Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

So Tug had crossed his Rubicon, and should have been safe now. I mean, Captain McLendon took him in. He—McLendon—was one of a big family of brothers in a big house with a tremendous mother weighing close to two hundred pounds, who liked to cook and eat both so one more wouldn’t matter; maybe she never even noticed Tug. So he should have been safe now while the company waited for orders to move. But the others wouldn’t let him alone; his method of joining the colors was a little too unique, not to mention East Lynne; there was always one to say:

“Tug, is it really so that General Lee didn’t need to give up when he did?1D; and Tug would say,

“That’s what papa says. He was there and seen it, even if he wasn’t but seventeen years old.” And the other would say:

“So you had to go clean against him, clean against your own father, to join the Rifles?” And Tug sitting there quite still now, the hands that never would be able to paint more than the roughest outhouse walls and finesseless fences but which could do things to the intractable and unpredictable mule which few other hands dared, hanging quiet too between his knees, because by now he would know what was coming next. And the other—and all the rest of them within range—watching Tug with just half an eye since the other three halves would be watching Captain McLendon across the room; in fact they usually waited until McLendon had left, was actually out.

“That’s right,” Tug would say; then the other:

“Why did you do it, Tug? You’re past thirty now, safe from the draft, and your father’s an old man alone here with nobody to take care of him.”

“We cant let them Germans keep on treating folks like they’re doing. Somebody’s got to make them quit.”

“So you had to go clean against your father to join the army to make them quit. And now you’ll have to go clean against him again to go round to the other side of the world where you can get at them.”

“I‘m going to France,” Tug would say.

“That’s what I said: halfway round. Which way are you going? east or west? You can pick either one and still get there. Or better still, and I’ll make you a bet. Pick out east, go on east until you find the war, do whatever you aim to do to them Germans and then keep right on going east, and I’ll bet you a hundred dollars to one that when you see Jefferson next time, you’ll be looking at it right square across Miss Joanna Burden’s mailbox one mile west of the courthouse.” But by that time Captain McLendon would be there; probably somebody had gone to fetch him. He may have been such a bad company commander that he was relieved of his command long before it ever saw the lines, and a few years after this he was going to be the leader in something here in Jefferson that I anyway am glad I dont have to lie down with in the dark every time I try to go to sleep. But at least he held his company together (and not by the bars on his shoulders since, if they had been all he had, he wouldn’t have had a man left by the first Saturday night, but by simple instinctive humanity, of which even he, even in the middle of that business he was going to be mixed up in later, seemed to have had a little, like now) until a better captain could get hold of it. He was already in uniform. He was a cotton man, a buyer for one of the Memphis export houses, and he spent most of his commissions gambling on cotton futures in the market, but he never had looked like a farmer until he put on the uniform.

“What the hell’s going on here?” he said. “What the hell do you think Tug is? a damn ant running around a damn orange or something? He aint going around anything: he’s going straight across it, across the water to France to fight for his country, and when they dont need him in France any longer he’s coming back s the same water, back here to Jefferson the same way he went out of it, like we’ll all be damn glad to get back to it. So dont let me hear any more of this” (excrement: my word) “any more.”

Whether or not Tug would continue to need Captain McLendon, he didn’t have him much longer. The company was mustered that week and sent to Texas for training; whereupon, since Tug was competent to paint any flat surface provided it was simple enough, with edges and not theoretical boundaries, and possessed that gift with horses and mules which the expert Pat Stamper had recognised at once to partake of that inexplicable quality called genius, naturally the army made him a cook and detached him the same day, so that he was not only the first Yoknapatawpha County soldier (the Sartoris boys didn’t count since they were officially British troops) to go overseas, he was among the last of all American troops to get back home, which was in late 1919, since obviously the same military which would decree him into a cook, would mislay where it had sent him (not lose him; my own experience between ‘42 and ‘45 taught me that the military never loses anything: it merely buries it).