“Much obliged,” Mr Snopes said. He wasn’t looking at anything. He didn’t waste any time but he wasn’t hurrying either: he just got up and took the new black hat from the desk and put it on and went to the door and opened it and didn’t quite stop even then, just kind of changing feet to step around the opening door and said, not to anybody anymore than he had ever been looking at anybody: “Good day,” and went out and closed the door behind him.
Then I said, “What—” and then stopped, Uncle Gavin and I both watching the door as it opened again, or began to, opening about a foot with no sound beyond it until we saw Ratliff’s cheek and one of his eyes, then it opened on and Ratliff came in, eased in, sidled in, still not making any sound.
“Am I too late, or jest too soon?” he said.
“Neither,” Uncle Gavin said. “He stopped, decided not to. Something happened. The pattern went wrong. It started out all regular. You know: this is not just for me, and least of all for my kinsman. Do you know what he said?”
“How can I yet?” Ratliff said. “That’s what I’m doing now.”
“I said ‘You and I should get together. I want him to go to the penitentiary.’ And he said, ‘So do I’.”
“All right,” Ratliff said. “Go on.”
“ ‘ — not for me, my kinsman’,” Uncle Gavin said. “ ‘For Jefferson’. So the next step should have been the threat. Only he didn’t—”
“Why threat?” Ratliff said.
“The pattern,” Uncle Gavin said. “First the soap, then the threat, then the bribe. As Montgomery Ward himself tried it.”
“This aint Montgomery Ward,” Ratliff said. “If Montgomery Ward had been named Flem, them pictures wouldn’t a never seen Jefferson, let alone vice versa. But we dont need to worry about Flem being smarter than Montgomery Ward; most anybody around here is that. What we got to worry about is, who else around here may not be as smart as him too. Then what?”
“He quit,” Uncle Gavin said. “He came right up to it. He even asked me to send Chick out. And when I said No, he just picked up his hat and said Much obliged and went out as if he had just stopped in here to borrow a match.”
Ratliff blinked at Uncle Gavin. “So he wants Montgomery Ward to go to the penitentiary. Only he dont want him to go under the conditions he’s on his way there now. Then he changed his mind.”
“Because of Chick,” Uncle Gavin said.
“Then he changed his mind,” Ratliff said.
“You’re right,” Uncle Gavin said. “It was because he knew that by refusing to send Chick out I had already refused to be bribed.”
“No,” Ratliff said. “To Flem Snopes, there aint a man breathing that cant be bought for something; all you need to do is jest to find it. Only, why did he change his mind?”
“All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “Why?”
“What was the conversation about jest before he told you to send Chick out?”
“About the penitentiary,” Uncle Gavin said. “I just told you.”
“It was about Wilbur Provine,” I said.
Ratliff looked at me. “Wilbur Provine?”
“His still,” I said. “That path and Judge Long.”
“Oh,” Ratliff said. “Then what?”
“That’s all,” Uncle Gavin said. “He just said ‘Send that boy out’ and I said—”
“That wasn’t next,” I said. “The next was what Mr Snopes said about the five years, that maybe the extra four years was for the path, and you said Maybe and Mr Snopes said again, ‘It was five years, wasn’t it?’ and you said Yes and then he said to send me out.”
“All right, all right,” Uncle Gavin said. But he was looking at Ratliff. “Well?” he said.
“I dont know neither,” Ratliff said. “All I know is, I’m glad I aint Montgomery Ward Snopes.”
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “When Judge Long sees that suitcase.”
“Sho,” Ratliff said. “That’s jest Uncle Sam. It’s his Uncle Flem that Montgomery Ward wants to worry about, even if he dont know it yet. And us too. As long as all he wanted was jest money, at least you knowed which way to guess even if you knowed you couldn’t guess first. But this time — —” He looked at us, blinking.
“All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “How?”
