“That’s why I was late calling you: it taken a little time too, though I got to admit nothng showed on his outside. Because people are funny. No, they aint funny: they’re jest sad. Here was this feller already in for life and even if they had found out that was a mistake or somebody even left the gate unlocked, he wouldn’t a dast to walk outen it because the gal’s paw had done already swore he would kill him the first time he crossed the Parchman fence. So what in the world could he a done with two hundred and fifty dollars even if he could ever a dreamed he could get away with this method of getting holt of it.”
“But how, dammit?” Stevens said. “How?”
“Why, the only way Mink could a done it, which was likely why never nobody thought to anticipate it. On the way from the Warden’s office to the gate he jest told the trusty he needed to step into the gentlemen’s room a minute and when they was inside he give the trusty the two hundred and fifty dollars and asked the trusty to hand it back to the Warden the first time the trusty conveniently got around to it, the longer the better after he, Mink, was outside the gate and outen sight, and tell the Warden Much obliged but he had done changed his mind and wouldn’t need it. So there the trusty was: give Mink another hour or two and he would be gone, likely forever, nobody would know where or care. Because I dont care where you are: the minute a man can really believe that never again in his life will he have any use for two hundred and fifty dollars, he’s done already been dead and has jest this minute found it out. And that’s all. I dont—”
“I do,” Stevens said. “Flem told me. He’s in Memphis. He’s too little and frail and old to use a knife or a club so he will have to go to the nearest place he can hope to get a gun with ten dollars.”
“So you told Flem. What did he say?”
“He said, Much obliged,” Stevens said. After a moment he said, “I said, when I told Flem Mink had left Parchman at eight o’clock this morning on his way up here to kill him, he said Much obliged.”
“I heard you,” Ratliff said. “What would you a said? You would sholy be as polite as Flem Snopes, wouldn’t you? So maybe it’s all right, after all. Of course you done already talked to Memphis.”
“Tell them what?” Stevens said. “How describe to a Memphis policeman somebody I wouldn’t recognise myself, let alone that he’s actually in Memphis trying to do what I assume he is trying to do, for the simple reason that I dont know what to do next either?”
“What’s wrong with Memphis?” Ratliff said.
“I’ll bite,” Stevens said. “What is?”
“I thought it would took a heap littler place than Memphis not to have nobody in it you used to go to Harvard with.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” Stevens said. He put in the call at once and presently was talking with him: the classmate, the amateur Cincinnatus at his plantation not far from Jackson, who had already been instrumental in getting the pardon through, so that Stevens needed merely explain the crisis, not the situation.
“You dont actually know he went to Memphis, of course,” the friend said.
“That’s right,” Stevens said. “But since we are forced by emergency to challenge where he might be, at least we should be permitted one assumption in good faith.”
“All right,” the friend said. “I know the mayor and the commissioner of police both. All you want—all they can do really—is check any places where anyone might have tried to buy a gun or pistol for ten dollars since say noon today. Right?”
“Right,” Stevens said. “And ask them please to call me collect here when—if they do.”
“I’ll call you myself,” the friend said. “You might say I also have a small equity in your friend’s doom.”
“When you call me that to Flem Snopes, smile,” Stevens said.
That was Thursday; during Friday Central would run him to earth all right no matter where he happened to be about the Square. However, there was plenty to do in the office if he composed himself to it. Which he managed to do in time and was so engaged when Ratliff came in carrying something neatly folded in a paper bag and said, “Good mawnin,” Stevens not looking up, writing on the yellow foolscap pad, steadily, quite composed in fact even with Ratliff standing for a moment looking down at the top of his head. Then Ratliff moved and took one of the chairs beyond the desk, the one against the wall, then half rose and placed the little parcel neatly on the filing case beside him and sat down, Stevens still writing steadily between pauses now and then to read from the open book beneath his left hand; until presently Ratliff reached and took the morning Memphis paper from the desk and opened it and rattled faintly the turn of the page and after a while rattled that one faintly, until Stevens said,
“Dammit, either get out of here or think about something else. You make me nervous.”
