Sofy starnes Dide april 16 th 1905
Hawkshaw wrote the last one himself; it was neat and well written, like a bookkeeper’s hand:
Mrs Will Starnes. April 23, 1916.
“The record will be in the back,” Bidwell said.
We turned to the back. It was there, in a neat column, in Hawkshaw’s hand. It began with April 16, 1917, $200.00. The next one was when he made the next payment at the bank: April 16, 1918, $200.00; and April 16, 1919, $200.00; and April 16, 1920, $200.00; and on to the last one: April 16, 1930, $200.00. Then he had totaled the column and written under it:
“Paid in full. April 16, 1930.”
It looked like a sentence written in a copy book in the old-time business colleges, like it had flourished, the pen had, in spite of him. It didn’t look like it was written boastful; it just flourished somehow, the end of it, like it had run out of the pen somehow before he could stop it.
“So he did what he promised her he would,” Stevens said.
“That’s what I told Bidwell,” I said.
Stevens went on like he wasn’t listening to me much.
“So the old lady could rest quiet. I guess that’s what the pen was trying to say when it ran away from him: that now she could lie quiet. And he’s not much over forty-five. Not so much anyway. Not so much but what, when he wrote ‘Paid in full’ under that column, time and despair rushed as slow and dark under him as under any garlanded boy or crownless and crestless girl.”
“Only the girl went bad on him,” I said. “Forty-five’s pretty late to set out to find another. He’ll be fifty-five at least by then.”
Stevens looked at me then. “I didn’t think you had heard,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “That is, I looked in the barber shop when I passed. But I knew he would be gone. I knew all the time he would move on, once he had that mortgage cleared. Maybe he never knew about the girl, anyway. Or likely he knew and didn’t care.”
“You think he didn’t know about her?”
“I dont see how he could have helped it. But I dont know. What do you think?”
“I dont know. I dont think I want to know. I know something so much better than that.”
“What’s that?” I said. He was looking at me. “You keep on telling me I haven’t heard the news. What is it I haven’t heard?”
“About the girl,” Stevens said. He looked at me.
“On the night Hawkshaw came back from his last vacation, they were married. He took her with him this time.”
Centaur in Brass
IN OUR TOWN Flem Snopes now has a monument to himself, a monument of brass, none the less enduring for the fact that, though it is constantly in sight of the whole town and visible from three or four points miles out in the country, only four people, two white men and two Negroes, know that it is his monument, or that it is a monument at all.
He came to Jefferson from the country, accompanied by his wife and infant daughter and preceded by a reputation for shrewd and secret dealing. There lives in our county a sewing-machine agent named Suratt, who used to own a half interest in a small back-street restaurant in town—himself no mean hand at that technically unassailable opportunism which passes with country folks—and town folks, too—for honest shrewdness.
He travels about the county steadily and constantly, and it was through him that Snopes’s doings first came to our ears: how first, a clerk in a country store, Snopes one day and to everyone’s astonishment was married to the store owner’s daughter, a young girl who was the belle of the countryside. They were married suddenly, on the same day upon which three of the girl’s erstwhile suitors left the county and were seen no more.
Soon after the wedding Snopes and his wife moved to Texas, from where the wife returned a year later with a well-grown baby. A month later Snopes himself returned, accompanied by a broad-hatted stranger and a herd of half-wild mustang ponies, which the stranger auctioned off, collected the money, and departed. Then the purchasers discovered that none of the ponies had ever had a bridle on. But they never learned if Snopes had had any part in the business, or had received any part of the money.
The next we heard of him was when he appeared one day in a wagon laden with his family and household goods, and with a bill-of-sale for Suratt’s half of the restaurant. How he got the bill-of-sale, Suratt never told, and we never learned more than that there was somehow involved in the affair a worthless piece of land which had been a portion of Mrs. Snopes’s dowry. But what the business was even Suratt, a humorous, talkative man who was as ready to laugh at a joke on himself as at one on anyone else, never told. But when he mentioned Snopes’s name after that, it was in a tone of savage and sardonic and ungrudging admiration.