“You mind that story about how the feller found his strayed dog? he jest set down and imagined where he would be if he was that dog and got up and went and got it and brung it home. All right. We’re Flem Snopes. We got a chance to get shut of our — what’s that old-timey word? unsavory — unsavory nephew into the penitentiary. Only we’re vice president of a bank now and we cant afford to have it knowed even a unsavory nephew was running a peep show of French postcards. And the judge that will send him there is the same judge that told Wilbur Provine he was going to Parchman not for making whiskey but for letting his wife tote water a mile and a half.” He blinked at Uncle Gavin. “You’re right. The question aint ‘what’ a-tall: it’s jest ‘how’. And since you wasn’t interested in money, and he has got better sense than to offer it to Hub Hampton, we dont jest know what that ‘how’ is going to be. Unless maybe since he got to be a up-and-coming feller in the Baptist church, he is depending on Providence.”
Maybe he was. Anyway, it worked. It was the next morning, about ten oclock; Uncle Gavin and I were just leaving the office to drive up to Wyott’s Crossing where they were having some kind of a squabble over a drainage tax suit, when Mr Hampton came in. He was kind of blowing through his teeth, light and easy like he was whistling except that he wasn’t making any noise and even less than that of tune. “Morning,” he said. “Yesterday morning when we were in that studio and I was hunting through them bottles on that shelf for alcohol or something that would burn.”
“All right,” Uncle Gavin said.
“How many of them bottles and jugs did I draw the cork or unscrew the cap and smell? You were there. You were watching.”
“I thought all of them,” Uncle Gavin said. “Why?”
“So did I,” Mr Hampton said. “I could be wrong.” He looked at Uncle Gavin with his hard little eyes, making that soundless whistling between his teeth.
“You’ve prepared us,” Uncle Gavin said. “Got us into the right state of nervous excitement. Now tell us.”
“About six this morning, Jack Crenshaw telephoned me.” (Mr Crenshaw was the Revenue field agent that did the moonshine still hunting in our district.) “He told me to come on to that studio as soon as I could. They were already inside, two of them. They had already searched it. Two of them gallon jugs on that shelf that I opened and smelled yesterday that never had nothing but kodak developer in them, had raw corn whiskey in them this morning, though like I said I could have been wrong and missed them. Not to mention five gallons more of it in a oil can setting behind the heater, that I hadn’t got around to smelling yesterday when you stopped me for the reason that I never seen it there when I looked behind the heater yesterday or I wouldn’t been smelling at the bottles on that shelf for something to burn paper with. Though, as you say, I could be wrong.”
“As you say,” Uncle Gavin said.
“You may be right,” Mr Hampton said. “After all, I’ve been having to snuff out moonshine whiskey in this county ever since I first got elected. And since 1919, I have been so in practice that now I dont even need to smell: I just kind of feel it the moment I get where some of it aint supposed to be. Not to mention that five-gallon coal oil can full of it setting where you would have thought I would have fell over it reaching my hand to that shelf.”
“All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “Go on.”
“That’s all,” Mr Hampton said.
“How did he get in?” Uncle Gavin said.
“He?” Mr Hampton said.
“All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “Take ‘they’ if you like it better.”
“I thought of that too,” Mr Hampton said. “The key. I said THE key because even that fool would have more sense than to have a key to that place anywhe
re except on a string around his neck.”
“That one,” Uncle Gavin said.
“Yep,” Mr Hampton said. “I dropped it into the drawer where I usually keep such, handcuffs and a extra pistol. Anybody could have come in while me and Miss Elma” (she was the office deputy, widow of the sheriff Mr Hampton had succeeded last time) “was out, and taken it.”
“Or the pistol either,” Uncle Gavin said. “You really should start locking that place, Hub. Some day you’ll leave your star in there and come back to find some little boy out on the street arresting people.”
“Maybe I should,” Mr Hampton said. “All right,” he said. “Somebody took that key and planted that whiskey. It could have been any of them — any of the folks that that damned Grover Winbush says was coming from four counties around to sweat over them damn pictures at night.”
“Maybe it’s lucky you at least had that suitcase locked up. I suppose you’ve still got that, since Mr Gombault hasn’t got back yet?”
“That’s right,” Mr Hampton said.
