Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

by Faulkner, William

  “That’s right,” Ratliff said. “That was the trade.”

  “What trade?” his uncle said.

  “It was likely that same low-minded anonymous scoundrel again,” Ratliff said. “Anyhow, somebody made the trade that if Senator Snopes would withdraw from this-here particular race for Congress, the folks that had seen them pro-Devries dogs would forget it, and the ones that hadn’t wouldn’t never need to know about it.”

  “But he would have beat that too,” his uncle said. “Clarence Snopes stopped or even checked just because a few dogs raised their legs against him? Hell, he would have wound up having every rabies tag in Yoknapatawpha County counted as an absentee ballot.”

  “Oh, you mean Clarence,” Ratliff said. “I thought you meant Uncle Billy Varner.”

  “Uncle Billy Varner?” his uncle said.

  “That’s right,” Ratliff said. “It was Uncle Billy hisself that that low-minded rascal must a went to. Leastways Uncle Billy hisself sent word back that same afternoon that Senator Clarence Egglestone Snopes had withdrawed from the race for Congress; Uncle Billy never seemed to notified the ex-Senator a-tall. Oh yes, they told Uncle Billy the same thing you jest said: how it wouldn’t hurt Clarence none in the long run; they even used your same words about the campaign tactics of the dogs, only a little stronger. But Uncle Billy said No, that Clarence Snopes wasn’t going to run for nothing in Beat Two.

  “‘But he aint running in jest Beat Two,’ they said. ‘He aint even running in jest Yoknapatawpha County now. He’s running in a whole one-eighth of the state of Missippi.’” And Uncle Billy said:

  “‘Durn the whole hundred eighths of Missippi and Yoknapatawpha County too. I aint going to have Beat Two and Frenchman’s Bend represented nowhere by nobody that ere a son-a-bitching dog that happens by cant tell from a fence post.’”

  His uncle was looking at Ratliff. He had been looking at Ratliff for some time. “So this anonymous meddler you speak of not only knew the twin nephews and that dog thicket, he knew old Will Varner too.”

  “It looks like it,” Ratliff said.

  “So it worked,” his uncle said.

  “It looks like it,” Ratliff said.

  Both he and his uncle looked at Ratliff sitting neat and easy, blinking, bland and inscrutable in one of the neat blue shirts he made himself, which he never wore a tie with though Charles knew he had two at home he had paid Allanovna seventy-five dollars apiece for that time his uncle and Ratliff went to New York ten years ago to see Linda Snopes married, which Ratliff had never had on. “O Cincinnatus,” his uncle said.

  “What?” Ratliff said.

  “Nothing,” his uncle said. “I was just wondering who it was that told those twin boys about that dog thicket.”

  “Why, Colonel Devries, I reckon,” Ratliff said. “A soldier in the war with all them medals, after three years of practice on Germans and Italians and Japanese, likely it wasn’t nothing to him to think up a little political strategy too.”

  “They were mere death worshippers and simple pre-absolved congenital sadists,” his uncle said. “This was a born bred and trained American professional ward-level politician.”

  “Maybe aint neither of them so bad, providing a man jest keeps his eyes open and uses what he has, the best he knows,” Ratliff said. Then he said, “Well,” and rose, lean and easy, perfectly bland, perfectly inscrutable, saying to Charles now: “You mind that big oat field in the bend below Uncle Billy’s pasture, Major? It stayed full of geese all last winter they say. Why dont you come out when the season opens and shoot a few of them? I reckon Uncle Billy will let us.”

  “Much obliged,” Charles said.

  “It’s a trade then,” Ratliff said. “Good day, gentlemen.” Then Ratliff was gone. Now Charles was looking at his uncle, whereupon his uncle drew a sheet of paper to him and began to write on it, not fast: just extremely preoccupied, absorbed.

  “So, quote,” Charles said, “it will have to be you, the young people unquote. I believe that’s about how it went, wasn’t it?—that summer back in ’37 when us moralists were even having to try to beat Roosevelt himself in order to get to Clarence Snopes?”

  “Good day, Charles,” his uncle said.

