“But jest suppose I dont—” He didn’t add change in time because he stopped himself.
“He’s going to take that risk,” I said. “He’s got to. I mean, he’s got to now. He couldn’t have stopped them from sending you here. But he knows you think he didn’t try. He’s got to help you get out not only to prove to you he never put you here but so he can quit thinking and remembering that you believe he did. You see?”
He was completely still, just blinking a little, his hands hanging empty but even now shaped inside the palms like the handles of a plow and even his neck braced a little as though still braced against the loop of the plowlines. “I just got five more years, then I’ll get out by myself. Then wont nobody have no right to hold expectations against me. I wont owe nobody no help then.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Just five more years. That’s practically nothing to a man that has already put in fifteen years with a man with a shotgun watching him plow cotton that aint his whether he feels like plowing that day or not, and another man with a shotgun standing over him while he eats grub that he either ate it or not whether he felt like eating or not, and another man with a shotgun to lock him up at night so he could either go to sleep or stay awake whether he felt like doing it or not. Just five years more, then you’ll be out where the free sun and air can shine on you without any man with a shotgun’s shadow to cut it off. Because you’ll be free.”
“Free,” he said, not loud: just like that: “Free.” That was all. It was that easy. Of course the guard I welshed to cursed me; I had expected that: it was a free country; every convict had a right to try to escape just as every guard and trusty had the right to shoot him in the back the first time he didn’t halt. But no unprintable stool pigeon had the right to warn the guard in advance.
I had to watch it too. That was on the bill too: the promissory note of breathing in a world that had Snopeses in it. I wanted to turn my head or anyway shut my eyes. But refusing to not look was all I had left now: the last sorry lousy almost worthless penny—the damn little thing looking like a little girl playing mama in the calico dress and sunbonnet that he believed was Flem’s idea (that had been difficult; he still wanted to believe that a man should be permitted to run at his fate, even if that fate was doom, in the decency and dignity of pants; it took a little doing to persuade him that a petticoat and a woman’s sunbonnet was all Flem could get). Walking; I had impressed that on him: not to run, but walk; as forlorn and lonely and fragile and alien in that empty penitentiary compound as a paper doll blowing across a rolling mill; still walking even after he had passed the point where he couldn’t come back and knew it; even still walking on past the moment when he knew that he had been sold and that he should have known all along he was being sold, not blaming anybody for selling him nor even needing to sell him because hadn’t he signed—he couldn’t read but he could sign his name—that same promissory note too to breathe a little while, since his name was Snopes?
So he even ran before he had to. He ran right at them before I even saw them, before they stepped out of the ambush. I was proud, not just to be kin to him but of belonging to what Reba called all of us poor son of a bitches. Because it took five of them striking and slashing at his head with pistol barrels and even then it finally took the blackjack to stop him, knock him out.
The Warden sent for me. “Dont tell me anything,” he said. “I wish I didn’t even know as much already as I suspect. In fact, if it was left to me, I’d like to lock you and him both in a cell and leave you, you for choice in handcuffs. But I’m under a bond too so I’m going to move you into solitary for a week or so, for your own protection. And not from him.”
“Dont brag or grieve,” I said. “You had to sign one of them too.”
“What?” he said. “What did you say?”
“I said you dont need to worry. He hasn’t got anything against me. If you dont believe me, send for him.”
So he came in. The bruises and slashes from the butts and the blades of the sights were healing fine. The blackjack of course never had showed. “Hidy,” he said. To me. “I reckon you’ll see Flem before I will now.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Tell him he hadn’t ought to used that dress. But it dont matter. If I had made it out then, maybe I would a changed. But I reckon I wont now. I reckon I’ll jest wait.”
So Flem should have taken that suggestion about the ten grand. He could still do it. I could write him a letter: Sure you can raise ten thousand. All you need to do is swap Manfred de Spain a good jump at your wife. No: that wont do: trying to peddle Eula Varner to Manfred de Spain is like trying to sell a horse to a man that’s already been feeding and riding it for ten or twelve years. But you got that girl, Linda. She aint but eleven or twelve but what the hell, put smoked glasses and high heels on her and rush her in quick and maybe De Spain wont notice it.
