Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

He was the old one. Some folks said he was Mr Flem’s father but some said he was just his uncle: a short thick dirty old man with fierce eyes under a tangle of eyebrows and a neck that would begin to swell and turn red before, as Ratliff said, you had barely had time to cross the first word with him. So they bought a little house for him about a mile from town, where he lived with an old-maid daughter and the twin sons named Vardaman and Bilbo that belonged to I.O. Snopes’s other wife, the one that Uncle Gavin called the number-two wife that was different from the number-one one that rocked all day long on the front gallery of the Snopes Hotel.

The house had a little piece of ground with it that old man Snopes made into a truck garden and watermelon patch. The watermelon patch was the industry. No, that’s wrong. Maybe I mean the industry toolace because of the watermelon patch. Because it was like the old man didn’t really raise the watermelons to sell or even just to be eaten, but as a bait for the pleasure or sport or contest or maybe just getting that mad, of catching boys robbing it; planting and cultivating and growing watermelons just so he could sit ambushed with a loaded shotgun behind a morning-glory vine on his back gallery until he could hear sounds from the melon patch and then shooting at it.

Then one moonlight night he could see enough too and this time he actually shot John Wesley Roebuck with a load of squirrel shot, and the next morning Mr Hub Hampton, the sheriff, rode out there and told old Snopes that if he ever again let that shotgun off he would come back and take it away from him and throw him in jail to boot. So after that, old Snopes didn’t dare use the gun. All he could do now was to stash away piles of rocks at different places along the fence, and just sit behind the vine with a heavy stick and a flashlight.

That was how the industry started. Mr Hampton had passed the word around town to all the mothers and fathers to tell their sons to stay out of that damned patch now; that any time they wanted a watermelon that bad, he, Mr Hampton, would buy them one, because if they kept on making old man Snopes that mad, some day he would burst a blood vessel and die and we would all be in jail. But old Snopes didn’t know that because Vardaman and Bilbo didn’t tell him. They would wait until he was in the house, lying down maybe to take a nap after dinner, when they would run in and wake him, yelling, hollering that some boys were in the patch, and he would jump up yelling and cursing and grab up the oak cudgel and go tearing out to the patch, and nobody in it or near it except Vardaman and Bilbo behind the corner of the house dying laughing, then dodging and running and still laughing while the old man scrabbled up his piled rocks to throw at them.

Because he never would catch on. No, that’s wrong too: he always caught on. The trouble was, he didn’t dare risk doing nothing when they would run in hollering “Grampaw! Grampaw! Chaps in the melon patch!” because it might be true. He would have to jump up and grab the stick and run out, knowing beforehand he probably wouldn’t find anybody there except Vardaman and Bilbo behind the corner of the house that he couldn’t even catch, throwing the rocks and cursing them until he would give out of rocks and breath both, then standing there gasping and panting with his neck as red as a turkey gobbler’s and without breath any more to curse louder than whispering. That’s what we—all the boys in Jefferson between six and twelve years old and sometimes even older—would go out there to hide behind the fence and watch. We never had seen anybody bust a blood vessel and die and we wanted to be there when it happened to see what it would look like.

This was after Uncle Gavin finally got home from rehabilitating Europe. We were crossing the Square when she passed us. I never could tell if she had looked at Uncle Gavin, though I know she never looked at me, let alone spoke when we passed. But then, that was all right; I didn’t expect her either to or not to; sometimes she would speak to me but sometimes she never spoke to anybody and we were used to it. Like she did this time: just walking on past us exactly like a pointer dog walks just before it freezes onto the birds. Then I saw that Uncle Gavin had stopped and turned to look after her. But then I remembered he had been away since 1914 which was eight years ago now, so she was only about five or six when he saw her last. eight=0em" width="1em" align="justify">“Who is that?” he said.

“Linda Snopes,” I said. “You know: Mr Flem Snopes’s girl.” And I was still watching her too. “She walks like a pointer,” I said. “I mean, a pointer that’s just—”

“I know what you mean,” Uncle Gavin said. “I know exactly what you mean.”

EIGHT

GAVIN STEVENS