Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Not to give away,” she said. “Not the man that owns a hundred head of cattle and a barn and pasture to feed them in his own name.” The man turned and walked toward her. She turned and began to scream at him, the two children watching Ratliff quietly from behind her skirts as if they were deaf or as if they lived in another world from that in which the woman screamed, like two dogs might. “Deny it if you can!” she cried at the man. “He’d let you rot and die right here and glad of it, and you know it! Your own kin you’re so proud of because he works in a store and wears a necktie all day! Ask him to give you a sack of flour even and see what you get. Ask him! Maybe he’ll give you one of his old neckties someday so you can dress like a Snopes too!” The man walked steadily toward her. He did not even speak again. He was the smaller of the two of them; he walked steadily toward her with a curious sidling deadly, almost deferential, air until she broke, turned swiftly and went back toward the house, the herded children before her still watching Ratliff over their shoulders. The man approached the buckboard.

“You say the message came from Flem?” he said.

“I said it come from Frenchman’s Bend,” Ratliff said. “The name mentioned was Snopes.”

“Who was it seems to done all this mentioning about Snopes?”

“A friend,” Ratliff said pleasantly. “He seems to made a mistake. I ask you to excuse it. Can I follow this lane over to the Whiteleaf Bridge road?”

“If Flem sent you word to leave it here, suppose you leave it.”

“I just told you I thought I had made a mistake and ask you to excuse it,” Ratliff said. “Does this lane—”

“I see,” the other said. “That means you aim to have a little cash down. How much?”

“You mean on the machine?”

“What do you think I am talking about?”

“Ten dollars,” Ratliff said. “A note for twenty more in six months. That’s gathering-time.”

“Ten dollars? With the message you got from—”

“We aint talking about messages now,” Ratliff said. “We’re talking about a sewing machine.”

“Make it five.”

“No,” Ratliff said pleasantly.

“All right,” the other said, turning. “Fix up your note.” He went back to the house. Ratliff got out and went to the rear of the buckboard and opened the dog kennel’s door and drew from beneath the new machine a tin dispatch box. It contained a pen, a carefully corked ink bottle, a pad of note forms. He was filling in the note when Snopes returned, reappeared at his side. As soon as Ratliff’s pen stopped Snopes slid the note toward himself and took the pen from Ratliff’s hand and dipped it and signed the note, all in one continuous motion, without even reading it, and shoved the note back to Ratliff and took something from his pocket which Ratliff did not look at yet because he was looking at the signed note, his face perfectly expressionless. He said quietly,

“This is Flem Snopes’s name you have signed.”

“All right,” the other said. “Then what?” Ratliff looked at him. “I see. You want my name on it too, so one of us anyway cant deny it has been signed. All right.” He took the note and wrote again on it and passed it back. “And here’s your ten dollars. Give me a hand with the machine.” But Ratliff did not move again, because it was not money but another paper which the other had given him, folded, dog-eared and soiled. Opened, it was another note. It was dated a little more than three years ago, for ten dollars with interest, payable on demand one year after date of execution, to Isaac Snopes or bearer, and signed Flem Snopes. It was indorsed on the back (and Ratliff recognised the same hand which had just signed the two names to the first note) to Mink Snopes, by Isaac Snopes (X) his mark, and beneath that and still in the same hand and blotted (or dried at least), to V. K. Ratliff, by Mink Snopes, and Ratliff looked at it quite quietly and quite soberly for almost a minute. “All right,” the other said. “Me and Flem are his cousins. Our grandma left us all three ten dollars a piece. We were to get it when the least of us—that was him—come twenty-one. Flem needed some cash and he borrowed his from him on this note. Then he needed some cash a while back and I bought Flem’s note from him. Now if you want to know what color his eyes are or anything else, you can see for yourself when you get to Frenchman’s Bend. He’s living there now with Flem.”

“I see,” Ratliff said. “Isaac Snopes. He’s twenty-one, you say?”

“How could he have got that ten dollars to lend Flem if he hadn’t been?”

“Sho,” Ratliff said. “Only this here aint just exactly a cash ten dollars—”