Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

So what Charles’s Uncle Gavin really wanted to know was not so much what had happened to Clarence, as what had happened to old Will Varner. Because whatever eliminated Clarence from the congressional race would have to impact not on Clarence but on old Will; it wouldn’t have needed to touch Clarence at all in fact. Because nobody really minded Clarence just as you dont mind a stick of dynamite until somebody fuses it; otherwise he was just so much sawdust and greasy paper that wouldn’t even burn good set on fire. He was unprincipled and without morals of course but, without a guiding and prompting and absolving hand or intelligence, Clarence himself was anybody’s victim since all he had was his blind instinct for sadism and overreaching, and was himself really dangerous only to someone he would have the moral and intellectual ascendency of, which out of the entire world’s population couldn’t possibly be anybody except another Snopes, and out of the entire Snopes population couldn’t possibly be more than just one of them. In this case it was his youngest brother Doris—a hulking youth of seventeen who resembled Clarence not only in size and shape but the same mentality of a child and the moral principles of a wolverine, the only difference being that Doris hadn’t been elected to the state legislature yet. Back in the late twenties Byron Snopes, who looted Colonel Sartoris’s bank and fled to Texas, sent back C.O.D. four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children which Clarence, spending the summer at home between two legislative sessions, adopted into a kind of peonage of practical jokes. Only, being a state senator now, Clarence had to be a little careful about his public dignity, not for the sake of his constituency but because even he knew a damn sight better than to take chances with old Will Varner’s standards of amour-propre. So he would merely invent the jokes and use his brother Doris to perpetrate them, until the four Indian children finally caught Doris alone in no man’s land and captured him and tied him to a stake in the woods and even had the fire burning when someone heard his screams and got there in time to save him.

But Clarence himself was in his late twenties then, already a state senator; his career had begun long before that, back when he was eighteen or nineteen years old out at Varner’s store and became leader of a subjugated (he was big and strong and Ratliff said really liked fighting, provided the equality in size was enough in his favor) gang of cousins and toadies who fought and drank and gambled and beat up Negroes and terrified women and young girls around Frenchman’s Bend until (Ratliff said) old Varner became irritated and exasperated enough to take him out of the public domain by ordering the local j.p. to appoint Clarence his constable. That was where and when Clarence’s whole life, existence, destiny, seemed at last to find itself like a rocket does at the first touch of fire.