And still Lawyer didn’t move: jest setting there with that still paper-colored face like it was froze stiff and his hands too laying on the table in front of him: not clenched one inside the other like his paw’s: jest laying there. Then Manfred begun to laugh, not loud, not even in no hurry: jest standing there laughing with his feet still crossed and his hands still in his pockets, jest laughing even while he turned and went across to the door and opened it and went out and closed it behind him. Which jest left Lawyer and his paw and that was when Lawyer said it.
“So you dont want him not to be mayor,” Judge Stevens says. “Then what is it you do want? for him not to be alive? Is that it?”
That was when Lawyer said it: “What must I do now, Papa? Papa, what can I do now?”
So something happened somewhere between that board of aldermen meeting last night and that special court session this morning. Except that if we ever knowed what it was, it wasn’t going to be Lawyer’s fault. I mean, we might a knowed or anyway had a good idea what happened and where while them lights was burning in that upstairs office long after ever body else in Jefferson had done went home to bed; some day Lawyer his-self might tell it, probably would, would have to tell it to somebody jest to get some rest from it. What we wouldn’t know would be jest how it happened. Because when Lawyer come to tell it, he wouldn’t be having to tell what happened: he would be having to tell, to say, it wouldn’t much matter what, to somebody, anybody listening, it wouldn’t much matter who.
The only one of the whole three of them that understood her, was Flem. Because needing or expecting to understand one another hadn’t never occurred between her and Manfred de Spain. All the understanding one another they needed was you might say for both of them to agree on when and where next and jest how long away it would have to be. But apart from that, they never no more needed to waste time understanding one another than sun and water did to make rain. They never no more needed to be drawed together than sun and water needed to be. In fact, most of Manfred’s work had already been done for him by that boy back in Frenchman’s Bend — McCarron, who except that he come first, could a been Manfred’s younger brother; who never even lived in Frenchman’s Bend and nobody in Frenchman’s Bend ever seen or heard of him before that summer, like he had been sent through Frenchman’s Bend at the one exact moment to see her, like you might say Manfred de Spain had been sent through Jefferson at the one exact moment to see her.
And a heap of McCarron’s work already done for him too because she done it: that night when them five Frenchman’s Bend boys laid for them and bushwacked them in the buggy to drag him out of it and maybe beat him up or anyhow skeer him out of Frenchman’s Bend. And gradually the tale come out how, even with one arm broke, he fought them all off and got the buggy turned around and got her back home all safe except for a natural maiden swoon. Which aint quite right. Because them five boys (I knowed two of them) never told it, which you might say is proof. That after they broke his arm it was her that taken the loaded end of the buggy-whip and finished the last one or maybe two, and her that turned the buggy around in the road and got it away from there. Jest far enough; not back home yet: jest far enough; to as the feller says crown the triumph on the still-hot field of the triumph; right there on the ground in the middle of the dark road because somebody had to still hold that skeered horse, with the horse standing over them and her likely having to help hold him up too off of that broke arm; not jest her first time but the time she got that baby. Which folks says aint likely to happen jest the first time but between what did happen and what ought to happened, I dont never have trouble picking ought.
But Lawyer Stevens never understood her and never would: that he never had jest Manfred de Spain to have to cope with, he was faced with a simple natural force repeating itself under the name of De Spain or McCarron or whatever into ever gap or vacancy in her breathing as long as she breathed; and that wouldn’t never none of them be him. And he never did realise that she understood him because she never had no way of telling him because she didn’t know herself how she done it. Since women learn at about two or three years old and then forget it, the knowledge about their-selves that a man stumbles on by accident forty-odd years later with the same kind of startled amazement of finding a twenty-five cent piece in a old pair of britches you had started to throw away. No, they dont forget it: they jest put it away until ten or twenty or forty years later the need for it comes up and they reach around and pick it out and use it and then hang it up again without no more remembering just which one it was than she could remember today which finger it was she scratched with yesterday: only that tomorrow maybe she will itch again but she will find something to scratch that one with too.
