Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “Flem Snopes’s wife, riding into Jefferson society on Judge Lemuel Stevens’s daughter’s coat-tail,” and went on to town to the store; and then Uncle Gavin came out and said:

  “You’ll do it, then?”

  “Of course,” Mother said. “Is it that bad?”

  “I intend to try to not let it be,” Uncle Gavin said. “Even if you aren’t anything but just a woman, you must have seen her. You must have.”

  “Anyway, I have watched men seeing her,” Mother said.

  “Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. It didn’t sound like an out-breathe, like talking. It sounded like an in-breathe: “Yes.”

  “You’re going to save her,” Mother said, not looking at Uncle Gavin now: just watching the sock she was darning.

  “Yes!” Uncle Gavin said, fast, quick: no in-breathe this time, so quick he almost said the rest of it before he could stop himself, so that all Mother had to do was say it for him:

  “ — from Manfred de Spain.”

  But Uncle Gavin had caught himself by now; his voice was just harsh now. “You too,” he said. “You and your husband too. The best people, the pure, the unimpugnable. Charles who by his own affirmation has never even looked at her; you by that same affirmation not only Judge Stevens’s daughter, but Caesar’s wife.”

  “Just what—” Mother said, then Gowan said she stopped and looked at him. “Dont you really want to be excused a little while? as a personal favor?” she said.

  “Nome,” Gowan said.

  “You cant help it either, can you?” she said. “You’ve got to be a man too, haven’t you?” She just talked to Uncle Gavin then: “Just what is it about this that you cant stand? That Mrs Snopes may not be chaste, or that it looks like she picked Manfred de Spain out to be unchaste with?”

  “Yes!” Uncle Gavin said. “I mean no! It’s all lies — gossip. It’s all — —”

  “Yes,” Mother said. “You’re right. It’s probably all just that. Saturday’s not a very good afternoon to get in the barbershop, but you might think about it when you pass.”

  “Thanks,” Uncle Gavin said. “But if I’m to go on this crusade with any hope of success, the least I can do is look wild and shaggy enough to be believed. You’ll do it, then?”

  “Of course,” Mother said.

  “Thank you,” Uncle Gavin said. Then he was gone.

  “I suppose I could be excused now,” Gowan said.

  “What for now?” Mother said. She was still watching Uncle Gavin, down the walk and into the street now. “He should have married Melisandre Backus,” she said. Melisandre Backus lived on a plantation about six miles from town with her father and a bottle of whiskey. I dont mean he was a drunkard. He was a good farmer. He just spent the rest of his time sitting on the gallery in summer and in the library in winter with the bottle, reading Latin poetry. Miss Melisandre and Mother had been in school together, at high school and the Seminary both. That is, Miss Melisandre was always four years behind Mother. “At one time I thought he might; I didn’t know any better then.”

  “Cousin Gavin?” Gowan said. “Him married?”

  “Oh yes,” Mother said. “He’s just too young yet. He’s the sort of man doomed to marry a widow with grown children.”

  “He could still marry Miss Melisandre,” Gowan said.

  “It’s too late,” Mother said. “He didn’t know she was there.”

  “He sees her every day she comes in to town,” Gowan said.

  “You can see things without looking at them, just like you can hear things without listening,” Mother said.

  “He sure didn’t just do that when he saw Mrs Snopes that day,” Gowan said. “Maybe he’s waiting for her to have another child besides Linda and for them to grow up?”

  “No no,” Mother said. “You dont marry Semiramis: you just commit some form of suicide for her. Only gentlemen with as little to lose as Mr Flem Snopes can risk marrying Semiramis. — It’s too bad you are so old too. A few years ago I could have made you come with me to call on her. Now you’ll have to admit openly that you want to come; you may even have to say ‘Please’.”