“And Jack Crenshaw and his buddy are just interested in whiskey, not photography. Which means you haven’t turned that suitcase over to anybody yet.”
“That’s right,” Mr Hampton said.
“Are you going to?” Uncle Gavin said.
“What do you think?” Mr Hampton said.
“That’s what I think too,” Uncle Gavin said.
“After all, the whiskey is enough,” Mr Hampton said. “And even if it aint, all we got to do is show Judge Long just any one of them photographs right before he pronounces sentence. Damn it,” he said, “it’s Jefferson. We live here. Jefferson’s got to come first, even before the pleasure of crucifying that damned — —”
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “I’ve heard that sentiment.” Then Mr Hampton left. And all we had to do was just to wait, and not long. You never had to wonder about how much Ratliff had heard because you knew in advance he had heard all of it. He closed the door and stood just inside it.
“Why didn’t you tell him yesterday about Flem Snopes?” he said.
“Because he let Flem Snopes or whoever it was walk right in his office and steal that key. Hub’s already got about all the felonious malfeasance he can afford to compound,” Uncle Gavin said. He finished putting the papers into the brief case and closed it and stood up.
“You leaving?” Ratliff said.
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “Wyott’s Crossing.”
“You aint going to wait for Flem?”
“He wont come back here,” Uncle Gavin said. “He wont dare. What he came here yesterday to try to bribe me to do, is going to happen anyway without the bribe. But he dont dare come back here to find out. He will have to wait and see like anybody else. He knows that.” But still Ratliff didn’t move from the door.
“The trouble with us is, we dont never estimate Flem Snopes right. At first we made the mistake of not estimating him a-tall. Then we made the mistake of over-estimating him. Now we’re fixing to make the mistake of under-estimating him again. When you jest want money, all you need to do to satisfy yourself is count it and put it where cant nobody get it, and forget about it. But this-here new thing he has done found out it’s nice to have, is different. It’s like keeping warm in winter or cool in summer, or peace or being free or content-ment. You cant jest count it and lock it up somewhere safe and forget about it until you feel like looking at it again. You got to work at it steady, never to forget about it. It’s got to be out in the open, where folks can see it, or there aint no such thing.”
“No such thing as what?” Uncle Gavin said.
“This-here new discovery he’s jest made,” Ratliff said. “Call it civic virtue.”
“Why not?” Uncle Gavin said. “Were you going to call it something else?” Ratliff watched Uncle Gavin, curious, intent; it was as if he were waiting for something. “Go on,” Uncle Gavin said. “You were saying.”
Then it was gone, whatever it had been. “Oh yes,” Ratliff said. “He’ll be in to see you. He’ll have to, to make sho you recognise it too when you see it. He may kind of hang around until middle of the afternoon, to kind of give the dust a chance to settle. But he’ll be back then, so a feller can at least see jest how much he missed heading him off.”
So we didn’t drive up to Wyott’s then, and this time Ratliff was the one who under-estimated. It wasn’t a half an hour until we heard his feet on the stairs and the door opened and he came in. This time he didn’t take off the black hat: he just said “Morning, gentle-men” and came on to the desk and dropped the key to Montgomery Ward’s studio on it and was going back toward the door when Uncle Gavin said:
“Much obliged. I’ll give it back to the sheriff. You’re like me,” he said. “You dont give a damn about truth either. What you are interested in is justice.”
“I’m interested in Jefferson,” Mr Snopes said, reaching for the door and opening it. “We got to live here. Morning, gentlemen.”
ELEVEN
V. K. Ratliff
AND STILL HE missed it, even set — sitting right there in his own office and actively watching Flem rid Jefferson of Montgomery Ward. And still I couldn’t tell him.
