Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “Now, Miss Reba, you don’t want to start that,” Minnie said. “Don’t you remember, last time you started grieving about Mr Binford we had po-lice in here until four o’clock in the morning. Drink your beer and forget about gin.”

  “Yes,” Reba said. She even drank some of the beer. Then she set the glass down. “You said something about a favour. It can’t be money — I ain’t talking about your nerve: I mean your good sense. So it might be interesting—”

  “Expect it is money,” I said. I took out the fifty dollars and separated ten from it and pushed the ten across to her. “I’m going away for a couple of years. That’s for you to remember me by.” She didn’t touch it. She wasn’t even looking at it, though Minnie was. She just looked at me. “Maybe Minnie can help too,” I said. “I want to make a present of forty dollars to the poorest son of a bitch I can find. Who is the poorest son of a bitch anywhere at this second that you and Minnie know?”

  They were both looking at me, Minnie too from under the hat. “How do you mean, poor?” Reba said.

  “That’s in trouble or jail or somewhere that maybe wasn’t his fault.”

  “Minnie’s husband is a son of a bitch and he’s in jail all right,” Reba said. “But I wouldn’t call him poor. Would you, Minnie?”

  “Nome,” Minnie said.

  “But at least he’s out of woman trouble for a while,” Reba told Minnie. “That ought to make you feel a little better.”

  “You don’t know Ludus,” Minnie said. “I like to see any place, chain gang or not, where Ludus can’t find some fool woman to believe him.”

  “What did he do?” I said.

  “He quit his job last winter and laid around here ever since, eating out of my kitchen and robbing Minnie’s pocketbook every night after she went to sleep, until she caught him actually giving the money to the other woman, and when she tried to ask him to stop he snatched the flatiron out of her hand and damn near tore her ear off with it. That’s why she has to wear a hat all the time even in the house. So I’d say if any — if anybody deserved them forty dollars it would be Minnie—”

  A woman began screaming at the top of the stairs in the upper hall. Minnie and Reba ran out. I picked up the money and followed. The woman screaming the curses was the new girl, Thelma, standing at the head of the stairs in a flimsy kimono, or more or less of it. Captain Strutterbuck was halfway down the stairs, wearing his hat and carrying his coat in one hand and trying to button his fly with the other. Minnie was at the foot of the stairs. She didn’t outshout Thelma nor even shout her silent: Minnie just had more volume, maybe more practice:

  “Course he never had no money. He ain’t never had more than two dollars at one time since he been coming here. Why you ever let him get on the bed without the money in your hand first, I don’t know. I bet he never even took his britches off. A man won’t take his britches off, don’t never have no truck with him a-tall; he done already shook his foot, no matter what his mouth still saying.”

  “All right,” Reba told Minnie. “That’ll do.” Minnie stepped back; even Thelma hushed; she saw me or something and even pulled the kimono back together in front. Strutterbuck came on down the stairs, still fumbling at the front of his pants; maybe the last thing he did want was for both his eyes to look at the same thing at the same time. But I don’t know; according to Minnie he had no more reason to be alarmed and surprised now at where he was than a man walking a tightrope. Concerned of course and damned careful, but not really alarmed and last of all surprised. He reached the downstairs floor. But he was not done yet. There were still eight or ten feet to the front door.

  But Reba was a lady. She just held her hand out until he quit fumbling at his fly and took the folded money order out of whatever pocket it was in and handed it to her. A lady. She never raised her hand at him. She never even cursed him. She just went to the front door and took hold of the knob and turned and said, “Button yourself up. Ain’t no man going to walk out of my house at just eleven o’clock at night with his pants still hanging open.” Then she closed the door after him and locked it. Then she unfolded the money order. Minnie was right. It was for two dollars, issued at Lonoke, Arkansas. The sender’s name was spelled Q’Milla Strutterbuck. “His sister or his daughter?” Reba said. “What’s your guess?”

  Minnie was looking too. “It’s his wife,” she said. “His sister or mama or grandma would sent five. His woman would sent fifty — if she had it and felt like sending it. His daughter would sent fifty cents. Wouldn’t nobody but his wife sent two dollars.”

  She brought two more bottles of beer to the dining-room table. “All right,” Reba said. “You want a favour. What favour?”

  I took out the money again and shoved the ten across to her again, still holding the other forty. “This is for you and Minnie, to remember me until I come back in two years. I want you to send the other to my great-uncle in the Mississippi penitentiary at Parchman.”

  “Will you come back in two years?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You can look for me. Two years. The man I’m going to be working for says I’ll be back in one, but I don’t believe him.”

  “All right. Now what do I do with the forty?”

  “Send it to my great-uncle Mink Snopes in Parchman.”

  “What’s he in for?”

  “He killed a man named Jack Houston back in 1908.”

  “Did Houston deserve killing?”

  “I don’t know. But from what I hear, he sure worked to earn it.”

  “The poor son of a bitch. How long is your uncle in for?”

  “Life,” I said.