“Yes, sir,” he said, “Flem Snopes outsmarted me. And the man that can do that, I just wish I was him, with this whole State of Mississippi to graze on.”
In the restaurant business Snopes appeared to prosper. That is, he soon eliminated his partner, and presently he was out of the restaurant himself, with a hired manager to run it, and we began to believe in the town that we knew what was the mainspring of his rise and luck. We believed that it was his wife; we accepted without demur the evil which such little lost towns like ours seem to foist even upon men who are of good thinking despite them. She helped in the restaurant at first. We could see her there behind the wooden counter worn glass-smooth by elbows in their eating generations: young, with the rich coloring of a calendar; a face smooth, unblemished by any thought or by anything else: an appeal immediate and profound and without calculation or shame, with (because of its unblemishment and not its size) something of that vast, serene, impervious beauty of a snowclad virgin mountain flank, listening and not smiling while Major Hoxey, the town’s lone rich middle-aged bachelor, graduate of Yale and soon to be mayor of the town, incongruous there among the collarless shirts and the overalls and the grave, country-eating faces, sipped his coffee and talked to her.
Not impregnable: impervious. That was why it did not need gossip when we watched Snopes’s career mount beyond the restaurant and become complement with Major Hoxey’s in city affairs, until less than six months after Hoxey’s inauguration Snopes, who had probably never been close to any piece of machinery save a grindstone until he moved to town, was made superintendent of the municipal power plant. Mrs. Snopes was born one of those women the deeds and fortunes of whose husbands alone are the barometers of their good name; for to do her justice, there was no other handle for gossip save her husband’s rise in Hoxey’s administration.
But there was still that intangible thing: partly something in her air, her face; partly what we had already heard about Flem Snopes’s methods. Or perhaps what we knew or believed about Snopes was all; perhaps what we thought to be her shadow was merely his shadow falling upon her. But anyway, when we saw Snopes and Hoxey together we would think of them and of adultery in the same instant, and we would think of the two of them walking and talking in amicable cuckoldry. Perhaps, as I said, this was the fault of the town. Certainly it was the fault of the town that the idea of their being on amicable terms outraged us more than the idea of the adultery itself. It seemed foreign, decadent, perverted: we could have accepted, if not condoned, the adultery had they only been natural and logical and enemies.
But they were not. Yet neither could they have been called friends. Snopes had no friends; there was no man nor woman among us, not even Hoxey or Mrs. Snopes, who we believed could say, “I know his thought”—least of all, those among whom we saw him now and then, sitting about the stove in the rear of a certain smelly, third-rate grocery, listening and not talking, for an hour or so two or three nights a week. And so we believed that, whatever his wife was, she was not fooling him. It was another woman who did that: a Negro woman, the new young wife of Tom-Tom, the day fireman in the power plant.
Tom-Tom was black: a big bull of a man weighing two hundred pounds and sixty years old and looking about forty. He had been married about a year to h
is third wife, a young woman whom he kept with the strictness of a Turk in a cabin two miles from town and from the power plant where he spent twelve hours a day with shovel and bar.
One afternoon he had just finished cleaning the fires and he was sitting in the coal-bunker, resting and smoking his pipe, when Snopes, his superintendent, employer and boss, came in. The fires were clean and the steam was up again, and the safety valve on the middle boiler was blowing off.
Snopes entered: a potty man of no particular age, broad and squat, in a clean though collarless white shirt and a plaid cap. His face was round and smooth, either absolutely impenetrable or absolutely empty. His eyes were the color of stagnant water; his mouth was a tight, lipless seam. Chewing steadily, he looked up at the whistling safety valve.
“How much does that whistle weigh?” he said after a time.
“Must weight ten pound, anyway,” Tom-Tom said.
“Is it solid brass?”
“If it ain’t, I ain’t never seed no brass what is solid,” Tom-Tom said.
Snopes had not once looked at Tom-Tom. He continued to look upward toward the thin, shrill, excruciating sound of the valve. Then he spat, and turned and left the boiler-room.