TWELVE
Charles Mallison
WHATEVER IT WAS Ratliff thought Mr Snopes wanted, I dont reckon that what Uncle Gavin took up next helped it much either. And this time he didn’t even have Miss Melisandre Backus for Mother to blame it on because Miss Melisandre herself was married now, to a man, a stranger, that everybody but Miss Melisandre (we never did know whether her father, sitting all day long out there on that front gallery with a glass of whiskey-and-water in one hand and Horace or Virgil in the other — a combination which Uncle Gavin said would have insulated from the reality of rural north Mississippi harder heads than his — knew or not) knew was a big rich New Orleans bootlegger. In fact she still refused to believe it even when they brought him home with a bullet hole neatly plugged up in the middle of his forehead, in a bullet-proof hearse leading a cortege of Packards and Cadillac limousines that Hollywood itself, let alone Al Capone, wouldn’t have been ashamed of.
No, that’s wrong. We never did know whether she knew it or not too, even years after he was dead and she had all the money and the two children and the place which in her childhood had been just another Mississippi cotton farm but which he had changed with white fences and weather-vanes in the shape of horses so that it looked like a cross between a Kentucky country club and a Long Island race track, and plenty of friends who felt they owed it to her that she should know where all that money actually came from; and still, as soon as they approached the subject, she would change it — the slender dark girl still, even though she was a millionairess and the mother of two children, whose terrible power was that defenselessness and helplessness which conferred knighthood on any man who came within range, before he had a chance to turn and flee; — changing the entire subject as if she had never heard her husband’s name or, in fact, as though he had never lived.
I mean, this time Mother couldn’t even say “If he would only marry Melisandre Backus, she would save him from all this”, meaning Linda Snopes this time like she had meant Mrs Flem Snopes before. But at least she thought about saying it because almost at once she stopped worrying. “It’s all right,” she told Father. “It’s the same thing again: dont you remember? He never was really interested in Melisandre. I mean.… you know: really interested. Books and flowers. Picking my jonquils and narcissus as fast as they bloomed, to send out there where that whole two-acre front yard was full of jonquils, cutting my best roses to take out there and sit in that hammock reading poetry to her. He was just forming her mind: that’s all he wanted. And Melisandre was only five years younger, where with this one he is twice her age, practically her grandfather. Of course that’s all it is.”
Then Father said: “Heh heh heh. Form is right, only it’s on Gavin’s mind, not hers. It would be on mine too if I wasn’t already married and scared to look. Did
you ever take a look at her? You’re human even if you are a woman.” Yes, I could remember a heap of times when Father had been born too soon, before they thought of wolf whistles.
“Stop it,” Mother said.
“But after all,” Father said, “maybe Gavin should be saved from those sixteen-year-old clutches. Suppose you speak to him; tell him I am willing to make a sacrifice of myself on the family altar — —”
“Stop it! Stop it!” Mother said. “Cant you at least be funny?”
“I’m worse than that, I’m serious,” Father said. “They were at a table in Christian’s yesterday afternoon. Gavin just had a saucer of ice cream but she was eating something in a dish that must have set him back twenty or thirty cents. So maybe Gavin knows what he’s doing after all; she’s got some looks of her own, but she still aint quite up with her mother: you know — —” using both hands to make a kind of undulating hourglass shape in the air in front of him while Mother stood watching him like a snake. “Maybe he’s concentrating on just forming her form first you might say, without bothering too much yet about her mind. And who knows? maybe some day she’ll even look at him like she was looking at that banana split or whatever it was when Skeets McGowan set it down in front of her.”
But by that time Mother was gone. And this time she sure needed somebody like Miss Melisandre, with all her friends (all Jefferson for that matter) on the watch to tell her whenever Uncle Gavin and Linda stopped in Christian’s drugstore after school while Linda ate another banana split or ice cream soda, with the last book of poetry Uncle Gavin had ordered for her lying in the melted ice cream or spilled coca cola on the marble table top. Because I reckon Jefferson was too small for a thirty-five-year-old bachelor, even a Harvard M.A. and a Ph.D. from Heidelberg and his hair already beginning to turn white even at just twenty-five, to eat ice cream and read poetry with a sixteen-year-old high school girl. Though if it had to happen, maybe thirty-five was the best age for a bachelor to buy ice cream and poetry for a sixteen-year-old girl. I told Mother that. She didn’t sound like a snake because snakes cant talk. But if dentists’ drills could talk she would have sounded just like one.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 477
