jest a simple unavoidable occupational hazard of runing a business like that in the same town where Grover Winbush was night marshal, which Montgomery Ward knowed as well as anybody else that knowed Grover. So when the business had been running over a year without no untoward interruption, Montgomery Ward figgered that whoever had been catching Grover slipping in and out of that alley after midnight once a month for the last nine or ten of them, was maybe business acquaintances Grover had made raiding crap games or catching them with a pint of moonshine whiskey in their hind pockets. Or who knows? Maybe even Flem hisself had got a-holt of each one of them in time, protecting not so much his own future interests and proposed investments, because maybe at that time he hadn’t even found out he wanted to go into the a-teelyer (that’s what Montgomery Ward called it; he had the name painted on the window: Atelier Monty) business, but simply protecting and defending solvency and moderate profit itself, not jest out of family loyalty to another Snopes but from pure and simple principle, even if he was a banker now and naturally would have to compromise, to a extent at least, profit with respectability, since any kind of solvency redounds to the civic interest providing it dont get caught, and even respectability can go hand in hand with civic interest providing the civic interest has got sense enough to take place after dark and not make no loud noise at it.
So when the county attorney and the county sheriff walked in on him that morning, Montgomery Ward naturally believed that pure and simple destiny was simply taking its natural course, and the only puzzling thing was the downright foolhardy, let alone reckless way Flem Snopes was hoping to take advantage of destiny. I mean, getting Lawyer Stevens and Sheriff Hampton into it, letting them get one whiff or flash of them nekkid pictures. Because of what you might call the late night shift his business had developed into, the Square never seen Montgomery Ward before noon. So until Lawyer and Hub told him about it, he hadn’t had time yet to hear about them two fellers robbing Uncle Willy Christian’s drug cabinet last night, that none of the folks watching the robbers through the front window could find hide nor hair of Gr
over Winbush to tell him about it until Grover finally come slipping back outen Montgomery Ward’s alley, by which time even the robbers, let alone the folks watching them, had done all went home.
I dont mean Montgomery Ward was puzzled that Lawyer and Hub was the first ones there. Naturally they would a been when his a-teelyer business finally blowed up, no matter what was the reason for the explosion. He would a expected them first even if Yoknapatawpha County hadn’t never heard the word Flem Snopes—a meal-mouthed sanctimonious Harvard- and Europe-educated lawyer that never even needed the excuse of his office and salaried job to meddle in anything providing it wasn’t none of his business and wasn’t doing him no harm; and old pussel-gutted Hampton that could be fetched along to look at anything, even a murder, once somebody remembered he was Sheriff and told him about it and where it was. No. What baffled Montgomery Ward was, what in creation kind of a aberration could Flem Snopes been stricken with to leave him believing he could use Lawyer Stevens and Hub Hampton to get them pictures, and ever dream of getting them away from them.
So for a moment his faith and confidence in Flem Snopes his-self wavered and flickered you might say. For that one horrid moment he believed that Flem Snopes could be the victim of pure circumstance compounded by Grover Winbush, jest like anybody else. But only a moment. If that durn boy that seen them two robbers in Uncle Willy’s drug cabinet had to pick out to go to the late picture show that sme one night in that whole week that Grover picked out to take jest one more slip up that alley to Montgomery Ward’s back room; if Flem Snopes was subject to the same outrageous misfortune and coincidence that the rest of us was, then we all might jest as well pack up and quit.
Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion Page 83
