Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“I come to you for legal lawyer’s advice,” Snopes said. “You give it to me: give the hawg away. I owe the fee for it. If five dollars aint enough, say so.” Then he was gone. Stevens was thinking fast now, not Why did he choose mei because that was obvious: he had drawn Essie Meadowfill’s deed to the property under dispute; he was the only person in Jefferson outside Meadowfill’s family with whom old Meadowfill had had anything resembling human contact in almost twenty years. Nor even Why did Snopes need to notify any outsider, lawyer or not, that he intended to give that hog away? Nor even Why did he lead me into saying the actual words first myself, technically constituting them paid-for legal advice? Instead, what Stevens thought was How, by giving that hog away, is he going to compel old Meadowfill to sell that lot?

His Uncle Gavin always said he was not really interested in truth nor even in justice: that all he wanted was just to know, to find out, whether the answer was any of his business or not; and that all means to that end were valid, provided he left neither hostile witnesses nor incriminating evidence. Charles didn’t believe him; some of his methods were not only too hard, they took too long; and there are some things you simply do not do even to find out. But his uncle said that Charles was wrong: that curiosity is another of the mistresses whose slaves decline no sacrifice.

The trouble in this case was, his uncle didn’t know what he was looking for. He had two methods—inquiry and observation—and three leads—Snopes, the hog, and Meadowfill—to discover what he might not recognise in time even when he found it. He couldn’t use inquiry, because the only one who might know the answer—Snopes—had already told all he intended for anyone to know. And he couldn’t use observation on the hog because, like Snopes, it could move too. Which left only the one immobile: old Meadowfill. So he picked Charles up the next morning and at daylight they were ambushed also in his uncle’s parked car where they could see the Meadowfill house and orchard and the lane leading to Snopes’s house and, as the other point of the triangle, the little new house which McKinley Smith had almost finished. They sat there for two hours. They watched McKinley depart on his mule for his cotton patch. Then Snopes himself came out of his yard into the lane and went on toward town, the Square. Presently it was time for even Essie Meadowfill to go to work. Thenthere remained only old Meadowfill ambushed behind his window. Only the hog was missing.

“If that’s what we’re waiting for,” Charles said.

“I agree,” his uncle said.

“I mean, to distract the eyes that have probably been watching us for the last two hours long enough for us to get away.”

“I didn’t want to come either,” his uncle said. “But I had to or give that five dollars back.”

And the next morning was the same. By then it was too late to quit; they both had too much invested now, not even counting Snopes’s five dollars: two days of getting up before dawn, to sit for two hours in the parked car without even a cup of coffee, waiting for what they were not even sure they would recognise when they saw it. It was the third morning; McKinley and his mule had departed on schedule: so regular and normal that he and his uncle didn’t even realise they had not seen Snopes yet until Essie Meadowfill herself came out of the house on her way to work. To Charles it was like one of those shocks, starts such as when you find yourself waking up without knowing until then you were asleep; his uncle was already getting out of the car to begin to run when they saw the hog. That is, it was the hog and it was doing exactly what they expected it to do: moving toward MeadowfilPs orchard at that twinkling purposeful porcine trot. Only it was not where it should have been when it first became visible. It was going where they expected it to be going, but it was not coming from where it should have been coming from. It was coming not from the direction of Snopes’s house but from that of McKinley Smith’s. His uncle was already running, possibly from what Ratliff called his uncle’s simple instinct or affinity for being where something was going to happen, even if he wasn’t always quite on time, hurrying—Charles too of course—across the street and the little yard and into the house before old Meadowfill would see the hog through the window and make the shot.