Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “I got to have at least one bullet to try it with,” he said. “Unless you will guarantee it.”

  “Do we ask you to guarantee you ain’t going to rob or shoot anybody with it?” the first said.

  “Okay, okay, he’s got to try it out,” the second said. “Give him another bullet for a — You could spare another quarter, couldn’t you? Them forty-one bullets are hard to get, you know.”

  “Could it be a dime?” he said. “I got to get home yet.”

  “Okay, okay,” the second said. “Give him the pistol and three bullets for twelve dollars and a dime. He’s got to get home. To hell with a man that’ll rob a man trying to get home.”

  So he was all right; he stepped out into the full drowsing sunlight of early fall, into the unsleeping and passionate city. He was all right now. All he had to do now was to get to Jefferson and that wasn’t but eighty miles.

  THIRTEEN

  WHEN CHARLES MALLISON got home in September of 1945, there was a new Snopes in Jefferson. They had got shot down (“of course,” Charles always added, telling it) though it wasn’t a crash. Plexiglass was the pilot. Plex. His name was Harold Baddrington, but he had an obsession on the subject of cellophane, which he called plexiglass, amounting to a phobia; the simple sight or even the mere idea of a new pack of cigarettes or a new shirt or handkerchief as you had to buy them now pre-encased in an invisible impenetrable cocoon, threw him to the sort of virulent almost hysterical frenzy which Charles had seen the idea of Germans or Japanese throw some civilians, especially ones around fifty years old. He — Plex — had a scheme for winning the war with cellophane: instead of bombs, the seventeens and twenty-fours and the British Lancasters and Blenheims would drop factory-vulcanised packs of tobacco and new shirts and underclothes, and while the Germans were queued up waiting turns at the ice pick, they could be strafed en masse or even captured without a shot by paratroop drops.

  It wasn’t even a bailout; Plex made a really magnificent one-engine landing. The trouble was, he picked out a farm that a German patrol had already selected that morning to practise a new occupation innovation or something whose directive had just come down, so in almost no time the whole crew of them were in the P.O.W. camp at Limbourg, which almost immediately turned out to be the most dangerous place any of them had been in during the war; it was next door to the same marshalling yard that the R.A.F. bombed regularly every Wednesday night from an altitude of about thirty or forty feet. They would spend six days watching the calendar creep inexorably toward Wednesday, when as regular as clockwork the uproar of crashes and thuds and snarling engines would start up, and the air full of searchlights and machine-gun bullets and whizzing fragments of AA, the entire barracks crouching under bunks or anything else that would interpose another inch of thickness, no matter what, with that frantic desire, need, impulse to rush outdoors waving their arms and shouting up at the pandemonium overhead: “Hey, fellows! For Christ’s sake have a heart! It’s us! It’s us!” If it had been a moving-picture or a book instead of a war, Charles said they would have escaped. But he himself didn’t know and never knew anyone who ever actually escaped from a genuine authentic stalag, so they had to wait for regular routine liberation before he came back home and found there was already another Snopes in Jefferson.

  But at least they — Jefferson — were holding their own. Because in that same summer, 1945, when Jefferson gained the new Snopes, Ratliff eliminated Clarence. Not that Ratliff shot him or anything like that: he just simply eliminated Clarence as a factor in what Charles’s Uncle Gavin also called their constant Snopes-fear and -dread, or you might say, Snopes-dodging. It happened during the campaign which ended in the August primary election; Charles hadn’t got back home yet by a month, nor was his Uncle Gavin actually present at the picnic where it actually happened, where Clarence Snopes was actually defeated in the race for Congress which, being a national election, wouldn’t even take place until next year. That’s what he, Charles, meant by Ratliff doing it. He was in the office when his Uncle Gavin this time ran Ratliff to earth and bayed him and said, “All right. Just exactly what did happen out there that day?”

