Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

His uncle didn’t knock; they entered running, his uncle choosing by simple orientation the door beyond which old Meadowfill would have to be to use that particular window, and he was there, leaning forward in the wheel chair at the window, the glass sash of which was already raised though the screen was still down, the little rifle already half raised in one hand, the other hand grasping the handle to the screen to jerk it up. But he—Meadowfill—was just sitting there yet, looking at the hog. The town had got used to seeing meanness and vindictiveness and rage in his face; they were normal. But this time there was nothing in his face but gloating. He didn’t even turn his head when Charles and his uncle entered: he just said, “Come right in; you got a grandstand seat.” Now they could hear him cursing: not hard honest outdoors swearing but the quiet murmuring indoors obscenity which, Charles thought, if he ever had used it, his gray hairs should have forgot it now.

Then he began to stand up from the wheel chair and then Charles saw it too—a smallish lump a little longer than a brick, wrapped in a piece of gunny sack, bound in a crotch of the nearest peach tree about twenty feet from the house so that it pointed at the window, his uncle saying, “Stop! Stop! Dont raise it!” and even reaching for the screen, but too late; old Meadowfill, standing now, leaned the rifle beside the window and pu both hands on the handle and jerked the screen up. Then the light sharp vicious spat of the .22 cartridge from the peach tree; his uncle said he was actually looking at the rising screen when the wire frayed and vanished before the miniature blast; Charles himself seemed actually to hear the tiny pellets hiss across old Meadowfill’s belly and chest as the old man half-leaped half-fell backward into the chair which rushed from under him, leaving him asprawl on the floor, where he lay for a moment with on his face an expression of incredulous outrage: not pain, not anguish, fright: just outrage, already reaching for the rifle as he sat up.

“Somebody shot me!” he said.

“Certainly,” his uncle said, taking the rifle away from him. “That hog did. Can you blame it? Just lie still now until we can see.”

“Hog, hell,” old Meadowfill said. “It was that blank blank blank McKinley Smith!”

He wasn’t hurt: just burned, blistered, the tiny shot which had had to penetrate not only his pants and shirt but his winter underwear too, barely under his skin. But mad as a hornet, raging, bellowing and cursing and still trying to take the rifle away from Charles’s uncle (Mrs Meadowfill was in the room now, the shawl already clutched about her head as if some fatalistic hopeless telepathy communicated to her the instant the hog crossed their unfenced boundary, like the electric eye that opens doors) until at last he exhausted himself into what would pass with him for rationality. Then he told it: how Snopes had told Essie two days ago that he had given the hog to McKinley as a housewarming present or maybe even—Snopes hoped—a wedding gift some day soon, with Charles’s uncle saying, “Hold on a minute. Did Essie say Mr Snopes gave the hog to McKinley, or did she say Mr Snopes told her he had?”

“What?” Meadowfill said. “What?” Then he just began to curse again.

“Lie still,” Charles’s uncle said. “You’ve been shooting that hog for over a year now without hurting it so I reckon you can stand one shot yourself. But we’ll have a doctor on your wife’s account.”

His uncle had the gun too: a very neat homemade booby trap: a cheap single-shot .22 also, sawed-off barrel and stock and fastened to a board, the whole thing wrapped in the piece of feed sack and bound in the crotch of the tree, a black strong small-gauge length of reel-backing running from the trigger through a series of screw eyes to the sash of the window screen, the muzzle trained at the center of the window about a foot above the sill.

“If he hadn’t stood up before he raised that screen, the charge would have hit him square in the face,” Charles said.

“So what?” his uncle said. “Do you think who put it there cared? Whether it merely frightened and enraged him into rushing at Smith with that rifle”—it had a solid bullet in it this time, the big one: the long rifle; this time old Meadowfill aimed to hurt what he shot—“and compelling Smith to kill him in self-defense, or whether the shot blinded him or killed him right there in his wheel chair and so solved the whole thing? Her father dead and her sweetheart in jail for murdering him, and only Essie to need to deal withthe D;

“It was pretty smart,” Charles said.

“It was worse. It was bad. Nobody would ever have believed any one except a Pacific veteran would have invented a booby trap, no matter how much he denied it.”

“It was still smart,” Charles said. “Even Smith will agree.”

“Yes,” his uncle said. “That’s why I wanted you along. You were a soldier too. I may need an interpreter to talk to him.”