  “Because quote it wont be us,” Charles said. “We are too old, too tired, have lost the capacity to believe in ourselves—”

  “Damn it,” his uncle said, “I said good day.”

  “Yes sir,” Charles said. “In just a moment. Because quote the United States, America: the greatest country in the world if we can just keep on affording it unquote. Only, let ‘afford’ read ‘depend on God.’ Because He saved you this time, using V. K. Ratliff of course as His instrument. Only next time Ratliff may be off somewhere selling somebody a sewing machine or a radio”—That’s right, Ratliff now had a radio agency too, the radio riding inside the same little imitation house on the back of his pickup truck that the demonstrator sewing machine rode in; two years more and the miniature house would have a miniature TV stalk on top of it—“and God may not be able to put His hand on him in time. So what you need is to learn how to trust in God without depending on Him. In fact, we need to fix things so He can depend on us for a while. Then He wont need to waste Himself being everywhere at once.” Now his uncle looked up at him and suddenly Charles thought Oh yes, I liked Father too all right but Father just talked to me while Uncle Gavin listened to me, no matter how foolish what I was saying finally began to sound even to me, listening to me until I had finished, then saying, “Well, I dont know whether it will hold together or not but I know a good way to find out. Let’s try it.” Not YOU try it but US try it.

  “Yes,” his uncle said. “So do I.”

  FOURTEEN

  Though by the time Ratliff eliminated Clarence back into private life in Frenchman’s Bend, there had already been a new Snopes living in Jefferson for going on two years. So Jefferson was merely holding its own in what Charles’s uncle would call the Snopes condition or dilemma.

  This was a brand-new one, a bachelor named Orestes, called Res. That’s right, Orestes. Even Charles’s Uncle Gavin didn’t know how either. His uncle told him how back in 1943 the town suddenly learned that Flem Snopes now owned what was left of the Compson place. Which wasn’t much. The tale was they had sold a good part of it off back in 1909 for the municipal golf course in order to send the oldest son, Quentin, to Harvard, where he committed suicide at the end of his freshman year; and about ten years ago the youngest son, Benjy, the idiot, had set himself and the house both on fire and burned up in it. That is, after Quentin drowned himself at Harvard and Candace’s, the sister’s, marriage blew up and she disappeared, nobody knew where, and her daughter, Quentin, that nobody knew who her father was, climbed down the rainpipe one night and ran off with a carnival, Jason, the middle one, finally got rid of Benjy too by finally persuading his mother to commit him to the asylum only it didn’t stick, Jason’s version being that his mother whined and wept until he, Jason, gave up and brought Benjy back home, where sure enough in less than two years Benjy not only burned himself up but completely destroyed the house too.

  So Jason took the insurance and borrowed a little more on the now vacant lot and built himself and his mother a new brick bungalow up on the main street to the Square. But the lot was a valuable location; Jefferson had already begun to surround it; in fact the golf links had already moved out to the country club back in 1929, selling the old course back to Jason Compson. Which was not surprising. While he was still in high school Jason had started clerking after school and on Saturdays in Uncle Ike McCaslin’s hardware store, which even then was run by a man named Earl Triplett that Uncle Ike got from somewhere, everybody supposed off a deer stand or a Delta fishing lake, since that was where Uncle Ike spent most of his time. For which reason it was not surprising for the town to assume presently that Triplett had long since gently eliminated Uncle Ike from the business even though Uncle Ike still loafed in the store when he wasn’t hunting or fishing and withou
t doubt Triplett still let him have his rifle and shotgun ammunition and fishing tackle at cost. Which without doubt the town assumed Jason did too when Jason had eliminated Triplett in his turn back to his deer stand or trotline or minnow bucket.

