“You see?” Charles’s uncle said to Ratliff. “You can’t beat him.”
“You mean, even you can’t think of nothing to do about it?” Ratliff said.
“Certainly,” his uncle said. “Join him.”
“Join him?” Ratliff said.
“The most efficacious, the oldest — oh yes, without doubt the first, the very first, back to the very dim moment when two cave men confederated against the third one — of all political maxims.”
“Join — him?” Ratliff said.
“All right,” his uncle said. “You tell me then. I’ll join you.”
His uncle told how Ratliff blinked at him awhile. “There must be some simpler way than that. It’s a pure and simple proposition; there must be a pure and simple answer to it. Clarence jest purely and simply wants to get elected to Congress, he don’t keer how; there must be some pure and simple way for the folks that purely and simply don’t want him in Congress to say No to him, they don’t keer how neither.”
His uncle said again, “All right. Find it. I’ll join you.” But evidently it wasn’t that pure and simple to Ratliff either: only to Clarence. His uncle said that after that Clarence didn’t even need to make a campaign, a race; that all he would need to do would be to get up on the speakers’ platform at the Varner’s Mill picnic long enough to be sure that the people who had turned twenty-one since old Will Varner had last told them who to vote for, would know how to recognise the word Snopes on the ballot. In fact, Devries could have quit now, and his uncle said there were some who thought he ought to. Except how could he, with that medal — all five or six of them — for guts and valour in the trunk in the attic or wherever he kept them. Devries even came to Jefferson, into Clarence’s own bailiwick, and made his speech as if nothing were happening. But there you were. There were not enough soldiers back yet who would know what the medal meant. And even though the election itself would not happen until next year, nobody could know now that the Japs would cave this year too. To the others, the parents and Four-F cousins and such to whom they had sent their voting proxies, Devries was a nigger lover who had actually been decorated by the Yankee government for it. In fact, the story now was that Devries had got his Congressional Medal by choosing between a Negro and a white boy to save, and had chosen the Negro and left the white boy to die. Though Charles’s uncle said that Clarence himself did not start this one: they must do him that justice at least. Not that Clarence would have flinched from starting it: he simply didn’t need that additional ammunition now, having been, not so much in politics but simply a Snopes long enough now to know that only a fool would pay two dollars for a vote when fifty cents would buy it.
It must have been even a little sad: the man who had already been beaten in advance by the very medal which wouldn’t let him quit. It was more than just sad. Because his Uncle Gavin told him how presently even the ones who had never owned a mechanical leg and, if the odds held up, never would, began to realise what owning, having to live with one, let alone stand up and walk on it, must have meant. Devries didn’t sit in the car on the Square or even halted on the road, letting the constituency, the votes, do the standing and walking out to the car to shake his hand and listen to him as was Clarence’s immemorial and successful campaigning method. Instead, he walked himself, swinging that dead mechanical excrescence or bracing it to stand for an hour on a platform to speak, rationalising for the votes which he already knew he had lost, while trying to keep all rumour of the chafed and outraged stump out of his face while he did it. Until at last Charles’s uncle said how the very ones who would vote for him would dread having to look at him and keep the rumour of that stump out of their faces too; until they themselves began to wish the whole thing was over, the debacle accomplished, wondering (his uncle said) how they themselves might end it and set him free to go home and throw the tin leg away, chop it up, destroy it, and be just peacefully maimed.
Then the day approached for Uncle Billy Varner’s election-year picnic, where by tradition all county aspirants for office, county state or national, delivered themselves and so Clarence too would have to announce formally his candidacy, his Uncle Gavin saying how they clutched even at that straw: that once Clarence had announced for Congress, Devries might feel he could withdraw his name and save his face.
Only he didn’t have to. After the dinner was eaten and the speakers gathered on the platform, Clarence wasn’t even among them; shortly afterward the word spread that he had even left the grounds and by the next morning the whole county knew that he had not only withdrawn from the race for Congress, he had announced his retirement from public life altogether. And that this time he meant it because it was not Clarence but old man Will Varner himself who had sent the word out that Clarence was through. That was July 1945; a year after that, when the election for Congress finally came around, the Japanese had quit too and Charles and most of the rest of them who knew what Devries’s medal meant, were home in person with their votes. But they merely increased Devries’s majority; he didn’t really need the medal because Ratliff had already beat Clarence Snopes. Then it was September, Charles was home again and the next day his uncle ran Ratliff to earth on the Square and brought him up to the office and said,
“All right. Tell us just exactly what did happen out there that day.”
“Out where what day?” Ratliff said.
“You know what I mean. At Uncle Billy Varner’s picnic when Clarence Snopes withdrew from the race for Congress.”
“Oh, that,” Ratliff said. “Why, that was what you might call a kind of a hand of God, holp a little of course by them two twin boys of Colonel Devries’s sister.”
“Yes,” his uncle said. “That too: why Devries brought his sister and her family all the way over here from Cumberland County just to hear him announce for a race everybody knew he had already lost.”
