Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Because you’re the only one in Jefferson I can trust,” Lawyer ays.

Except that that one dont really ever lose Helen, because for the rest of her life she dont never actively get rid of him. Likely it’s because she dont want to.

SEVEN

CHARLES MALLISON

I remember how Ratliff once said that the world’s Helens never really lose forever the men who once loved and lost them; probably because they—the Helens—dont want to.

I still wasn’t born when Uncle Gavin left for Heidelberg, so as far as I know his hair had already begun to turn white when I first saw him. Because although I was born by then, I couldn’t remember him when he came home from Europe in the middle of the War, to get ready to go back to it. He said that at first, right up to the last minute, he believed that as soon as he finished his Ph.D. he was going as a stretcher-bearer with the German army; almost up to the last second before he admitted to himself that the Germany he could have loved that well had died somewhere between the Liège and Namur forts and the year 1848. Or rather, the Germany which had emerged between 1848 and the Belgian forts he did not love since it was no longer the Germany of Goethe and Bach and Beethoven and Schiller. This is what he said hurt, was hard to admit, to admit even after he reached Amsterdam and could begin to really ask about the American Field Service of which he had heard.

But he said how we—America—were not used yet to European wars and still took them seriously; and there was the fact that he had been for two years a student in a German university. But the French were different: to whom another Germanic war was just the same old chronic nuisance; a nation of practical and practising pessimists who were willing to let anyone regardless of his politics, who wanted to, do anything—particularly one who was willing to do it free. So he—Uncle Gavin spent those five months with his stretcher just behind Verdun and presently was himself in a bed in an American hospital until he got over the pneumonia and could come home, in Jefferson again, waiting, he said, until we were in it, which would not be long.

And he was right: the Sartoris boys, Colonel Sartoris’s twin grandsons, had already gone to England into the Royal Flying Corps and then it was April and then Uncle Gavin had his appointment as a Y.M.C.A. secretary, to go back to France with the first American troops; when suddenly there was Montgomery Ward Snopes, the first of what Ratliff called “them big gray-colored chaps of I.O.’s,” the one whose mama was still rocking in the chair in the front window of the Snopes Hotel because it was still too cold yet to move back onto the front gallery. And Jackson McLendon had organized his Jefferson company and had been elected captain of it and Montgomery Ward could have joined them. But instead he came to Uncle Gavin, to go to France with Uncle Gavin in the Y.M.C.A.; and that was when Ratliff said what he did about sometimes the men that loved and lost Helen of Troy just thought they had lost her. Only he could have added, All her kinfolks too. Because Uncle Gavin did it. I mean, took Montgomery Ward.

“Confound it, Lawyer,” Ratliff said. “It’s a Snopes.”

“Certainly,” Uncle Gavin said. “Can you suggest a better place for a Snopes today than northwestern France? As far west of Amiens and Verdun as you can get him?”

“But why?” Ratliff said.

“I thought of that too,” Uncle Gavin said. “If he had said he wanted to go in order to defend his country, I would have had Hub Hampton handcuff him hand and foot in jail and sit on him while I telephoned Washington. But what he said was, ‘They’re going to pass a law soon to draft us all anyhow, and if I go with you like you’re going, I figger I’ll get there first and have time to look around.’ ”

“To look around,” Ratliff said. He and Uncle Gavin looked at one another. Ratliff blinked two or three times.

“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. Ratliff blinked two or three times again.

“To look around,” he said.

“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. And Uncle Gavin took Montgomery Ward Snopes with him and that was the exact time when Ratliff said about the folks that thought they had finally lost Helen of Troy. But Gowan was still living with us; maybe because of the war in Europe the State Department still hadn’t let his mother and father come back from China or wherever it was yet; at least once every week on the way home across the Square he would meet Ratliff, almost like Ratliff was waiting for him, and Gowan would tell Ratliff the news from Uncle Gavin and Ratliff would say:

“Tell him to watch close. Tell him I’m doing the best I can here.”

“The best you can what?” Gowan said.

“Holding and toting,” Ratliff said.

“Holding and toting what?” Gowan said. That was when Gowan said he first noticed that you didn’t notice Ratliff hardly at all, until suddenly you did or anyway Gowan did. And after that, he began to look for him. Because the next time, Ratliff said:

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” Gowan said.