Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Look here, young man. I know how dishonorable your intentions are. What I want to know is, how serious they are.” Or if not him, at least somey. Because it wouldn’t be him. Ratliff had told me how Gavin said her doom would be to love once and lose him and then to mourn. Which could have been why she came back to Jefferson: since if all you want is to grieve, it doesn’t matter where you are. So she was lost; she had even lost that remaining one who should have married her for no other reason than that he had done more than anybody else while she was a child to make her into what she was now. But it wouldn’t be him; he had his own prognosis to defend, make his own words good no matter who anguished and suffered.

Yes, lost. She had been driving that black country-banker-cum-Baptist-deacon’s car ever since she got home; apparently she had assumed at first that she would drive it alone, until old Snopes himself objected because of the deafness. So each afternoon she would be waiting in the car when the bank closed and the two of them would drive around the adjacent country while he could listen for the approaching horns if any. Which—the country drives—was in his character since the county was his domain, his barony—the acres, the farms, the crops—since even where he didn’t already hold the mortgage, perhaps already in process of foreclosure even, he could measure and calculate with his eye the ones which so far had escaped him.

That is, except one afternoon a week, usually Wednesday. Old Snopes neither smoked nor drank nor even chewed tobacco; what his jaws worked steadily on was, as Ratliff put it, the same little chunk of Frenchman’s Bend air he had brought in his mouth when he moved to Jefferson thirty years ago. Yes, lost: it wasn’t even to Uncle Gavin: it was Ratliff she went to that afternoon and said, “I cant find who sells the whiskey now.” No, not lost so much, she had just been away too long, explaining to Ratliff why she hadn’t gone to Uncle Gavin: “He’s the County Attorney; I thought—” and Ratliff patting her on the back right there in the street, saying for anybody to hear it since obviously she couldn’t:

“You been away from home too long. Come on. We’ll go git him.”

So the three of them in Gavin’s car drove up to Jakeleg Wattman’s so-called fishing camp at Wyott’s Crossing so she would know where and how herself next time. Which was to drive up to Jakeleg’s little unpainted store (Jakeleg kept it unpainted so that whenever a recurrent new reform-administration sheriff would notify him he had to be raided again, Jakeleg wouldn’t have a lot of paint to scratch up in drawing the nails and dismantling the sections and carrying them another mile deeper into the bottom until the reform reached its ebb and he could move back convenient to the paved road and the automobiles) and get out of the car and step inside where the unpainted shelves were crowded with fishhooks and sinkers and lines and tobacco and flashlight batteries and coffee and canned beans and shotgun shells and the neat row of United States Internal Revenue Department liquor licenses tacked on the wall and Jakeleg in the flopping rubber hip boots he wore winter and summer with a loaded pistol in one of them, behind the chicken-wire-barricaded counter, and you would say, “Howdy, Jake. What you got today?” And he would tell you: the same one brand like he didn’t care whether you liked that brand or not, and the same one price like he didn’t give a damn whether that suited you either. And as soon as you said how many the Negro man (in the flopping hip boots Jakeleg had worn last year) would duck out or down or at least out of sight and reappear with the bottles and stand holding them ntil you had given Jakeleg the money and got your change (if any) back and Jakeleg would open the wicket in the wire and shove the bottles through and you would return to your car and that was all there was to it; taking (Uncle Gavin) Linda right on in with him, saying as likely as not: “Howdy, Jake. Meet Mrs Kohl. She cant hear but there’s nothing wrong with her taste and swallowing.” And maybe Linda said,