Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Because Snopes was moving his echelons up fast now. That one—I.O. and the vast gray-colored sitting wife and that vast gray-colored boy (his name was Montgomery Ward)—did not even pause at the tent behind the restaurant where Eck and his wife and two sons now (“Why not?” Ratliff said. “There’s a heap of more things beside frying a hamburger you dont really have to look down for.”) were still living. They—the I.O.s—by-passed it completely, the wife already sitting in the rocking chair on the boarding house’s front gallery—a big more-or-less unpainted square building just off the Square where itinerant cattle drovers and horse-and mule-traders stopped and where were incarcerated, boarded and fed, juries and important witnesses during court term, where she would sit rocking steadily—not doing anything, not reading, not particularly watching who passed in or out of the door or along the street: just rocking—for the next five years while and then after the place changed from a boarding house to a warren, with nailed to one of the front veranda posts a pine board lettered terrifically by hand: NOPE HOTEL

And now Eck, whose innocence or honesty or both had long since eliminated him from the restaurant into his night watchman’s chair beside the depot oil tank, had vacated his wife and sons (Wallstreet Panic: oh yes, I was like Ratliff: I couldn’t believe that one either, though the younger one, Admiral Dewey, we both could) from the tent behind it. In fact, the restaurant was not sold lock stock barrel and goodwill, but gutted, moved intact even to the customers and without even a single whole day’s closure, into the new boarding house where Mrs Eck was now the landlady; moved intact past the rocking figure on the gallery which continued to rock there through mere legend and into landmark like the effigy signs before the old time English public houses, so that country men coming into town and inquiring for the Snopes hotel were told simply to walkhat direction until they came to a woman rocking, and that was it.

And now there entered that one, not whose vocation but at least the designation of whose vocation, I.O. Snopes had usurped. This was the actual Snopes schoolmaster. No: he looked like a schoolmaster. No: he looked like John Brown with an ineradicable and unhidable flaw: a tall gaunt man in a soiled frock coat and string tie and a wide politician’s hat, with cold furious eyes and the long chin of a talker: not that verbal diarrhea of his cousin (whatever kin I.O. was; they none of them seemed to bear any specific kinship to one another; they were just Snopeses, like colonies of rats or termites are just rats and termites) but a kind of unerring gift for a base and evil ratiocination in argument, and for correctly reading the people with whom he dealt: a demagogue’s capacity for using people to serve his own appetites, all clouded over with a veneer of culture and religion; the very names of his two sons, Byron and Virgil, were not only instances but warnings.

And no schoolmaster himself either. That is, unlike his cousin, he was not even with us long enough to have to prove he was not. Or maybe, coming to us in the summer and then gone before the summer was, he was merely between assignments. Or maybe taking a busman’s holiday from a busman’s holiday. Or maybe in and about the boarding house and the Square in the mere brief intervals from his true bucolic vocation whose stage and scene were the scattered country churches and creeks and horse-ponds where during the hot summer Sundays revival services and baptisings took place: himself (he had a good baritone voice and probably the last working pitch pipe in north Mississippi) setting the tune and lining out the words, until one day a posse of enraged fathers caught him and a fourteen-year-old girl in an empty cotton house and tarred and feathered him out of the country. There had been talk of castration also though some timid conservative dissuaded them into holding that as a promise against his return.