“What? Uncle Billy wont be home now. He’ll be at the store this time of morning.”
“I know it,” he says. “Take this road here.” So we taken that road; we never even seen the store, let alone passed it, on to the house, the gate.
“You sane minute,” I says. “If it’s longer than that, you’ll owe me two more cigars.”
“All right,” he says. And he got out and went on, up the walk and into the house, and I switched off the engine and set there thinking What? What? Miz Varner. Not Uncle Billy: MIZ Varner. That Uncle Billy jest hated him because Flem beat him fair and square, at Uncle Billy’s own figger, out of that Old Frenchman place, while Miz Varner hated him like he was a Holy Roller or even a Baptist because he had not only condoned sin by marrying her daughter after somebody else had knocked her up, he had even made sin pay by getting the start from it that wound him up vice president of a bank. Yet it was Miz Varner he had come all the way out here to see, was willing to pay me three extra dollars for it (I mean, offered. I know now I could a asked him ten.)
No, not thinking What? What? because what I was thinking was Who, who ought to know about this, trying to think in the little time I would have, since his-self had volunteered that-ere one minute, so one minute it was going to be, jest which who that was. Not me, because there wasn’t no more loose dangling Ratliff-ends he could need; and not Lawyer Stevens and Linda and Eula and that going-off-to-school business that had been the last what you might call Snopes uproar to draw attention on the local scene, because that was ended too now, with Linda at least off at the University over at Oxford even if it wasn’t one of them Virginia or New England colleges Lawyer was panting for. I didn’t count Manfred de Spain because I wasn’t on Manfred de Spain’s side. I wasn’t against him neither, it was jest like Lawyer Stevens his-self would a said: the feller that already had as much on his side as Manfred de Spain already had or anyway as ever body in Jefferson whose business it wasn’t neither, believed he had, didn’t need no more. Let alone deserve it.
Only there wasn’t time. It wasn’t one minute quite but it wasn’t two neither when he come out the door in that-ere black hat and his bow tie, still chewing because I doubt if he ever quit chewing any more than he probably taken off that hat while he was inside, back to the car and spit and got in and I started the engine and says, “It wasn’t quite a full two, so I’ll let you off for one,” and he says,
“All right,” and I put her in low and set with my foot on the clutch and says,
‘ “In case she was out, you want to run by the store and tell Uncle Billy you left a message on the ha track for her?” and he chewed a lick or two more and balled up the ambeer and leaned to the window and spit again and set back and we went on to Rockyford and I set up the machine for Miz Ledbetter and she invited us to dinner and we et and come home and at four oclock this morning Uncle Billy druv up to Flem’s house in Jody’s car with his Negro driver and I know why four oclock because that was Miz Varner.
I mean Uncle Billy would go to bed soon as he et his supper, which would be before sundown this time of year, so he would wake up anywhere about one or two oclock in the morning. Of course he had done already broke the cook into getting up then to cook his breakfast but jest one Negro woman rattling pans in the kitchen wasn’t nowhere near enough for Uncle Billy, ever body else hadn’t jest to wake up then but to get up too: stomping around and banging doors and hollering for orning Ud that until Miz Varner was up and dressed too. Only Uncle Billy could eat his breakfast then set in a chair until he smoked his pipe out and then he would go back to sleep until daylight. Only Miz Varner couldn’t never go back to sleep again, once he had done woke her up good.
So this was her chance. I dont know what it was Flem told her or handed her that was important enough to make Uncle Billy light out for town at two oclock in the morning. But it wasn’t no more important to Miz Varner than her chance to go back to bed in peace and quiet and sleep until a decent Christian hour. So she jest never told him or give it to him until he woke up at his usual two a.m.; if it was something Flem jest handed her that she never needed to repeat, likely she never had to get up a-tall but jest have it leaning against the lamp when Uncle Billy struck a match to light it so he could see to wake up the rest of the house and the neighbors.
So I dont know what it was. But it wasn’t no joked-up piece of paper jest in the hopes of skeering Uncle Billy into doing something that until now he hadn’t aimed to do. Because Uncle Billy dont skeer, and Flem Snopes knows it. It had something to do with folks, people, and the only people connected with Jefferson that would make Uncle Billy do something he hadn’t expected until this moment he would do are Eula and Linda. Not Flem; Uncle Billy has knowed for twenty years now exactly what he will do to Flem the first time Flem’s eye falters or his hand slips or his attention wanders.
Let alone going to Uncle Billy his-self with it. Because anything in reference to that bank that Flem would know in advance that jest by handing it or saying it to Miz Varner would be stout enough to move Uncle Billy from Frenchman’s Bend to Jefferson as soon as he heard about it, would sooner or later have to scratch or leastways touch Eula. And maybe Uncle Billy Varner dont skeer and Flem Snopes knows it, but Flem Snopes dont skeer neither and most folks knows that too. And it dont take no especial coward to not want to walk into that store and up to old man Will Varner and tell him his daughter aint reformed even yet, that she’s been sleeping around again for eighteen years now with a feller she aint married to, and that her husband aint got guts enough to know what to do about it.
