Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Charles!” Mother said. That’s how it was. It was like we had had something in Jefferson for eighteen years and whether it had been right or whether it had been wrong to begin with didn’t matter any more now because it was ours, we had lived with it and now it didn’t even show a scar, like the nail driven into the tree years ago that violated and outraged and anguished that tree. Except that the tree hasn’t got much choice either: either to put principle above sap and refuse the outrage and next year’s sap both, or accept the outrage and the sap for the privilege of going on being a tree as long as it can, until in time the nail disappears. It dont go away; it just stops being so glaring in sight, barked over, there is a lump, a bump of course, but after a while the other trees forgive that and everything else accepts that tree and that bump too until one day the saw or the axe goes into it and hits that old nail.

Because I was twelve then. I had reached for the second time that point in the looping circles children—boys anyway—make growing up when for a little while they enter, live in, the same civilisation that grown people use, when it occurs to you that maybe the sensible and harmless things they wont let you do really seem as silly to them as the things they seem either to want to do or have to do seem to you. No: it’s when they laugh at you and suddenly you say, Why, maybe I am funny, and so the things they do are not outrageous and silly or shocking at all: they’re just funny; and more than that, it’s the same funny. So now I could ask. A few more years and I would know more than I knew then. But the loop, the circle, would be swinging on away out into space again where you cant ask grown people because you cant talk to anybody, not even the others your age because they too are rushing on out into space where you cant touch anybody, you dont dare try, you are too busy just hanging on; and you know that all the others out there are just as afraid of asking as you are, nobody to ask, nothing to do but make noise, the louder the better, then at least the other scared ones wont know how scared you are.

But I could still ask now, for a little while. I asked Mother.

“Why dont you ask Uncle Gavin?” she said.

She wanted to tell me. Maybe she even tried. But she couldn’t. It wasn’t because I was only twelve. It was because I was her child, created by her and Father because they wanted to be in bed together and nothing else would do, nobody else would do. You see? If Mrs Snopes and Mr de Spain had been anything else but people, she could have told me. But they were people too, exactly like her and Father; and it’s not that the child mustn’t know that the same magic which made him was the same thing that sent an old man like Mr Will Varner into town at four oclock in the morning just to take something as sorry and shabby as a bank full of money away from another man named Manfed de Spain: it’s because the child couldn’t believe that. Because to the child, he was not created by his mother’s and his father’s passion or capacity for it. He couldn’t have been because he was there first, he came first, before the passion; he created the passion, not only it but the man and the woman who served it; his father is not his father but his son-in-law, his mother not his mother but his daughter-in-law if he is a girl.

So she couldn’t tell me because she could not. And Uncle Gavin couldn’t tell me because he wasn’t able to, he couldn’t have stopped talking in time. That is, that’s what I thought then. I mean, that’s what I thought then was the reason why they—Mother—didn’t tell me: that the reason was just my innocence and not Uncle Gavin’s too and she had to guard both, since maybe she was my mother but she was Uncle Gavin’s twin and if a boy or a girl really is his father’s and her mother’s father-in-law or mother-in-law, which would make the girl her brother’s mother no matter how much younger she was, then a girl with just one brother and him a twin at that, would maybe be his wife and mother too.

So maybe that was why: not that I wasn’t old enough to accept biology, but that everyone should be, deserves to be, must be, defended and protected from the spectators of his own passion save in the most general and unspecific and impersonal terms of the literary and dramatic lay-figures of the protagonists of passion in their bloodless and griefless posturings of triumph or anguish; that no man deserves love since nature did not equip us to bear it but merely to endure and survive it, and so Uncle Gavin’s must not be watched where she could help and fend him, while it anguished on his own unarmored bones.