II
HE BUILT HIS monument slowly. But then, it is always strange to what involved and complex methods a man will resort in order to steal something. It’s as though there were some intangible and invisible social force that mitigates against him, confounding his own shrewdness with his own cunning, distorting in his judgment the very value of the object of his greed, which in all probability, had he but picked it up and carried it openly away, nobody would have remarked or cared. But then, that would not have suited Snopes, since he apparently had neither the high vision of a confidence man nor the unrecking courage of a brigand.
His vision at first, his aim, was not even that high; it was no higher than that of a casual tramp who pauses in passing to steal three eggs from beneath a setting hen. Or perhaps he was merely not certain yet that there really was a market for brass. Because his next move was five months after Harker, the night engineer, came on duty one evening and found the three safety whistles gone and the vents stopped with one-inch steel screw plugs capable of a pressure of a thousand pounds.
“And them three boiler heads you could poke a hole through with a soda straw!” Harker said. “And that damn black night fireman, Turl, that couldn’t even read a clock face, still throwing coal into them! When I looked at the gauge on the first boiler, I never believed I would get to the last boiler in time to even reach the injector.
“So when I finally got it into Turl’s head that that 100 on that dial meant where Turl would not only lose his job, he would lose it so good they wouldn’t even be able to find the job to give it to the next misbegotten that believed that live steam was something you blowed on a window pane in cold weather, I got settled down enough to ask him where them safety valves had gone to.
“ ‘Mr. Snopes took um off,’ Turl says.
“ ‘What in the hell for?’
“ ‘I don’t know. I just telling you what Tom-Tom told me. He say Mr. Snopes say the shut-off float in the water tank ain’t heavy enough. Say that tank start leaking some day, and so he going to fasten them three safety valves on the float and make it heavier.’
“ ‘You mean—’ I says. That’s as far as I could get: ‘You mean——’
“ ‘That what Tom-Tom say. I don’t know nothing about it.’
“But they were gone. Up to that night, me and Turl had been catching forty winks or so now and then when we got caught up and things was quiet. But you can bet we never slept none that night. Me and him spent that whole night, time about, on that coal pile, where we could watch them three gauges. And from midnight on, after the load went off, we never had enough steam in all three of them boilers put together to run a peanut parcher. And even when I was in bed, at home, I couldn’t sleep. Time I shut my eyes I would begin to see a steam gauge about the size of a washtub, with a red needle big as a shovel moving up toward a hundred pounds, and I would wake myself up hollering and sweating.”
But even that wore away after a while, and then Turl and Harker were catching their forty winks or so again. Perhaps they decided that Snopes had stolen his three eggs and was done. Perhaps they decided that he had frightened himself with the ease with which he had got the eggs. Because it was five months before the next act took place.
Then one afternoon, with his fires cleaned and steam up again, Tom-Tom, smoking his pipe on the coal pile, saw Snopes enter, carrying in his hand an object which Tom-Tom said later he thought was a mule shoe. He watched Snopes retire into a dim corner behind the boilers, where there had accumulated a miscellaneous pile of metal junk, all covered with dirt: fittings, valves, rods and bolts and such, and, kneeling there, begin to sort the pieces, touching them one by one with the mule shoe and from time to time removing one piece and tossing it behind him, into the runway. Tom-Tom watched him try with the magnet every loose piece of metal in the boiler-room, sorting out the iron from the brass: then Snopes ordered Tom-Tom to gather up the segregated pieces of brass and bring them in to his office.
Tom-Tom gathered the pieces into a box. Snopes was waiting in the office. He glanced once into the box, then he spat. “How do you and Turl get along?” he said. Turl, I had better repeat, was the night fireman; a Negro too, though he was saddle-colored where Tom-Tom was black, and in place of Tom-Tom’s two hundred pounds Turl, even with his laden shovel, would hardly have tipped a hundred and fifty.
“I tends to my business,” Tom-Tom said. “What Turl does wid hisn ain’t no trouble of mine.”
