Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

The other looked at him, chewing. Otherwise he didn’t move, he didn’t even seem to breathe. After a moment he said, “No.” He rose, without haste. “All right,” he said. He took his wallet from his hip and extracted a folded paper and gave it to Ratliff. It was Quick’s bill-of-sale for the fifty goats. “Got a match?” Snopes said. “I dont smoke.” Ratliff gave him the match and watched him set fire to the note and hold it, blazing, then drop it still blazing into the sand-box and then crush the carbon to dust with his toe. Then he looked up; Ratliff had not moved. And now just for another instant Ratliff believed he saw the jaw stop. “Well?” Snopes said. “What?” Ratliff drew the second note from his pocket. And then he knew that the jaw had stopped chewing. It did not move at all during the full minute while the broad impenetrable face hung suspended like a balloon above the soiled dog-eared paper, front back then front again. The face looked at Ratliff again with no sign of life in it, not even breathing, as if the body which belonged to it had learned somehow to use over and over again its own suspirations. “You want t collect this too,” he said. He handed the note back to Ratliff. “Wait here,” he said. He crossed the room to the rear door and went out. What, Ratliff thought. He followed. The squat reluctant figure was going on, in the sunlight now, toward the fence to the livery lot. There was a gate in it. Ratliff watched Snopes pass through the gate and go on across the lot, toward the barn. Then something black blew in him, a suffocation, a sickness, nausea. They should have told me! he cried to himself. Somebody should have told me! Then, remembering: Why, he did! Bookwright did tell me. He said Another one. It was because I have been sick, was slowed up, that I didn’t—He was back beside the desk now. He believed he could hear the dragging block long before he knew it was possible, though presently he did hear it as Snopes entered and turned, moving aside, the block thumping against the wooden step and the sill, the hulking figure in the bursting overalls blotting the door, still looking back over its shoulder, entering, the block thumping and scraping across the floor until it caught and lodged behind the counter leg where a three-year-old child would have stooped and lifted it clear though the idiot himself merely stood jerking fruitlessly at the string and beginning a wet whimpering moaning at once pettish and concerned and terrified and amazed until Snopes kicked the block free with his toe. They came on to the desk where Ratliff stood—the mowing and bobbing head, the eyes which at some instant, some second once, had opened upon, been vouchsafed a glimpse of, the Gorgon-face of that primal injustice which man was not intended to look at face to face and had been blasted empty and clean forever of any thought, the slobbering mouth in its mist of soft gold hair. “Say what your name is,” Snopes said. The creature looked at Ratliff, bobbing steadily, drooling. “Say it,” Snopes said, quite patiently. “Your name.”

“Ike H-mope,” the idiot said hoarsely.

“Say it again.”

“Ike H-mope.” Then he began to laugh, though almost at once it stopped being laughing and Ratliff knew that it had never been laughing, cachinnant, sobbing, already beyond the creature’s power to stop it, galloping headlong and dragging breath behind it like something still alive at the galloping heels of a cossack holiday, the eyes above the round mouth fixed and sightless.

“Hush,” Snopes said. “Hush.” At last he took the idiot by the shoulder, shaking him until the sound began to fall, bubbling and gurgling away. Snopes led him toward the door, pushing him on ahead, the other moving obediently, looking backward over his shoulder at the block with its two raked snuff tins dragging at the end of the filthy string, the block about to lodge again behind the same counter leg though this time Snopes kicked it free before it stopped. The hulking shape—the backlooking face with its hanging mouth and pointed faun’s ears, the bursting overalls drawn across the incredible female thighs—blotted the door again and was gone. Snopes closed the door and returned to the desk. He spat again into the sand-box. “That was Isaac Snopes,” he said. “I’m his guardian. Do you want to see the papers?”