Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

And no schoolmaster either. He didn’t merely usurp that as a position among strangers, he actually stole it as a vocation from his own kin. Though Frenchman’s Bend didn’t know that yet. They knew only that he was hardly out of the blacksmith shop (or dried again out of the cooling tub where Houston had flung him) when he was installed as teacher (“Professor,” the teacher was called in Frenchman’s Bend, provided of course he wore trousers) in the one-room schoolhouse which was an integer of old Varner’s princedom—integer not because old Varner or anyone else in Frenchman’s Bend considered that juvenile education filled any actual communal lack or need, but simply because his settlement had to have a going schoolhouse to be complete as a freight train has to have a caboose to be complete.

So I.O. Snopes was now the schoolmaster; shortly afterward he was married to a Frenchman’s Bend belle and within a year he was pushing a homemade perambulator about the village and his wife was already pregnant again; here, you would have said, was a man not merely settled but doomed to immobilization, until one day in the third year a vast gray-colored though still young woman, accompanied by a vast gray-colored five-year-old boy, drove up to Varner’s store in a buggy—

“It was his wife,” Ratliff said.

“His wife?” I said, cried. “But I thought—”

“So did we,” Ratliff said. “Pushing thatere homemade buggy with two of them in it this time, twins, already named Bilbo and Vardaman, besides the first one, Clarence. Yes sir, three chaps already while he was waiting for his other wife with that one to catch up with him—a little dried-up feller not much bigger than a crawfish, and that other wife—no, I mean the one he had now in Frenchman’s Bend when thatere number-one one druv up—wasn’t a big girl neither —Miz Vernon Tull’s sister’s niece by marriage she was—yet he got onto her too them same big gray-colored kind of chaps like the one in the buggy with his ma driving up to the store and saying to whoever was setting on the gallery at the moment: ‘I hear I.O. inside.’ (He was. We could all hear him.) ‘Kindly step in and tell him his wife’s come.’

“That was all. It was enough. When he come to the Bend that day three years ago he had a big carpetbag, and in them three years he had probably accumulated some more stuff; I mean besides them three new chaps. But he never stopped for none of it. He jest stepped right out of the back door of the store. And Flem had done long since already sold old man Trumbull back to Varner for the blacksmith, but now they was needing a new professor too or anyhow they would as soon as I.O. could get around the first corner out of sight where he could cut across country. Which he evidently done; never nobody reported any dust-cloud travelling fast along a road nowhere. They said he even stopped talking, though I doubt that. You got to draw the line somewhere, aint you?”

You have indeed. Though I.O. didn’t. That is, he was already talking when he appearehis turn behind the restaurant counter in the greasy apron, taking your order and cooking it wrong or cooking the wrong thing not because he worked so fast but simply because he never stopped talking long enough for you to correct or check him, babbling that steady stream of confused and garbled proverbs and metaphors attached to nothing and going nowhere.

And the wife, I mean the number-one wife, what might be called the original wife, who was number one in the cast even though she was number two on the stage. The other one, the number two in the cast even though she was number one on the stage, the Tull’s wife’s sister’s niece wife, who foaled the second set of what Ratliff called gray-colored chaps, Clarence and the twins Vardaman and Bilbo, remained in Frenchman’s Bend. It was the original one, who appeared in Frenchman’s Bend sitting in the buggy and left Frenchman’s Bend in the buggy, still sitting, and appeared in Jefferson five years later still sitting, translated, we knew not how, and with no interval between from the buggy where Ratliff had seen her twenty-two miles away that day five years ago, to the rocking chair on the front gallery of the boarding house where we saw her now, still at that same right angle enclosing her lap as if she had no movable hinge at the hips at all—a woman who gave an impression of specific density and immobility like lead or uranium, so that whatever force had moved her from the buggy to that chair had not been merely human, not even ten I.O.s.