NINETEEN
CHARLES MALLISON
It was like a circus day or the county fair. Or more: it was like the District or even the whole State field meet because we even had a holiday for it. Only it was more than just a fair or a field day because this one was going to have death in it too though of course we didn’t know that then.
It even began with a sc
hool holiday that we didn’t even know we were going to have. It was as if time, circumstance, geography, contained something which must, anyway was going to, happen and now was the moment and Jefferson, Mississippi, was the place, and so the stage was cleared and set for it.
The school holiday began Tuesday morning. Last week some new people moved to Jefferson, a highway engineer, and their little boy entered the second grade. He must have been already sick when his mother brought him because he had to go home; they sent for her and she came and got him that same afternoon and that night they took him to Memphis. That wasThursday but it wasn’t until Monday afternoon that they got the word back that what he had was polio and they sent word around that the school would be closed while they found out what to do next or what to not do or whatever it was while they tried to learn more about polio or about the engineer’s little boy or whatever it was. Anyhow it was a holiday we hadn’t expected or even hoped for, in April; that April morning when you woke up and you would think how April was the best, the very best time of all not to have to go to school, until you would think Except in the fall with the weather brisk and not-cold at the same time and the trees all yellow and red and you could go hunting all day long; and then you would think Except in the winter with the Christmas holidays over and now nothing to look forward to until summer; and you would think how no time is the best time to not have to go to school and so school is a good thing after all because without it there wouldn’t be any holidays or vacations.
Anyhow we had the holiday, we didn’t know how long; and that was fine too because now you never had to say Only two days left or Only one day left since all you had to do was just be holiday, breathe holiday, today and tomorrow too and who knows? tomorrow after that and, who knows? still tomorrow after that. So on Wednesday when even the children who would have been in school except for the highway engineer’s little boy began to know that something was happening, going on inside the president’s office of the bank—not the old one, the Bank of Jefferson, but the other, the one we still
called the new bank or even Colonel Sartoris’s bank although he had been dead seven years now and Mr de Spain was president of it—it was no more than we expected, since this was just another part of whatever it was time or circumstance or whatever it was had cleared the stage and emptied the school so it could happen.
No, to say that the stage was limited to just one bank; to say that time, circumstance, geography, whatever it was had turned school out in the middle of April in honor of something it wanted to happen inside just one set of walls was wrong. It was all of Jefferson. It was all the walls of Jefferson, the ground they stood on, the air they rose up in; all the walls and air in Jefferson that people moved and breathed and talked in; we were already at dinner except Uncle Gavin, who was never late unless he was out of town on county business, and when he did come in something was already wrong. I mean, I didn’t always notice when something was wrong with him and it wasn’t because I was only twelve yet, it was because you didn’t have to notice Uncle Gavin because you could always tell from Mother since she was his twin; it was like when you said “What’s the matter?” to Mother, you and she and everybody else knew you were saying What’s wrong with Uncle Gavin?
But we could always depend on Father. Uncle Gavin came in at last and sat down and unfolded his napkin and said something wrong and father glanced at him and then went back to eating and then looked at Uncle Gavin again.
“Well,” he said, “I hear they got old Will Varner out of bed at two this morning and brought him all the way in to town to promote Manfred de Spain. Promote him where?”
“What?” Uncle Gavin said.
“Where do you promote a man that’s already president of the bank?” Father said.
“Charley,” Mother said. “Or maybe promote aint the word I want,” Father said. “The one I want is when you promote a man quick out of bed—”
“Charley!” Mother said.
“—especially a bed he never had any business in, not to mention having to send all the way out to Frenchman’s Bend for your pa-in-law to pronounce that word—”
“Charles!” Mother said. That’s how it was. It was like we had had something in Jefferson for eighteen years and whether it had been right or whether it had been wrong to begin with didn’t matter any more now because it was ours, we had lived with it and now it didn’t even show a scar, like the nail driven into the tree years ago that violated and outraged and anguished that tree. Except that the tree hasn’t got much choice either: either to put principle above sap and refuse the outrage and next year’s sap both, or accept the outrage and the sap for the privilege of going on being a tree as long as it can, until in time the nail disappears. It dont go away; it just stops being so glaring in sight, barked over, there is a lump, a bump of course, but after a while the other trees forgive that and everything else accepts that tree and that bump too until one day the saw or the axe goes into it and hits that old nail.
Because I was twelve then. I had reached for the second time that point in the looping circles children—boys anyway—make growing up when for a little while they enter, live in, the same civilisation that grown people use, when it occurs to you that maybe the sensible and harmless things they wont let you do really seem as silly to them as the things they seem either to want to do or have to do seem to you. No: it’s when they laugh at you and suddenly you say, Why, maybe I am funny, and so the things they do are not outrageous and silly or shocking at all: they’re just funny; and more than that, it’s the same funny. So now I could ask. A few more years and I would know more than I knew then. But the loop, the circle, would be swinging on away out into space again where you cant ask grown people because you cant talk to anybody, not even the others your age because they too are rushing on out into space where you cant touch anybody, you dont dare try, you are too busy just hanging on; and you know that all the others out there are just as afraid of asking as you are, nobody to ask, nothing to do but make noise, the louder the better, then at least the other scared ones wont know how scared you are.