  “All right,” she said. “I know about that too. When will he get out?”

  “About 1948 if he lives and nothing else happens to him.”

  “All right. How do I do it?” I told her, the address and all.

  “You could send it From another prisoner.”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “I ain’t never been in jail. I don’t aim to be.”

  “Send it From a friend then.”

  “All right,” she said. She took the money and folded it. “The poor son of a bitch,” she said.

  “Which one are you talking about now?”

  “Both of them,” she said. “All of us. Every one of us. The poor son of a bitches.”

  I hadn’t expected to see Clarence at all until tomorrow morning. But there he was, a handful of crumpled bills scattered on the top of the dresser like the edge of a crap game and Clarence undressed down to his trousers standing looking at them and yawning and rooting in the pelt on his chest. This time they — Clarence — had found a big operator, a hot sport who, Virgil having taken on the customary two successfully, bet them he couldn’t handle a third one without stopping, offering them the odds this time, which Clarence covered with Flem’s other fifty since this really would be a risk; he said how he even gave Virgil a chance to quit and not hold it against him: “ ’We’re ahead now, you know; you done already proved yourself.’ And do you know, the little sod never even turned a hair. ‘Sure,’ he says, ‘Send her in.’ And now my conscience hurts me,” he said, yawning again. “It was Flem’s money. My conscience says don’t tell him a durn thing about it: the money just got spent like he thinks it was. But shucks, a man don’t want to be a hog.”

  So we went back home. “Why do you want to go back to the jail?” Flem said. “It’ll be three weeks yet.”

  “Call it for practice,” I said. “Call it a dry run against my conscience.” So now I had a set of steel bars between; now I was safe from the free world, safe and secure for a little while from the free Snopes world where Flem was parlaying his wife into the presidency of a bank and Clarence even drawing per diem as a state senator between Jackson and Gayoso Street to take the wraps off Virgil whenever he could find another Arkansas sport who refused to believe what he was looking at, and Byron in Mexico or wherever he was with whatever was still left of the bank’s money, and mine and Clarence’s father I.O. and all of our Uncl
e Wesley leading a hymn with one hand and fumbling the skirt of an eleven-year-old infant with the other; I don’t count Wallstreet and Admiral Dewey and their father Eck, because they don’t belong to us: they are only our shame.

  Not to mention Uncle Murdering Mink six or seven weeks later (I had to wait a little while you see not to spook him too quick). “Flem?” he said. “I wouldn’t a thought Flem wanted me out. I’d a thought he’d been the one wanted to keep me here longest.”

  “He must have changed,” I said. He stood there in his barred overalls, blinking a little — a damn little worn-out dried-up shrimp of a man not as big as a fourteen-year-old boy. Until you wondered how in hell anything as small and frail could have held enough mad, let alone steadied and aimed a ten-gauge shotgun, to kill anybody.

  “I’m obliged to him,” he said. “Only, if I got out tomorrow, maybe I won’t done changed. I been here a long time now. I ain’t had much to do for a right smart while now but jest work in the field and think. I wonder if he knows to risk that? A man wants to be fair, you know.”

  “He knows that,” I said. “He don’t expect you to change inside here because he knows you can’t. He expects you to change when you get out. Because he knows that as soon as the free air and sun shine on you again, you can’t help but be a changed man even if you don’t want to.”

  “But jest suppose I don’t—” He didn’t add change in time because he stopped himself.

  “He’s going to take that risk,” I said. “He’s got to. I mean, he’s got to now. He couldn’t have stopped them from sending you here. But he knows you think he didn’t try. He’s got to help you get out not only to prove to you he never put you here but so he can quit thinking and remembering that you believe he did. You see?”

  He was completely still, just blinking a little, his hands hanging empty but even now shaped inside the palms like the handles of a plow and even his neck braced a little as though still braced against the loop of the ploughlines. “I just got five more years, then I’ll get out by myself. Then won’t nobody have no right to hold expectations against me. I won’t owe nobody no help then.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Just five more years. That’s practically nothing to a man that has already put in fifteen years with a man with a shotgun watching him plow cotton that ain’t his whether he feels like plowing that day or not, and another man with a shotgun standing over him while he eats grub that he either ate it or not whether he felt like eating or not, and another man with a shotgun to lock him up at night so he could either go to sleep or stay awake whether he felt like doing it or not. Just five years more, then you’ll be out where the free sun and air can shine on you without any man with a shotgun’s shadow to cut it off. Because you’ll be free.”

  “Free,” he said, not loud: just like that: “Free.” That was all. It was that easy. Of course the guard I welshed to cursed me; I had expected that: it was a free country; every convict had a right to try to escape just as every guard and trusty had the right to shoot him in the back the first time he didn’t halt. But no unprintable stool pigeon had the right to warn the guard in advance.

