Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Or maybe he decided him and that boy better split up after both of them while he figgered it out. Anyway, the first I knowed, I had done took off my britches and was jest leaning out of the window in my shirttail trying to see what was going on, when I heerd a kind of sound behind me and looked over my shoulder and there was one of them horses standing in the door looking at me and standing in the hall behind him with a piece of plowline was that boy of Eck’s. I reckon we both moved at the same moment: me out of the window in my shirttail and the horse swirling to run on down the hall, me realizing I never had no britches on and running around the house toward the front steps jest about the time the horse met Miz Littlejohn coming onto the back gallery with a armful of washing in one hand and the washboard in the other; they claimed she said ‘git out of here you son of a bitch’ and split the washboard down the center of its face and throwed the two pieces at it without even changing hands, it swirling again to run back up the hall jest as I run up the front steps, and jumped clean over that boy still standing in the hall with his plowline without touching a hair, on to t front gallery again and seen me and never even stopped: jest swirled and run to the end of the gallery and jumped the railing and back into the lot again, looking jest like a big circus-colored hawk, sailing out into the moonlight and across the lot again in about two jumps and out the gate that still hadn’t nobody thought to close yet; I heerd him once more when he hit the wooden bridge jest this side of Bookwright’s turn-off. Then that boy come out of the house, still toting the plowline. ‘Howdy, Mr Ratliff,’ he says. ‘Which way did he go?’—Except you’re wrong.”

Horse boy, dog boy, cat boy, monkey boy, elephant boy: anything but Snopes boy. And then suppose, just suppose; suppose and tremble: one generation more removed from Eck Snopes and his innocence; one generation more until that innocent and outrageous belief that courage and honor are practical has had time to fade and cool so that merely the habit of courage and honor remain; add to that then that generation’s natural heritage of cold rapacity as instinctive as breathing and tremble at that prospect: the habit of courage and honor compounded by rapacity or rapacity raised to the absolute nth by courage and honor: not horse boy but a lion or tiger boy: Genghis Khan or Tamerlane or Attila in the defenseless midst of indefensible Jefferson. Then Ratliff was looking at me. I mean, he always was. I mean I discovered with a kind of terror that for a second I had forgot it. “What?” I said. “What did you say?”

“That you’re wrong. About Eck’s night watchman job at the oil tank. It wasn’t Manfred de Spain this time. It was the Masons.”

“What?” I said, cried.

“That’s right. Eck was one of the biggest ones of Uncle Billy Varner’s Frenchman’s Bend Masons. It was Uncle Billy sent word in to the Masons in Jefferson to find Eck a good light broke-neck job.”

“That bad?” I said. “That bad? The next one in the progression so outrageous and portentous and terrifying that Will Varner himself had to use influence twenty-two miles away to save Frenchman’s Bend?” Because the next one after Eck behind the restaurant counter was LO., the blacksmith-cum-schoolmaster-cum-bigamist, or multiplied by bigamy—a thin undersize voluble weasel-faced man talking constantly in a steady stream of worn saws and proverbs usually having no connection with one another nor application to anything else, who even with the hammer would not have weighed as much as the anvil he abrogated and dispossessed; who (Ratliff of course, Ratliff always) entered Frenchman’s Bend already talking, or rather appeared one morning already talking in Varner’s blacksmith shop which an old man named Trumbull had run man and boy for fifty years.

But no blacksmith, I.O. He merely held the living. It was the other one, our Eck, his cousin (whatever the relationship was, unless simply being both Snopes was enough until one proved himself unworthy, as Eck was to do, like two Masons from that moment to apostasy like Eck’s, forever sworn to show a common front to life), who did the actual work. Until one day, one morning perhaps the curate, Eck, was not there or perhaps it simply occurred to the vicar, the high priest, for the first time that his actually was the right and the authority to hold a communion service and nobody could really prevent him: that morning, Jack Houston with his gaited stallion until Snopes quicked it with the first nl; whereupon Houston picked Snopes up and threw him hammer and all into the cooling tub and managed somehow to hold the plunging horse and wrench the shoe off and the nail out at the same time, and led the horse outside and tied it and came back and threw Snopes back into the cooling tub again.