“I aint busy this mawnin,” Ratliff said. “If you got anything to tend to outside, I can set here and listen for the phone.”
“I have plenty I can do here if you’ll just stop filling the damned air with—” He flung, slammed the pencil down. “Obviously he hasn’t reached Memphis yet or anyway hasn’t tried to buy the gun, or we would have heard. Which is all we want: to get the word there first. Do you think that any reputable pawnshop or sporting-goods store that cares a damn about its license will sell him a gun now after the police—”
“If my name was Mink Snopes, I dont believe I would go to no place that had a license to lose for selling guns or pistols.”
“For instance?” Stevens said.
“Out at Frenchman’s Bend they said Mink was a considerable hell-raiser when he was young, within his means of course, which wasn’t much. But he made two or three of them country-boy Memphis trips with the young bloods of his time—Quicks and Tulls and Turpins and such: enough to probably know where to begin to look for the kind of places that dont keep the kind of licenses to have police worrying them ever time a gun or a pistol turns up in the wrong place or dont turn up in the right one.”
“Dont you think the Memphis police know as much about Memphis as any damned little murdering maniac, let alone one that’s been locked up in a penitentiary for forty years? The Memphis police, that have a damned better record than a dozen, hell, a hundred cities I could name—”
“All right, all right,” Ratliff said.
“By God, God Himself is not so busy that a homicidal maniac with only ten dollars in the world can hitchhike a hundred miles and buy a gun for ten dollars then hitchhike another hundred and shoot another man with it.”
“Dont that maybe depend on who God wants shot this time?” Ratliff said. “Have you been by the sheriff’s this mawnin?”
“No,” Stevens said.
“I have. Flem aint been to him either yet. And he aint left town neither. I checked on that too. So maybe that’s the best sign we want: Flem aint worried. Do you reckon he told Linda?”
“No,” Stevens said.
“How do you know?”
“He told me.”
“Flem did? You mean he jest told you, or you asked him?”
“I asked him,” Stevens said. “I said, ‘Are you going to tell Linda?’”
“And what did he say?”
“He said, ‘Why?’” Stevens said.
“Oh,” Ratliff said.
Then it was noon. What Ratliff had in the neat parcel was a sandwich, as neatly made. “You go home and eat dinner,” he said. “I’ll set here and listen for it.”
“Didn’t you just say that if Flem himself dont seem to worry, why the hell should we?”
“I wont worry then,” Ratliff said. “I’ll jest set and listen.”
Though Stevens was back in the office when the call came in midafternoon. “Nothing,” the classmate’s voice said. “None of the pawnshops nor any other place a man might go to buy a gun or pistol of any sort, let alone a ten-dollar one. Maybe he hasn’t reached Memphis yet, though it’s more than twenty-four hours now.”
“That’s possible,” Stevens said.
“Maybe he
never intended to reach Memphis.”
“All right, all right,” Stevens said. “Shall I write the commissioner myself a letter of thanks or—”
“Sure. But let him earn it first. He agreed that it not only wont cost much more, it will even be a good idea to check his list every morning for the next two or three days, just in case. I thanked him for you. I even went further and said that if you ever found yourselves in the same voting district and he decided to run for an office instead of just sitting for it—” as Stevens put the telephone down and turned to Ratliff again without seeing him at all and said,
“Maybe he never will.”
“What?” Ratliff said. “What did he say?” Stevens told, repeated, the gist. “I reckon that’s all we can do,” Ratliff said.
“Yes,” Stevens said. He thought Tomorrow will prove it. But I’ll wait still another day. Maybe until Monday.