But I could still ask now, for a little while. I asked Mother.
“Why dont you ask Uncle Gavin?” she said.
She wanted to tell me. Maybe she even tried. But she couldn’t. It wasn’t because I was only twelve. It was because I was her child, created by her and Father because they wanted to be in bed together and nothing else would do, nobody else would do. You see? If Mrs Snopes and Mr de Spain had been anything else but people, she could have told me. But they were people too, exactly like her and Father; and it’s not that the child mustn’t know that the same magic which made him was the same thing that sent an old man like Mr Will Varner into town at four oclock in the morning just to take something as sorry and shabby as a bank full of money away from another man named Manfed de Spain: it’s because the child couldn’t believe that. Because to the child, he was not created by his mother’s and his father’s passion or capacity for it. He couldn’t have been because he was there first, he came first, before the passion; he created the passion, not only it but the man and the woman who served it; his father is not his father but his son-in-law, his mother not his mother but his daughter-in-law if he is a girl.
So she couldn’t tell me because she could not. And Uncle Gavin couldn’t tell me because he wasn’t able to, he couldn’t have stopped talking in time. That is, that’s what I thought then. I mean, that’s what I thought then was the reason why they—Mother—didn’t tell me: that the reason was just my innocence and not Uncle Gavin’s too and she had to guard both, since maybe she was my mother but she was Uncle Gavin’s twin and if a boy or a girl really is his father’s and her mother’s father-in-law or mother-in-law, which would make the girl her brother’s mother no matter how much younger she was, then a girl with just one brother and him a twin at that, would maybe be his wife and mother too.
So maybe that was why: not that I wasn’t old enough to accept biology, but that everyone should be, deserves to be, must be, defended and protected from the spectators of his own passion save in the most general and unspecific and impersonal terms of the literary and dramatic lay-figures of the protagonists of passion in their bloodless and griefless posturings of triumph or anguish; that no man deserves love since nature did not equip us to bear it but merely to endure and survive it, and so Uncle Gavin’s must not be watched where she could help and fend him, while it anguished on his own unarmored bones.
Though even if they had tried to tell me, it would have been several years yet, not from innocence but from ignorance, before I would know, understand, what I had actually been looking at during the rest of that Wednesday afternoon while all of Jefferson waited for the saw to touch that buried nail. No: not buried, not healed or annealed into the tree but just cysted into it, alien and poison; not healed over, but scabbed over with a scab which merely renewed itself, incapable of healing, like a signpost.
Because ours was a town founded by Aryan Baptists and Methodists, for Aryan Baptists and Methodists. We had a Chinese laundryman and two Jews, brothers with their families, who ran two clothing stores. But one of them had been trained in Russia to be a rabbi and spoke seven languages including classic Greek and Latin and worked geometry problems for relaxation and he was absolved, lumped in the same absolution with old Doctor Wyott, president emeritus of the Academy (his grandfather had founded it), who could read not only Greek and Hebrew but Sanskrit too, who wore two foreign decorations for (we, Jefferson, believed) having been not just a professing but a militant and even boasting atheist for at least six of his eighty years and who had even beaten the senior Mr Wilder-mark at chess; and the other Jewish brother and his family and the Chinese all attended, were members of, the Methodist church and so they didn’t count either, being in our eyes merely non-white people, not actually colored. And although the Chinese was definitely a colored man even if not a Negro, he was only he, single peculiar and barren; not just kinless but even landless, half the world or anyway half the continent (we all knew about San Francisco?
??s Chinatown) sundered from his like and therefore as threatless as a mule.
There is a small Episcopal church in Jefferson, the oldest extant building in town (it was built by slaves and called the best, the finest too, I mean by the Northern tourists who passed through Jefferson now with cameras, expecting—we dont know why since they themselves had burned it and blown it up with dynamite in 1863—to find Jefferson much older or anyway older looking than it is and faulting us a little—because it isn’t) and a Presbyterian congregation too, the two oldest congregations in the county, going back to the old days of Issetibbeha, the Chickasaw chief, and his sister’s son Ikkemotubbe whom they called Doom, before the County was a county and Jefferson was Jefferson. But nowadays there wasn’t much difference between the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches and Issetibbeha’s old mounds in the low creek bottoms about the county because the Baptists and Methodists had heired from them, usurped and dispossessed; ours a town established and decreed by people neither Catholics nor Protestants nor even atheists but incorrigible nonconformists, nonconformists not just to everybody else but to each other in mutual accord; a nonconformism defended and preserved by descendants whose ancestors hadn’t quitted home and security for a wilderness in which to find freedom of thought as they claimed and oh yes, believed, but to find freedom in which to be incorrigible and unreconstructible Baptists and Methodists; not to escape from tyranny as they claimed and believed, but to establish one.