Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “I left before that,” Walter said. Now suddenly, and we hadn’t noticed him before, Mr Hampton was there, doing some of the looking too. He didn’t blink like Walter. He was a big man with a big belly and little hard pale eyes that didn’t seem to need to blink at all. They were looking at Grover Cleveland now.

  “How do you know you did?” he said to Walter.

  “Hell fire,” Uncle Willy said. “He aint never left that damned place before they turned the lights out since they first opened the door.”

  “I know that,” Mr Hampton said. He was still looking at Grover Cleveland with his little hard pale unblinking eyes. “I’ve been marshal and sheriff both here a long time too.” He said to Grover Cleveland: “Where were you last night when folks needed you?” But Grover Cleveland still tried; you’ll have to give him that, even if now even he never believed in it:

  “Oh, you mean them two fellers in Uncle Willy’s store about half past ten last night. Sure, I seen them. I naturally thought, taken for granted it was Uncle Willy and Skeets. So I.…”

  “So you what?” Mr Hampton said.

  “I … stepped back inside and … taken up the evening paper,” Grover Cleveland said. “Yes, that’s where I was: setting right there in the station reading the Memphis evening paper.…”

  “When Whit Rouncewell saw them two fellows in here, he went back to the station looking for you,” Mr Hampton said. “He waited an hour. By that time the lights were off in here but he never saw anybody come out the front door. And you never showed up. And Walter there says you never showed up at the Blue Goose either. Where were you last night, Grover?”

  So now there wasn’t anywhere for him to go. He just stood there with his coat-tail hiked up over the handle of his pistol and blackjack like a little boy’s shirt-tail coming out. Maybe that’s what it was: Grover Cleveland was too old to look like a boy. And Uncle Willy and Mr Hampton and all the rest of us looking at him until all of a sudden we were all ashamed to look at him anymore, ashamed to have to find out what we were going to find out. Except that Mr Hampton wasn’t ashamed to. Maybe it was being sheriff so long had made him that way, learned him it wasn’t Grover Cleveland you had to be ashamed of: it was all of us.

  “One night Doc Peabody was coming back from a case about one oclock and he saw you coming out of that alley side door to what Montgomery Ward Snopes calls his studio. Another night I was going home late myself, about midnight, and I saw you going into it. What’s going on in there, Grover?”

  Grover Cleveland didn’t move now either. It was almost a whisper: “It’s a club.”

  Now Mr Hampton and Uncle Gavin were looking at each other. “Dont look at me,” Uncle Gavin said. “You’re the law.” That was the funny thing: neither one of them paid any attention to Mr Connors, who was the marshal and ought to have been attending to this already. Maybe that was why.

  “You’re the County Attorney,” Mr Hampton said. “You’re the one to say what the law is before I can be it.”

  “What are we waiting for then?” Uncle Gavin said.

  “Maybe Grover wants to tell us what it is and save time,” Mr Hampton said.

  “No, dammit,” Uncle Gavin said. “Take your foot off him for a minute anyway.” He said to Grover Cleveland: “You go on back to the station until we need you.”

  “You can read the rest of that Memphis paper,” Mr Hampton said. “And we wont want you either,” he said to Mr Connors.

  “Like hell, Sheriff,” Mr Connors said. “Your jurisdiction’s just the county. What goes on in Jefferson is my jurisdiction. I got as much right — —” he stopped then but it was already too late. Mr Hampton looked at him with the little hard pale eyes that never seemed to need to blink at all.

  “Go on,” Mr Hampton said. “Got as much right to see what Montgomery Ward Snopes has got hid as me and Gavin have. Why didn’t you persuade Grover to take you into that club then?” But Mr Connors could still blink. “Come on,” Mr Hampton said to Uncle Gavin, turning. Uncle Gavin moved too.

  “That means you too,” he said to me.

  “That means all of you,” Mr Hampton said. “All of you get out of Uncle Willy’s way now. He’s got to make a list of what’s missing for the narcotics folks and the insurance too.”

  So we stood on the street and watched Mr Hampton and Uncle Gavin go on toward Montgomery Ward’s studio. “What?” I said to Ratliff.

