Which he did. He bought a small lot. She chose it; it was not even very far from where she had lived all her life. In fact, after the house began to go up, old Meadowfill even could (he had to, unless he went back to bed) sit in his window and watch its daily progress. But then we already knew that she was no more going to run from him than she was going to desert her mother. So we took this at its true meaning: a constant warning and reminder to him that he dared not make the mistake of dying. Perhaps from the excitement of his vendetta with Snopes’s hog, we might have added, except that the contest with the hog no longer existed; not, we realised now, that Meadowfill had quit, having found a more vulnerable and tender victim to vent upon, but (this was what we realised now) the hog itself had given up. Or Snopes had, that is. The hog had made its last sortie at about the time that Essie Meadowfill startled us with the fact that she had at last found a sweetheart, and had not appeared in the orchard since. Snopes still owned it. That is, the neighborhood knew (probably by smell when the wind was right) that it was still in his back yard; he evidently had given up at last and fixed his fence or (as we believed) simply stopped leaving the gate ajar on what he considered the strategic days. Though actually we had forgot Snopes and the hog in watching the new contest, battle of attrition.
He—McKinley—built the house himself, doing all the rough and heavy work, with one professional carpenter to mark off the planks for him to saw. We watched it: the furious and impotent old man in his wheel-chair ambush behind the window, without even the hog to vent his rage on anymore, while he watched the house going up. We speculated on whether he still kept the .22 rifle loaded to his hand perhaps, perhaps just how long it would be, how much he would be able to stand, before he would lose all restraint and fire one of the shot cartridges at one of them—McKinley or even the carpenter. Presently it would have to be the carpenter, unless old Meadowfill took up jacklighting. Because one day (it was spring now) McKinley had a mule too and now we learned that he had rented a small piece of land about a mile from town and was making a cotton-crop on it. The house was about finished now, down to the millwork—doors and windows and trim—which only the professional carpenter could do, so McKinley would depart on his mule each morning at sun-rise, to be gone until night-fall. And now we knew that old Meadowfill must have raged indeed: McKinley could have got discouraged, given up and sold even the unfinished house for that modest profit at least computed at the value of his own work on it, and left Jefferson. But he couldn’t have sold the unmade crop; McKinley would stay in Jefferson forever now to flout and taunt him, with only his life or his rival’s death to fend him from disaster.
Then the hog came back. It simply reappeared; probably one morning old Meadowfill wheeled himself from breakfast to the window, expecting to face nothing except one more interminable day of raging and impotent outrage, when there was the hog again, rooting for the ghosts of last fall’s peaches as though it had never been away: no time nor anguish nor frustration had intervened. We—I, because this was where I came in—liked to think that that’s what old Meadowfill felt: the hog had never been away and so all that had happened since to outrage him had been only a dream; and even the dream to be exercised as by a thunderclap by the next shot he would make. Which was immediately; apparently we were right and he had kept the loaded rifle at his hand all the time; some of the neighbors claimed to have heard the vicious spat of it while they were still in bed.
And (the report of the shot) over the rest of the town too while some of us were still at breakfast. Though, as Uncle Gavin said, he was one of the few who actually felt the repercussion. It was about noon, he was getting ready to lock the office and go home for dinner when he heard the feet mounting the outside stairs. Then Snopes entered, the five-dollar bill already in his hand, and crossed to the desk and laid the bill on it and said, “Good morning, Lawyer. I wont keep you. I just want a little advice—about five dollars’ worth.” Then he told it, Uncle Gavin not even touching the bill yet, just looking from it up at Snopes who in all the time he had lived among us had never been known to pay five dollars at one time for anything he didn’t know he could sell within twenty-four hours for at least twenty-five cents’ profit: “It’s that ere hog of mine that the old gentleman—old Mister Meadowfill—likes to shoot with them little shot.”