  I had to watch it too. That was on the bill too: the promissory note of breathing in a world that had Snopeses in it. I wanted to turn my head or anyway shut my eyes. But refusing to not look was all I had left now: the last sorry lousy almost worthless penny — the damn little thing looking like a little girl playing mama in the calico dress and sunbonnet that he believed was Flem’s idea (that had been difficult; he still wanted to believe that a man should be permitted to run at his fate, even if that fate was doom, in the decency and dignity of pants; it took a little doing to persuade him that a petticoat and a woman’s sunbonnet was all Flem could get). Walking; I had impressed that on him: not to run, but walk; as forlorn and lonely and fragile and alien in that empty penitentiary compound as a paper doll blowing across a rolling-mill; still walking even after he had passed the point where he couldn’t come back and knew it; even still walking on past the moment when he knew that he had been sold and that he should have known all along he was being sold, not blaming anybody for selling him nor even needing to sell him because hadn’t he signed — he couldn’t read but he could sign his name — that same promissory note too to breathe a little while, since his name was Snopes?

  So he even ran before he had to. He ran right at them before I even saw them, before they stepped out of the ambush. I was proud, not just to be kin to him but of belonging to what Reba called all of us poor son of a bitches. Because it took five of them striking and slashing at his head with pistol barrels and even then it finally took the blackjack to stop him, knock him out.

  The Warden sent for me. “Don’t tell me anything,” he said. “I wish I didn’t even know as much already as I suspect. In fact, if it was left to me, I’d like to lock you and him both in a cell and leave you, you for choice in handcuffs. But I’m under a bond too so I’m going to move you into solitary for a week or so, for your own protection. And not from him.”

  “Don’t brag or grieve,” I said. “You had to sign one of them too.”

  “What?” he said. “What did you say?”

  “I said you don’t need to worry. He hasn’t got anything against me. If you don’t believe me, send for him.”

  So he came in. The bruises and slashes from the butts and the blades of the sights were healing fine. The blackjack of course never had showed. “Hidy,” he said. To me. “I reckon you’ll see Flem before I will now.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Tell him he hadn’t ought to used that dress. But it don’t matter. If I had made it out then, maybe I would a changed. But I reckon I won’t now. I reckon I’ll jest wait.”

  So Flem should have taken that suggestion about the ten grand. He could still do it. I could write him a letter: Sure you can raise ten thousand. All you need to do is swap Manfred de Spain a good jump at your wife. No: that won’t do: trying to peddle Eula Varner to Manfred de Spain is like trying to sell a horse to a man that’s already been feeding and riding it for ten or twelve years. But you got that girl, Linda. She ain’t but eleven or twelve but what the hell, put smoked glasses and high heels on her and rush her in quick and maybe De Spain won’t notice it.

  Except that I wasn’t going to. But it wasn’t that that worried me. It was knowing that I wasn’t, knowing I was going to throw it away — I mean my commission of the ten grand for contacting the Chi syndicate for him. I don’t remember just when it was, I was probably pretty young, when I realised that I had come from what you might call a family, a clan, a race, maybe even a species, of pure sons of bitches. So I said, Okay, okay, if that’s the way it is, we’ll just show them. They call the best of lawyers, lawyers’ lawyers and the best of actors an actor’s actor and the best of athletes a ballplayer’s ballplayer. All right, that’s what we’ll do: every Snopes will make it his private and personal aim to have the whole world recognise him as THE son of a bitch’s son of a bitch.

  But we never do it. We never make it. The best we ever do is to be just another Snopes son of a bitch. All of us, every one of us — Flem, and old Ab that I don’t even know exactly what kin he is, and Uncle Wes and mine and Clarence’s father I.O., then right on down the line: Clarence and me by what you might call simultaneous bigamy, and Virgil and Vardaman and Bilbo and Byron and Mink. I don’t even mention Eck and Wallstreet and Admiral Dewey because they don’t belong to us. I have always believed that Eck’s mother took some extracurricular night work nine months before he was born. So the one true bitch we had was not a bitch at all but a saint and martyr, the one technically true pristine immaculate unchallengeable son of a bitch we ever produced wasn’t even a Snopes.

  FIVE

  When his nephew was gone, the Warden said, “Sit down.” He did so. “You got in the paper,” the Warden said. It was folded on the desk facing him:

  TRIES PRISON BREAK

  DISGUISED IN WOMEN’S CLOTHES

  Parchman, Miss. Sept 8,
1923 M. C.

  “Mink” Snopes, under life sentence for

  murder from Yoknapatawpha County . . .

  “What does the ‘C’ in your name stand for?” the Warden said. His voice was almost gentle. “We all thought your name was just Mink. That’s what you told us, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Mink Snopes.”

  “What does the ‘C’ stand for? They’ve got it M. C. Snopes here.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Nothing. Just M. C. Snopes like I.C. Railroad. It was them young fellers from the paper in the hospital that day. They kept on asking me what my name was and I said Mink Snopes and they said Mink ain’t a name, it’s jest a nickname. What’s your real name? And so I said M. C. Snopes.”

  “Oh,” the Warden said. “Is Mink all the name you’ve got?”