Except that I wasn’t going to. But it wasn’t that that worried me. It was knowing that I wasn’t, knowing I was going to throw it away—I mean my commission of the ten grand for contacting the Chi syndicate for him. I dont remember just when it was, I was probably pretty young, when I realised that I had come from what you might call a family, a clan, a race, maybe even a species, of pure sons of bitches. So I said, Okay, okay, if that’s the way it is, we’ll just show them. They call the best of lawyers, lawyers’ lawyers and the best of actors an actor’s actor and the best of athletes a ballplayer’s ballplayer. All right, that’s what we’ll do: every Snopes will make it his private and personal aim to have the whole world recognise him as THE son of a bitch’s son of a bitch.
But we never do it. We never make it. The best we ever do is to be just another Snopes son of a bitch. All of us, every one of us—Flem, and old Ab that I dont even know exactly what kin he is, and Uncle Wes and mine and Clarence’s father I.O., then right on down the line: Clarence and me by what you might call simultaneous bigamy, and Virgil and Vardaman and Bilbo and Byron and Mink. I dont even mention Eck and Wallstreet and Admiral Dewey because they dont belong to us. I have always believed that Eck’s mother took some extracurricular night work nine months before he was born. So the one true bitch we had was not a bitch at all but a saint and martyr, the one technically true pristine immaculate unchallengeable son of a bitch we ever produced wasn’t even a Snopes.
FIVE
When his nephew was gone, the Warden said, “Sit down.” He did so. “You got in the paper,” the Warden said. It was folded on the desk facing him:
TRIES PRISON BREAK
DISGUISED IN WOMEN’S CLOTHES
Parchman, Miss. Sept 8, 1923 M.C. “Mink” Snopes, under life sentence for murder from Yoknapatawpha County…
“What does the ‘C’ in your name stand for?” the Warden said. His voice was almost gentle. “We all thought your name was just Mink. That’s what you told us, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Mink Snopes.”
“What does the ‘C stand for? They’ve got it M.C. Snopes here.”
“Oh,” he said. “Nothing. Just M.C. Snopes like I. C. Railroad. It was them young fellers from the paper in the hospital that day. They kept on asking me what my name was and I said Mink Snopes and they said Mink aint a name, it’s jest a nickname. What’s your real name? And so I said M.C. Snopes.”
“Oh,” the Warden said. “Is Mink all the name you’ve got?”
“That’s right. Mink Snopes.”
“What did your mother call you?”
“I dont know. She died. The first I knowed my name was just Mink.” He got up. “I better go. They’re likely waiting for me.”
“Wait,” the Warden said. “Didn’t you know it wouldn’t work? Didn’t you know you couldn’t get away with it?”
“They told me,” he said. “I was warned.” He stood, not moving, relaxed, small and frail, his face downbent a little, musing, peaceful, almost like faint smiling. “He hadn’t ought to fooled me to get caught in that dress and sunbonnet,” he said. “I wou
ldn’t a done that to him.”
“Who?” the Warden said. “Not your … is it nephew?”
“Montgomery Ward?” he said. “He was my uncle’s grandson. No. Not him.” He waited a moment. Then he said again, “Well I better—”
“You would have got out in five more years,” the Warden said. “You know they’ll probably add on another twenty now, dont you?”
“I was warned of that too,” he said.
“All right,” the Warden said. “You can go.”
This time it was he who paused, stopped. “I reckon you never did find out who sent me them forty dollars.”
“How could I?” the Warden said. “I told you that at the time. All it said was From a Friend. From Memphis.”
“It was Flem,” he said.
“Who?” the Warden said. “The cousin you told me refused to help you after you killed that man? That you said could have saved you if he had wanted to? Why would he send you forty dollars now, after fifteen years?”
