Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

So Uncle Gavin stopped long enough for Ratliff to get out (we had just reached the Square), then we went on, Uncle Gavin talking again or still talking since he had only stopped long enough to say What? to Ratliff, and parked the car and went up to the office and he was still talking that same kind of foolishness that you never could decide whether it didn’t make any sense or not, and took one of the pipes from the bowl and begun to look around the desk until I went and shoved the tobacco jar up and he looked at the jar and said, “Oh yes, thanks,” and put the pipe down, still talking. Then Ratliff came in and went to the cooler and got a glass and the spoon and sugar-bowl from the cabinet and took a pint bottle of white whiskey from inside of his shirt, Uncle Gavin still talking, and made the toddy and came and held it out.

“Here,” he said.

“Why, much obliged,” Uncle Gavin said. “That looks fine. That sure looks fine.” But he didn’t touch it. He didn’t even take it while Ratliff set it down on the desk where I reckon it was still sitting when Clefus came in the next morning to sweep the office and found it and probably had already started to throw it out when he caught his hand back in time to smell it or recognise it or anyway drink it. And now Uncle Gavin took up the pipe again and filled it and fumbled in his pocket and then Ratliff held out a match and Uncle Gavin stopped talking and looked at it and said, “What?” Then he said, “Thanks,” and took the match and scratched it carefully on the underside of the desk and blew it carefully out and put it into the tray and put the pipe into the tray and folded his hands on the desk and said to Ratliff:

“So maybe you can tellme because for the life of me I cant figure it out. Why did she do it? Why? Because as a rule women dont really care about facts just so they fit; it’s just men that dont give a damn whether they fit or not, who is hurt, how many are hurt, just so they are hurt bad enough. So I want to ask your opinion. You know women, travelling around the country all day long right in the middle of them, from one parlor to another all day long all high and mighty, as dashing and smooth and welcome as if you were a damned rush—” and stopped and Ratliff said,

“What? What rush? Rush where?”

“Did I say rush?” Uncle Gavin said. “No no, I said Why? A young girl’s grief and anguish when young girls like grief and anguish and besides, they can get over it. Will get over it. And just a week from her birthday too of course but after all Flem is the one to get the zero for that: for missing by a whole week anything as big as a young girl’s nineteenth birthday. Besides, forget all that; didn’t somebody just say that young girls really like grief and anguish? No no, what I said was, Why?” He sat there looking at Ratliff. “Why? Why did she have to? Why did she? The waste. The terrible waste. To waste all that, when it was not hers to waste, not hers to destroy because it is too valuable, belonged to too many, too little of it to waste, destroy, throw away and be no more.” He looked at Ratliff. “Tell me, V.K. Why?”

“Maybe she was bored,” Ratliff said.

“Bored,” Uncle Gavin said. Then he said it again, not loud: “Bored.” And that was when he began to cry, sitting there straight in the chair behind the desk with his hands folded together on the desk, not even hiding his face. “Yes,” he said. “She was bored. She loved, had a capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it. Yes,” he said, sitting there crying, not even trying to hide his face from us, “of course she was bored.”

And one more thing. One morning—it was summer again now, July—the northbound train from New Orleans stopped and the first man off was usually the Negro porter—not the Pullman porters, they were always back down the track at the end; we hardly ever saw them, but the one from the day coaches at the front end—to get down and strut a little while he talked to the section hands and the other Negroes that were always around to meet the passenger trains. But this time it was the conductor himself, almost jumping down before the train stopped, with the white flagman at his heels, almost stepping on them; the porter himself didn’t get off at all: just his head sticking out a window about half way down the car.

Then four things got off. I mean, they were children. The tallest was a girl though we never did know whether she was the oldest or just the tallest, then two boys, all three in overalls, and then a little one in a single garment down to its heels like a man’s shirt made out of a flour-or meal-sack or maybe a scrap of an old tent. Wired to the front of each one of them was a shipping tag written in pencil:

FROM: BYRON SNOPES, Efont>font> PASO, TEXAS

To: MR FLEM SNOPES, JEFFERSON, MISSISSIPPI