Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Jest exactly fourteen months since that McCarron boy started to crumple at the seams at that first encounter. But it wasn’t waiting. Not a natural phenomenon like Eula. She was jest being, breathing, setting with that baby in a rocking chair on Varner’s front gallery while Flem changed enough money into them sixty silver dollars and buried them in that Old Frenchman place rose garden jest exactly where me and Henry Armull and Odum Bookwright couldn’t help but find them. And still jest being and breathing, setting with the baby in the wagon that day they moved in to Jefferson so Flem could get a active holt on Grover Winbush to evict him outen the other half of that café me and Grover owned. And still jest being and breathing but not setting now because likely even the tide-wave dont need to be informed when it’s on the right spoke to whatever rim it’s due at next, her and Flem and the baby living in that canvas tent behind the cafe between when she would walk across the Square until finally Manfred de Spain, the McCarron that wouldn’t start or break up when they collided together, would look up and see her. Who hadn’t had none of them select advantages of being the only child of a well-to-do widowed maw living in Florida hotels while he was temporarily away at them select eastern schools, but instead had had to make out the best he could with jest being the son of a Confederate cavalry officer, that graduated hisself from West Point into what his paw would a called the Yankee army and went to Cuba as a lieutenant and come back with a long jagged scar down one cheek that the folks trying to beat him for mayor rumored around wasn’t made by no Spanish bayonet a-tall but instead by a Missouri sergeant with a axe in a crap game: which, whether it was so or not, never stood up long between him and getting elected mayor of Jefferson, nor between him and getting to be president of Colonel Sartoris’s bank when that come up, not to mention between him and Eula Varner Snopes when that come up.

I aint even mentioning Lawyer. It wasn’t even his bad luck he was on that rim too because tide-waves aint concerned with luck. It was his fate. He jest got run over by coincidence, like a ant using the same spoke a elephant happened to find necessary or convenient. It wasn’t that he was born too soon or too late or even in the wrong place. He was born at exactly the right time, only in the wrong envelope. It was his fate and doom not to been born into one of them McCarron separate covers too instead of into that fragile and what you might call gossamer-sinewed envelope of boundless and hopeless aspiration Old Moster give him.

So there he was, rushing headlong into that engagement that the best he could possibly hope would be to lose it quick, since any semblance or intimation of the most minorest victory would a destroyed him like a lightning bolt, while Flem Snopes grazed gently on up them new Jefferson pastures, him and his wife and infant daughter still living in the tent behind the café and Flem hisself frying the hamburgers now after Grover Winbush found out suddenly one day that he never owned one half of a café neither; then the Rouncewells that thought they still owned what Miz Rouncewell called the Commercial Hotel against all the rest of Yoknapatawpha County calling it the Rouncewell boarding house, found they was wrong too and the Flem Snopeses lived there now, during the month or so it taken him to eliminate the Rouncewells outen it, with the next Snopes from Frenchman’s Bend imported into the tent behind the café and frying the hamburgers because Flem hisself was now superintendent of the power plant; Manfred de Spain had not only seen Eula, he was already mayor of Jefferson when he done it.

And still Lawyer was trying, even while at least once ever day he would have to see his mortal victorious rival and conqueror going in and out of the mayor’s office or riding back and forth across the Square in that red brass-trimmed E.M.F. roadster that most of north Missippi, let alone jest Yoknapatawpha County, hadn’t seen nothing like before; right on up and into that alley behind the Ladies’ Cotillion Club Christ ball where he tried to fight Manfred with his bare fists until his sister’s husband drug him up outen the gutter and held him long enough for Manfred to get outen sight and then taken him home to the bathroom to wash him off and says to him: “What the hell do you mean? Dont you know you dont know how to fight?” And Lawyer leaning over the washbowl trying to stanch his nose with handfuls of tissue paper, saying, “Of course I know it. But can you suh-jest a better way than this for me to learn?”