“That’s that hand of God I jest mentioned,” Ratliff said. “Because naturally otherwise Colonel Devries couldn’t a possibly heard away over there in Cumberland County about one little old lonesome gum thicket behind Uncle Billy Varner’s water mill now, could he?”
“All right, all right,” his uncle said. “Thicket. Twin boys. Stop now and just tell us.”
“The twin boys was twin boys and the thicket was a dog thicket,” Ratliff said. “You and Chick both naturally know what twin boys is and I was about to say you and Chick both of course know what a dog thicket is too. Except that on second thought I reckon you don’t because I never heard of a dog thicket neither until I seen this clump of gum and ash and hickory and pin-oak switches on the bank jest above Varner’s millpond where it will be convenient for the customers like them city hotels that keeps a reservoy of fountain-pen ink open to anybody that needs it right next to the writing-room—”
“Hold it,” his uncle said. “Dog thicket. Come on now. I’m supposed to be busy this morning even if you’re not.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Ratliff said. “It was a dog way-station. A kind of a dog post office you might say. Every dog in Beat Two uses it at least once a day, and every dog in the congressional district, let alone jest Yoknapatawpha County, has lifted his leg there at least once in his life and left his visiting card. You know: two dogs conies trotting up and takes a snuff and Number One says ‘I be dawg if here ain’t that old bobtail Bluetick from up at Wyott’s Crossing. What you reckon he’s doing away down here?’ ‘No it ain’t,’ Number Two says. ‘This here is that-ere fyce that Res Grier swapped Solon Quick for that half a day’s work shingling the church that time, don’t you remember?’ and Number One says, ‘No, that fyce come afterward. This here is that old Wyott’s Crossing Bluetick. I thought he’d a been skeered to come back here after what that Littlejohn half-Airedale done to him that day.’ You know: that sort of thing.”
“All right,” his uncle said. “Go on.”
“That’s all,” Ratliff said, “Jest that-ere what you might call select dee-butant Uncle Billy Varner politics comi
ng-out picnic and every voter and candidate in forty miles that owned a pickup or could bum a ride in one or even a span of mules either if wasn’t nothing else handy, the sovereign votes theirselves milling around the grove where Senator Clarence Egglestone Snopes could circulate among them until the time come when he would stand up on the platform and actively tell them where to mark the X. You know: ever thing quiet and peaceful and ordinary and law-abiding as usual until this-here anonymous underhanded son-of-a-gun — I won’t say scoundrel because evidently it must a been Colonel Devries his-self couldn’t nobody else a knowed who them two twin boys was, let alone what they was doing that far from Cumberland County; leastways not them particular two twin boys and that-ere local dog thicket in the same breath you might say — until whoever this anonymous underhanded feller was, suh-jested to them two boys what might happen say if two folks about that size would shoo them dogs outen that thicket long enough to cut off a handful of them switches well down below the dog target level and kind of walk up behind where Senator C. Egglestone Snopes was getting out the vote, and draw them damp switches light and easy, not to disturb him, across the back of his britches legs. Light and easy, not to disturb nobody, because apparently Clarence nor nobody else even noticed the first six or eight dogs until maybe Clarence felt his britches legs getting damp or maybe jest cool, and looked over his shoulder to see the waiting line-up of his political fate with one eye while already breaking for the nearest automobile or pickup you could roll the windows up in with the other, with them augmenting standing-room-only customers strung out behind him like the knots in a kite’s tail until he got inside the car with the door slammed and the glass rolled up, them frustrated dogs circling round and round the automobile like the spotted horses and swan boats on a flying jenny, except the dogs was travelling on three legs, being already loaded and cocked and aimed you might say. Until somebody finally located the owner of the car and got the key and druv Clarence home, finally outdistancing the last dog in about two miles, stopping at last in the ex-Senator’s yard where he was safe, the Snopes dogs evidently having went to the picnic too, while somebody went into the house and fetched out a pair of dry britches for the ex-Senator to change into in the automobile. That’s right. Ex-Senator. Because even with dry britches he never went back to the picnic; likely he figgered that even then it would be too much risk and strain. I mean, the strain of trying to keep your mind on withdrawing from a political race and all the time having to watch over your shoulder in case some dog recollected your face even if your britches did smell fresh and uninteresting.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” his uncle said. “It’s too simple. I don’t believe it.”
“I reckon he figgered that to convince folks how to vote for him and all the time standing on one foot trying to kick dogs away from his other leg, was a little too much to expect of even Missippi voters,” Ratliff said.
“I don’t believe you, I tell you,” his uncle said. “That wouldn’t be enough to make him withdraw even if everybody at the picnic had known about it, seen it. Didn’t you just tell me they got him into a car and away almost at once?” Then his uncle stopped. He looked at Ratliff, who stood blinking peacefully back at him. His uncle said: “Or at least—”
“That’s right,” Ratliff said. “That was the trade.”
“What trade?” his uncle said.
“It was likely that same low-minded anonymous scoundrel again,” Ratliff said. “Anyhow, somebody made the trade that if Senator Snopes would withdraw from this-here particular race for Congress, the folks that had seen them pro-Devries dogs would forget it, and the ones that hadn’t wouldn’t never need to know about it.”
