Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Sixteen and seventeen and going on eighteen now and Lawyer still lending her books to read and keeping her stall-fed twice a week on icecream sundaes and banana splits, so anyhow Jefferson figgered it knowed what Lawyer was up to whether he admitted it out or not. And naturally Eula had already knowed for five or six years what she was after. Like there’s a dog, maybe not no extra dog but leastways a good sound what you might call a dog’s dog, that dont seem to belong to nobody else, that seems to show a preference for your vicinity, that even after the five or six years you aint completely convinced there wont never be no other dog available, and that even them five or six years back and even with another five or six years added onto now, you never needed and you aint going to need that dog personally, there aint any use in simply throwing away and wasting its benefits and accomplishments, even if they aint nothing but fidelity and devotion, by letting somebody else get a-holt of it. Or say you got a gal child coming along, that the older and bigger she gets, the more of a nuisance she’s bound to be on your time and private occupations: in which case not only wont that fidelity and devotion maybe come into handy use, but even the dog itself might that could still be capable of them long after even hit had give up all expectation of even one bone.

Which is what Jefferson figgered. But not me. Maybe even though she got rid of Hoake McCarron, even after she knowed she was pregnant, there is still moments when even female physical phenomenons is female first whether they want to be or not. So I believe that women aint so different from men: that if it aint no trouble nor shock neither for a man to father onto hisself the first child of the woman he loved and lost and still cant rid outen his mind, no matter how many other men holp to get it, it aint no trouble neither for that woman to father a dozen different men’s chillen onto that man that lost her and still never expected nothing of her except to accept his devotion.

And since she was a female too, likely by the time Linda was thirteen or fourteen or even maybe as soon as she got over that first startle, which would a been at the second or third icecream sody, she taken for granted she knowed what he was aiming at too. And she would a been wrong. That wasn’t Lawyer. Jest to train her up and marry her wasn’t it. She wouldn’t a been necessary for that—I mean, the simple natural normal following lifetime up to the divorce of steady uxorious hymeneal conflict that any female he could a picked outen that school crowd or from Christian’s sody counter would been fully competent for. Jest that wouldn’t a been worth his effort. He had to be the sole one masculine feller within her entire possible circumambience, not jest to recognise she had a soul still capable of being saved from what he called Snopesism: a force and power that stout and evil as to jeopardise it jest from her believing for twelve or thirteen years she was blood kin when she actively wasn’t no kin a-tall, but that couldn’t nobody else in range and reach but him save it—thatere bubble-glass thing somewhere inside her like one of them shimmer-colored balls balanced on the seal’s nose, fragile yet immune too jest that one constant fragile inch above the smutch and dirt of Snopes as long as the seal dont trip or stumble or let her attention wander.