Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

But at least they—Jefferson—were holding their own. Because in that same summer, 1945, when Jefferson gained the new Snopes, Ratliff eliminated Clarence. Not that Ratliff shot him or anything like that: he just simply eliminated Clarence as a factor in what Charles’s Uncle Gavin also called their constant Snopes-fear and -dread, or you might say, Snopes-dodging. It happened during the campaign which ended in the August primary election; Charles hadn’t got back home yet by a month, nor was his Uncle Gavin actually presre ot the picnic where it actually happened, where Clarence Snopes was actually defeated in the race for Congress which, being a national election, wouldn’t even take place until next year. That’s what he, Charles, meant by Ratliff doing it. He was in the office when his Uncle Gavin this time ran Ratliff to earth and bayed him and said, “All right. Just exactly what did happen out there that day?”

Senator Clarence Egglestone Snopes, pronounced “Cla’nce” by every free white Yoknapatawpha American whose right and duty it was to go to the polls and mark his X each time old man Will Varner told him to; just Senator Clarence Snopes for the first few years after old Varner ordained or commanded—anyway, translated—him into the upper house of the state legislature in Jackson; beginning presently to put on a little flesh (he had been a big, hulking youth and young man but reasonably hard and active in an awkward kind of way until the sedentary brain work of being one of the elected fathers and guardians and mentors of the parliamentary interests of Yoknapatawpha County began to redden his nose and pouch his eyes and paunch his belt a little) until one hot July day in the middle twenties when no other man in Jefferson or Yoknapatawpha County either under sixty years of age had on a coat, Clarence appeared on the Square in a complete white linen suit with a black Windsor tie, and either just before or just after or maybe it was that same simultaneous start or shock brought it to their notice, they realised that he was now signing himself Senator C. E. Snopes, and Charles’s Uncle Gavin said, “Where did the ‘E’ come from?” and Ratliff said,

“Maybe he picked it up along with thatere white wedding suit going and coming through Memphis to get back and forth to Jackson to work. Because why not? Aint even a elected legislative senator got a few private rights like any free ordinary voter?”

What Charles meant was that Clarence already had them all a little off balance like a prize fighter does his opponent without really hitting him yet. So their emotion was simple docility when they learned that their own private Cincinnatus was not even C. any longer but was Senator Egglestone Snopes; his Uncle Gavin merely said, “Egglestone? Why Egglestone?” and Ratliff merely said,

“Why not?” and even his Uncle Gavin merely said,

“Yes, why not?” So they didn’t really mark it when one day the C. was back again—Senator C. Egglestone Snopes now, with a definite belly and the pouched eyes and a lower lip now full from talking, forensic. Because Clarence was making speeches, anywhere and everywhere, at bond rallies and women’s clubs, any place or occasion where there was a captive audience, because Charles was still in the German prison camp when his Uncle Gavin and Ratliff realised that Clarence intended to run for Congress in Washington and that old Will Varner might quite possibly get him elected to it—the same Clarence Snopes who had moved steadily onward and upward from being old Varner’s privately appointed constable in Varner’s own private Beat Two, then supervisor of the Beat and then elected out of the entire county by means of old Will’s diffused usurious capacity for blackmail, to be the county representative in Jackson; and now, 1945, tapped by all the mutually compounding vote-swapping Varners of the whole congressional district for the House of Representatives in Washington itself, where in the clutches not of a mere neighborhood or sectional Will Varner but of a Will Varner of ational or even international scope, there would be no limit to what he might be capable of unless somebody did something about it. This, until that day in July at the annual Varner’s Mill picnic where by custom and tradition not only the local candidates for county and State offices but even the regional and sectional ones for national offices, like Clarence, even though the election itself would not happen until next year, started the ball rolling. Whereupon Clarence not only failed to appear on the speakers’ platform to announce his candidacy, he disappeared from the picnic grounds before the dinner was even served. And the next day word went over the county that Clarence had not only decided not to run for Congress, he was even withdrawing from public life altogether when his present term in the state senate was up.