“It was Flem,” he said. “He can afford it. Besides, he never had no money hurt against me. He was jest getting a holt with Will Varner then and maybe he figgered he couldn’t resk getting mixed up with a killing, even if hit was his blood kin. Only I wish he hadn’t used that dress and sunbonnet. He never had to do that.”
They were picking the cotton now; already every cotton county in Mississippi would be grooming their best fastest champions to pick against the best of Arkansas and Missouri for the championship picker of the Mississippi Valley. But he wouldn’t be here. No champion at anything would ever be here because only failures wound up here: the failures at killing and stealing and lying. He remembered how at first he had cursed his bad luck for letting them catch him but he knew better now: that there was no such thing as bad luck or good luck: you were either born a champion or not a champion and if he had been born a champion Houston not only couldn’t, he wouldn’t have dared, misuse him about that cow to where he had to kill him; that some folks were born to be failures and get caught always, some folks were born to be lied to and believe it, and he was one of them.
It was a fine crop, one of the best he remembered, as though everything had been exactly right: season: wind and sun and rain to sprout it, the fierce long heat of summer to grow and ripen it. As though back there in the spring the ground itself had said, All right, for once let’s confederate instead of fighting—the ground, the dirt which any and every tenant farmer and sharecropper knew to be his sworn foe and mortal enemy—the hard implacable land which wore out his youth and his tools and then his body itself. And not just his body but that soft mysterious one he had touched that first time with amazement and reverence and incredulous excitement the night of his marriage, now worn too to such leather-toughness that half the time, it seemed to him most of the time, he would be too spent with physical exhaustion to remember it was even female. And not just their two, but those of their children, the two girls to watch growing up and be able to see what was ahead of that tender and elfin innocence; until was it any wonder that a man would look at that inimical irreconcilable square of dirt to which he was bound and chained for the rest of his life, and say to it: You got me, you’ll wear me out because you are stronger than me since I’m jest bone and flesh. I cant leave you because I cant afford to, and you know it. Me and what used to be the passion and excitement of my youth until you wore out the youth and I forgot the passion, will be here next year with the children of our passion for you to wear that much nearer the grave, and you know it; and the year after that, and the year after that, and you know that too. And not just me, but all my tenant and cropper kind that have immolated youth and hope on thirty or forty or fifty acres of dirt that wouldn’t nobody but our kind work because you’re all our kind have. But we can burn you. Every late February or March we can set fire to the surface of you until all of you in sight is scorched and black, and there aint one goddamn thing you can do about it. You can wear out our bodies and dull our dreams and wreck our stomachs with the sowbelly and corn meal and molasses which is all you afford us to eat but every spring we can set you afire again and you know that too.
It was different now. He didn’t own this land; he referred of course to the renter’s or cropper’s share of what it made. Now, what it produced or failed to produce—bumper or bust, flood or drouth, cotton at ten cents a pound or a dollar a pound—would make not one tittle of difference in his present life. Because now (years had passed; the one in which he would have been free again if he had not allowed his nephew to talk him into that folly which anybody should have known—even that young fool of a lawyer they had made him take back there at the trial when he, Mink, could have run his case much better, that didn’t have any sense at all, at least knew this much and even told him so and even what the result to him would be—not only wouldn’t work, it wasn’t even intended to work, was now behind him) he had suddenly discovered something. People of his kind never had owned even temporarily the land which they believed they had rented between one New Year’s and the next one. It was the land itself which owned them, and not just from a planting to its harvest but in perpetuity; not the owner, the landlord who evacuated them from one worthless rental in November, onto the public roads to seek desperately another similar worthless one two miles or ten miles or two counties or ten counties away before time to seed the next crop in March, but the land, the earth itself passing their doomed indigence and poverty from holding to holding of its thralldom as a family or a clan does a hopelessly bankrupt tenth cousin.
