Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“So he trained them. The first way he done it was to set a bottle of sody pop on a stump in front of the store with a string running from it to where he would be setting on the gallery, until they would maneuver around and finally bushwack up to where one of them could reach for it, when he would snatch it off the stump with the string and drag it out of their reach. Only that never worked but once so then he would have to drink the bottles empty and fill them again with muddy water or some such, or another good training method was to gather up a few throwed-away candy-bar papers and wrap them up again with mud inside or maybe jest not nothing a-tall because it taken them a good while to give up then, especially if now and then he had a sho enough candy bar or a sho enough bottle of strawberry or orange shuffled into the other ones.

“Anyhow he was always with them, hollering at them and waving his arms to go this way or that way when folks was watching, like dogs; they even had some kind of a play house or cave or something in another ditch about half a mile up the road. That’s right. What you think you are laughing at is the notion of a big almost growed man like Clarence, playing, until all of a sudden you find out that what you’re laughing at is calling anything playing that them four things would be interested in.

“So Dee-wit had jest reached the store when here come Doris’s maw, down the road hollering ‘Them Indians! Them Indians!’ jest like that: a pure and simple case of mother love and mother instinct. Because likely she didn’t know anything yet and even if she had, in that state she couldn’t a told nobody: jest standing there in the road in front of the store wringing her hands and hollering Them Indians until the men squatting along the gallery begun to get up and then to run because about that time Dee-wit come up. Because he knowed what Miz Snopes was trying to say. Maybe he never had no mother love and mother instinct but then neither did Miz Snopes have a last-night’s knife-slash down both cheeks.

“ ‘Them Indians?’ he says. ‘Fore God, men, run. It may already be too late.’

“But it wasn’t. They was in time. Pretty soon they could hear Doris bellowing and screaming and then they could line him out and the fastest ones run on ahead and down into the ditch to where Doris was tied to a blackjack sapling with something less than a cord of wood stacked around him jest beginning to burn good.

“So they was in time. Jody telephoned Flem right away and in fact all this would a formally took place yesterday evening except that Doris’s hunting pack never reappeared in sight until this morning when Dee-wit lifted the shade enough to see them waiting on the front gallery for breakfast. But then his house was barred in time because he hadn’t never unbarred it from last night. And Jody’s car was already standing by on emergency alert as they say and it wasn’t much trouble to toll them into it since like Doris said one place was jest like another to them.

“So they’re down at the dee-po now. Would either of you gentlemen like to go down with me and watch what they call the end of a erea, if that’s what they call what I’m trying to say? The last and final end of Snopes out-and-out unvarnished behavior in Jefferson, if that’s what I’m trying to say.”

So Ratliff and I went to the station while he told me the rest of it. It was Miss Eunice Habersham; she had done the telephoning herself: to the Travellers’ Aid in New Orleans to meet the Jefferson train and put them on the one for El Paso, and to the El Paso Aid to get them across the border and turn them over to the Mexican police to send them back home, to Byron Snopes or the reservation or wherever it was. Then I noticed the package and said, “What’s that?” but he didn’t answer. He just parked the pickup and took the cardboard carton and we went around onto the platform where they were: the three in the overalls and what Ratliff called the least un in the nightshirt, each with the new shipping tag wired to the front of its garment, but printed in big block capitals this time, like shouting this time:

FROM: FLEM SNOPES, JEFFERSON, MISS.

To: BYRON SNOPES

EL PASO, TEXAS