Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Except Ratliff. Ratliff alone out of Yoknapatawpha County would know Mink on sight. To be unschooled, untravelled, and to an extent unread, Ratliff had a terrifying capacity for knowledge or local information or acquaintanceship to match the need of any local crisis. Stevens admitted to himself now what he was waiting, dallying, really wasting time for: for Ratliff to drive back in his pickup truck from Parchman, to be hurried on to Memphis without even stopping, cutting the engine, to reveal Mink to the Memphis police and so save Mink’s cousin, kinsman, whatever Flem was, from that just fate; knowing—Stevens—better all the while: that what he really wanted with Ratliff was to find out how Mink had not only got past the Parchman gate without that absolutely contingent money, but had managed it in such a way that apparently only the absolutely unpredicted and unwarranted presence of Ratliff at a place and time that he had no business whatever being, revealed the fact that he hadn’t taken it.

It was not three oclock when Ratliff phoned; it would be almost nine before he reached Jefferson. It was not that the pickup truck wouldn’t have covered the distance faster. It was that no vehicle owned by Ratliff (provided he was in it and conscious, let alone driving it) was going to cover it faster. Besides, at some moment not too lofter six oclock he was going to stop to eat at the next dreary repetitive little cotton-gin hamlet, or (nowadays) on the highway itself, drawing neatly in and neatly parking before the repetitive Dixie Cafes or Mac’s or Lorraine’s, to eat, solitary, neatly and without haste the meat a little too stringy to chew properly and too overcooked to taste at all, the stereotyped fried potatoes and the bread you didn’t chew but mumbled, like one of the paper napkins, the machine-chopped prefrozen lettuce and tomatoes like (except for the tense inviolate color) something exhumed by paleontologists from tundras, the machine-made prefrozen pie and what they would call coffee—the food perfectly pure and perfectly tasteless except for the dousing of machine-made tomato ketchup.

He (Stevens) could, perhaps should, have had plenty of time to drive out to Rose Hill and eat his own decent evening meal. Instead, he telephoned his wife.

“I’ll come in and we can eat at the Holston House,” she said.

“No, honey. I’ve got to see Ratliff as soon as he gets back from Parchman.”

“All right. I think I’ll come in and have supper with Maggie” (Maggie was his sister) “and maybe we’ll go to the picture show and I’ll see you tomorrow. I can come in to town, cant I, if I promise to stay off the streets?”

“You see, you dont help me. How can I resist togetherness if you wont fight back?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow then,” she said. “Good night.” So they ate at the Holston House; he didn’t feel quite up to his sister and brother-in-law and his nephew Charles tonight. The Holston House still clung to the old ways, not desperately nor even gallantly: just with a cold and inflexible indomitability, owned and run by two maiden sisters (that is, one of them, the younger, had been married once but so long ago and so briefly that it no longer counted) who were the last descendants of the Alexander Holston, one of Yoknapatawpha County’s three original settlers, who had built the log ordinary which the modern edifice had long since swallowed, who had had his part—been in fact the catalyst—in the naming of Jefferson over a century ago; they still called the dining room simply the dining room and (nobody knew how) they still kept Negro men waiters, some of whose seniority still passed from father to son; the guests still ate the table d’hôte meals mainly at two long communal tables at the head of each of which a sister presided; no man came there without a coat and necktie and no woman with her head covered (there was a dressing room with a maid for that purpose), not even if she had a railroad ticket in her hand.

Though his sister did pick his wife up in time for the picture show. So he was back in the office when a little after eight-thirty he heard Ratliff on the stairs and said, “All right. What happened?” Then he said, “No. Wait. What were you doing at Parchman?”