Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Do what?” Varner said. “To who? Dont you know them damn tomcats are halfway to Texas now? Where would you be about now, if it was you? Where would I be, even at my age, if I was footloose enough to prowl any roof I wanted to and could get in when I did? I know damn well where, and so would you—right where they are and still lathering horsemeat.” He went to the door and unlocked it, though the steady irate tattoo of Mrs Varner’s stick was so loud that she apparently did not hear the key turn at all. “Now you go on out to the barn and set down until you cool off. Make Sam dig you some worms and go fishing. If this family needs any head-holding-up done, I’ll tend to it myself.” He turned the knob. “Hell and damnation, all this hullabaloo and uproar because one confounded running bitch finally foxed herself. What did you expect—that she would spend the rest of her life just running water through it?” That was Saturday afternoon. On the next Monday morning the seven men squatting about the gallery of the store saw the clerk, Snopes, coming on foot down the road from Varner’s house, followed by a second man who was carrying a suitcase. The clerk not only wore the gray cloth cap and the minute tie but a coat too, and then they saw that the suitcase which the second man carried was the straw one which Snopes had carried new to Varner’s house one afternoon a year ago and left there. Then they began to look at the man who was carrying it. They saw that the clerk was heeled as by a dog by a man a little smaller than himself but shaped exactly like him. It was as though the two of them were merely graded by perspective. At first glance even the two faces were identical, until the two of them mounted the steps. Then they saw that the second face was a Snopes face right enough, differing from the other only by that unpredictable variation within the iron kinship to which they had become accustomed—in this case a face not smaller than the other exactly but closer, the features plucked together at the center of it not by some inner impulse but rather from the outside, as though by a single swift gesture of the fingers of one hand; a face quick and bright and not derisive exactly, but profoundly and incorrigibly merry behind the bright, alert, amoral eyes of a squirrel or a chipmunk.

They mounted the steps and crossed the gallery, carrying the suitcase. Snopes jerked his head at them exactly as Will Varner himself did it, chewing; they entered the store. After a while three more men came out of the blacksmith shop opposite, so there were a dozen of them about within sight of the gallery when, an hour later, the Varner surrey came up. The Negro, Sam, was driving. Beside him in front was the tremendous battered telescope bag which Mr and Mrs Varner had made their honeymoon to Saint Louis with and which all travelling Varners had used since, even the daughters marrying, sending it back empty, when it would seem to be both symbol and formal notice of moonset, the mundane return, the valedictory of bright passion’s generous impulsive abandon, as the printed card had been of its hopeful dawn. Varner, in the back seat with his daughter, called a general greeting, short, perfectly inflectionless, unreadable. He did not get out, and those on the gallery looked quietly once and then away from the calm beautiful mask beside him beneath the Sunday hat, the veil, above the Sunday dress, even the winter coat, seeing without looking at him as Snopes came out of the store, carrying the straw suitcase, and mounted to the front seat beside the telescope bag. The surrey moved on. Snopes turned his head once and spat over the wheel. He had the straw suitcase on his knees like the coffin of a baby’s funeral.

The next morning Tull and Bookwright returned from Jefferson, where they had delivered another drove of cattle to the railroad. By that night the countryside knew the rest of it—how on that Monday afternoon Varner and his daughter and his clerk had visited his bank, where Varner had cashed a considerable check. Tull said it was for three hundred dollars. Bookwright said that meant a hundred and fifty then, since Varner would discount even his own paper to himself fifty percent. From there they had gone to the courthouse, to the Chancery Clerk’s office, where a deed to the Old Frenchman place was recorded to Flem and Eula Varner Snopes. A Justice of the Peace had a desk in the Circuit Clerk’s office, where they bought the license.

Tull blinked rapidly, telling it. He coughed. “The bride and groom left for Texas right after the ceremony,” he said.

That makes five,” a man named Armstid said. “But they say Texas is a big place.”

“It’s beginning to need to be,” Bookwright said. “You mean six.”

Tull coughed. He was still blinking rapidly. “Mr Varner paid for it too,” he said.

“Paid for what too?” Armstid said.

“The wedding license,” Tull said.

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