But he didn’t wait that long. On Saturday his office was always, not busy with the county business he was paid a salary to handle, so much as constant with the social coming and going of the countrymen who had elected him to his office. Ratliff, who knew them all too, as well or even better, was unobtrusive in his chair against the wall where he could reach the telephone without even getting up; he even had another neat homemade sandwich, until at noon Stevens said,
“Go on home and eat a decent meal, or come home with me. It wont ring today.”
“You must know why,” Ratliff said.
“Yes. I’ll tell you Monday. No: tomorrow. Sunday will be appropriate. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
“So you know it’s all right now. All settled and finished now. Whether Flem knows it yet or not, he can sleep from now on.”
“Dont ask me yet,” Stevens said. “It’s like a thread; it’s true only until I—something breaks it.”
“You was right all the time then. There wasn’t no need to tell her.”
“There never has been,” Stevens said. “There never will be.”
“That’s jest what I said,” Ratliff said. “There aint no need now.”
“And what I just said was there never was any need to tell her and there never would have been, no matter what happened.”
“Not even as a moral question?” Ratliff said.
“Moral hell and question hell,” Stevens said. “It aint any question at all: it’s a fact: the fact that not you nor anybody else that wears hair is going to tell her that her act of pity and compassion and simple generosity murdered the man who passes as her father whether he is or not or a son of a bitch or not.”
“All right, all right,” Ratliff said. “This here thread you jest mentioned. Maybe another good way to keep it from getting broke before time is to keep somebody handy to hear that telephone when it dont ring at three o’clock this afternoon.”
So they were both in the office at three o’clock. Then it was four. “I reckon we can go now,” Ratliff said.
“Yes,” Stevens said.
“But you still wont tell me now,” Ratliff said.
“Tomorrow,” Stevens said. “The call will have to come by then.”
“So this here thread has got a telephone wire inside of it after all.”
“So long,” Stevens said. “See you tomorrow.”
And Central would know where to find him at any time on Sunday too and in fact until almost half past two that afternoon he still believed he was going to spend the whole day at Rose Hill. His life had known other similar periods of unrest and trouble and uncertainty even if he had spent most of it as a bachelor; he could recall one or two of them when the anguish and unrest were due to the fact that he was a bachelor, that is, circumstances, conditions insisted on his continuing celibacy despite his own efforts to give it up. But back then he had had something to escape into: nepenthe, surcease: the project he had decreed for himself while at Harvard of translating the Old Testament back into the classic Greek of its first translating; after which he would teach himself Hebrew and really attain to purity; he had thought last night Why yes, I have that for tomorrow; I had forgotten about that. Then this morning he knew that that would not suffice any more, not ever again now. He meant of course the effort: not just the capacity to concentrate but to believe in it; he was too old now and the real tragedy of age is that no anguish is any longer grievous enough to demand, justify, any sacrifice.
So it was not even two-thirty when with no surprise really he found himself getting into his car and still no surprise when, entering the empty Sunday-afternoon Square, he saw Ratliff waiting at the foot of the office stairs, the two of them, in the office now, making no pretence as the clock crawled on to three. “What happened that we set exactly three o’clock as the magic deadline in this here business?” Ratliff said.
“Does it matter?” Stevens said.
“That’s right,” Ratliff said. “The main thing is not to jar or otherwise startle that-ere thread.” Then the courthouse clock struck its three heavy mellow blows into the Sabbath somnolence and for the first time Stevens realised how absolutely he had not just expected, but known, that his telephone would not ring before that hour. Then in that same second, instant, he knew why it had not rung; the fact that it had not rung was more proof of what it would have conveyed than the message itself would have been.
“All right,” he said. “Mink is dead.”
“What?” Ratliff said.
“I dont know where, and it doesn’t matter. Because we should have known from the first that three hours of being free would kill him, let alone three days of it.” He was talking rapidly, not babbling: “Dont you see? a little kinless tieless frail alien animal that never really belonged to the human race to start with, let alone belonged in it, then locked up in a cage for thirty-eight years and now at sixty-three years old suddenly set free, shoved, flung out of safety and security into freedom like a krait or a fer-de-lance that is quick and deadly dangerous as long as it can stay inside the man-made man-tended tropic immunity of its glass box, but wouldn’t live even through the first hour set free, flung, hoicked on a pitchfork or a pair of long-handled tongs into a city street?”