  “I dont know,” he said. “That is, I reckon I know. We’ll have to wait for Hub and your uncle to prove it.”

  “What do you reckon it is?” I said.

  Now he looked at me. “Let’s see,” he said. “Even if you are nine going on ten, I reckon you still aint outgrowed ice cream, have you. Come on. We wont bother Uncle Willy and Skeets now neither. We’ll go to the Dixie Café.” So we went to the Dixie Café and got two cones and stood on the street again.

  “What?” I said.

  “My guess is, it’s a passel of French postcards Montgomery Ward brought back from the war in Paris. I reckon you dont know what that is, do you?”

  “I dont know,” I said.

  “It’s kodak pictures of men and women together, experimenting with one another. Without no clothes on much.” I dont know whether he was looking at me or not. “Do you know now?”

  “I dont know,” I said.

  “But maybe you do?” he said.

  That’s what it was. Uncle Gavin said he had a big album of them, and that he had learned enough about photography to have made slides from some of them so he could throw them magnified on a sheet on the wall with a magic lantern in that back room. And he said how Montgomery Ward stood there laughing at him and Mr Hampton both. But he was talking mostly to Uncle Gavin.

  “Oh sure,” he said. “I dont expect Hub here — —”

  “Call me Mister Hampton,” Mr Hampton said.

  “ — to know any better—”

  “Call me Mister Hampton, boy,” Mr Hampton said.

  “Mister Hampton,” Montgomery Ward said. “ — but you’re a lawyer; you dont think I got into this without reading a little law first myself, do you? You can confiscate these — all you’ll find here; I dont guess Mister Hampton will let a little thing like law stop him from that — —”

  That was when Mr Hampton slapped him. “Stop it, Hub!” Uncle Gavin said. “You damned fool!”

  “Let him go ahead,” Montgomery Ward said. “Suing his bondsmen is easier than running a magic lantern. Safer too. Where was I? Oh yes. Even if they had been sent through the mail, which they haven’t, that would just be a federal charge, and I dont see any federal dicks around here. And even if you tried to cook up a charge that I’ve been making money out of them, where are your witnesses? All you got is Grover Winbush, and he dont dare testify, not because he will lose his job because he’ll probably do that anyway, but because the God-fearing christian holy citizens of Jefferson wont let him because they cant have it known that this is what their police do when they’re supposed to be at work. Let alone the rest of my customers not to mention any names scattered around in banks and stores and gins and filling stations and farmers too two counties wide in either direction — Sure: I just thought of this too: come on, put a fine on me and see how quick it will be paid.…” and stopped and said with a kind of hushed amazement: “Sweet Christ.” He was talking fast now: “Come on, lock me up, give me a thousand stamped envelopes and I’ll make more money in three days than I made in the whole two years with that damned magic lantern.” Now he was talking to Mr Hampton: “Maybe that’s what you wanted, to begin with: not the postcards but the list of customers; retire from sheriff and spend all your time on the collections. Or no: keep the star to bring pressure on the slow payers — —”

  Only this time Uncle Gavin didn’t have to say anything because this time Mr Hampton wasn’t going to hit him. He just stood there with his little hard eyes shut until Montgomery Ward stopped. Then he said to Uncle Gavin:

  “Is that right? We’ve got to have a federal of
ficer? There’s nothing on our books to touch him with? Come on, think. Nothing on the city books even?” Now it was Uncle Gavin who said By God.

  “That automobile law,” he said. “That Sartoris law,” while Mr Hampton stood looking at him. “Hanging right there in that frame on the wall by your own office door? Didn’t you ever look at it? that you cant drive an automobile on the streets of Jefferson—”

  “What?” Montgomery Ward said.

  “Louder,” Uncle Gavin said. “Mr Hampton cant hear you.”

  “But that’s just inside the city!” Montgomery Ward said. “Hampton’s just County Sheriff; he cant make an arrest on just a city charge.”

  “So you say,” Mr Hampton said; now he did put his hand on Montgomery Ward’s shoulder; Uncle Gavin said if he had been Montgomery Ward, he’d just as soon Mr Hampton had slapped him again. “Tell your own lawyer, not ours.”

