Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Besides, he was a Mason too. He had been a Mason such a long time that he was a good one even if he wasn’t very high up in it. So they buried the neck-brace anyway, in a coffin all regular, with the Masons in charge of the funeral, and more people than you would have thought sent flowers, even the oil company too although Mr Snopes had ruined their tank for nothing because Cedric Nunnery wasn’t even in it.

So they buried what they did have of him; there was the Baptist preacher too, and the Masons in their aprons dropping a pinch of dirt into the grave and saying “Alas my brother,” and covered the raw red dirt with the flowers (one of the flower pieces had the Mason signs worked into it); and the tank was insured so when the oil company got through cussing Mr Snopes for being a grown man with no more sense than that, they even gave Mrs Snopes a thousand dollars to show they were sorry for her even if she had married a fool. That is, they gave the money to Mrs Snopes because their oldest boy, Wallstreet, wasn’t but sixteen then. But he was the one that used it.

But that came later. All that happened now was that Mayor de Spain finally got to be a commanding officer long enough to ring his alarm bell at least, and we had some more fresh Snopes news to send Uncle Gavin. By “we” I mean me now. Gowan’s mother and father had finally got home from China or wherever it was and now Gowan was in Washington (it was fall) for the last year anyway at the prep school getting ready for the University of Virginia next year and one afternoon Mother sent for me, into the parlor, and there was Ratliff in his neat faded blue tieless shirt and his smooth brown face, in the parlor like company (there was a tea tray and Ratliff had a teacup and a cucumber sandwich and I know now there were a lot of people in Jefferson, let alone in the county where Ratliff came from, that wouldn’t have known what to do with a cup of tea at four oclock in the afternoon and maybe Ratliff never saw one before then either but you couldn’t have told it by watching him) and Mother said,

“Make your manners to Mister Ratliff, bub. He’s come to call on us,” and Ratliff said,

“Is that what you call him?” and Mother said,

“No, we just call him whatever is handy yet,” and Ratliff raid,

“Sometimes fellers named Charles gets called Chick when they gets to school.” Then he said to me: “Do you like strawberry icecream cones?” and I said,

“I like any kind of icecream cones,” and Rathff said:

“Then maybe your cousin—” and stopped and said to Mother: “Excuse me, Miz Mallison; I done been corrected so many times that it looks like it may take me a spell yet.” So after that it was me and Ratliff instead of Gowan and Ratliff, only instead of two cones, it cost Ratliff three now because when I went to town without Mother, Aleck Sander was with me. And I dont know how Ratliff did it and of course I cant remember when because I wasn’t even five yet. But he had put into my mind too, just like into Gowan’s, that idea of Snopeses covering Jefferson like an influx of snakes or varmints from the woods and he and Uncle Gavin were the only ones to recognise the danger and the threat and now he was having to tote the whole load by himself until they would finally stop the war and Uncle Gavin could get back home and help. “So you might just as well start listening now,” he said, “whether you aint but five or not. You’re going to have to hear a heap of it before you get old enough or big enough to resist.”

It was November. Then that day, the courthouse bell rang again and all the church bells too this time, wild and frantic too in the middle of the week from the Sunday steeples and a few shotguns and pistols too like the old veterans that were still alive when they unveiled the Confederate monument that day except that the ones this time hadn’t been to a war yet, so maybe what they were celebrating this time was that this one finally got over before they had to go to it. So now Uncle Gavin could come home where Ratliff himself could ask him what Montgomery Ward Snopes had done that his name must not be mentioned or discussed. That was when Ratliff told me, “You might as well get used to hearing it even if you aint but five.” That was when he said: “What do you reckon it was he done? Your cousin has been watching Snopeses for going on ten years now; he even taken one all the way to France with him to keep hisself abreast and up-to-date. What you reckon a Snopes could a done after ten years to shock and startle him so much he couldn’t bear even to discuss it?”