“I heard about it,” Uncle Gavin said. “All right. What do you want for your five dollars?” He told about it: Snopes standing there beyond the desk, not secret, not fawning: just bland, deferent, inscrutable. “For telling you what you already know? That, once you sue him for injuring your hog, he will invoke against you the law against livestock running loose inside the town limits? Provided you can prove an injury. Provided you can satisfy even a j.p. court why you waited this long. Tell you what you already knew last summer when he fired the first shot at it? Either fix the fence, or get rid of the hog.”
“It costs a right smart to feed a hog,” Snopes said.
“Then eat it,” Uncle Gavin said.
“A whole hog, for just one single man?” Snopes said.
“Then sell it,” Uncle Gavin said.
“That old gentleman has done shot it so much now, I doubt wouldn’t nobody buy it,” Snopes said.
“Then give it away,” Uncle Gavin said. Then he said he stopped, because it was already too late. Snopes said, with no inflection whatever:
“Give the hog away,” already turning when Uncle Gavin said:
“Here. Wait,” though even then Snopes paused only long enough to look back at the bill as Uncle Gavin pushed it across the desk toward him.
“I come for legal advice,” he said. “I owe a legal fee for it,” and was gone, Uncle Gavin thinking fast now, not Why did he pick on me? because that was obvious: because of his instrumentality in Essie’s deed, Uncle Gavin was the only person in Jefferson outside his family, with whom old Meadowfill had had anything resembling human contact in almost twenty years, nor even Why did he need to notify any outsider, lawyer or not, that he intended to give that hog away? nor even Why did he lead me into saying the actual words first myself, technically constituting them paid-for legal advice? but How, by giving that hog away, is he going to compel old Meadowfill to sell that lot?
He always said that he was not really interested in truth nor even justice: that all he wanted was just to know, to find out, whether the answer was any of his business or not; and that all means to that end were valid, provided he left neither hostile witnesses nor incriminating evidence. Only I didn’t believe him; some of his methods were not only too hard, they took too long; and there are some things you wont do even to find out. But he said I was wrong; that curiosity is another one of the mistresses whose slaves decline no sacrifice. Maybe this one proved both of us right.
The trouble was, he said, he didn’t know what he was looking for; he had two methods for three leads, to discover what he might not recognise in time even when he found it. He couldn’t use inquiry, because the only one who knew the answer had already told him all he intended for him to know. And he couldn’t use observation of the second lead, because like Snopes the hog could move too. Which left only the immobile one, the fixed quantity: old man Meadowfill.
So at daylight the next morning, he too was ambushed in his parked car where he could see old Meadowfill’s house and orchard, and beyond them, Snopes’s front door; and beyond that in turn, the little new house which McKinley Smith had almost finished. During the next two hours he watched McKinley depart on his mule for his cotton-patch, then Snopes himself come out of his house and walk away toward the Square and his normal day of usurious opportunism; presently it would be time for Essie Meadowfill to leave for work. Which she did, and there remained only himself in his car and old Meadowfill in his window, both (he hoped) invisible to the other. So, of the elements, only the hog was missing: assuming that it was the hog he was waiting for, which he didn’t even know yet, let alone what he would do next if—when—it appeared. So that he thought that perhaps Snopes really
had recognised impasse, had given up and given the hog away; and he, Uncle Gavin, had made a mare’s nest.
And the next morning was the same. Which was when he should have quit too. Except that he should have quit two days ago. Because it was too late now, not that he had too much at stake because he didn’t know what was at stake yet, but rather too much invested: if no more than two days of rising before dawn, to sit for two hours in a parked car without even a cup of coffee. So when he saw the hog—it was the third morning; McKinley and his mule had departed at the regular hour: so regular and normal that he had not even realised he had not seen Snopes until Essie herself came out on her way to work; he said it was one of those shocks, starts as when you find yourself waking up without even knowing until then you were asleep, so that he was already getting out of the car when he saw the hog. That is, it was the hog and it was doing exactly what he expected it to do: moving toward old Meadowfill’s orchard at that rapid and purposeful trot. Only it was not quite where it should have been when he first saw it. It was going where he expected it to be going, but it was not coming exactly from where he had expected it to come. Though at the time he didn’t pay much attention to that, still being in that initial surge of belated not-yet-awake alarm, just hurrying now to get across the street and the little yard and into the house and to the wheel-chair before old Meadowfill saw the hog and made the shot and so completed the pattern before he, Uncle Gavin, was close enough to read whatever it was Snopes had intended him either to read or not read, whichever it was.