  “Wait!” Montgomery Ward said to Uncle Gavin. “You own a car too! So does Hampton!”

  “We’re doing this alphabetically,” Uncle Gavin said. “We’ve passed the H’es. We’re in S now, and S-n comes before S-t. Take him on, Hub.”

  So Montgomery Ward didn’t have anywhere to go then, he had run completely out; he just stood there now and Uncle Gavin watched Mr Hampton take his hand off Montgomery Ward and pick up the album of pictures and the envelopes that held the rest of them and carry them to the sink where Montgomery Ward really would develop a film now and then, and tumble them in and then start hunting among the bottles and cans of developer stuff on the shelf above it.

  “What are you looking for?” Uncle Gavin said.

  “Alcohol — coal oil — anything that’ll burn,” Mr Hampton said.

  “Burn?” Montgomery Ward said. “Hell, man, those things are valuable. Look, I’ll make a deal: give them back to me and I’ll get to hell out of your damned town and it’ll never see me again. — All right,” he said. “I’ve got close to a hundred bucks in my pocket. I’ll lay it on the table here and you and Stevens turn your backs and give me ten minutes — —”

  “Do you want to come back and hit him again?” Uncle Gavin said. “Dont mind me. Besides, he’s already suggested we turn our backs so all you’ll have to do is just swing your arm.” But Mr Hampton just took another bottle down and took out the stopper and smelled it. “You cant do that,” Uncle Gavin said. “They’re evidence.”

  “All we need is just one,” Mr Hampton said.

  “That depends,” Uncle Gavin said. “Do you just want to convict him, or do you want to exterminate him?” Mr Hampton stopped, the bottle in one hand and the stopper in the other. “You know what Judge Long will do to the man that just owns one of these pictures.” Judge Long was the Federal Judge of our district. “Think what he’ll do to the man that owns a wheelbarrow full of them.”

  So Mr Hampton put the bottle back and after a while a deputy came with a suitcase and they put the album and the envelopes into it and locked it and Mr Hampton locked the suitcase in his safe to turn over to Mr Gombault, the U.S. marshal, when he got back to town, and they locked Montgomery Ward up in the county jail for operating an automobile contrary to law in the city of Jefferson, with Montgomery Ward cussing a while then threatening a while then trying again to bribe anybody connected with the jail or the town that would take the money. And we wondered how long it would be before he sent for Mr de Spain because of that connection. Because we knew that the last person on earth he would hope for help from would be his uncle or cousin Flem, who had already got shut of one Snopes through a murder charge so why should he balk at getting rid of another one with just a dirty postcard.

  So even Uncle Gavin, that Ratliff said made a kind of religion of never letting Jefferson see that a Snopes had surprised him, didn’t expect Mr Flem that afternoon when he walked into the office and laid his new black hat on the corner of the desk and sat there with the joints of his jaws working faint and steady like he was trying to chew without unclamping his teeth. You couldn’t see behind Mr Hampton’s eyes because they looked at you too hard; you couldn’t pass them like you couldn’t pass a horse in a lane that wasn’t big enough for a horse and a man both but just for the horse. You couldn’t see behind Mr Snopes’s eyes because they were not really looking at you at all, like a pond of stagnant water is not looking at you. Uncle Gavin said that was why it took him a minute or two to realise that he and Mr Snopes were looking at exactly the same thing: it just wasn’t with the same eye.

  “I’m thinking of Jefferson,” Mr Snopes said.

  “So am I,” Uncle Gavin said. “Of that damned Grover Winbush and every other arrested adolescent between fourteen and fifty-eight in half of north Mississippi with twenty-five cents to pay for one look inside that album.”

  “I forgot about Grover Winbush,” Mr Snopes said. “He wont only lose his job but when he does folks will want to know why and this whole business will come out.” That was Mr Snopes’s trouble. I mean, that was our trouble with Mr Snopes: there wasn’t anything to see even when you thought he might be looking at you. “I dont know whether you know it or not. His ma lives out at Whiteleaf. He sends her a dollar’s worth of furnish by the mail rider every Saturday morning.”