  Senator Clarence Egglestone Snopes, pronounced “Cla’-nce” by every free white Yoknapatawpha American whose right and duty it was to go to the polls and mark his X each time old man Will Varner told him to; just Senator Clarence Snopes for the first few years after old Varner ordained or commanded — anyway, translated — him into the upper house of the state legislature in Jackson; beginning presently to put on a little flesh (he had been a big, hulking youth and young man but reasonably hard and active in an awkward kind of way until the sedentary brain work of being one of the elected fathers and guardians and mentors of the parliamentary interests of Yoknapatawpha County began to redden his nose and pouch his eyes and paunch his belt a little) until one hot July day in the middle twenties when no other man in Jefferson or Yoknapatawpha County either under sixty years of age had on a coat, Clarence appeared on the Square in a complete white linen suit with a black Windsor tie, and either just before or just after or maybe it was that same simultaneous start or shock brought it to their notice, they realised that he was now signing himself Senator C. E. Snopes, and Charles’s Uncle Gavin said, “Where did the ‘E’ come from?” and Ratliff said,

  “Maybe he picked it up along with that-ere white wedding suit going and coming through Memphis to get back and forth to Jackson to work. Because why not? Ain’t even a elected legislative senator got a few private rights like any free ordinary voter?”

  What Charles meant was that Clarence already had them all a little off balance like a prize fighter does his opponent without really hitting him yet. So their emotion was simple docility when they learned that their own private Cincinnatus was not even C. any longer but was Senator Egglestone Snopes; his Uncle Gavin merely said, “Egglestone? Why Egglestone?” and Ratliff merely said,

  “Why not?” and even his Uncle Gavin merely said,

  “Yes, why not?” So they didn’t really mark it when one day the C. was back again — Senator C. Egglestone Snopes now, with a definite belly and the pouched eyes and a lower lip now full from talking, forensic. Because Clarence was making speeches, anywhere and everywhere, at bond rallies and women’s clubs, any place or occasion where there was a captive audience, because Charles was still in the German prison camp when his Uncle Gavin and Ratliff realised that Clarence intended to run for Congress in Washington and that old Will Varner might quite possibly get him elected to it — the same Clarence Snopes who had moved steadily onward and upward from being old Varner’s privately appointed constable in Varner’s own private Beat Two, then supervisor of the Beat and then elected out of the entire county by means of old Will’s diffused usurious capacity for blackmail, to be the county representative in Jackson; and now, 1945, tapped by all the mutually compounding vote-swapping Varners of the whole congressional district for the House of Representatives in Washington itself, where in the clutches not of a mere neighbourhood or sectional Will Varner but of a Will Varner of really national or even international scope, there would be no limit to what he might be capable of unless somebody did something about it. This, until that day in July at the annual Varner’s Mill picnic where by custom and tradition not only the local candidates for county and state offices but even the regional and sectional ones for national offices, like Clarence, even though the election itself would not happen until next year, started the ball rolling. Whereupon Clarence had not only failed to appear on the speakers’ platform to announce his candidacy, he disappeared from the picnic grounds before the dinner was even served. And the next day word went over the county that Clarence had not only decided not to run for Congress, he was even withdrawing from public life altogether when his present term in the state senate was up.

  So what Charles’s Uncle Gavin really wanted to know was not so much what had happened to Clarence, as what had happened to old Will Varner. Because whatever eliminated Clarence from the congressio
nal race would have to impact not on Clarence but on old Will; it wouldn’t have needed to touch Clarence at all in fact. Because nobody really minded Clarence just as you don’t mind a stick of dynamite until somebody fuses it; otherwise he was just so much sawdust and greasy paper that wouldn’t even burn good set on fire. He was unprincipled and without morals of course, but without a guiding and prompting and absolving hand or intelligence, Clarence himself was anybody’s victim since all he had was his blind instinct for sadism and overreaching, and was himself really dangerous only to someone he would have the moral and intellectual ascendency of, which out of the entire world’s population couldn’t possibly be anybody except another Snopes, and out of the entire Snopes population couldn’t possibly be more than just one of them. In this case it was his youngest brother Doris — a hulking youth of seventeen who resembled Clarence not only in size and shape but the same mentality of a child and the moral principles of a wolverine, the only difference being that Doris hadn’t been elected to the state legislature yet. Back in the late twenties Byron Snopes, who looted Colonel Sartoris’s bank and fled to Texas, sent back C.O.D. four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children which Clarence, spending the summer at home between two legislative sessions, adopted into a kind of peonage of practical jokes. Only, being a state senator now, Clarence had to be a little careful about his public dignity, not for the sake of his constituency but because even he knew a damn sight better than to take chances with old Will Varner’s standards of amour-propre. So he would merely invent the jokes and use his brother Doris to perpetrate them, until the four Indian children finally caught Doris alone in no man’s land and captured him and tied him to a stake in the woods and even had the fire burning when someone heard his screams and got there in time to save him.