  But Gowan didn’t. It was Saturday afternoon and there was a football game and though he hadn’t made the regular team yet you never could tell when somebody that had might break a leg or have a stroke or even a simple condition in arithmetic. Besides, he said Mother didn’t need his help anyway, having the whole town’s help in place of it; he said they hadn’t even reached the Square the next morning on the way to church when the first lady they met said brightly:

  “What’s this I hear about yesterday afternoon?” and Mother said just as brightly:

  “Indeed?” and the second lady they met said (she belonged to the Byron Society and the Cotillion Club too):

  “I always say we’d all be much happier to believe nothing we dont see with our own eyes, and only half of that,” and Mother said still just as brightly:

  “Indeed?” They — the Byron Society and the Cotillion Club, both when possible of course though either alone in a pinch — seemed to be the measure. Now Uncle Gavin stopped talking about Snopeses. I mean, Gowan said he stopped talking at all. It was like he didn’t have time anymore to concentrate on talk in order to raise it to conversation, art, like he believed was everybody’s duty. It was like he didn’t have time to do anything but wait, to get something done that the only way he knew to get it done was waiting. More than that, than just waiting: not only never missing a chance to do things for Mother, he even invented little things to do for her, so that even when he would talk a little, it was like he was killing two birds with the same stone.

  Because when he talked now, in sudden spells and bursts of it that sometimes never had any connection at all with what Father and Mother and Grandfather might have been talking about the minute before, it wouldn’t even be what he called BB gun conversation. It would be the most outrageous praise, praise so outrageous that even Gowan at just thirteen years old could tell that. It would be of Jefferson ladies that he and Mother had known all their lives, so that whatever ideas either one of them must have had about them, the other must have known it a long time by now. Yet all of a sudden every few days during the next month Uncle Gavin would stop chewing fast over his plate and drag a fresh one of them by the hair you might say into the middle of whatever Grandfather and Mother and Father had been talking about, talking not to Grandfather or Father or Gowan, but telling Mother how good or pretty or intelligent or witty somebody was that Mother had grown up with or anyway known all her life.

  Oh yes, members of the Byron Society and the Cotillion Club or maybe just one of them (probably only Mother knew it was the Cotillion Club he was working for) at a pinch, so that each time they would know that another new one had called on Mrs Flem Snopes. Until Gowan would wonder how Uncle Gavin would always know when the next one had called, how to scratch her off the list that hadn’t or add her onto the score that had or whatever it was he kept. So Gowan decided that maybe Uncle Gavin watched Mrs Snopes’s house. And it was November now, good fine hunting weather, and since Gowan had finally given up on the football team, by rights he and Top (Top was Aleck Sander’s older brother except that Aleck Sander wasn’t born yet either. I mean, he was Guster’s boy and his father was named Top too so they called him Big Top and Top Little Top) would have spent every afternoon after school with the beagles Uncle Gavin gave them after rabbits. But instead, Gowan spent every afternoon for almost a week in the big ditch behind Mr Snopes’s house, not watching the house but to see if Uncle Gavin was hid somewhere in the ditch too watching to see who called on Mrs Snopes next. Because Gowan was only thirteen then: he was just watching for Uncle Gavin; it wasn’t until later that he said how he realised that if he had tried harder or longer, he might have caught Mr de Spain climbing in or out of the back window like most of Jefferson was convinced he was doing, and then he really would have had something he could have sold for a dollar or two to a lot of people in town.

  But if Uncle
Gavin was hid somewhere in that ditch too, Gowan never caught him. Better still, Uncle Gavin never caught Gowan in it. Because if Mother had ever found out Gowan was hiding in that ditch behind Mr Snopes’s house because he thought Uncle Gavin was hidden in it too, Gowan didn’t know what she might have done about Uncle Gavin but he sure knew what would have happened to him. And worse: if Mr Snopes had ever found out Gowan thought Uncle Gavin might be hiding in that ditch spying on his house. Or worse still: if the town ever found out Gowan was hiding in that ditch because he thought Uncle Gavin was.

  Because when you are just thirteen you dont have sense enough to realise what you are doing and shudder. Because even now I can remember some of the things Aleck Sander and I did for instance and never think twice about it, and I wonder how any boys ever live long enough to grow up. I remember, I was just twelve; Uncle Gavin had just given me my shotgun; this was after (this is how Father put it) Mrs Snopes had sent him to Heidelberg to finish his education and he had been in the War and then come back home and got himself elected County Attorney in his own right; there were five of us: me and three other white boys and Aleck Sander, hunting rabbits one Saturday. It was cold, one of the coldest spells we ever had; when we came to Harrykin Creek it was frozen over solid and we begun to talk about how much we would take to jump into it. Aleck Sander said he would do it if each one of us would give him a dollar so we said we would and sure enough, before we could have stopped him, Aleck Sander hauled off and jumped into the creek, right through the ice, clothes and all.