“But he would have beat that too,” his uncle said. “Clarence Snopes stopped or even checked just because a few dogs raised their legs against him? Hell, he would have wound up having every rabies tag in Yoknapatawpha County counted as an absentee ballot.”
“Oh, you mean Clarence,” Ratliff said. “I thought you meant Uncle Billy Varner.”
“Uncle Billy Varner?” his uncle said.
“That’s right,” Ratliff said. “It was Uncle Billy his-self that that low-minded rascal must a went to. Leastways Uncle Billy his-self sent word back that same afternoon that Senator Clarence Egglestone Snopes had withdrawed from the race for Congress; Uncle Billy never seemed to notified the ex-Senator a-tall. Oh yes, they told Uncle Billy the same thing you jest said: how it wouldn’t hurt Clarence none in the long run; they even used your same words about the campaign tactics of the dogs, only a little stronger. But Uncle Billy said No, that Clarence Snopes wasn’t going to run for nothing in Beat Two.
“ ’But he ain’t running in jest Beat Two,’ they said. ‘He ain’t even running in jest Yoknapatawpha County now. He’s running in a whole one-eighth of the state of Missippi.’ ” And Uncle Billy said:
“ ’Durn the whole hundred eighths of Missippi and Yoknapatawpha County too. I ain’t going to have Beat Two and Frenchman’s Bend represented nowhere by nobody that-ere a son-a-bitching dog that happens by can’t tell from a fence post.’ ”
His uncle was looking at Ratliff. He had been looking at Ratliff for some time. “So this anonymous meddler you speak of not only knew the twin nephews and that dog thicket, he knew old Will Varner too.”
“It looks like it,” Ratliff said.
“So it worked,” his uncle said.
“It looks like it,” Ratliff said.
Both he and his uncle looked at Ratliff sitting neat and easy, blinking, bland and inscrutable in one of the neat blue shirts he made himself, which he never wore a tie with though Charles knew he had two at home he had paid Allanovna seventy-five dollars apiece for that time his uncle and Ratliff went to New York ten years ago to see Linda Snopes married, which Ratliff had never had on. “O Cincinnatus,” his uncle said.
“What?” Ratliff said.
“Nothing,” his uncle said. “I was just wondering who it was that told those twin boys about that dog thicket.”
“Why, Colonel Devries, I reckon,” Ratliff said. “A soldier in the war with all them medals, after three years of practice on Germans and I-talians and Japanese, likely it wasn’t nothing to him to think up a little political strategy too.”
“They were mere death worshippers and simple pre-absolved congenital sadists,” his uncle said. “This was a born bred and trained American professional ward-level politician.”
“Maybe ain’t neither of them so bad, providing a man jest keeps his eyes open and uses what he has, the best he knows,” Ratliff said. Then he said, “Well,” and rose, lean and easy, perfectly bland, perfectly inscrutable, saying to Charles now: “You mind that big oat field in the bend below Uncle Billy’s pasture, Major? It stayed full of geese all last winter they say. Why don’t you come out when the season opens and shoot a few of them? I reckon Uncle Billy will let us.”
“Much obliged,” Charles said.
“It’s a trade then,” Ratliff said. “Good-day, gentlemen.” Then Ratliff was gone. Now Charles was looking at his uncle, whereupon his uncle drew a sheet of paper to him and began to write on it, not fast: just extremely preoccupied, absorbed.
“So, quote,” Charles said, “it will have to be you, the young people unquote. I believe that’s about how it went, wasn’t it? — that summer back in ‘37 when us moralists were even having to try to beat Roosevelt himself in order to get to Clarence Snopes?”
“Good-day, Charles,” his uncle said.
“Because quote it won’t be us,” Charles said. “We are too old, too tired, have lost the capacity to believe in ourselves—”
“Damn it,” his uncle said, “I said good-day.”
“Yes sir,” Charles said. “In just a moment. Because quote the United States, America: the greatest country in the world if we can just keep on affording it unquote. Only, let ‘afford’ read ‘depend on God’. Because He saved you this time, using V. K. Ratliff of course as His instrument. Only next time Ratliff may be off somewh
ere selling somebody a sewing machine or a radio” — That’s right, Ratliff now had a radio agency too, the radio riding inside the same little imitation house on the back of his pickup truck that the demonstrator sewing machine rode in; two years more and the miniature house would have a miniature TV stalk on top of it— “and God may not be able to put His hand on him in time. So what you need is to learn how to trust in God without depending on Him. In fact, we need to fix things so He can depend on us for a while. Then He won’t need to waste Himself being everywhere at once.” Now his uncle looked up at him and suddenly Charles thought Oh yes, I liked Father too all right but Father just talked to me while Uncle Gavin listened to me, no matter how foolish what I was saying finally began to sound even to me, listening to me until I had finished, then saying, “Well, I don’t know whether it will hold together or not but I know a good way to find out. Let’s try it.” Not YOU try it but US try it.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 529