  But Clarence himself was in his late twenties then, already a state senator; his career had begun long before that, back when he was eighteen or nineteen years old out at Varner’s store and became leader of a subjugated (he was big and strong and Ratliff said really liked fighting, provided the equality in size was enough in his favour) gang of cousins and toadies who fought and drank and gambled and beat up Negroes and terrified women and young girls around Frenchman’s Bend until (Ratliff said) old Varner became irritated and exasperated enough to take him out of the public domain by ordering the local J.P. to appoint Clarence his constable. That was where and when Clarence’s whole life, existence, destiny, seemed at last to find itself like a rocket does at the first touch of fire.

  Though his career didn’t go quite that fast, not at first anyway. Or maybe it wasn’t his career so much as his exposure, revealment. At first it was almost like he was just looking around, orienting himself, learning just where he now actually was; and only then looking in a sort of amazed incredulity at the vista opening before him. Merely amazed at first, before the exultation began, at the limitless prospect which nobody had told him about. Because at first he even behaved himself. At first everybody thought that, having been as outrageous as he had been with no other backing than the unanimity of his old lawless pack, he would be outrageous indeed now with the challengeless majesty of organised law according to Will Varner to back him. But he fooled them. Instead, he became the champion and defender of the civic mores and the public peace of Frenchman’s Bend. Of course the first few Negroes who ran afoul of his new official capacity suffered for it. But there was now something impersonal even to the savaging of Negroes. Previous to his new avatar, he and his gang had beaten up Negroes as a matter of principle. Not chastising them as individual Negroes nor even, Charles’s Uncle Gavin said, warring against them as representatives of a race which was alien because it was of a different appearance and therefore enemy per se, but (and his Uncle Gavin said Clarence and his gang did not know this because they dared not know it was so) because they were afraid of that alien race. They were afraid of it not because it was black but because they — the white man — had taught the black one how to threaten the white economy of material waste, when the white man compelled the black man to learn how to do more with less and worse if the black man wanted to survive in the white economy — less and worse of tools to farm and work with, less of luxury to be content with, less of waste to keep alive with. But not any more now. Now when Clarence manhandled a Negro with the blackjack he carried or with the butt of the pistol which he now officially wore, it was with a kind of detachment, as if he were using neither the man’s black skin nor even his human flesh, but simply the man’s present condition of legal vulnerability as testing ground or sounding board on which to prove again, perhaps even reassure himself from day to day, just how far his official power and legal immunity actually went and just how physically strong, even with the inevitable passage of time, he actually remained.

