“That’s all,” Mr Hampton said.
“How did he get in?” Uncle Gavin said.
“He?” Mr Hampton said.
“All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “Take ‘they’ if you like it better.”
“I thought of that too,” Mr Hampton said. “The key. I said the key because even that fool would have more sense than to have a key to that place anywhere except on a string around his neck.”
“That one,” Uncle Gavin said.
“Yep,” Mr Hampton said. “I dropped it into the drawer where I usually keep such, handcuffs and a extra pistol. Anybody could have come in while me and Miss Elma” (she was the office deputy, widow of the sheriff Mr Hampton had succeeded last time) “was out, and taken it.”
“Or the pistol either,” Uncle Gavin said. “You really should start locking that place, Hub. Some day you’ll leave your star in there and come back to find some little boy out on the street arresting people.”
“Maybe it’s lucky you at least had that suitcase locked up. I suppose you’ve still got that, since Mr Gombault hasn’t got back yet?”
“That’s right,” Mr Hampton said.
“And Jack Crenshaw and his buddy are just interested in whiskey, not photography. Which means you haven’t turned that suitcase over to anybody yet.”
“That’s right,” Mr Hampton said.
“Are you going to?” Uncle Gavin said.
“What do you think?” Mr Hampton said.
“That’s what I think too,” Uncle Gavin said.
“After all, the whiskey is enough,” Mr Hampton said. “And even if it aint, all we got to do is show Judge Long just any one of them photographs right before he pronounces sentence. Damn it,” he said, “it’s Jefferson. We live here. Jefferson’s got to come first, even before the pleasure of crucifying that damned—”
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “I’ve heard that sentiment.” Then Mr Hampton left. And all we had to do was just to wait, and not long. You never had to wonder about how much Ratliff had heard because you knew in advance he had heard all of it. He closed the door and stood just inside it.
“Why didn’t you tell him yesterday about Flem Snopes?” he said.
“Because he let Flem Snopes or whoever it was walk right in his office and steal that key. Hub’s already got about all the felonious malfeasance he can afford to compound,” Uncle Gavin said. He finished putting the papers into the briefcase and closed it and stood up.
“You leaving?” Ratliff said.
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “Wyott’s Crossing.”
“You aint going to wait for Flem?”
“He wont come back here,” Uncle Gavin said. “He wont dare. What he came here yesterday to try to bribe me to do is going to happen anyway without the bribe. But he dont dare come back here to find out. He will have to wait and see like anybody else. He knows that.” But still Ratliff didn’t move from the door.
“The trouble with us is, we dont never estimate Flem Snopes right. At first we made the mistake of not estimating him a-tall. Then we made the mistake of overestimating him. Now we’re fixing to make the mistake of underestimating him again. When you jest want money, all you need to do to satisfy yourself is count it and put it where cant nobody get it, and forget about it. But this-here new it. Butg he has done found out it’s nice to have, is different. It’s like keeping warm in winter or cool in summer, or peace or being free or contentment. You cant jest count it and lock it up somewhere safe and forget about it until you feel like looking at it again. You got to work at it steady, never to forget about it. It’s got to be out in the open, where folks can see it, or there aint no such thing.”
“No such thing as what?” Uncle Gavin said.
“This-here new discovery he’s jest made,” Ratliff said. “Call it civic virtue.”
“Why not?” Uncle Gavin said. “Were you going to call it something else?” Ratliff watched Uncle Gavin, curious, intent; it was as if he were waiting for something. “Go on,” Uncle Gavin said. “You were saying.”
Then it was gone, whatever it had been. “Oh yes,” Ratliff said. “He’ll be in to see you. He’ll have to, to make sho you recognize it too when you see it. He may kind of hang around until middle of the afternoon, to kind of give the dust a chance to settle. But he’ll be back then, so a feller can at least see jest how much he missed heading him off.”
