Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion

by William Faulkner

  That lot was beyond the house from the road; the rear wall of the stable was not in sight from either. It was not directly in view from anywhere in the village proper, and on this September forenoon Ratliff realised that it did not need to be. Because he was walking in a path, a path which he had not seen before, which had not been there in May. Then that rear wall came into his view, the planks nailed horizontally upon it, that plank at head-height prized off and leaning, the projecting nails faced carefully inward, against the wall and no more motionless than the row of backs, the row of heads which filled the gap. He knew not only what he was going to see but that, like Bookwright, he did not want to see it, yet, unlike Bookwright, he was going to look. He did look, leaning his face in between two other heads; and it was as though it were himself inside the stall with the cow, himself looking out of the blasted tongueless face at the row of faces watching him who had been given the wordless passions but not the specious words. When they looked around at him, he already held the loose plank, holding it as if he were on the point of striking at them with it. But his voice was merely sardonic, mild even, familiar, cursing as Houston had: not in rage and not even in outraged righteousness.

  “I notice you come to have your look too,” one said.

  “Sholy,” Ratliff said. “I aint cussing you folks. I’m cussing all of us,” lifting the plank and fitting it back into the orifice. “Does he—What’s his name? that new one? Lump.—does he make you pay again each time, or is it a general club ticket good for every performance?” There was a half-brick on the ground beside the wall. With it he drove the nails back while they watched him, the brick splitting and shaling, crumbling away onto his hands in fine dust—a dry, arid, pallid dust of the color of shabby sin and shame, not splendid, not magnificent like blood, and fatal. “That’s all,” he said. “It’s over. This here engagement is completed.” He did not wait to see if they were departing. He crossed the lot in the bright hazy glare of the September noon, and the back yard. Mrs Littlejohn was in the kitchen. Again like Houston, he did not need to tell her.

  “What do you think I think when I look out that window and watch them sneaking up along that fence?” she said.

  “Only all you done was think,” he said. “That new clerk,” he said. “That Snopes encore. Launcelot,” he said. “Lump. I remember his ma.” He remembered her in life, as well as from inquiry—a thin, eager, plain woman who had never had quite enough to eat and showed it and did not even know that she had actually never had enough to eat, who taught school. Out of a moil of sisters and brothers fathered by a congenital failure who between a constant succession of not even successful petty-mercantile bankruptcies, begot on his whining and sluttish wife still more children whom he could not quite clothe and feed. Out of this, through one summer term at the State Teacher’s College and into a one-room country school, and out of the school before the first year was done and into marriage with a man under indictment then because of a drummer’s sample-case of shoes, all for the right foot, which had vanished from a railway baggage-room. And who brought with her into that marriage, as sole equipment and armament, the ability to wash and feed and clothe a swarm of brothers and sisters without ever enough food or clothing or soap to do it with, and a belief that there was honor and pride and salvation and hope too to be found for man’s example between the pages of books, and who bore one child and named it Launcelot, flinging this quenchless defiance into the very jaws of the closing trap, and died. “Launcelot!” Ratliff cried. He did not even curse: not that Mrs Littlejohn would have minded, or perhaps even have heard him. “Lump! Just think of his shame and horror when he got big enough to realise what his ma had done to his family’s name and pride so that he even had to take Lump for folks to call him in place of it! He pulled that plank off! At just exactly the right height! Not child-height and not woman-height: man-height! He just keeps that little boy there to watch and run to the store and give the word when it’s about to start. Oh, he aint charging them to watch it yet, and that’s what’s wrong. That’s what I dont understand. What I am afraid of. Because if he, Lump Snopes, Launcelot Snopes … I said encore,” he cried. “What I was trying to say was echo. Only what I meant was forgery.” He ceased, having talked himself wordless, mute into baffled and aghast outrage, glaring at the man-tall, man-grim woman in the faded wrapper who stared as steadily back at him.

  “So that’s it,” she said. “It aint that it is, that itches you. It’s that somebody named Snopes, or that particular Snopes, is making something out of it and you dont know what it is. Or is it because folks come and watch? It’s all right for it to be, but folks mustn’t know it, see it.”

  “Was,” he said. “Because it’s finished now. I aint never disputed I’m a pharisee,” he said. “You dont need to tell me he aint got nothing else. I know that. Or that I can sholy leave him have at least this much. I know that too. Or that besides, it aint any of my business. I know that too, just as I know that the reason I aint going to leave him have what he does have is simply because I am strong enough to keep him from it. I am stronger than him. Not righter. Not any better, maybe. But just stronger.”

  “How are you going to stop it?”