Or I dont know, maybe he did understand all that and maybe he did get what he wanted. I mean, not what he wanted but what he knew he could have, the next best, like any thing is better than nothing, even if that anything is jest a next-best anything. Because there was more folks among the Helens and Juliets and Isoldes and Guineveres than jest the Launcelots and Tristrams and Romeos and Parises. There was them others that never got their names in the poetry books, the next-best ones that sweated and panted too. And being the next-best to Paris is jest a next-best too, but it aint no bad next-best to be. Not ever body had Helen, but then not ever body lost her neither.
So I kind of happened to be at the deepo that day when Lucius Hogganbeck’s jitney drove up and Lawyer got out with his grips and trunk and his ticket to Mottstown junction to catch the express from Memphis to New York and get on the boat that would take him to that German university he had been talking for two years now about what a good idea it would be to go to it providing you happened to want to go to a university in Germany like that one; until that morning yesterday or maybe it was the day before when he told his paw: “What must I do now, Papa? Papa, what can I do now?” It was still cold so he taken his sister on into the waiting room and then he come back out where I was.
“Good,” he says, brisk and chipper as you could want. “I was hoping to see you before I left, to pass the torch on into your active hand. You’ll have to hold the fort now. You’ll have to tote the load.”
“What fort?” I says. “What load?”
“Jefferson,” he says. “Snopeses. Think you can handle them till I get back?”
“Not me nor a hundred of me,” I says. “The only thing to do is get completely shut of them, abolish them.”
“No no,” he says. “Say a herd of tigers suddenly appears in Yoknapatawpha County; wouldn’t it be a heap better to have them shut up in a mule-pen where we could at least watch them, keep up with them, even if you do lose a arm or a leg ever time you get within ten feet of the wire, than to have them roaming and strolling loose all over ever where in the entire country? No, we got them now; they’re ourn now; I dont know jest what Jefferson could a committed back there whenever it was, to have won this punishment, gained this right, earned this privilege. But we did. So it’s for us to cope, to resist; us to endure, and (if we can) survive.”
“But why me?” I says. “Why out of all Jefferson pick on me?”
“Because you’re the only one in Jefferson I can trust,” Lawyer says.
Except that that one dont really ever lose Helen, because for the rest of her life she dont never actively get rid of him. Likely it’s because she dont want to.
SEVEN
Charles Mallison
I REMEMBER HOW Ratliff once said that the world’s Helens never really lose forever the men who once loved and lost them; probably because they — the Helens — dont want to.
I still wasn’t born when Uncle Gavin left for Heidelberg so as far as I know his hair had already begun to turn white when I first saw him. Because although I was born by then, I couldn’t remember him when he came home from Europe in the middle of the War, to get ready to go back to it. He said that at first, right up to the last minute, he believed that as soon as he finished his Ph.D. he was going as a stretcher-bearer with
the German army; almost up to the last second before he admitted to himself that the Germany he could have loved that well had died somewhere between the Liège and Namur forts and the year 1848. Or rather, the Germany which had emerged between 1848 and the Belgian forts he did not love since it was no longer the Germany of Goethe and Bach and Beethoven and Schiller. This is what he said hurt, was hard to admit, to admit even after he reached Amsterdam and could begin to really ask about the American Field Service of which he had heard.
But he said how we — America — were not used yet to European wars and still took them seriously; and there was the fact that he had been for two years a student in a German university. But the French were different: to whom another Germanic war was just the same old chronic nuisance; a nation of practical and practising pessimists who were willing to let anyone regardless of his politics, who wanted to, do anything — particularly one who was willing to do it free. So he — Uncle Gavin — spent those five months with his stretcher just behind Verdun and presently was himself in a bed in an American hospital until he got over the pneumonia and could come home, in Jefferson again, waiting, he said, until we were in it, which would not be long.