“Wait,” Ratliff said, “wait.”
But Stevens didn’t even pause. “Of course we haven’t heard yet where he was found or how or by whom identified because nobody cares; maybe nobody has even noticed him yet. Because he’s free. He can even die wherever he wants to now. For thirty-eight years until last Thursday morning he couldn’t have had a pimple or a hangnail without it being in a record five minutes later. But he’s free now. Nobody cares when or where or how he dies provided his carrion doesn’t get under somebody’s feet. So we can go home now, until somebody does telephone and you and Flem can go and identify him.”
“Yes,” Ratliff said. “Well—”
“Give it up,” Stevens said. “Come on out home with me and have a drink.”
“We could go by first and kind of bring Flem up to date,” Ratliff said. “Maybe even he might take a dram then.”
“I’m not really an evil man,” Stevens said. “I wouldn’t have loaned Mink a gun to shoot Flem with; I might not even have just turned my head while Mink used his own. But neither am I going to lift my hand to interfere with Flem spending another day or two expecting any moment that Mink will.”
He didn’t even tell the Sheriff his conviction that Mink was dead. The fact was, the Sheriff told him; he found the Sheriff in his courthouse office and told him his and Ratliff’s theory of Mink’s first objective and the reason for it and that the Memphis police would still check daily the places where Mink might try to buy a weapon.
“So evidently he’s not in Memphis,” the Sheriff said. “That’s how many days now?”
“Since Thursday.”
“And he’s not in Frenchman’s Bend.”
“How do you know?”
“I drove out yesterday and looked around a little.”
“So you did believe me, after all,” Stevens said.
“I get per diem on my car,” t
he Sheriff said. “Yesterday was a nice day for a country drive. So he’s had four days now, to come a hundred miles. And he dont seem to be in Memphis. And I know he aint in Frenchman’s Bend. And according to you, Mr Snopes knows he aint in Jefferson here. Maybe he’s dead.” Whereupon, now that another had stated it, spoke it aloud, Stevens knew that he himself had never believed it, hearing without listening while the Sheriff went on: “A damned little rattlesnake that they say never had any friends to begin with and nobody out at the Bend knows what became of his wife and his two girls or even when they disappeared. To be locked up for thirty-eight years and then suddenly turned out like you do a cat at night, with nowhere to go and nobody really wanting him out. Maybe he couldn’t stand being free. Maybe just freedom killed him. I’ve known it to happen.”
“Yes,” Stevens said, “you’re probably right,” thinking quietly We wont stop him. We cant stop him—not all of us together, Memphis police and all. Maybe even a rattlesnake with destiny on his side dont even need luck, let alone friends. He said: “Only we dont know yet. We cant count on that.”
“I know,” the Sheriff said. “I deputised two men at Varner’s store yesterday that claim they remember him, would know him again. And I can have Mr Snopes followed, watched back and forth to the bank. But dammit, watch for who, what, when, where? I cant put a man inside his house until he asks for it, can I? His daughter. Mrs Kohl. Maybe she could do something. You still dont want her to know?”
“You must give me your word,” Stevens said.
“All right,” the Sheriff said. “I suppose your Jackson buddy will let you know the minute the Memphis police get any sort of a line, wont he?”
“Yes,” Stevens said. Though the call didn’t come until Wednesday. Ratliff had rung him up a little after ten Tuesday night and told him the news, and on his way to the office this morning he passed the bank whose drawn shades would not be raised today, and as he stood at his desk with the telephone in his hand he could see through his front window the somber black-and-white-and-violet convolutions of tulle and ribbon and waxen asphodels fastened to the locked front door.
Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion Page 118