Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“And you aint never told her,” I says. Then I says, “It’s even worse than that. Whenever it occurs to her enough to maybe fret over it a little and she comes to you and says maybe, ‘Tell me the truth now. He aint my father,’ she can always depend on you saying, ‘You’re wrong, he is.’ Is that the dependence and need you was speaking of?” Now he wasn’t looking at me. “What would you do if she got it turned around backwards and said to you, ‘Who is my father?’ ” No, he wasn’t looking at me. “That’s right,” I says. “She wont never ask that. I reckon she has done watched Gavin Stevens too, enough to know there’s some lies even he ought not to need to cope with.” He wasn’t looking at me a-tall. “So that there dependence is on a round-trip ticket too,” I says.

He was back after ten days. And I thought how maybe if that sculptor could jest ketch her unawares, still half asleep maybe, and seduce her outen the bed and up to a altar or even jest a j.p. before she noticed where she was at, maybe he—Lawyer—would be free. Then I knowed that wasn’t even wishful thinking because there wasn’t nothing in that idea that could been called thinking a-tall. Because once I got rid of them hopeful cobwebs I realised I must a knowed for years what likely Eula knowed the moment she laid eyes on him: that he wouldn’t never be free because he wouldn’t never want to be free because this was his life and if he ever lost it he wouldn’t have nothing left. I mean, the right and privilege and opportunity to dedicate forever his capacity for responsibility to something that wouldn’t have no end to its appetite and that wouldn’t never threaten to give him even a bone back in recompense. And I remembered what he said back there about how she was doomed to fidelity and monogamy—to love once and lose him and then to grieve, and I said I reckoned so, that being Helen of Troy’s daughter was kind of like being say the ex-Pope of Rome or the ex-Emperor of Japan: there wasn’t much future to it. And I knowed now he was almost right, he jest had that word “doomed” in the wrong place: that it wasn’t her that was doomed, she would likely do fine; it was the one that was recipient of the fidelity and the monogamy and the love, and the one that was the proprietor of the responsibility that never even wanted, let alone expected, a bone back, that was the doomed one, and how even between them two the lucky one might be the one that had the roof fall on him while he was climbing into or out of the bed.

So naturally I would a got a fur piece quick trying to tell him that, so naturally my good judgment told me not to try it. And so partly by jest staying away from him but mainly by fighting like a demon, like Jacob with his angel, I finally resisted actively saying it—a temptation about as strong as a human man ever has to face, which is to deliberately throw away the chance to say afterward, “I told you so.” So time passed. That little additional mantelpiece footrest was up now that hadn’t nobody ever seen except that Negro yardman—a Jefferson legend after he mentioned it to me and him (likely) and me both happened to mention it in turn to some of our close intimates: a part of the Snopes legend and another Flem Snopes monument in that series mounting on and up from that water tank that we never knowed yet if they had got out of it all that missing Flem Snopes regime powerhouse brass them two mad skeered Negro firemen put into it.

Then it was 1936 and there was less and less of that time left: Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany and sho enough, like Lawyer said, that one in Spain too; Lawyer said, “Pack your grip. We will take the airplane from Memphis tomorrow morning.—No no,” he says, “you dont need to fear contamination from association this time. They’re going to be married. They’re going to Spain to join the Loyalist army and apparently he nagged and worried at her until at last she probably said, ‘Oh hell, have it your way then.ȉ ”

“So he wasn’t a liberal emancipated advanced-thinking artist after all,” I says. “He was jest another ordinary man that believed if a gal was worth sleeping with she was worth deserving to have a roof over her head and something to eat and a little money in her pocket for the balance of her life.”

“All right,” he says. “All right.”

“Except we’ll go on the train,” I says. “It aint that I’m jest simply skeered to go in a airplane: it’s because when we go across Virginia I can see the rest of the place where thatere first immigrant Vladimir Kyrilytch worked his way into the United States.” So I was already on the corner with my grip when he drove up and stopped and opened the door and looked at me and then done what the moving pictures call a double take and says,

“Oh hell.”

“It’s mine,” I says. “I bought it.”

“You,” he says, “in a necktie. That never even had one on before, let alone owned one, in your life.”

“You told me why. It’s a wedding.”

“Take it off,” he says.

“No,” I says.

“I wont travel with you. I wont be seen with you.”