But he made it. He wouldn’t have stopped to knock even if there had been time, since at this hour Mrs Meadowfill would be in the kitchen washing up from breakfast. Only there was plenty of time. He reached the door and saw old Meadowfill leaning forward in the wheel-chair behind the screened window, the little rifle already half-raised in one hand. But he had not risen yet to raise the screen: he was just sitting there looking through the window at the hog, and Uncle Gavin said his face was terrible. We were all used to seeing meanness and vindictiveness and rage in it; they were normal. But this was gloating. He sat there gloating; he didn’t even turn his head as Uncle Gavin crossed to the chair, he just said: “Come right in; you got a grandstand seat.” And now Uncle Gavin could hear him cursing—not the hard outdoors swearing of anger or combat, but a quiet murmur of indoors foulness which, even if old Meadowfill had ever known and used, his gray hairs should have forgotten now.
Then he rose from the wheel-chair. As he did so, Uncle Gavin said he noticed the smallish lump, about the size of a brick wrapped in a piece of gunnysack, bound to the bole of one of the peach trees about forty feet from the window. But he paid no attention to it, just saying, “Stop it, Mr Meadowfill; stop it,” as the old man, standing up now, set the gun beside the window and took hold of the handles on the bottom frame of the screen and jerked it upward in its greased grooves. Then the light sharp vicious spat of the shot; Uncle Gavin said he was actually looking at the screen when the wire suddenly frayed and vanished before the myriad tiny invisible pellets. And though this was impossible, he said he seemed actually to hear them hiss across old man Meadowfill’s belly and chest as the old man half-leaped half-fell backward onto the chair, which rushed backward from under him, leaving him to sprawl onto the floor, where he lay for a moment with on his face an expression of incredulous and mounting outrage: not pain, just outrage, already reaching for the rifle as he began to scramble onto his knees.
“Somebody shot me!” he said in that outraged and unbelieving voice.
“Certainly,” Uncle Gavin said. “That hog did. Dont try to move.”
“Hog, hell!” old Meadowfill said. “It was that blank blank blank McKinley Smith!”
That was when Uncle Gavin drafted me. Though when I got there, he already had old Meadowfill back in the wheel-chair; Mrs Meadowfill must have been somewhere in the background by that time, but I suppose I didn’t notice her any more than Uncle Gavin had. Old Meadowfill was no calmer yet, still raging, mad as a hornet—he wasn’t hurt: just burned, blistered, the little shot barely under his skin—bellowing and cursing and still trying to get hold of the rifle which Uncle Gavin had taken away from him, but at least immobilised, by Uncle Gavin’s moral force or maybe just because Uncle Gavin was standing up. He told Uncle Gavin about it—how Snopes had told Essie two days ago that he had given McKinley the hog, as a sort of house-warming present or maybe even—Snopes hoped—a wedding one someday soon. Uncle Gavin had the weapon too: a very neat home-made booby-trap; it had been a cheap single shot .22 rifle also once, sawed off barrel and stock and wrapped in the feed sack and fastened to the bole of the peach tree, a black practically invisible cord running through a series of screw eyes from the sash of the screen to the trigger, the muzzle trained at the center of the window about a foot above the sill; Mrs Meadowfill was there then so we could leave.
“If he hadn’t stood up before he touched that screen, the charge would have hit him square in the face,” I said.
“Do you think who set it cared about that?” Uncle Gavin said. “Whether it merely frightened and enraged him into rushing at Smith with that little rifle (it had a solid bullet in it this time, and the cartridge was the big one, the long rifle; then how old Meadowfill intended to hunt what he shot at next) and compelling Smith to kill him, or whether the shot blinded him or killed him right there in his wheel-chair and so solved the whole thing?”
