Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“And Dee-wit said he would like to a give up then. But by that time that least un wouldn’t give him no rest a-tall. Only he didn’t know what to do because he had done been warned about that knife even if he hadn’t never seen it. Then he remembered them pills, that bottle of knock-out opium pills that Doc Peabody had give Miz Dee-wit that time the brooder lamp blowed up and burnt most of her front hair off, so he taken eight of them and bought four bottles of sody pop at the store and put two capsules into each bottle and druv the caps back on and hid the bottles jest exactly where he figgered they would have to hunt jest exactly hard enough to find them. And by dark the four bottles was gone and he waited again to be sho it had had plenty of time to work and taken Vernon’s flashlight and went across the hall and got on his hands and knees and crawled across to the pallet—he knowed by practice now exactly where on the pallet that least un slept or anyway hid—and reached out easy and found the hem of that nightshirt with one hand and the flashlight ready to snap on in the other.

“And when he told about it, he was downright crying not with jest skeer so much as pure and simple unbelief. ‘I wasn’t doing nothing’ he says. ‘I wasn’t going to hurt it. All in the world I wanted was jest to see which it was—’ ”

“Which is it?” Uncle Gavin said.

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Ratliff said. “He never even got to snap the flashlight on. He jest felt them two thin quick streaks of fire, one down either cheek of his face; he said that all that time he was already running backward on his hands and knees toward the door he knowed there wouldn’t even be time to turn around, let alone get up on his feet to run, not to mention shutting the door behind him; and when he run back into his and Miz Deewit’s room there wouldn’t be no time to shut that one neither except he had to, banging it shut and hollering for Miz Dee-wit now, dragging the bureau against it while Miz Dee-wit lit the lamp and then come and holp him until he hollered at her to shut the windows first; almost crying with them two slashes running from each ear, jest missing his eye on one side, right down to the corners of his mouth like a great big grin that would bust scab and all if he ever let his face go, telling how they would decide that the best thing would be to put the lamp out too and set in the dark until he remembered how they had managed somehow to get inside that locked-up Coca-Cola plant without even touching the patented burglar alarm.

“So they jest shut and locked the windows and left the lamp burning, sitting there in that airtight room on that hot summer night, until it come light enough for Miz Dee-wit to at least jump and dodge on the way back to the kitchen to start a fire in the stove and cook breakfast. Though the house was empty then. Not safe of course: jest empty except for themselves while they tried to decide whether to try to get word in to Flem or Hub Hampton to come out and get them, or jest pack up themselves without even waiting to wash up the breakfast dishes, and move over to Tull’s. Anyhow Dee-wit said him and Miz Dee-wit was through and they knowed it, four dollars a week or no four dollars a week; and so, it was about nine oclock, he was on his way to the store to use the telephone to call Jefferson, when Miz I.O. Snopes, I mean the number-two one that got superseded back before she ever had a chance to move to town, saved him the trouble.”

We all knew Doris Snopes. And even if we hadn’t, we would have recognised him at first glance since he looked almost exactly like his older brother Clarence (Senator C. Eggleston Snopes, our—or Uncle Billy Varner’s, Ratliff and Uncle Gavin said—member of the upper house of the state legislature) almost exactly alike, with (this is Uncle Gavin again) the same mentality of a child and the mutual moral principles of a woverine; younger than Clarence in years but not looking younger or more innocent so much as just newer, as the lesser-used axe or machine gun looks newer—a big hulking animal about seventeen years old, who like his brother Clarence was all one gray color: a grayish tinge already to his tow-colored hair, a grayish pasty look to his flesh, which looked as if it would not flow blood from a wound but instead a pallid fluid like thin oatmeal; he was the only Snopes or resident of Frenchman’s Bend or Yknapatawpha County either, for that matter, who made his Texas cousins welcome. “You might say he adopted them,” Ratliff said. “Right from that first day. He even claimed he could talk to them and that he was going to train them to hunt in a pack; they would be better than any jest pack of dogs because sooner or later dogs always quit and went home, while it didn’t matter to them where they was.