Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“You mean you’ve rejoined the church since that night two years ago? No you haven’t. You’ve never been inside the chapel since you came here back in 1908.” Which was true. Though the present Warden and his predecessor had not really been surprised at that. What they had expected him to gravitate to was one of the small violent irreconcilable nonconformist non-everything and -everybody else which existed along with the regular prison religious establishment in probably all Southern rural penitentiaries—small fierce cliques and groups (this one called themselves Jehovah’s Shareholders) headed by self-ordained leaders who had reached prison through a curiously consistent pattern: by the conviction of crimes peculiar to the middle class, to respectability, originating in domesticity or anyway uxoriousness: bigamy, rifling the sect’s funds for a woman: his wife or someone else’s or, in an occasional desperate case, a professional prostitute.

“I didn’t need no church,” he said. “I done it in confidence.”

“In confidence?” the Warden said.

“Yes,” he said, almost impatiently. “You dont need to write God a letter. He has done already seen inside you long before He would even need to bother to read it. Because a man will learn a little sense in time even outside. But he learns it quick in here. That when a Judgment powerful enough to help you, will help you if all you got to do is jest take back and accept it, you are a fool not to.”

“So He will take care of Stillwell for you,” the Warden said.

“Why not? What’s He got against me?”

“Thou shalt not kill,” the Warden said.

“Why didn’t He tell Houston that? I never went all the way in to Jefferson to have to sleep on a bench in the depot jest to try to buy them shells, until Houston made me.”

“Well I’ll be damned,” the Warden said. “I will be eternally damned. You’ll be out of here in three more years anyway but if I had my way you’d be out of here now, today, before whatever the hell it is that makes you tick starts looking cross-eyed at me. I dont want to spend the rest of my life even thinking somebody is thinking the kind of hopes about me you wish about folks that get in your way. Go on now. Get back to work.”

So when it was only October, no holiday valentine or Christmas card month that he knew of, when the Warden sent for him, he was not even surprised. The Warden sat looking at him for maybe half a minute, with something not just aghast but almost respectful in the look, then said: “I will be damned.” It was a telegram this time. “It’s from the Chief of Police in San Diego, California. There was a church in the Mexican quarter. They had stopped using it as a church, had a new one or something. Anyway it had been deconsecrated, so what went on inside it since, even the police haven’t quite caught up with yet. Last week it fell down. They dont know why: it just fell down all of a sudden. They found a man in it—what was left of him. This is what the telegram says: ‘Fingerprints F.B.I. identification your man Number 08213 Shuford H. Stillwell.’ ” The Warden folded the telegram back into the envelope and put it back into the drawer. “Tell me again about that church you said you used to go to before Houston made you kill him.”

He didn’t answer that at all. He just drew a long breath and exhaled it. “I can go now,” he said. “I can be free.”

“Not right this minute,” the Warden said. “It will take a month or two. The petition will have to be got up and sent to the Governor. Then he will ask for my recommendation. Then he will sign the pardon.”

“The petition?” he said.

“You got in here by law,” the Warden said. “You’ll have to get out by law.”

“A petition,” he said.

“That your family will have a lawyer draw up, asking the Governor to issue a pardon. Your wife—but that’s right, she’s dead. One of your daughters then.”

“Likely they done married away too by now.”

“All right,” the Warden said. Then he said, “Hell, man, you’re already good as out. Your cousin, whatever he is, right there in Jackson now in the legislature—Egglestone Snopes, that got beat for Congress two years ago?”

He didn’t move, his head bent a little; he said, “Then I reckon I’ll stay here after all.” Because how could he tell ay here aftanger: Clarence, my own oldest brothers grandson, is in politics that depends on votes. When I leave here I wont have no vote. What will I have to buy Clarence Snopes’s name on my paper? Which just left Eck’s boy, Wallstreet, whom nobody yet had ever told what to do. “I reckon I’ll be with you them other three years too,” he said.

“Write your sheriff yourself,” the Warden said. “I’ll write the letter for you.”

“Hub Hampton that sent me here is dead.”

“You’ve still got a sheriff, haven’t you? What’s the matter with you? Have forty years in here scared you for good of fresh air and sunshine?”