  “I dont know. Maybe I even cant. Maybe I dont even want to. Maybe all I want is just to have been righteouser, so I can tell myself I done the right thing and my conscience is clear now and at least I can go to sleep tonight.” But he seemed to be at no loss as to what to do next. He did stand for a time on Mrs Littlejohn’s front steps, but he was only canvassing the possibilities—or rather, discarding the faces as he called them up: the fierce intractable one barred with the single eyebrow; the high one ruddy and open and browless as a segment of watermelon above the leather blacksmith’s apron; that third one which did not belong to the frock coat so much as it appeared to be attached to it like a toy balloon by its string, the features of which seemed to be in a constant state of disorganised flight from about the long, scholarly, characterless nose as if the painted balloon-face had just been fetched in out of a violent and driving rain—Mink, Eck, I. O.; and then he began to think Lump again, cursing, driving his mind back to the immediate problem with an almost physical effort, though actually standing quite still on the top step, his face familiar and enigmatic, quiet, actually almost smiling, bringing the three possible faces once more into his mind’s eye and watching them elide once more—the one which would not stay at all; the second which would never even comprehend what he was talking about; the third which in that situation would be like one of the machines in railway waiting-rooms, into which you could insert the copper coin or lead slug of impulse to action, and you would get something back in return, you would not know what, except that it would not be worth quite as much as the copper or the slug. He even thought of the older one, or at least the first one: Flem, thinking how this was probably the first time anywhere where breath inhaled and suspired and men established the foundations of their existences on the currency of coin, that anyone had ever wished Flem Snopes were here instead of anywhere else, for any reason, at any price.

  It was now nearing noon, almost an hour since he had seen the man he sought emerge from the store. He made inquiries at the store; ten minutes later he turned from a lane, through a gate in a new wire fence. The house was new, one-storey, paintless. There were a few of the summer’s flowers blooming on dustily into the summer’s arid close, all red ones—cannas and geraniums—in a raw crude bed before the steps and in rusted cans and buckets along the edge of the porch. The same little boy was in the yard beyond the house, and a big, strong, tranquil-faced young woman opened the door to him, an infant riding her hip and another child peering from behind her skirt. “He’s in his room, studying,” she said. “Just walk right in.”

  The room also was unpainted, of tongue-and-groove planking; it looked and was as air-tight as a strong-box and not much larger, though even then he remarked how the odor of it was not a bachelor-uncle smell but was curiously enough that of a closet in whic
h a middle-aged widow kept her clothes. At once he saw the frock coat lying across the bed’s foot, because the man (he really was holding a book, and he wore spectacles) in the chair had given the opening door one alarmed look and sprang up and snatched up the coat and began to put it on. “Never mind,” Ratliff said. “I aint going to stay long. This here cousin of yours. Isaac.” The other finished getting into the coat, buttoning it hurriedly about the paper dickey he wore in place of a shirt (the cuffs were attached to the coat sleeves themselves) then removing the spectacles with that same flustered haste, as if he had hurried into the coat in order to remove the spectacles, so that for that reason Ratliff noticed that the frames had no lenses in them. The other was watching him with that intentness which he had seen before, which (the concentration and intelligence both) seemed actually to be had ntegral part either of the organs or the process behind them, but seemed rather to be a sort of impermanent fungus-growth on the surface of the eyeballs like the light down which children blow from the burrs of dandelion blooms. “About that cow,” Ratliff said.

  Now the features fled. They streamed away from the long nose which burlesqued ratiocination and firmness and even made a sort of crass Roman holiday of rationalised curiosity, fluid and flowing even about the fixed grimace of glee. Then Ratliff saw that the eyes were not laughing but were watching him and that there was something intelligently alert, or at least competent, behind them, even if it were not firm. “Aint he a sight now?” Snopes cackled, chortled. “I done often thought, since Houston give him that cow and Mrs Littlejohn located them in that handy stall, what a shame it is some of his folks aint running for office. Bread and circuses, as the fellow says, makes hay at the poll-box. I dont know of no cheaper way than Lump’s got to get a man—”

  “Beat,” Ratliff said. He did not raise his voice, and he did not speak further than that one word. The other face did not change either: the long, still nose, the fixed grimace, the eyes which partook of the life of neither. After a moment Snopes said:

  “Beat?”

  “Beat,” Ratliff said.

  “Beat,” the other said. If it were not intelligence, Ratliff told himself, it was a good substitute. “Except as it happens, I ain’t—”

  “Why?” Ratliff said. “When Caesar’s wife goes up to Will Varner next month to get that ere school job again, and he aint pure as a marble monument, what do you think is going to happen?” The face did not actually alter because the features were in a constant state of flux, having no relation to one another save that the same skull bore them, the same flesh fed them.

  “Much obliged,” Snopes said. “What do you figure we better do?”