  “So to save one is to save both,” Uncle Gavin said. “If Grover Winbush’s mother is to keep on getting that dollar’s worth of fatback and molasses every Saturday morning, somebody will have to save your cousin, nephew — which is he, anyway? — too.”

  Like Ratliff said, Mr Snopes probably missed a lot folks said to him behind his back, but he never missed what folks didn’t say to him to his face. Anyway, irony and sarcasm were not one of them. Or anyway it wasn’t this time. “That’s how I figgered it,” he said. “But you’re a lawyer. Your business is to know how to figger different.”

  Uncle Gavin didn’t miss much of what wasn’t quite said to his face either. “You’ve come to the wrong lawyer,” he said. “This case is in federal court. Besides, I couldn’t take it anyway; I draw a monthly salary to already be on the other side. Besides,” he said (while he was just City Attorney he talked Harvard and Heidelberg. But after that summer he and I spent travelling about the county running for County Attorney, he began to talk like the people he would lean on fences or squat against the walls of country stores with, saying ‘drug’ for ‘dragged’ and ‘me and you’ instead of ‘you and I’ just like they did, even saying figgered just like Mr Snopes just said it), “let’s you and me get together on this. I want him to go to the penitentiary.”

  And that’s when Uncle Gavin found out that he and Mr Snopes were looking at exactly the same thing: they were just standing in different places because Mr Snopes said, as quick and calm as Uncle Gavin himself: “So do I.” Because Montgomery Ward was his rival just like Wallstreet was, both of them alike in that there just wasn’t room in Jefferson for either one of them and Mr Snopes too. Because according to Ratliff, Uncle Gavin was missing it. “So do I,” Mr Snopes said. “But not this way. I’m thinking of Jefferson.”

  “Then it’s just too bad for Jefferson,” Uncle Gavin said. “He will get Judge Long and when Judge Long sees even one of those pictures, let alone a suitcase full of them, I will almost feel sorry even for Montgomery Ward. Have you forgotten about Wilbur Provine last year?”

  Wilbur Provine lived in Frenchman’s Bend too. Ratliff said he was really a Snopes; that when Providence realised that Eck Snopes was going to fail his lineage and tradition, it hunted around quick and produced Wilbur Provine to plug the gap. He ran a still in the creek bottom by a spring about a mile and a half from his house, with a path worn smooth as a ribbon and six inches deep from his back door to the spring where he had walked it twice a day for two years until they caught him and took him to federal court before Judge Long, looking as surprised and innocent as if he didn’t even know what the word ‘still’ meant while the lawyer questioned him, saying No, he never had any idea there was a still within ten miles, let alone a path leading from his back door to it because he himself hadn�
��t been in that creek bottom in ten years, not even to hunt and fish since he was a christian and he believed that no christian should destroy God’s creatures, and he had burned out on fish when he was eight years old and hadn’t been able to eat it since.

  Until Judge Long himself asked him how he accounted for that path, and Wilbur blinked at Judge Long once or twice and said he didn’t have any idea, unless maybe his wife had worn it toting water from the spring; and Judge Long (he had the right name, he was six and a half feet tall and his nose looked almost a sixth of that) leaning down across the Bench with his spectacles at the end of his nose, looking down at Wilbur for a while, until he said: “I’m going to send you to the penitentiary, not for making whiskey but for letting your wife carry water a mile and a half from that spring.” That was who Montgomery Ward would get when he came up for trial and you would have thought that everybody in Yoknapatawpha County, let alone just Jefferson, had heard the story by now. But you would almost thought Mr Snopes hadn’t. Because now even the hinges of his jaws had quit that little faint pumping.

  “I heard Judge Long gave him five years,” he said. “Maybe them extra four years was for the path.”

  “Maybe,” Uncle Gavin said.

  “It was five years, wasn’t it?” Mr Snopes said.

  “That’s right,” Uncle Gavin said.

  “Send that boy out,” Mr Snopes said.

  “No,” Uncle Gavin said.

  Now the hinges of Mr Snopes’s jaws were pumping again. “Send him out,” he said.

  “I’m thinking of Jefferson too,” Uncle Gavin said. “You’re vice president of Colonel Sartoris’s bank. I’m even thinking of you.”