And he was right: the Sartoris boys, Colonel Sartoris’s twin grandsons, had already gone to England into the Royal Flying Corps and then it was April and then Uncle Gavin had his appointment as a Y.M.C.A. secretary, to go back to France with the first American troops; when suddenly there was Montgomery Ward Snopes, the first of what Ratliff called “them big gray-colored chaps of I.O.’s”, the one whose mamma was still rocking in the chair in the front window of the Snopes Hotel because it was still too cold yet to move back onto the front gallery. And Jackson McLendon had organised his Jefferson company and had been elected captain of it and Montgomery Ward could have joined them. But instead he came to Uncle Gavin, to go to France with Uncle Gavin in the Y.M.C.A.; and that was when Ratliff said what he did about sometimes the men that loved and lost Helen of Troy just thought they had lost her. Only he could have added, All her kinfolks too. Because Uncle Gavin did it. I mean, took Montgomery Ward.
“Confound it, Lawyer,” Ratliff said. “It’s a Snopes.”
“Certainly,” Uncle Gavin said. “Can you suggest a better place for a Snopes today than north-western France? as far west of Amiens and Verdun as you can get him?”
“But why?” Ratliff said.
“I thought of that too,” Uncle Gavin said. “If he had said he wanted to go in order to defend his country, I would have had Hub Hampton handcuff him hand and foot in jail and sit on him while I telephoned Washington. But what he said was, ‘They’re going to pass a law soon to draft us all anyhow, and if I go with you like you’re going, I figger I’ll get there first and have time to look around’.”
“To look around,” Ratliff said. He and Uncle Gavin looked at one another. Ratliff blinked two or three times.
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. Ratliff blinked two or three times again.
“To look around,” he said.
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. And Uncle Gavin took Montgomery Ward Snopes with him and that was the exact time when Ratliff said about the folks that thought they had finally lost Helen of Troy. But Gowan was still living with us maybe because of the war in Europe the State Department still hadn’t let his mother and father come back from China or wherever it was yet; at least once every week on the way home across the Square he would meet Ratliff, almost like Ratliff was waiting for him, and Gowan would tell Ratliff the news from Uncle Gavin and Ratliff would say:
“Tell him to watch close. Tell him I’m doing the best I can here.”
“The best you can what?” Gowan said.
“Holding and toting,” Ratliff said.
“Holding and toting what?” Gowan said. That was when Gowan said he first noticed that you didn’t notice Ratliff hardly at all, until suddenly you did or anyway Gowan did. And after that, he began to look for him. Because the next time, Ratliff said:
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” Gowan said.
“Then of course your aunt lets you drink coffee,” Ratliff said. “What do you say — —”
“She’s not my aunt, she’s my cousin,” Gowan said. “Sure. I drink coffee. I dont specially like it. Why?”
“I like a occasional ice cream cone myself,” Ratliff said.
“What’s wrong with that?” Gowan said.
“What say me and you step in the drugstore here and have a ice cream cone?” Ratliff said. So they did. Gowan said Ratliff always had strawberry when they had it, and that he could expect Ratliff almost any afternoon now and now Gowan said he was in for it, he would have to eat the cone whether he wanted it or not, he and Ratliff now standing treat about, until finally Ratliff said, already holding the pink-topped cone in his brown hand:
“This here is jest about as pleasant a invention as any I know about. It’s so pleasant a feller jest dont dare risking getting burnt-out on it. I cant imagine no tragedy worse than being burnt-out on strawberry ice cream. So what you say we jest make this a once-a-week habit and the rest of the time jest swapping news?”