  So we got him out and built a fire while he stripped off and wrapped up in our hunting coats while we tried to dry his clothes before they froze solid too and got him dressed again at last and then he said, “All right. Now pay me my money.”

  We hadn’t thought about that. Back then, no Jefferson, Mississippi boy or anywhere else in Mississippi that I know of, ever had a whole dollar at one time very often, let alone four at the same time. So we had to trade with him. Buck Connors and Aleck Sander traded first: if Buck jumped through the ice, Aleck Sander would let him off his dollar. So Buck did, and while we dried him off I said,

  “If that’s what we got to do, let’s all jump in at once and get it over with,” and we even started for the creek when Aleck Sander said No, that we were all white boys taking advantage of him because he was a Negro by asking him to let us do the same thing he did. So we had to trade again. Ashley Holcomb was next. He climbed up a tree until Aleck Sander said he was high enough and shut his eyes and jumped out of it, and Aleck Sander let him off his dollar. Then I was next, and somebody said how, because Aleck Sander’s mother was our cook and Aleck Sander and I had more or less lived together ever since we were born, that Aleck Sander would probably let me off light. But Aleck Sander said No, he had thought of that himself and for that very reason he was going to have to be harder on me than on Ashley and so the tree I would jump out of would be over a brier patch. And I did; it was like jumping into cold fire streaking my hands and face and tearing my britches though my hunting coat was brand new almost (Uncle Gavin had mailed it to me from Germany the day he got Mother’s cable that I was born; it was the best hunting coat in Jefferson everybody said when I finally got big enough to wear it) so it didn’t tear except for one pocket.

  So that left only John Wesley Roebuck and maybe all of a sudden Aleck Sander realised that here was his last dollar going because John Wesley suggested everything but Aleck Sander still said No. Finally John Wesley offered to do all of them: jump through the ice then out of Ashley’s tree and then out of mine but Aleck Sander still said No. So this is how they finally traded though in a way that still wasn’t fair to Aleck Sander because old man Ab Snopes had already shot John Wesley in the back once about two years ago and so John Wesley was used to it, which may have been one of the reasons why he agreed to the trade. This was it. John Wesley borrowed my hunting coat to put on top of his because we had already proved that mine was the toughest, and he borrowed Ashley’s sweater to wrap around his head and neck, and we counted off twenty-five steps for him and Aleck Sander put one shell in his gun and somebody, maybe me, counted One Two Three slow and when whoever it was said One John Wesley broke and ran and when whoever it was said Three Aleck Sander shot John Wesley in the back and John Wesley gave me and Ashley back the sweater and my hunting coat and (it was late by then) we went home. Except that I had to run all the way (it was cold, the coldest spell I ever remember) because we had to burn up my hunting coat because it would be easier to explain no hunting coat at all than one with the back full of Number Six shot.

  Then we found out how Uncle Gavin would find out which one called next. It was Father did the scoring for him. I dont mean Father was Uncle Gavin’s spy. The last thing Father was trying to do was to help Uncle Gavin, ease Uncle Gavin’s mind. If anything, he was harder against Uncle Gavin even than he had thought he was that first day against Mother going to call on Mrs Snopes; it was like he was trying to take revenge on Mother and Uncle Gavin both: on Uncle Gavin for even wanting Mother to call on Mrs Snopes, and on Mother for saying right out loud in front of Uncle Gavin and Gowan both that she not only was going to do it, she didn’t see any harm in it. In fact, Gowan said it was Father’s mind that Mrs Snopes seemed to stay on now, more than on Uncle Gavin’s. Almost any time now Father would walk in rubbing his hands and saying “oh you kid” or “twenty-three skiddoo” and they knew that he had just seen Mrs Snopes again on the street or had just heard that another Cotillion or Byron Society member had called on her; if they had invented wolf whistles then, Father would have been giving one.

