Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  So we thought of course that her father, a small though thrifty farmer, had found the money somehow. Because Wallstreet saved his business. And he had not only learned about solvency from that experience, he had learned something more about success too. In another year he had rented (then bought it) the store next door and converted it into a warehouse, stock room, so he could buy in larger wholesale lots for less money; another few years and he had rented what had been the last livery stable in Jefferson for his warehouse and knocked down the wall between the two stores and now we had in Jefferson the first self-service grocery store we had ever seen, built on the pattern which the big chain grocery stores were to make nation-wide in the purveying of food; the street his store faced on made an L with the alley where the old Snopes restaurant had been so that the tent in which he had passed his first night in Jefferson was directly behind his store too; he either bought or rented that lot (there were more automobiles in Jefferson now) and made a parking lot and so taught the housewives of Jefferson to come to town and seek his bargains and carry them home themselves.

  That is, we — or that is, I — thought that it was his father-in-law who had found the money to save him, until now. “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “So it was you.”

  “That’s right,” Ratliff said. “All I wanted was just a note for it. But he insisted on making me a partner. And I’ll tell you something else we’re fixing to do. We’re fixing to open a wholesale.”

  “A what?” I said.

  “A wholesale company like the big ones in St Louis, right here in Jefferson, so that instead of either having to pay high freight on a little shirt-tail full of stuff, or risk overloading on something perishable to save freight, a merchant anywhere in the county can buy jest what he needs at a decent price without having to add no freight a-tall.”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” I said. “Why didn’t you think of that yourself years ago?”

  “That’s right,” Ratliff said. “Why didn’t you?”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” I still said. Then I said: “Hell fire, are you still selling stock? Can I get in?”

  “Why not?” he said. “Long as your name aint Snopes. Maybe you could even buy some from him if your name wasn’t jest Flem Snopes. But you got to pass that-ere little gal first. His wife. You ought to stop in there sometime and hear her say Them goddamn Snopes once. Oh sho, all of us have thought that, and some of us have even said it out loud. But she’s different. She means it. And she aint going to never let him change neither.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve heard about that. I wonder why she never changed their name.”

  “No no,” he said. “You dont understand. She dont want to change it. She jest wants to live it down. She aint trying to drag him by the hair out of Snopes, to escape from Snopes. She’s got to purify Snopes itself. She’s got to beat Snopes from the inside. Stop in there and listen sometimes.”

  “A wholesale house,” I said. “So that’s why Flem — —” But that was foolish, as Ratliff himself saw even before I said it.

  “ — why Flem changed his account from his own bank to the other one? No no. We aint using the banks here. We dont need them. Like Flem was the first feller in Jefferson to find out that. Wall’s credit is too good with the big wholesalers and brokers we deal with. The way they figger, he aint cutting into nobody’s private business: he’s helping all business. We dont need no bank. But we — he — still aims to keep it home-made. So you see him if you want to talk about stock.”

  “I will,” I said. “But what is Flem himself up to? Why did he pull his money out of De Spain’s bank as soon as he got to be vice president of it? Because he’s still that, so he still owns stock in it. But he doesn’t keep his own money in it. Why?”

  “Oh,” he said, “is that what you’re worried about? Why, we aint sho yet. All we’re doing now is watching the bushes shake.” Between the voice and the face there was always two Ratliffs: the second one offering you a fair and open chance to divine what the first one really meant by what it was saying, provided you were smart enough. But this time that second Ratliff was trying to tell me something which for whatever reason the other could not say in words. “As long as that little gal lives, Flem aint got no chance to ever get a finger-hold on Wall. So Eck Snopes is out. And I.O. Snopes never was in because I.O. never was worth nothing even to I.O., let alone for anybody else to take a cut of the profit. So that jest about exhausts all the Snopes in reach that a earnest hardworking feller might make a forced share-crop on.”