So we didn’t drive up to Wyott’s then, and this time Ratliff was the one who underestimated. It wasn’t a half an hour until we heard his feet on the stairs and the door opened and he came in. This time he didn’t take off the black hat: he just said “Morning, gentlemen” and came on to the desk and dropped the key to Montgomery Ward’s studio on it and was going back toward the door when Uncle Gavin said:
“Much obliged. I’ll give it back to the sheriff. You’re like me,” he said. “You dont give a damn about truth either. What you are interested in is justice.”
“I’m interested in Jefferson,” Mr Snopes said, reaching for the door and opening it. “We got to live here. Morning, gentlemen.”
ELEVEN
V. K. RATLIFF
And still he missed it, even set—sitting right there in his own office and actively watching Flem rid Jefferson of Montgomery Ward. And still I couldn’t tell him.
TWELVE
CHARLES MALLISON
Whatever it was Ratliff thought Mr Snopes wanted, I dont reckon that what Uncle Gavin took up next helped it much either. And this time he didn’t even have Miss Melisandre Backus for Mother to blame it on because Miss Melisandre herself was married now, to a man,
a stranger, that everybody but Miss Melisandre (we never did know whether her father, sitting all day long out there on that front gallery with a glass of whiskey-and-water in one hand and Horace or Virgil in the other—a combination which Uncle Gavin said would have insulated from the reality of rural north Mississippi harder heads than his—knew or not) knew was a big rich New Orleans bootlegger. In fact she still refused to believe it even when they brought him home with a bullet hole neatly plugged up in the middle of his forehead, in a bullet-proof hearse leading a cortege of Packards and Cadillac limousines that Hollywood itself, let alone Al Capone, wouldn’t have been ashamed of.
No, that’s wrong. We never did know whether she knew it or not too, even years after he was dead and she had all the money and the two children and the place which in her childhood had been just another Mississippi cotton farm but which he had changed with white fences and weather-vanes in the shape of horses so that it looked like a cross between a Kentucky country club and a Long Island race track, and plenty of friends who felt they owed it to her that she should know where all that money actually came from; and still, as soon as they approached the subject, she would change it—the slender dark girl still, even though she was a millionairess and the mother of two children, whose terrible power was that defenselessness and helplessness which conferred knighthood on any man who came within range, before he had a chance to turn and flee—changing the entire subject as if she had never heard her husband’s name or, in fact, as though he had never lived.
I mean, this time Mother couldn’t even say “If he would only marry Melisandre Backus, she would save him from all this,” meaning Linda Snopes this time like she had meant Mrs Flem Snopes before. But at least she thought about saying it because almost at once she stopped worrying. “It’s all right,” she told Father. “It’s the same thing again: dont you remember? He never was really interested in Melisandre. I mean … you know: really interested. Books and flowers. Picking my jonquils and narcissus as fast as they bloomed, to send out there where that whole two-acre front yard was full of jonquils, cutting my best roses to take out there and sit in that hammock reading poetry to her. He was just forming her mind: that’s all he wanted. And Melisandre was only five years younger, where with this one he is twice her age, practically her grandfather. Of course that’s all it is.”
Then Father said: “Heh heh heh. For
m is right, only it’s on Gavin’s mind, not hers. It would be on mine too if I wasn’t already married and scared to look. Did you ever take a look at her? You’re human even if you are a woman.” Yes, I could remember a heap of times when Father had been born too soon, before they thought of wolf whistles.
“Stop it,” Mother said.
“But after all,” Father said, “maybe Gavin should be saved from those sixteen-year-old clutches. Suppose you speak to him; tell him I am willing to make a sacrifice of myself on the family altar—”
“Stop it! Stop it!” Mother said. “Cant you at least be funny?”
“I’m worse than that, I’m serious,” Father said. “They were at a table in Christian’s yesterday afternoon. Gavin just had a saucer of ice cream but she was eating something in a dish that must have set him back twenty or thirty cents. So maybe Gavin knows what he’s doing after all; she’s got some looks of her own, but she still aint quite up with her mother: you know—” using both hands to make a kind of undulating hourgass shape in the air in front of him while Mother stood watching him like a snake. “Maybe he’s concentrating on just forming her form first you might say, without bothering too much yet about her mind. And who knows? Maybe some day she’ll even look at him like she was looking at that banana split or whatever it was when Skeets McGowan set it down in front of her.”
