Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

So he expected Flem. But he never expected Hub Hampton and Lawyer Stevens. So for what you might call a flashing moment or two after Hub and Lawyer busted in that morning, Montgomery Ward figgered it was this here new respectability Flem had done got involved with: a respectability that delicate and tetchous that wouldn’t nothing else suit it but it must look like the Law itself had purified the Snopes a-teelyer industry outen Jefferson, and so Flem was jest using Lawyer Stevens and Hub Hampton for a cat’s-paw. Of course another moment of thoughtful deliberation would a suh-jested to him that once a feller dedicated to civic improvement and the moral advancement of youth like Lawyer Stevens, and a meat-eating Hard-Shell Baptist deacon like Hub Hampton got a-holt of them nekkid photographs, there wouldn’t be nothing left of that business for Flem to move nowhere except the good will. Though them little hard pale-colored eyes looking down at him across the top of Hub Hampton’s belly wasn’t hardly the time for meditation and deliberation of any kind, thoughtful or not. In fact, Montgomery Ward was so far from being deliberate or even thinking a-tall for that matter, that it aint surprising if in that same flashing moment he likely cast on his cousin Flem the horrid aspersion that Flem had let Lawyer Stevens and Hub Hampton outfigger him; that Flem had merely aimed to close him, Montgomery Ward, out, and was innocent enough to believe he could get them nekkid pictures back outen Hub Hampton’s hands once Hub had seen them, and that that cat’s-paw’s real name was Flem Snopes.

Though even in his extremity Montgomery Ward had more simple sense and judgment, let alone family pride and loyalty, than to actively believe that ten thousand Lawyer Stevenses and Hub Hamptons, let alone jest one each of them, could a diddled Flem Snopes. In fact, sooner than that foul aspersion, he would believe that Flem Snopes was subject to bad luck too, jest like a human being—not the bad luck of misreading Grover Winbush’s character that Grover could slip up and down that alley two or three times a week for seven or eight months without ever body in Yoknapatawpha County’ ketching him at least once, but the bad luck of being unable to anticipate that them two robbers would pick out the same night to b Uncle Willy Christian’s drugstore that that Rouncewell boy would to climb down the drain pipe and go to the late picture show.

So all Montgomery Ward had to do now was set in his jail cell where Hub taken him and wait with what you might call almost professional detachment and interest to see how Flem was going to get them pictures back from Hub. It would take time of course; even with all his veneration and family pride for Flem Snopes, he knowed that even for Flem it wouldn’t be as simple as picking up a hat or a umbrella. So when the rest of that day passed and hadn’t nothing more happened, it was exactly as he had anticipated. Naturally he had toyed with the notion that, took by surprise too, Flem might call on him, Montgomery Ward, to pick up whatever loose useful ends of information he might have without even knowing he had none. But when Flem never showed up nor sent word, if anything his admiration and vindication for Flem jest increased that much more since here was active proof that Flem wasn’t going to need even what little more, even if it wasn’t no more than encouragement and moral support, that Montgomery Ward could a told him.

And he anticipated right on through that night and what you might call them mutual Yoknapatawpha County bedbugs, on into the next morning too. So you can imagine his interested surprise—not alarm yet nor even astonishment: jest interest and surprise—when whatever thoughtful acquaintance (it was Euphus Tubbs, the jailor; he was a interested party too, not to mention having spent most of his life being surprised) come in that afternoon and told him how Hub Hampton had went back to the studio that morning jest in case him and Lawyer had overlooked any further evidence yesterday, and instead captured five gallons of moonshine whiskey setting in the bottles on the shelf that Montgomery Ward hisself assumed never held nothing but photograph developer. “Now you can go to Parchman instead of Atlanta,” Euphus says. “Which wont be so fur away. Not to mention being in Missippi, where a native Missippi jailor can get the money for your keep instead of these durn judges sending our Missippi boys clean out of the country where folks we never even heard of before can collect on them.”