Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Both of them,” she said. “All of us. Every one of us. The poor son of a bitches.”

I hadn’t expected to see Clarence at all until tomorrow morning. But there he was, a handful of crumpled bills scattered on the top of the dresser like the edge of a crap game and Clarence undressed down to his trousers standng looking at them and yawning and rooting in the pelt on his chest. This time they—Clarence—had found a big operator, a hot sport who, Virgil having taken on the customary two successfully, bet them he couldn’t handle a third one without stopping, offering them the odds this time, which Clarence covered with Flem’s other fifty since this really would be a risk; he said how he even gave Virgil a chance to quit and not hold it against him: “ ‘We’re ahead now, you know; you done already proved yourself.’ And do you know, the little sod never even turned a hair. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Send her in.’ And now my conscience hurts me,” he said, yawning again. “It was Flem’s money. My conscience says dont tell him a durn thing about it: the money just got spent like he thinks it was. But shucks, a man dont want to be a hog.”

So we went back home. “Why do you want to go back to the jail?” Flem said. “It’ll be three weeks yet.”

“Call it for practice,” I said. “Call it a dry run against my conscience.” So now I had a set of steel bars between; now I was safe from the free world, safe and secure for a little while yet from the free Snopes world where Flem was parlaying his wife into the presidency of a bank and Clarence even drawing per diem as a state senator between Jackson and Gayoso Street to take the wraps off Virgil whenever he could find another Arkansas sport who refused to believe what he was looking at, and Byron in Mexico or wherever he was with whatever was still left of the bank’s money, and mine and Clarence’s father I.O. and all of our Uncle Wesley leading a hymn with one hand and fumbling the skirt of an eleven-year-old infant with the other; I dont count Wallstreet and Admiral Dewey and their father Eck, because they dont belong to us: they are only our shame.

Not to mention Uncle Murdering Mink six or seven weeks later (I had to wait a little while you see not to spook him too quick). “Flem?” he said. “I wouldn’t a thought Flem wanted me out. I’d a thought he’d been the one wanted to keep me here longest.”

“He must have changed,” I said. He stood there in his barred overalls, blinking a little—a damn little wornout dried-up shrimp of a man not as big as a fourteen-year-old boy. Until you wondered how in hell anything as small and frail could have held enough mad, let alone steadied and aimed a ten-gauge shotgun, to kill anybody.

“I’m obliged to him,” he said. “Only, if I got out tomorrow, maybe I wont done changed. I been here a long time now. I aint had much to do for a right smart while now but jest work in the field and think. I wonder if he knows to risk that? A man wants to be fair, you know.”

“He knows that,” I said. “He dont expect you to change inside here because he knows you cant. He expects you to change when you get out. Because he knows that as soon as the free air and sun shine on you again, you cant help but be a changed man even if you dont want to.”

“But jest suppose I dont—” He didn’t add change in time because he stopped himself.

“He’s going to take that risk,” I said. “He’s got to. I mean, he’s got to now. He couldn’t hve stopped them from sending you here. But he knows you think he didn’t try. He’s got to help you get out not only to prove to you he never put you here but so he can quit thinking and remembering that you believe he did. You see?”

He was completely still, just blinking a little, his hands hanging empty but even now shaped inside the palms like the handles of a plow and even his neck braced a little as though still braced against the loop of the plowlines. “I just got five more years, then I’ll get out by myself. Then wont nobody have no right to hold expectations against me. I wont owe nobody no help then.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Just five more years. That’s practically nothing to a man that has already put in fifteen years with a man with a shotgun watching him plow cotton that aint his whether he feels like plowing that day or not, and another man with a shotgun standing over him while he eats grub that he either ate it or not whether he felt like eating or not, and another man with a shotgun to lock him up at night so he could either go to sleep or stay awake whether he felt like doing it or not. Just five years more, then you’ll be out where the free sun and air can shine on you without any man with a shotgun’s shadow to cut it off. Because you’ll be free.”