  “There’s that—” I said.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll say it for you. Montgomery Ward. The photograph gallery. If Flem aint been in that thing all the time from the very first, he dont never aim to be. And the fact that there aint been a new photograph in his show window in over a year now, let alone Jason Compson collecting his maw’s rent prompt on time since the second month after Montgomery Ward opened up, is proof enough that Flem seen from the first day that there wasn’t nothing there for him to waste his time on. So I cant think of but one Snopes object that he’s got left.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll bite.”

  “That-ere twenty-dollar gold piece.”

  “What twenty-dollar gold piece?”

  “Dont you remember what I said that day, about how when a country boy makes his first Sad-dy night trip to Memphis, that-ere twenty-dollar bill he wears pinned inside his undershirt so he can at least get back home?”

  “Go on,” I said. “You cant stop now.”

  “What’s the one thing in Jefferson that Flem aint got yet? The one thing he might want. That maybe he’s been working at ever since they taken Colonel Sartoris out of that wrecked car and he voted Uncle Billy Varner’s stock to make Manfred de Spain president of that bank?”

  “To be president of it himself,” I said. “No!” I said. “It cant be! It must not be!” But he was just watching me. “Nonsense,” I said.

  “Why nonsense?” he said.

  “Because, to use what you call that twenty-dollar gold piece, he’s got to use his wife too. Do you mean to tell me you believe for one moment that his wife will side with him against Manfred de Spain?” But still he just looked at me. “Dont you agree?” I said. “How can he hope for that?”

  Yes, he was just looking at me. “That would jest be when he finally runs out of the bushes,” he said. “Out to where we can see him. Into the clearing. What’s that clearing?”

  “Clearing?” I said.

  “That he was working toward? — All right,” he said. “That druv him to burrow through the bushes to get out of them?”

  “Rapacity,” I said. “Greed. Money. What else does he need? want? What else has ever driven him?”

  But he just looked at me, and now I could actually watch that urgency fade until only the familiar face remained, bland, smooth, impenetrable and courteous. He drew out the dollar watch looped on a knotted shoelace between his button hole and his breast pocket. “I be dog if it aint almost dinner time,” he said. “Jest about time to walk to it.”

  NINE

  V. K. Ratliff

  BECAUSE HE MISSED it. He missed it completely.

  TEN

  Charles Mallison

  THEY FINALLY CAUGHT Montgomery Ward Snopes. I mean, they caught Grover Cleveland Winbush. Like Ratliff said, anybody bootlegging anything that never had any more sense than to sell Grover Cleveland Winbush some of it, deserved to be caught.

  Except Uncle Gavin said that, even without Grover Cleveland, Montgomery Ward was bound to be caught sooner or later, since there simply wasn’t any place in Jefferson, Mississippi culture for a vocation or hobby or interest like the one Montgomery Ward had tried to establish among us. In Europe, yes; and maybe among the metropolitan rich or bohemians, yes too. But not in a land composed mainly of rural Baptists.

  So they caught Grover Cleveland. It was one night, not very late. I mean, the stores were all closed but folks were still going home from the second r
unning of the picture show; and some of them, I reckon anybody that passed and happened to look inside, saw the two fellows inside Uncle Willy Christian’s drug store working at the prescription case where Uncle Willy kept the medicines; and even though they were strangers — that is, nobody passing recognised them — the ones that looked in and saw them said the next day that they never thought anything of it, being that early and the lights on and Grover Cleveland not having anything to do as night marshal except to walk around the Square and look in the windows, that sooner or later he would have to see them if they never had any business there.