  Because they were not always Negroes. In fact, one of the first victims of Clarence’s new condition was his lieutenant, his second-in-command, in the old gang; if anything, Clarence was even more savage this time because the man had tried to trade on the old relationship and the past; it was as if Clarence had now personally invested a kind of incorruptibility and integrity into his old natural and normal instinct and capacity for violence and physical anguish; had had to borrow them — the incorruptibility and the integrity — at so high a rate that he had to defend them with his life. Anyway, he had changed. And, Charles’s Uncle Gavin said, since previous to his elevation to grace, everybody had believed Clarence incapable of change, now the same people believed immediately that the new condition was for perpetuity, for the rest of his life. They still believed this even after they found out — it was no rumour; Clarence himself bragged, boasted quietly of it — that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan when it appeared in the country (it never got very far and didn’t last very long; it was believed that it wouldn’t have lasted at all except for Clarence), taken in because the Klan needed him or could use him, or, as Charles’s Uncle Gavin said, probably because there was no way under heaven that they could have kept him out since it was his dish just as he was its. This was before he became constable of Frenchman’s Bend; his virgin advent from private life you might say, his initial accolade of public recognition, comparatively harmless yet, since even a Ku Klux Klan would have more sense than to depend on Clarence very far; he remained just one more obedient integer, muscle man — what in a few more years people would mean by “goon” — until the day came when old Will Varner’s irritation or exasperation raised him to constable, whereupon within the year it was rumoured that he was now an officer in the Klavern or whatever they called it; and in two more years was himself the local Dragon or Kleagle: who having been designated by old Varner custodian of the public peace, had now decreed himself arbiter of its morals too.

  Which was probably when he really discerned at last the breadth and splendour of his rising destiny; with amazement and incredulity at that apparently limitless expanse and, who knows? maybe even humility too that he should have been chosen, found worthy — that limitless field for his capacity and talents: not merely to beat, hammer men into insensibility and submission, but to use them; not merely to expend their inexhaustible numbers like ammunition or consume them like hogs or sheep, but to use, employ them like mules or oxen, with one eye constant for the next furrow tomorrow or next year; using not just their competence to mark an X whenever and wherever old Will Varner ordered them to, but their capacity for passion and greed and alarm as well, as though Clarence had been in the business of politics all his life instead of those few mere years as a hick constable. And, as Charles’s uncle said, doing it all by simple infallible instinct, without preceptor or example. Because this was even before Huey Long had risen far enough to show their own Mississippi Bilbo just what a man with a little brass and courage and no inhibitions could really accomplish.

  So when Clarence announced for the state legislature, they — the County — knew he would need no other platform than Uncle Billy Varner’s name. In fact they decided immediately that his candidacy was not even
Clarence’s own idea but Uncle Billy’s; that Uncle Billy’s irritation had simply reached a point where Clarence must be removed completely from his sight. But they were wrong. Clarence had a platform. Which was the moment when some of them, a few of them like Charles’s uncle and Ratliff and a few more of the young ones like Charles (he was only eight or ten then) who would listen (or anyway had to listen, like Charles) to them, discovered that they had better fear him, tremble and beware. His platform was his own. It was one which only his amoral temerity would have dared because it set him apostate to his own constituency; the thin deciding margin of his vote came from sources not only beyond the range of Will Varner’s autocracy, it came from people who under any other conditions would have voted for almost any other member of the human race first: he came out publicly against the Ku Klux Klan. He had been the local Kleagle, Dragon, whatever the title was, right up to the day he announced his candidacy — or so the County thought. But now he was its mortal enemy, stumping the county apparently only coincidentally to win an office, since his dedication was to destroy a dragon, winning the race by that scant margin of votes coming mostly from Jefferson itself — schoolteachers, young professional people, women — the literate and liberal innocents who believed that decency and right and personal liberty would prevail simply because they were decent and right; who until Clarence offered them one, had had no political unanimity and had not even bothered always to vote, until at last the thing they feared and hated seemed to have produced for them a champion. So he went to Jackson not as the successful candidate for a political office but as the dedicated paladin of a cause, walking (Charles’s uncle said) into the legislative halls in an aura half the White Knight’s purity and half the shocked consternation of his own kind whom he had apparently wrenched himself from and repudiated. Because he did indeed destroy the Ku Klux Klan in Yoknapatawpha County; as one veteran klansman expressed it: “Durn it, if we can’t beat a handful of schoolteachers and editors and Sunday-school superintendents, how in hell can we hope to beat a whole race of niggers and catholics and jews?”