Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Yes,” the Sheriff said. “I reckon you would. Let’s step over to the bank and see Mr Snopes; maybe all three of us can figure out something. Or maybe Mrs Kohl. You’ll have to tell her too, I reckon.”

Whereupon Stevens repeated almost verbatim what Ratliff had said into the telephone after he had put it down: “Tell a woman that apparently she just finished murdering her father at eight oclock this morning?”

“All right, all right,” the Sheriff said. “You want me to come to the bank with you?”

“No,” Stevens said. “Not yet anyway.”

“I still think you have found a booger where there wasn’t one,” the Sheriff said. “If he comes back here at all, it’ll just be out at Frenchman’s Bend. Then all we’ll have to do is pick him up the first time we notice him in town and have a talk with him.”

“Notice, hell,” Stevens said. “Aint that what I’m trying to tell you? that you dont notice him. That was the mistake Jack Houston made thirty-eight years ago: he didn’t notice him either until he stepped out from behind that bush that morning with that shotgun—if he even stepped out of the bushes before he shot, which I doubt.”

He recrossed the Square rapidly, thinking Yes, I really am a coward, after all when that quantity, entity with which he had spent a great deal of his life talking or rather having to listen to (his skeleton perhaps, which would outlast the rest of him by a few months or years—and without doubt would spend that time moralising at him while he would be helpless to answer back) answered immediately Oíd anyone ever say you were noti Then he But I am not a coward: I am a humanitarian. Then the other You are not even an original; that word is customarily used as a euphemism for it.

The bank would be closed now. But when he crossed the Square to the sheriff’s office the car with Linda behind the wheel had not been waiting so this was not the day of the weekly whiskey run. The shades were drawn but after some knob-rattling at the side door one of the bookkeepers peered out and recognised him and let him in; he passed on through the machine-clatter of the day’s recapitulation—the machines themselves sounding immune and even inattentive to the astronomical sums they reduced to staccato trivia—and knocked at the door on which Colonel Sartoris had had the word PRIVATE lettered by hand forty years ago, and opened it.

Snopes was sitting not at the desk but with his back to it, facing the cold now empty fireplace, his feet raised and crossed against the same heel scratches whose initial inscribing Colonel Sartoris had begun. He was not reading, he was not doing anything: just sitting there with his black planter’s hat on, his lower jaw moving faintly and steadily as though he were chewing something, which as the town knew also he was not; he didn’t even lower his feet when Stevens came to the desk (it was a broad flat table littered with papers in a sort of neat, almost orderly way) and said almost in one breath:

“Mink left Parchman at eight oclock this morning. I dont know whether you know it or not but we—I had some money waiting to be given to him at the gate, under condition that in accepting it he had passed his oath to leave Mississippi without returning to Jefferson and never cross the state line again. He didn’t take the money; I dont know yet how since he was not to be given the pardon until he did. He caught a ride in a passing truck and has disappeared. The truck was headed north.”

“How much was it?” Snopes said.

“What?” Stevens said.

“The money,” Snopes said.

“Two hundred and fifty dollars,” Stevens said.

“Much obliged,” Snopes said.

“Good God, man,” Stevens said. “I tell you a man left Parchman at eight oclock this morning on his way here to murder you and all you say is Much obliged?”

The other didn’t move save for the faint chewing motion; Stevens thought with a kind of composed and seething rage If he would only spit now and then. “Then all he had was that ten dollars they give them when they turn them loose,” Snopes said.

“Yes,” Stevens said. “As far as we—I know. But yes.” Or even just go through the motions of spitting now and then he thought.

“Say a man thought he had a grudge against you,” Snopes said. “A man sixty-three years old now with thirty-eight of that spent in the penitentiary and even before that wasn’t much, not much bigger than a twelve-year-old boy—”