Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“I was just a major,” Charles said. “I never had enough rank to tell anything to any sergeant, let alone a Marine one.”

“He was just a corporal,” his uncle said.

“He was still a Marine,” Charles said.

Only they didn’t go to Smith first; he would be in his cotton patch now anyway. And, Charles told himself, if Snopes had been him, there wouldn’t be anybody in Snopes’s house either. But there was. Snopes opened the door himself; he was wearing an apron and carrying a frying pan; there was even a fried egg in it. But there wasn’t anything in his face at all. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Come in.”

“No thanks,” Charles’s uncle said. “It wont take that long. This is yours, I think.” There was a table; his uncle laid the sack-wrapped bundle on it and flipped the edge of the sacking, the mutilated rifle sliding across the table. And still there was nothing whatever in Snopes’s face or voice:

“Thatere is what you lawyers call debatable, aint it?”

“Oh yes,” Charles’s uncle said. “Everybody knows about fingerprints now, just as they do about booby traps.”

“Yes,” Snopes said. “Likely you aint making me a present of it.”

“That’s right,” his uncle said. “I’m selling it to you. For a deed to Essie Meadowfill for that strip of your lot the oil company wants to buy, plus that thirteen feet that Mr Meadowfill thought he owned.” And now indeed Snopes didn’t move, immobile with the cold egg in the frying pan. “That’s right,” his uncle said. “In that case, I’ll see if McKinley Smith wants to buy it.”

Snopes looked at his uncle a moment. He was smart; you would have to give him that, Charles thought. “I reckon you would,” he said. “Likely that’s what I would do myself.”

“That’s what I thought,” his uncle said.

“I reckon I’ll have to go and see Cousin Flem,” Snopes said.

“I reckon not,” his uncle said. “I just came from the bank.”

“I reckon I would have done that myself too,” Snopes said. “What time will you be in your office?”

And he and his uncle could have met Smith at his house at sundown too. Instead, it was not even noon when Charles and his uncle stood at the fence and watched McKinley and the mule come up the long black shear of turning earth like the immobilised wake of the plow’s mold board. Then he was standing across the fence from them, naked from the waist up in his overalls and combat boots. Charles’s uncle handed him the deed. “Here,” his uncle said.

Smith read it. “This is Essie’s.”

“Then marry her,” his uncle said. “Then you can sell the lot and buy a farm. Aint that what you both want? Haven’t you got a shirt or a jumper here with you? Get it and you can ride back with me; the major here will bring the mule.”

“No,” Smith said; he was already shoving, actually ramming the deed into his pocket as he turned back to the mule. “I’ll bring him in. I’m going home first. I aint going to marry nobody without a necktie and a shave.”

Then they had to wait for the Baptist minister to wash his hands and put on his coat and necktie; Mrs Meadowfill was already wearing the first hat anybody had ever seen on her; it looked a good deal like the first hat anybody ever made. “But papa,” Essie said.

“Oh,” Charles’s uncle said. “You mean that wheel chair. It belongs to me now. It was a legal fee. I’m going to give it to you and McKinley for a christening present as soon as you earn it.”

Then it was two days later, in the office.

“You see?” his uncle said. “It’s hopeless. Even when you get rid of one Snopes, there’s already another one behind you even before you can turn around.”

“That’s right,” Ratliff said serenely. “As soon as you look, you see right away it aint nothing but jest another Snopes.”

FIFTEEN

Linda Kohl was already home too when Charles got back. From her war also: the Pascagoula shipyard where she finally had her way and became a riveter; his Uncle Gavin told him, a good one. At least her hands, fingernails, showed it: not bitten, gnawed down, but worn off. And now she had a fine, a really splendid dramatic white streak in her hair running along the top of her skull almost like a plume. A collapsed plume; in fact, maybe that was what it was, he thought: a collapsed plume lying flat athwart her skull instead of cresting upward first then back and over; it was the fall of 1945 now and the knight had run out of tourneys and dragons, the war itself had slain them, used them up, made them obsolete.