  Anyhow, for all practical purposes Jason Compson was now the McCaslin Hardware Company. So nobody was surprised when it was learned that Jason had bought back into the original family holding the portion which his father had sacrificed to send his older brother to Harvard—a school which Jason held in contempt for the reason that he held all schools beyond the tenth grade to be simply refuges for the inept and the timid. Charles’s uncle said that what surprised him was when he went to the courthouse and looked at the records and saw that, although Jason had apparently paid cash for the abandoned golf course, he had not paid off the mortgage on the other part of the property on which he had raised the money to build his new bungalow, the interest on which he had paid promptly in to Flem Snopes’s bank ever since, and apparently planned to continue. This, right up to Pearl Harbor. So that you would almost believe Jason had a really efficient and faithful spy in the Japanese Diet. And then in the spring of 1942, another spy just as efficient and loyal in the U.S. Cabinet too; his uncle said that to listen to Jason, you would believe he not only had advance unimpeachable information that an air-training field was to be located in Jefferson, he had an unimpeachable promise that it would be located nowhere else save on that old golf links; his uncle said how back then nobody in Jefferson knew or had thought much about airfields and they were willing to follow Jason in that anything open enough to hit golf balls in was open enough to land airplanes on.

  Or anyway the right one believed him. The right one being Flem Snopes, the president of the bank which held the mortgage on the other half of Jason’s property. His Uncle Gavin said it must have been like a two-handed stud game when both have turned up a hole-ace and by mutual consent decreed the other two aces dead cards. Gavin said that of course nobody knew what really happened. All they knew was what they knew about Jason Compson and Flem Snopes; Gavin said there must have come a time when Flem, who knew all along that he didn’t know as much about airfields as Jason did, must have had a terrifying moment when he believed maybe he didn’t know as much about money either. So Flem couldn’t risk letting Jason draw another card and maybe raise him; Flem had to call.

  Or (Gavin said) so Jason thought. That Jason was simply waving that imaginary airfield around the Square to spook Mr Snopes into making the first move. Which was evidently what Snopes did: he called in the note his bank held on Jason’s mortgage. All amicable and peaceful of course, which was the way Jason expected it, inviting him (Jason) into that private back room in the bank and saying, “I’m just as sorry about this as you can ever be, Mr Compson. But you can see how it is. With our country fighting for its very life and existence on both sides of the world, it’s every man’s duty and privilege too to add his little mite to the battle. So my board of directors feel that every possible penny of the bank’s resources should go into matters pertaining directly to the war effort.”

  Which was just what Jason wanted: “Why certainly, Mr Snopes. Any patriotic citizen will agree whole-heartedly with you. Especially when there is a direct war effort right here in Jefferson, like this airfield I understand they have practically let the contract for, just as soon as the title to the land is cleared:” naming his price for the ex-golf course, out of which sum naturally the mortgage note would be paid. Or, if Mr Snopes and his directors preferred, he, Jason, would name a lump sum for the entire Compson property, including the mortgage, and so leave the bank’s directors or some patriotic civic body representing the town itself to deal with the government for the airfield; Jason reserving only the right to hope that the finished flying field might be christened Compson Field as a monument not to him, Jason, but to the hope that his family had had a place in the history of Jefferson at least not to be ashamed of, including as it did one governor and one brigadier general, whether it was worth commemorating or not. Because Charles’s uncle said that Jason was shrewd too in his way, enough to speculate that the man who had spent as much as Snopes had to have his name on a marble monument over the grave of his unfaithful wife, might spend some more to have an airfield named for him too.

  Or so Jason thought. Because in January ’43 Jefferson learned that Mr Snopes—not the bank: Mr Private Individual Snopes—now owned the Compson place. And now his Uncle Gavin said how Jason exposed his hand a little from triumph. But then, who could really blame him since until now nobody but the Italian marble syndicate had ever managed to sell Flem Snopes anything as amorphous as prestige. And what the Italians had sold him was respectability, which was not a luxury but a necessity: referring (Jason did) to his old home property as Snopes Field, even (Charles’s uncle said) waylaying, ambushing Mr Snopes himself now and then on the street when there was an audience, to ask about the progress of the project; this after even the ones who didn’t know what an airfield really was, had realised there would not be one here since the government had already designated the flatter prairie land to the east near Columbus, and the perfectly flat Delta land to the west near Greenville, as the only acceptable terrain for flight training. Because then Jason began to commiserate with Mr Snopes in reverse, by delivering long public tirades on the government’s stupidity; that Mr Snopes in fact was ahead of his time but that inevitably, in the course of time as the war continued and we all had to tighten our belts still further, the Snopes concept of a flying field composed of hills would be recognised as the only practical one and would become known throughout the world as the Snopes Airport Plan, since under it runways that used to have to be a mile long could be condensed into half that distance, since by simply bulldozing away the hill beneath it both sides of the runway could be used for each takeoff and landing, like a fly on a playing card wedged in a crack.