That was past now. He no longer belonged to the land even on those sterile terms. He belonged to the government, the state of Mississippi. He could drag dust up and down cotton middles from year in to year out and if nothing whatever sprang up behind him, it would make no difference to him. No more now to go to a commissary store every Saturday morning to battle with the landlord for every gram of the cheap bad meat and meal and molasses and the tumbler of snuff which was his and his wife’s one spendthrift orgy. No more to battle with the landlord for every niggard sack of fertilizer, then gather the poor crop which suffered from that niggard lack and still have to battle the landlord for his niggard insufficient share of it. All he had to do now was just to keep moving; even the man with the shotgun standing over him neither knew nor cared whether anything came up behind him or not just so he kept moving, any more than he cared. At first he was ashamed, in shame and terror lest the others find that he felt this way; until one day he knew (he could not have said how) that all the others felt like this; that, given time enough, Parchman brought them all to this; he thought in a kind of musing amazement Yes sir, a man can get used to jest anything, even to being in Parchman, if you jest give him time enough.
But Parchman just changed the way a man looked at what he saw after he got in Parchman. It didn’t change what he brought with him. It just made remembering easier because Parchman taught him how to wait. He remembered back there that day even while the Judge was still saying “Life” down at him, when he still believed that Flem would come in and save him, until he finally realised that Flem wasn’t, had never intended to, how he had pretty near actually said it out loud: Just let me go long enough to get out to Frenchman’s Bend or wherever he is and give me ten minutes and I’ll come back here and you can go on and hang me if that’s what you want to do. And how even that time three or five or eight years or whenever it was back there when Flem had used that nephew—what was his name? Montgomery Ward—to trick him into trying to escape in a woman’s dress and sunbonnet and they had given him twenty years more exactly like that young fool lawyer had warned him they would at the very beginning, how even while he was fighting with the five guards he was still saying the same thing: Just let me go long enough to reach Jefferson and have ten minutes and I will come back myself and you can hang me.
He didn’t think things like that any more now because he had learned to wait. And, waiting, he found out that he was listening, hearing too; that he was keeping up with
what went on by just listening and hearing even better than if he had been right there in Jefferson because like this all he had to do was just watch them without having to worry about them too. So his wife had gone back to her people they said and died and his daughters had moved away too, grown girls now, likely somebody around Frenchman’s Bend would know where. And Flem was a rich man now, president of the bank and living in a house he rebuilt that they said was as big as the Union Depot in Memphis, with his daughter, old Will Varner’s girl’s bastard, that was grown now, that went away and married and her and her husband had been in another war they had in Spain and a shell or cannon ball or something blew up and killed the husband but just made her stone deaf. And she was back home now, a widow, living with Flem, just the two of them in the big house where they claimed she couldn’t even hear it thunder, the rest of the folks in Jefferson not thinking much of it because she was already mixed up in a nigger Sunday school and they said she was mixed up in something called commonists, that her husband had belonged to and that in fact they were both fighting on the commonist side in that war.
Flem was getting along now. They both were. When he got out in 1948 he and Flem would both be old men. Flem might not even be alive for him to get out for in 1948 and he himself might not even be alive to get out in 1948 and he could remember how at one time that too had driven him mad: that Flem might die, either naturally or maybe this time the other man wouldn’t be second class and doomed to fail and be caught, and it would seem to him that he couldn’t bear it; who hadn’t asked for justice since justice was only for the best, for champions, but at least a man might expect a chance, anybody had a right to a chance. But that was gone too now, into, beneath the simple waiting; in 1948 he and Flem both would be old men and he even said aloud: “What a shame we cant both of us jest come out two old men setting peaceful in the sun or the shade, waiting to die together, not even thinking no more of hurt or harm or getting even, not even remembering no more about hurt or harm or anguish or revenge,”— two old men not only incapable of further harm to anybody but even incapable of remembering hurt or harm, as if whatever necessary amount of the money which Flem no longer needed and soon now would not need at all ever again, could be used to blot, efface, obliterate those forty years which he, Mink, no longer needed now and soon also, himself too, would not even miss. But I reckon not he thought. Cant neither of us help nothing now. Cant neither one of us take nothing back.
Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion Page 87