Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Except she never had to leave Missippi to locate that place.” And then I said it, what Eula herself must have, had to have, said to him that day: “Why didn’t you marry her?”

“Because she wasn’t but nineteen,” he says.

“And you are all of thirty-five aint you,” I says. “When the papers are full of gals still carrying a doll in one hand marrying folks of sixty and seventy, providing of course they got a little extra money.”

“I mean, she’s got too much time left to run into something where she might need me. How many papers are full of people that got married because someday they might need the other one?”

“Oh,” I says. “So all you got to do now is jest stay around close where you can hear the long-distance telephone or the telegram boy can find you. Because naturally you wont be waiting for her to ever come back to Missippi. Or maybe you are?”

“Naturally not,” he says. “Why should she?”

“Thank God?” I says. He didn’t answer. “Because who knows,” I says, “she may d in ready found that dream even in jest these … two days, aint it? three? Maybe he was already settled there when she arrived. That’s possible in Grinnich Village, aint it?”

Then he said it too. “Yes,” he says, “thank God.” So he was free. And in fact, when you had time to look around a little, he never had nothing no more to do but jest rest in peace and quiet and content ment. Because not only him but all Jefferson was free of Snopeses; for the first time in going on twenty years, Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County too was in what you might call a kind of Snopes doldrum. Because at last even Flem seemed to be satisfied: setting now at last in the same chair the presidents of the Merchants and Farmers Bank had been setting in ever since the first one, Colonel Sartoris, started it twenty-odd years ago, and actively living in the very house the second one of it was born in, so that all he needed to do too after he had done locked up the money and went home was to live in solitary peace and quiet and contentment too, not only shut of the daughter that had kept him on steady and constant tenterhooks for years whether she might not escape at any moment to where he couldn’t watch her and the first male feller that come along would marry her and he would lose her share of Will Varner’s money, but shut of the wife that at any time her and Manfred de Spain would get publicly caught up with and cost him all the rest of Varner’s money and bank voting stock too.

In fact, for the moment Flem was the only true Snopes actively left in Jefferson. Old man Ab never had come no closer than that hill two miles out where you could jest barely see the water tank, where he taken the studs that day back about 1910 and hadn’t moved since. And four years ago Flem had ci-devanted I.O. back to Frenchman’s Bend for good. And even before that Flem had eliminated Montgomery Ward into the penitentiary at Parchman where Mink already was (Mink hadn’t really resided in Jefferson nohow except jest them few months in the jail waiting for his life sentence to be awarded). And last month them four half-Snopes Indians that Byron Snopes, Colonel Sartoris’s bank clerk that resigned by the simple practical expedient of picking up as much of the loose money he could tote and striking for the nearest U.S. border, sent back collect from Mexico until somebody could get close enough to fasten the return prepaid tags on them before whichever one had it at the moment could get out that switch-blade knife. And as for Eck’s boys, Wallstreet Panic and Admiral Dewey, they hadn’t never been Snopeses to begin with, since all Wallstreet evidently wanted to do was run a wholesale grocery business by the outrageous un-Snope-sish method of jest selling ever body exactly what they thought they was buying, for exactly what they thought they was going to pay for it.