  Then it was December; Mother had just told how the Cotillion Club had finally voted to send Mr and Mrs Snopes an invitation to the Christmas Ball and Grandfather had got up and put his napkin down and said, “Thank you for the meal, Margaret,” and Gowan went and held the door for him to go out, then Father said:

  “Dance? Suppose she dont know how?” and Gowan said,

  “Does she have to?” and now they all stopped; he said they all stopped at exactly the same time and looked at him and he said that even if Mother and Uncle Gavin were brother and sister one was a woman and the other was a man and Father wasn’t any kin to either one of them. Yet he said they all three looked at him with exactly the same expression on their faces. Then Father said to Mother:

  “Hold him while I look at his teeth again. You told me he wasn’t but thirteen.”

  “What have I said now?” Gowan said.

  “Yes,” Father said. “What were we saying? Oh yes, dancing, the Christmas Cotillion.” He was talking to Uncle Gavin now. “Well by godfrey, that puts you one up on Manfred de Spain, dont it? He’s a lone orphan; he hasn’t got a wife or a twin sister who was one of the original founders of Jefferson literary and snobbery clubs; all he can do to Flem Snopes’s wife is — —” Gowan said how until now Mother was always between Father and Uncle Gavin, with one hand on each of their chests to hold them apart. He said that now Mother and Uncle Gavin were both at Father, with Mother holding one hand on Father’s mouth and reaching for his, Gowan’s, ears with the other, and she and Uncle Gavin both saying the same thing, only Uncle Gavin was just using another set of words for it:

  “Dont you dare!”

  “Go on. Say it.”

  So Father didn’t. But even he didn’t anticipate what Uncle Gavin would do next: try to persuade Mother to make the Cotillion committee not invite Mr de Spain to the ball at all. “Hell fire,” Father said. “You cant do that.”

  “Why cant we?” Mother said.

  “He’s the mayor!” Father said.

  “The mayor of a town is a servant,” Mother said. “He’s the head servant of course: the butler. You dont invite a butler to a party because he’s a butler. You invite him in spite of it.”

  But Mayor de Spain got his invitation too. Maybe the reason Mother didn’t stop it like Uncle Gavin wanted her to, was simply for that reason she had already given, explained, described: that she and the Cotillion
Club didn’t have to invite him because he was Mayor, and so they invited him just to show it, prove it. Only Father didn’t think that was the reason. “No sir,” he said. “You damned gals aint fooling me or anybody else. You want trouble. You want something to happen. You like it. You want two red-combed roosters strutting at one another, provided one of you hens is the reason for it. And if there’s anything else you can think of to shove them in to where one of them will have to draw blood in self defense, you’ll do that too because every drop of that blood or every black eye or every public-torn collar or split or muddy britches is another item of revenge on that race of menfolks that hold you ladies thralled all day long day after day with nothing to do between meals but swap gossip over the telephone. By godfrey,” he said, “if there wasn’t any club to give a Christmas dance two weeks from now, you all would probably organise one just to invite Mrs Snopes and Gavin and Manfred de Spain to it. Except you are wasting your time and money this trip. Gavin dont know how to make trouble.”

  “Gavin’s a gentleman,” Mother said.

  “Sure,” Father said. “That’s what I said: it aint that he dont want to make trouble: he just dont know how. Oh I dont mean he wont try. He’ll do the best he knows. But he just dont know how to make the kind of trouble that a man like Manfred de Spain will take seriously.”

  But Mr de Spain did the best he could to teach Uncle Gavin how. He began the day the invitations were sent out and he got his after all. When he bought that red E.M.F. the first thing he did was to have a cut-out put on it and until he got elected mayor the first time you could hear him all the way to the Square the moment he left home. And soon after that Lucius Hogganbeck got somebody (it was Mr Roth Edmonds and maybe Mr de Spain too since Lucius’s father, old Boon Hogganbeck, had been Mr Roth’s father’s, Mr McCaslin Edmonds, and his uncle’s, Uncle Ike McCaslin, and old Major de Spain’s huntsman-doghandler-man Friday back in the time of Major de Spain’s old hunting camp) to sign a note for him to buy a Model T Ford and set up in the jitney passenger-hauling business, and he had a cut-out too and on Sunday afternoons half the men in Jefferson would slip off from their wives and go out to a straight stretch of road about two miles from town (even two miles back in town you could hear them when the wind was right) and Mr de Spain and Lucius would race each other. Lucius would charge his passengers a nickel a head to ride in the race, though Mr de Spain carried his free.