Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

The wagons containing the men, the women and the children approaching the village from that direction, stopped, and the men who had walkey examin from the store to stand along Varner’s fence, watched, while Lump and Eck Snopes and Varner’s Negro, Sam, loaded the furniture and the trunks and the boxes into the wagon backed up to the edge of the veranda. It was the same wagon drawn by the same mules which had brought Flem Snopes back from Texas in April, and the three men came and went between it and the house, Eck or the Negro backing clumsily through the door with the burden between them and Lump Snopes scuttling along beside it in a constant patter of his own exhortations and commands, holding to it, to be sure, but carrying no weight, to load that into the wagon and return, pausing at the door and stepping aside as Mrs Varner bustled out with another armful of small crocks and hermetic jars of fruit and vegetables. The watchers along the fence checked the objects off—the dismantled bed, the dresser, the washstand with its flowered matching bowl and ewer and slop-jar and chamber-pot, the trunk which doubtless contained the wife’s and the child’s clothing, the wooden box which the women at least knew doubtless contained dishes and cutlery and cooking vessels, and lastly a tightly roped mass of brown canvas. “What’s that?” Freeman said. “It looks like a tent.”

“It is a tent,” Tull said. “Eck brought it out from the express office in town last week.”

“They aint going to move to Jefferson and live in a tent, are they?” Freeman said.

“I dont know,” Tull said. At last the wagon was loaded; Eck and the Negro bumped through the door for the last time, Mrs Varner bustled out with the final hermetic jar; Lump Snopes re-entered the house and emerged with the straw suitcase which they all knew, then Flem Snopes and then his wife came out. She was carrying the baby which was too large to have been born at only seven months but which had certainly not waited until May, and stood there for a moment. Olympus-tall, a head taller than her mother or husband either, in a tailored suit despite the rich heat of summer’s full maturing, whose complexion alone showed that she was not yet eighteen since the unseeing and expressionless mask-face had no age, while the women in the wagons looked at her and thought how that was the first tailored suit ever seen in Frenchman’s Bend and how she had got some clothes out of Flem Snopes anyway because it would not be Will Varner that bought them now, and the men along the fence looked at her and thought of Hoake McCarron and how any one of them would have bought the suit or anything else for her if she had wanted it.

Mrs Varner took the child from her and they watched her sweep the skirts inward into one hand with the gesture immemorial and female and troubling, and climb the wheel to the seat where Snopes already sat with the reins, and lean down and take the child from Mrs Varner. The wagon moved, lurched into motion, the team swinging to cross the yard toward the open gate into the lane, and that was all. If farewell was said, that was it, the halted wagons along the road creaking into motion again though Freeman and Tull and the other four men merely turned, relaxed again, their backs against the picket fence now, their faces identically grave, a little veiled and perhaps even sober, not quite watching the laden wagon as it turned out of the lane and approached and then was passing them—the plaid cap, the steady and deliberate jaw, the minute bow and the white shirt; the other face calm and beautiful and by its expression carven or even corpse-like, looking not at them certainly and maybe not at anything they knew. “So long, Flem,” Freeman said. “Save me a steak when you get y hand in at cooking.” He didn’t answer. He might not have heard even. The wagon went on. Watching it, not moving yet, they saw it turn into the old road which until two weeks ago had been marked only by the hooves of Varner’s fat white horse for more than twenty years.

“He’ll have to drive three extra miles to get back into the road to town that way,” Tull said in an anxious voice.

“Maybe he aims to take them three miles on into town with him and swap them to Grover Cleveland Winbush for the other half of that restaurant,” Freeman said.

“Maybe he’ll swap them to Ratliff and Bookwright and Henry Armstid for something else,” a third man—his name was Winbush also, a brother of the other one—said. “He’ll find Ratliff in town too.”

“He’ll find Henry Armstid without having to go that far,” Freeman said.