“Solved it?” I said.
“It was a balance,” he said. “A kind of delicate attenuated unbearable equilibrium of outrage; so delicate that the first straw’s weight, no matter how trivial, would not just upset it but overturn, reverse all the qualities in it; all withheld no longer withheld, all unsold no longer unsold.”
“Yes,” I said. “It was pretty smart.”
“It was worse,” Uncle Gavin said. “It was bad. Nobody would ever have thought anyone except a Pacific veteran would have invented a booby-trap, no matter how much he denied it.”
“It was still smart,” I said. “Even Smith will agree.”
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “That’s why I telephoned you. You were a soldier too. I may need an interpreter to talk to him.”
“I was just a major,” I said. “I never had enough rank to tell anything to any sergeant, let alone a Marine one.” But we didn’t go [to find] Smith first; he would be in his cotton-patch now anyway. And if Snopes had been me, there wouldn’t have been anybody in his house either. But there was. He opened the door himself; he wore an apron and carried a frying pan. There was even a fried egg in it. But then, thinking of that before hand wouldn’t be much for who thought of that reciprocating booby-trap. And there wasn’t anything in his face either.
“Gentle-men,” he said. “Come in.”
“No thanks,” Uncle Gavin said. “It wont take that long. This is yours, I think.” There was a table; Uncle Gavin laid the feed sack on it and flipped it suddenly, the mutilated rifle sliding across the table until it stopped. And still there was nothing whatever in Snopes’s face or voice.
“That ere is what you lawyers call debatable, aint it?”
“Oh yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “Everybody knows about finger prints now too, just like they do about space flight and booby-traps.”
“Yes,” Snopes said. “Are you giving it to me, or selling it to me?”
“I’m selling it to you,” Uncle Gavin said. “For a deed to Essie Meadowfill for that strip of your lot the oil company wants to buy, and a release for that strip of Meadowfill’s lot that your deed covers. She’ll pay you what you paid for the strip, plus ten percent, of what the oil company pays her for it.” And now indeed Snopes didn’t move, immobile with the cold egg in the frying pan. “That’s right,” Uncle Gavin said. “In that case, I’d have to see if McKinley Smith wants to buy it.”
He was smart, you’d have to give him that; smart enough to know exactly how far to try. “Just ten percent.?” he said.
“You invented that figure,” Uncle Gavin
said. And smart enough to know when to quit trying too. He set the frying pan carefully on the floor and folded the mutilated rifle back into the feed sack.
“I reckon you’ll have time to be in your office today, wont you?” he said.
And this time it was Uncle Gavin who stopped dead for a second. But he only said: “I’m going there now.” And we could have met Smith at his house when he came in at sundown too. It was Uncle Gavin who wouldn’t wait; it was not yet noon when we stood at the roadside fence and watched Smith and the mule come up the long black shear of turning earth like the immobilised wake of the plow’s mold-board. Then he was standing across the fence from us, naked from the waist up except for his overalls and combat boots; and I remembered what Uncle Gavin had said that morning about what was withheld to be no longer withheld. He handed Smith the deed. “Here,” he said.
Smith read it. “This is Essie’s,” he said.
“Then marry her,” Uncle Gavin said. “Then you can sell that lot and buy a farm. Isn’t that what you both want? Haven’t you got a shirt or a jumper here with you? Get it and you can ride to town with me; Chick here will bring the mule.”
“No,” Smith said; he was already shoving, actually ramming the deed into his pocket as he turned back to the mule. “I’ll bring him in. I’m going home first. I aint going to marry anybody without a necktie and a shave.”
And one more, while we were waiting for the Baptist minister to wash his hands and put his coat on too; Mrs Meadowfill was wearing the first hat any of us had ever seen on her; it looked a good deal like the first hat anybody ever made. “But papa,” Essie Smith-soon-to-be said.
“Oh,” Uncle Gavin said. “You mean that wheel-chair. It belongs to me now. It was a legal fee. I’m going to give it to you for a wedding present.”
Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner Page 39