  Or maybe Jason was whistling in the dark, Gavin said, saying No in terror to terrified realisation, already too late. Because Jason was shrewd in his way, having had to practise shrewdness pretty well to have got where he now was without any outside help and not much of a stake either. That maybe as soon as he signed the deed and before he even cashed the check, it may have occurred to him that Flem Snopes had practised shrewdness pretty well too, to be president of a bank now from even less of a stake than he, Jason, who at least had had a house and some land where Flem’s had been only a wife. That Jason may have divined, as through some prescience bequeathed him by their mutual master, the Devil, that Flem Snopes didn’t want and didn’t intend to have a flying field on that property. That it was only Jason Compson who assumed that that by-product of war would go on forever which condemned and compelled real estate to the production and expansion of airplanes and tanks and cannon, but that Flem Snopes knew better. Flem Snopes knew that the airplanes and tanks and guns were self-consuming in their own nihilism and inherent obsolescence, and that the true by-product of the war which was self-perpetuating and -compounding and would prevail and continue to self-compound into perpetuity, was the children, the birth rate, the space on which to build walls to house it from weather and temperature and contain its accumulating junk.

  Too late. Because now Snopes owned it and all he had to do was just to sit still and wait while the war wore itself out. Since whether America, Jefferson, won it or lost it wouldn’t matter; in either case population would compound and government or somebody would have to house it, and the houses would have to stand on something somewhere—a plot of land extending a quarter of a mile in both directions except for a little holding in one corner owned by a crotchety old man named Meadowfill, whom Flem Snopes would take care of in ten or fifteen minutes as soon as he got around to needing it, which even before Pearl Harbor had already begun to be by-passed and surrounded and enclosed by the town. So what Jason did next didn’t surprise anyone; Charles’s uncle said the only surprising thing was why Jason chose him, Gavin Stevens, to try to bribe either to find a flaw in the title he
had conveyed to Mr Snopes; or if he, Stevens, couldn’t find one, to invent one into it. His uncle said Jason answered that one himself: “Hell, aint you supposed to be the best-educated lawyer in this section? Not only Harvard but that German place too?”

  “That is, if Harvard cant trick your property back from Flem Snopes, Heidelberg should,” his uncle said. “Get out of here, Jason.”

  “That’s right,” Jason said. “You can afford virtue, now that you have married money, cant you?”

  “I said get out of here, Jason,” his uncle said.

  “Okay, okay,” Jason said. “I can probably find a lawyer somewhere that aint got enough money in Flem Snopes’s bank to be afraid of him.”

  Except that Jason Compson shouldn’t have needed anybody to tell him that Flem Snopes wasn’t going to buy a title from anybody capable of having a flaw in it, or anything else in it to make it vulnerable. But Jason continued to try; Charles’s uncle told him about it: Jason going about the business of trying to find some way, any way to overturn or even just shake Snopes’s title, with a kind of coldly seething indefatigable outrage like that of a revivalist who finds that another preacher has stepped in behind his back and converted the client or patient he had been working on all summer, or a liar or a thief who has been tricked or robbed by anoher liar or thief. But he failed each time: Snopes’s title to the entire old Compson place stood, so that even Jason gave up at last; and that same week the same Wat Snopes who had transformed the old De Spain house into Flem’s antebellum mansion twenty years ago, came in again and converted the Compson carriage house (it was detached from the main house so Benjy had failed to burn it) into a small two-storey residence, and a month later the new Jefferson Snopes, Orestes, was living in it. And not merely as Flem Snopes’s agent in actual occupation against whatever machinations Jason might still discover or invent. Because by summer Res had fenced up the adjacent ground into lots and was now engaged in the business of buying and selling scrubby cattle and hogs. Also, by that time he was engaged in an active kind of guerrilla feud with old man Meadowfill, whose orchard boundary was Res Snopes’s hog-lot fence.