So Gowan said all right and after that they would just meet in passing and Gowan would give Ratliff Uncle Gavin’s last message: “He says to tell you he’s doing the best he can too but that you were right: just one aint enough. One what?” Gowan said. “Aint enough for what?” But then Gowan was seventeen; he had a few other things to do, whether grown people believed it or not, though he didn’t object to delivering the messages Mother said Uncle Gavin sent in his letters to Ratliff, when he happened to see Ratliff, or that is when Ratliff saw, caught him, which seemed to be almost every day so that he wondered just when Ratliff found time to earn a living. But he didn’t always listen to all Ratliff would be saying at those times, so that afterward he couldn’t even say just how it was or when that Ratliff put it into his mind and he even got interested in it like a game, a contest or even a battle, a war, that Snopeses had to be watched constantly like an invasion of snakes or wild cats and that Uncle Gavin and Ratliff were doing it or trying to because nobody else in Jefferson seemed to recognise the danger. So that winter when the draft finally came and got Byron Snopes out of Colonel Sartoris’s bank, Gowan knew exactly what Ratliff was talking about when he said:
“I dont know how he will do it but I will lay a million to one he dont never leave the United States; I will lay a hundred to one he wont get further away from Mississippi than that first fort over in Arkansas where they first sends them; and if you will give me ten dollars I will give you eleven if he aint back here in Jefferson in three weeks.” Gowan didn’t do it but he said later he wished he had because Ratliff would have lost by two days and so Byron was back in the bank again. But we didn’t know how and even Ratliff never found out how he did it until after he had robbed the bank and escaped to Mexico, because Ratliff said the reason Snopeses were successful was that they had all federated unanimously to remove being a Snopes from just a zoological category into a condition composed of success by means of the single rule and regulation and sacred oath of never to tell anybody how. The way Byron did it was to go to bed every night with a fresh plug of chewing tobacco taped into his left armpit until it ran his heart up to where the army doctors finally discharged him and sent him home.
So at least there was some fresh Snopes news to send Uncle Gavin, which was when Ratliff noticed that it had been months since Uncle Gavin had mentioned Montgomery Ward Snopes. Though by the time Uncle Gavin’s letter got back saying Dont mention that name to me again. I wont discuss it. I will not we had some fresh Snopes news of our own to send him.
This time it was Eck. “Your uncle was right,” Ratliff said. “He’s my cousin, I tell you,” Gowan said.
“All right, all right,” Ratliff said. “Eck wasn’t a Snopes. That’s why he had to die. Like there wasn’t no true authentic room for Snopeses in the world and they made their-selves one by that pure and simple mutual federation, and the fir
st time one slips or falters or fails in being Snopes, it dont even need the rest of the pack like wolves to finish him: simple environment jest watched its chance and taken it.”
Eck was the one with the steel brace where a log broke his neck one time, the night watchman of the oil company’s storage tank at the depot; I knew about this myself because I was almost four years old now. It was just dust-dark; we were at supper when there came a tremendous explosion, the loudest sound at one time that Jefferson ever heard, so loud that we all knew it couldn’t be anything else but that German bomb come at last that we — Mayor de Spain anyway — had been looking for ever since the Germans sank the Lusitania and we finally had to get into the war too. That is, Mayor de Spain had gone to West Point and had been a lieutenant in Cuba and when this one started he wanted to get into it too. But he couldn’t maybe so he tried to organise a Home Guard company, except that nobody but him took it very seriously. But at least he had an alarm system to ring the courthouse bell when a German attack came.
So when that tremendous big sound went off and the bell began to ring, we all knew what it was and we were all waiting for the next one to fall, until the people running out into the street hollering “Which way was it?” finally located it down toward the depot. It was the oil storage tank. It was a big round tank, about thirty feet long and ten feet deep, sitting on brick trestles. That is, it had been there because there wasn’t anything there now, not even the trestles. Then about that time they finally got Mrs Nunnery to hush long enough to tell what happened.
She was Cedric Nunnery’s mamma. He was about five years old. They lived in a little house just up the hill from the depot and finally they made her sit down and somebody gave her a drink of whiskey and she quit screaming and told how about five oclock she couldn’t find Cedric anywhere and she came down to where Mr Snopes was sitting in his chair in front of the little house about the size of a privy that he called the office where he night watched the tank, to ask him if he had seen Cedric. He hadn’t but he got up right away to help her hunt, in all the box cars on the side track and in the freight warehouse and everywhere, hollering Cedric’s name all around; only Mrs Nunnery didn’t remember which of them thought of the oil tank first. Likely it was Mr Snopes since he was the one that knew it was empty, though probably Mrs Nunnery had seen the ladder too still leaning against it where Mr Snopes had climbed up to open the manhole in the top to let fresh air come in and drive the gas out.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 470
