Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Then even that winter was over at last. It ended as it had begun, in rain, not cold rain but loud fierce gusts of warm water washing out of the earth the iron enduring frost, the belated spring hard on its bright heels and all coming at once, pell mell and disordered, fruit and bloom and leaf, pied meadow and blossoming wood and the long fields shearing dark out of winter’s slumber, to the shearing plow. The school was already closed for the planting year when he passed it and drove up to the store and hitched his team to the old familiar post and mounted among the seven or eight men squatting and lounging about the gallery as if they had not moved since he had looked back last at them almost six months ago. “Well, men,” he said. “School’s already closed I see. Chillen can go to the field now and give you folks a chance to rest.”

“It’s been closed since last October,” Quick said. “Teacher quit.”

“I. O.? Quit?”

“His wife come in one day. He looked up and saw her and lit out.”

“His what?” Ratliff said.

“His wife,” Tull said. “Or so she claimed. A kind of big gray-colored woman with a—”

“Ah shucks,” Ratliff said. “He aint married. Aint he been here three years? You mean his mother.”

“No, no,” Tull said. “She was young all right. She just had a kind of gray color all over. In a buggy. With a baby about six months old.”

“A baby?” Ratliff said. He looked from face to face among them, blinking. “Look here,” he said. “What’s all this anyway? How’d he get a wife, let alone a baby six months old? Aint he been right here three years? Hell a mile, he aint been out of hearing long enough to done that.”

“Wallstreet says they are his,” Tull said.

“Wallstreet?” Ratliff said. “Who’s Wallstreet?”

“That boyofEck’s.”

“That boy about ten years old?” Ratliff blinked at Tull now. “They never had that panic until a year or two back. How’d a boy ten years old get to be named Wall street?”

“I dont know,” Tull said.

“I reckon it’s his all right,” Quick said. “Leastways he taken one look at that buggy ad he aint been seen since.”

“Sho now,” Ratliff said. “A baby is one thing in pants that will make any man run, provided he’s still got room enough to start in. Which it seems I. O. had.”

“He needed room,” Bookwright said in his harsh, abrupt voice. “This one could have held him, provided somebody just throwed I. O. down first and give it time to get a hold. It was bigger than he was already.”

“It might hold him yet,” Quick said.

“Yes,” Tull said. “She just stopped long enough to buy a can of sardines and crackers. Then she druv on down the road in the same direction somebody told her I. O. had been going. He was walking. Her and the baby both et the sardines.”

“Well, well,” Ratliff said. “Them Snopeses. Well, well—” He ceased. They watched quietly as the Varner surrey came up the road, going home. The Negro was driving; in the back seat with her mother, Mrs Flem Snopes sat. The beautiful face did not even turn as the surrey drew abreast of the store. It passed in profile, calm, oblivious, incurious. It was not a tragic face: it was just damned. The surrey went on.

“Is he really waiting in that jail yonder for Flem Snopes to come back and get him out?” the fourth man said.

“He’s still in jail,” Ratliff said.

“But is he waiting for Flem?” Quick said.

“No,” Ratliff said. “Because Flem aint corning back here until that trial is over and finished.” Then Mrs Littlejohn stood on her veranda, ringing the dinner bell, and they rose and began to disperse. Ratliff and Bookwright descended the steps together.

“Shucks,” Bookwright said. “Even Flem Snopes aint going to let his own blood cousin be hung just to save money.”

“I reckon Flem knows it aint going to go that far. Jack Houston was shot from in front, and everybody knows he never went anywhere without that pistol, and they found it laying there in the road where they found the marks where the horse had whirled and run, whether it had dropped out of his hand or fell out of his pocket when he fell or not. I reckon Flem had done inquired into all that. And so he aint coming back until it’s all finished. He aint coming back here where Mink’s wife can worry him or folks can talk about him for leaving his cousin in jail. There’s some things even a Snopes wont do. I dont know just exactly what they are, but they’s some somewhere.”