“That ain’t what Turl thinks,” Snopes said, chewing, watching Tom-Tom, who looked at Snopes as steadily in turn; looked down at him. “Turl wants me to give him your day shift. He says he’s tired firing at night.”
“Let him fire here long as I is, and he can have it,” Tom-Tom said.
“Turl don’t want to wait that long,” Snopes said, chewing, watching Tom-Tom’s face. Then he told Tom-Tom how Turl was planning to steal some iron from the plant and lay it at Tom-Tom’s door and so get Tom-Tom fired. And Tom-Tom stood there, huge, hulking, with his hard round little head. “That’s what he’s up to,” Snopes said. “So I want you to take this stuff out to your house and hide it where Turl can’t find it. And as soon as I get enough evidence on Turl, I’m going to fire him.”
Tom-Tom waited until Snopes had finished, blinking his eyes slowly. Then he said immediately: “I knows a better way than that.”
“What way?” Snopes said. Tom-Tom didn’t answer. He stood, big, humorless, a little surly; quiet; more than a little implacable though heatless. “No, no,” Snopes said. “That won’t do. You have any trouble with Turl, and I’ll fire you both. You do like I say, unless you are tired of your job and want Turl to have it. Are you tired of it?”
“Ain’t no man complained about my pressure yet,” Tom-Tom said sullenly.
“Then you do like I say. You take that stuff out home with you tonight. Don’t let nobody see you; not even your wife. And if you don’t want to do it, just say so. I reckon I can get somebody that will do it.”
And that’s what Tom-Tom did. And he kept his own counsel too, even when afterward, as discarded fittings and such accumulated again, he would watch Snopes test them one by one with the magnet and sort him out another batch to take out home and hide. Because he had been firing those boilers for forty years, ever since he was a man. At that time there was but one boiler, and he had got twelve dollars a month for firing it, but now there were three, and he got sixty dollars a month; and now he was sixty, and he owned his little cabin and a little piece of corn, and a mule and a wagon in which he rode into town to church twice each Sunday, with his new young wife beside him and a gold watch and chain.
And Harker didn’t know then, either, even though he would watch the junked metal accumulate in the corner and then disappear over night until it came to be his nightly jok
e to enter with his busy, bustling air and say to Turl: “Well, Turl, I notice that little engine is still running. There’s a right smart of brass in them bushings and wrist pins, but I reckon it’s moving too fast to hold that magnet against it.” Then more soberly; quite soberly, in fact, without humor or irony at all, since there was some of Suratt in Harker too: “That durn fellow! I reckon he’d sell the boilers too, if he knowed of any way you and Tom-Tom could keep steam up without them.”
And Turl didn’t answer. Because by that time Turl had his own private temptations and worries, the same as Tom-Tom, of which Harker was also unaware.
In the meantime, the first of the year came and the city was audited.
“They come down here,” Harker said, “two of them, in glasses. They went over the books and they poked around everywhere, counting everything in sight and writing it down. Then they went back to the office and they was still there at six o’clock when I come on. It seems that there was something wrong; it seems like there was some old brass parts wrote down in the books, only the brass seemed to be missing or something. It was on the books all right, and the new valves and things it had been replaced with was there. But be durn if they could find a one of them old pieces except one busted bib that had got mislaid under the work-bench someway or other. It was right strange. So I went back with them and held the light while they looked again in all the corners, getting a right smart of soot and grease on them, but that brass just naturally seemed to be plumb missing. So they went away.
“And the next morning early they come back. They had the city clerk with them this time and they beat Mr. Snopes down here and so they had to wait till he come in in his check cap and his chew, chewing and looking at them while they told him. They was right sorry; they hemmed and hawed a right smart, being sorry. But it wasn’t nothing else they could do except to come back on him, long as he was the superintendent; and did he want me and Turl and Tom-Tom arrested right now, or would tomorrow do? And him standing there, chewing, with them eyes like two gobs of cup grease on a hunk of raw dough, and them still telling him how sorry they was.
Collected Stories Page 14