  So it wasn’t until the next morning when Uncle Willy opened up for business, that he found out somebody had unlocked the store and not only unlocked the safe and took what money he had in it, they had broke open his pharmacy cabinet and stole all his morphine and sleeping pills. That’s what caused the trouble. Ratliff said they could have taken the money or for that matter all the rest of the store too except that prescription case, including the alcohol because Walter Christian, the Negro janitor, had been taking that a drink at a time ever since he and Uncle Willy both were boys and first started in the store, and Uncle Willy would have cussed and stomped around of course and even had the Law in, but that was all. But whoever touched that prescription cabinet with the morphine in it raised the devil himself. Uncle Willy was a bachelor, about sixty years old, and if you came in at the wrong time of day he even snarled at children too. But if you were careful to remember the right time of day he supplied the balls and bats for our baseball teams and after a game he would give the whole teams ice cream free whether they won or not. I mean, until one summer some of the church ladies decided to reform him. After that it was hard to tell when to speak to him or not. Then the ladies would give up for a while and it would be all right again.

  Besides that, the federal drug inspectors had been nagging and worrying at him for years about keeping the morphine in that little flimsy wooden drawer that anybody with a screwdriver or a knife blade or maybe just a hair pin could prize open, even though it did have a key to it that Uncle Willy kept hidden under a gallon jug marked Nux Vomica on a dark shelf that nobody but him was even supposed to bother because it was so dark back there that even Walter never went back there since Uncle Willy couldn’t have seen whether he had swept there or not even if he had; and each time Uncle Willy would have to promise the inspectors to lock the morphine up in the safe from now on.

  So now he was going to have more trouble than ever explaining to the inspectors why he hadn’t put the morphine in the safe like he promised; reminding them how, even if he had, the robbers would still have got it and it wasn’t going to do any good now because, like Ratliff said, federal folks were not interested in whether anything worked or not, all they were interested in was that you did it exactly like their rules said to do it.

  So Uncle Willy was the real cause of them catching Montgomery Ward Snopes. He was good and wild at first. He was so wild for a while that nobody could find out how much had been stolen or even what he was talking about, with more folks coming in from the street not so much to see where the robbery was but to watch Uncle Willy; until finally, it was Ratliff of course, said: “Uncle Willy dont need no sheriff yet. What he needs first is Doc Peabody.”

  “Of course,” Uncle Gavin said to Ratliff. “Why does it always have to be you?” He went back to where Skeets McGowan, Uncle Willy’s clerk and soda-jerker, and two other boys were standing with their heads inside the open safe looking at where the money had been stolen from, and pulled Skeets out and told him to run upstairs quick and tell Doctor Peabody to hurry down. Then Uncle Gavin and the others kind of crowded Uncle Willy more or less quiet without actually holding him until Doctor Peabody came in with the needle already in his hand even and ran most of them out and rolled up Uncle Willy’s sleeve then rolled it back down again and then Uncle Willy settled down into being just mad.

  So he was the one responsible for catching Montgomery Ward. Or the two fellows that stole his morphine were. By this time we knew that several people passing from the picture show had seen the two fellows in the store, and now Uncle Willy wanted to know where Grover Cleveland Winbush was all that time. Yes sir, he wasn’t wild now. He was just mad, as calm and steady and deadly about it as a horsefly. By that time, nine oclock in the morning, Grover Cleveland would be at home in bed asleep. Somebody said they would telephone out and wake him up and tell him to get on back to the Square fast as he could.

  “Hell,” Uncle Willy said. “That’ll take too long. I’ll go out there myself. I’ll wake him up and get him back to town. He wont need to worry about quick because I’ll tend to that. Who’s got a car?”

  Only Mr Buck Connors, the marshal, the chief of police, was there by this time. “Hold up now, Uncle Willy,” he said. “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do things. We want to do this one the right way. These folks have probably done already trompled up most of the evidence. But at least we can make an investigation according to police procedure regulations. Besides, Grover Cleveland was up all last night on duty. He’s got to stay up again all night tonight. He’s got to get his sleep.”

  “Exactly,” Uncle Willy said. “Egg-zackly. Up all night, but not far enough up to see two damn scoundrels robbing my store in full view of the whole damn town. Robbed me of three hundred dollars’ worth of valuable medicine, yet Grover Winbush—”

  “How much cash did they get?” Mr Connors said.

  “What?” Uncle Willy said.

  “How much money was in the safe?”