But by that time Mother was gone. And this time she sure needed somebody like Miss Melisandre, with all her friends (all Jefferson for that matter) on the watch to tell her whenever Uncle Gavin and Linda stopped in Christian’s drugstore after school while Linda ate another banana split or ice cream soda, with the last book of poetry Uncle Gavin had ordered for her lying in the melted ice cream or spilled Coca-Cola on the marble table top. Because I reckon Jefferson was too small for a thirty-five-year-old bachelor, even a Harvard M.A. and a Ph.D. from Heidelberg and his hair already beginning to turn white even at just twenty-five, to eat ice cream and read poetry with a sixteen-year-old high-school girl. Though if it had to happen, maybe thirty-five was the best age for a bachelor to buy ice cream and poetry for a sixteen-year-old girl. I told Mother that. She didn’t sound like a snake because snakes cant talk. But if dentist’s drills could talk she would have sounded just like one.
“There’s no best or safe age for a bachelor anywhere between three and eighty to buy ice cream for a sixteen-year-old girl,” she said. “Forming her mind,” she said. But she sounded just like cream when she talked to Uncle Gavin. No: she didn’t sound like anything because she didn’t say anything. She waited for him to begin it. No: she just waited because she knew he would have to begin it. Because Jefferson was that small. No, I mean Uncle Gavin had lived in Jefferson or in little towns all his life, so he not only knew what Jefferson would be saying about him and Linda Snopes and those banana splits and ice-cream sodas and books of poetry by now, but that Mother had too many good friends to ever miss hearing about it.
So she just waited. It was Saturday. Uncle Gavin walked twice in and out of the office (we still called it that because Grandfather had, except when Mother could hear it. Though after a while even she stopped trying to call it the library) where Mother was sitting at the desk adding up something, maybe the laundry; he walked in and out twice and she never moved. Then he said:
“I was thinking—” Because they were like that. I mean, I thought the reason they were like that was because they were twins. I mean, I assumed that because I didn’t know any other twins to measure them against. She didn’t even stop adding.
“Of course,” she said. “Why not tomorrow?” So he could have gone out then, since obviously both of them knew what the other was talking about. But he said:
“Thank you.” Then he said to me: “Aint Aleck Sander waiting for you outside?”
“Fiddlesticks,” Mother said. “Anything he will learn about sixteen-year-old girls from you will probably be a good deal more innocent than what he will learn some day from sixteen-year-old girls. Shall I telephone her mother and ask her to let her come for dinner tomorrow, or do you want to?”
“Thank you,” Uncle Gavin said.“Do you want me to tell you about it?”
“Do you want to?” Mother said.
“Maybe I’d better,” Uncle Gavin said.
“Do you have to?” Mother said. This time Uncle Gavin didn’t say anything Then Mother said: “All right. We’re listening.” Again Uncle Gavin didn’t say anything. But now he was Uncle Gavin again. I mean, until now he sounded a good deal like I sounded sometimes. But now he stood looking at the back of Mother’s head, with his shock of white hair that always needed cutting and the stained bitt of the corncob pipe sticking out of his breast pocket and the eyes and the face that you never did quite know what they were going to say next except that when you heard it you realised it was always true, only a little cranksided that nobody else would have said it quite that way.
“Well, well,” he said, “if that’s what a mind with no more aptitude for gossip and dirt than yours is inventing and thinking, just imagine what the rest of Jefferson, the experts, have made of it by now. By Cicero, it makes me feel young already; when I go to town this morning I believe I will buy myself a red necktie.” He looked at the back of Mother’s head. “Thank you, Maggie,” he said. “It will need all of us of good will. To save Jefferson from Snopeses is a crisis, an emergency, a duty. To save a Snopes from Snopeses is a privilege, an honor, a pride.”
“Especially a sixteen-year-old female one,” Mother said.
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “Do you deny it?”
“Have I tried to?” Mother said.
“Yes, you have tried.” He moved quick and put his hand on the top of her head, still talking. “And bless you for it. Tried always to deny that damned female instinct for uxorious and rigid respectability which is the backbone of any culture not yet decadent, which remains strong and undecadent only so long as it still produces an incorrigible unreconstructible with the temerity to assail and affront and deny it—like you—” and for a second both of us thought he was going to bend down and kiss her; maybe all three of us thought it. Then he didn’t, or anyway Mother said:
“Stop it. Let me alone. Make up your mind: do you want me to telephone her, or will you do it?”
“I’ll do it,” he said. He looked at me. “Two red ties: one for you. I wish you were sixteen too. What she needs is a beau.”
“Then if by being sixteen I’d have to be her beau, I’m glad I’m not sixteen,” I said. “She’s already got a beau. Matt Levitt. He won the Golden Gloves up in Ohio or somewhere last year. He acts like he can still use them. Would like to, too. No, much obliged,” I said.
“What’s that?” Mother said.
“Nothing,” Uncle Gavin said.
“You never saw him box then,” I said. &;Or you wouldn’t call him nothing. I saw him once. With Preacher Birdsong.”
“And just which of your sporting friends is Preacher Birdsong?” Mother said.
“He aint sporting,” I said. “He lives out in the country. He learned to box in France in the war. He and Matt Levitt—”
“Let me,” Uncle Gavin said. “He—”
“Which he?” Mother said. “Your rival?”
“—is from Ohio,” Uncle Gavin said. “He graduated from that new Ford mechanics’ school and the company sent him here to be a mechanic in the agency garage—”
“He’s the one that owns that yellow cut-down racer,” I said.
“And Linda rides in it?” Mother said.
“—and since Jefferson is not that large and he has two eyes,” Uncle Gavin said, “sooner or later he saw Linda Snopes, probably somewhere between her home and the school house; being male and about twenty-one, he naturally lost no time in making her acquaintance; the Golden Gloves reputation which he either really brought with him or invented somewhere en route has apparently eliminated what rivals he might have expected—”
“Except you,” Mother said.
“That’s all,” U
ncle Gavin said.
“Except you,” Mother said.
“He’s maybe five years her senior,” Uncle Gavin said. “I’m twice her age.”
“Except you,” Mother said. “I dont think you will live long enough to ever be twice any woman’s age, I dont care what it is.”
“All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “What was it I just said? To save Jefferson from a Snopes is a duty; to save a Snopes from a Snopes is a privilege.”
“An honor, you said,” Mother said. “A pride.”
“All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “A joy then. Are you pleased now?” That was all, then. After a while Father came home but Mother didn’t have much to tell him he didn’t already know, so there wasn’t anything for him to do except to keep on needing the wolf whistle that hadn’t been invented yet; not until the next day after dinner in fact.
She arrived a little after twelve, just about when she could have got here after church if she had been to church. Which maybe she had, since she was wearing a hat. Or maybe it was her mother who made her wear the hat on account of Mother, coming up the street from the corner, running. Then I saw that the hat was a little awry on her head, as if something had pulled or jerked at it or it had caught on something in passing, and that she was holding one shoulder with the other hand. Then I saw that her face was mad. IC;What cared too, but right now it was mostly just mad as she turned in the gate, still holding her shoulder but not running now, just walking fast and hard, the mad look beginning to give way to the scared one. Then they both froze into something completely different because then the car passed, coming up fast from the corner—Matt Levitt’s racer because there were other stripped-down racers around now but his was the only one with that big double-barrel brass horn on the hood that played two notes when he pressed the button, going past fast; and suddenly it was like I had smelled something, caught a whiff of something for a second that even if I located it again I still wouldn’t know whether I had ever smelled it before or not; the racer going on and Linda still walking rigid and fast with her hat on a little crooked and still holding her shoulder and still breathing a little fast even if what was on her face now was mostly being scared, on to the gallery where Mother and Uncle Gavin were waiting.