  “I dont know,” Uncle Willy said. “I didn’t count it. — yet Grover Winbush that we pay a hundred and twenty-five a month just to wake up once an hour during the night and look around the Square, has got to get his sleep. If nobody’s got a car here, get me a taxi. That son of a bitch has already cost me three hundred dollars; I aint going to stop at just one more quarter.”

  But they still held him hemmed off while somebody telephoned Grover Cleveland. And at first we thought that whoever telephoned and woke him up had scared him good too, until we learned the rest of it and realised all he needed for his scare was to hear that anything had happened anywhere in Jefferson last night that he would have seen if he had been where he was supposed to be or where folks thought he was. Because it wasn’t hardly any time before Ratliff said:

  “There he was. I jest seen him.”

  “Where?” somebody said.

  “He jest snatched his head back in the alley yonder,” Ratliff said. We all watched the alley. It led from a side street onto the Square where Grover Cleveland could have cut across lots from his boarding house. Then he stepped out of it, already walking fast. He didn’t wear a uniform like Mr Connors, he wore ordinary clothes with usually his coat-tail hiked up over the handle of the pistol and the blackjack in his hip pocket, coming up the street fast, picking his feet up quick like a cat on a hot stove. And if you thought it would have been Mr Connors or even Mr Hampton, the sheriff, that did the investigating, you would have been wrong. It was Uncle Willy himself. At first Grover Cleveland tried to bluff. Then he fell back on lying. Then he just fell back.

  “Howdy, son,” Uncle Willy said. “Sorry to wake you up in the middle of the night like this, just to answer a few questions. The first one is, just where were you, roughly, more or less, at exactly half-past ten oclock last night, more or less?”

  “Who, me?” Grover Cleveland said. “Where I’m always at at that time of night: standing right across yonder in the station door where if anybody after the last picture show might need anything, like maybe losing their car key or maybe they find out they got a flat tire—”

  “Well, well,” Uncle Willy said. “And yet you never saw a light on in my store, and them two damned scoundrels — —”

  “Wait,” Grover Cleveland said. “I’m wrong. When I seen the last picture show beginning to let out, I noticed the time, half past ten or maybe twenty-five to eleven, and I decided to go down and close up the Blue Go
ose and get that out of the way while I had time.” The Blue Goose was a Negro café below the cotton gin. “I’m wrong,” Grover Cleveland said. “That’s where I was.”

  Uncle Willy never said anything. He just turned his head enough and hollered “Walter!” Walter came in. His grandfather had belonged to Uncle Willy’s grandfather before the Surrender and he and Uncle Willy were about the same age and a good deal alike, except that instead of morphine Walter would go into the medicinal alcohol every time Uncle Willy put the key down and turned his back, and if anything Walter was a little more irascible and short-tempered. He came in from the back and said,

  “Who calling me?”

  “I am,” Uncle Willy said. “Where were you at half past ten last night?”

  “Who, me?” Walter said, exactly like Grover Cleveland did, except he said it like Uncle Willy had asked him where he was when Dr Einstein first propounded his theory of relativity. “You talking about last night?” he said. “Where you reckon? At home in bed.”

  “You were at that damned Blue Goose café, where you are every night until Grover Winbush here comes in and runs all you niggers out and closes it up,” Uncle Willy said.

  “Then what you asking me, if you know so much?” Walter said.

  “All right,” Uncle Willy said. “What time last night did Mr Winbush close it?” Walter stood there, blinking. His eyes were always red. He made in an old fashioned hand freezer the ice cream which Uncle Willy sold over his soda fountain. He made it in the cellar: a dark cool place with a single door opening onto the alley behind the store, sitting in the gloom and grinding the freezer, so that when you passed about all you saw was his red eyes, looking not malevolent, not savage but just dangerous if you blundered out of your element and into his, like a dragon or a crocodile. He stood there, blinking. “What time did Grover Winbush close up the Blue Goose?” Uncle Willy said.