  “We aint going to do nothing,” Ratliff said. “I dont want to teach school.”

  “But you’ll help. After all, we was getting along all right until you come into it.”

  “No,” Ratliff said harshly. “Not me. But I aim to do this much. I am going to stay here until I see if his folks are doing something about it. About letting them folks hang around that crack and watch, anyhow.”

  “Sholy,” Snopes said. “That ere wont do. That’s it. Flesh is weak, and it wants but little here below. Because sin’s in the eye of the beholder; cast the beam outen your neighbors’ eyes and out of sight is out of mind. A man cant have his good name drug in the alleys. The Snopes name has done held its head up too long in this country to have no such reproaches against it like stock-diddling.”

  “Not to mention that school,” Ratliff said.

  “Sholy. We’ll have a conference. Family conference. We’ll meet at the shop this afternoonv height1D;

  When Ratliff reached the shop that afternoon, they were both there—the smith’s apprentice and the school-teacher, and a third man: the minister of the village church—a farmer and a father; a harsh, stupid, honest, superstitious and upright man, out of no seminary, holder of no degrees, functioning neither within nor without any synod but years ago ordained minister by Will Varner as he decreed his school teachers and commissioned his bailiffs. “It’s all right,” I. O. said when Ratliff entered. “Brother Whitfield has done solved it. Only—”

  “I said I knowed of a case before where it worked,” the minister corrected. Then he told them—or the teacher did, that is:

  “You take and beef the critter the fellow has done formed the habit with, and cook a piece of it and let him eat it. It’s got to be a authentic piece of the same cow or sheep or whatever it is, and the fellow has got to know that’s what he is eating; he cant be tricked nor forced to eating it, and a substitute wont work. Then he’ll be all right again and wont want to chase nothing but human women. Only—” and now Ratliff noticed it—something in the diffusive face at once speculative and annoyed: “—only Mrs Littlejohn wont let us have the cow. You told me Houston give it to him.”

  “No I didn’t,” Ratliff said. “You told me that.”

  “But didn’t he?”

  “Mrs Littlejohn or Houston or your cousin will be the one to tell you that.”

  “Well, no matter. Anyway, she wont. And now we got to buy it from her. And what I cant understand is, she says she dont know how much, but that you do.”

  “Oh,” Ratliff said. But now he was not looking at Snopes. He was looking at the minister. “Do you know it will work, Reverend?” he said.

  “I know it worked once,” Whitfield said.

  “Then you have knowed it to fail.”

  “I never knowed it to be tried but that once,” Whitfield said.

  “All right,” Ratliff said. He looked at the two others—cousins, nephew and uncle, whatever they were. “It will cost you sixteen dollars and eighty cents.”

  “Sixteen dollars and eighty cents?” I. O. said. “Hell fire.” The little quick pale eyes darted from face to face between them. Then he turned to the minister. “Look here. A cow is a heap of different things besides the meat. Yet it’s all that same cow. It’s got to be, because it’s some things that cow never even had when it was born, so what else can it be but the same thing? The horns, the hair. Why couldn’t we take a little of them and make a kind of soup; we could even take a little of the actual living blood so it wouldn’t be no technicality in it—”

  “It was the meat, the flesh,” the minister said. “I taken the whole cure to mean that nt only the boy’s mind but his insides too, the seat of passion and sin, can have the proof that the partner of his sin is dead.”

  “But sixteen dollars and eighty cents,” I. O. said. He looked at Ratliff. “I dont reckon you aim to put up none of it.”

  “No,” Ratliff said.

  “And Mink aint, not to mention after that law verdict Will Varner put on him this morning,” the other said fretfully. “And Lump. If anything, Lump is going to be put out considerable with what after all wasn’t a whole heap of your business,” he told Ratliff. “And Flem aint in town. So that leaves me and Eck here. Unless Brother Whitfield would like to help us out for moral reasons. After all, what reflects on one, reflects on all the members of a flock.”

  “But he dont,” Ratliff said. “He cant. Come to think of it, I’ve heard of this before myself. It’s got to be done by the fellow’s own blood kin, or it wont work.” The little bright quick eyes went constantly between his face and the minister’s.

  “You never said nothing about that,” he said.

  “I just told you what I know happened,” Whitfield said. “I dont know how they got the cow.”

  “But sixteen-eighty,” I. O. said. “Hell fire.” Ratliff watched him—the eyes which were much shrewder than they appeared—not intelligent; he revised that: shrewd. Now he even looked at his cousin or nephew for the first time. “So it’s me and you, Eck.” And the cousin or nephew spoke for the first time.

  “You mean we got to buy it?”

  “Yes,” I. O. said. “You sholy wont refuse a sacrifice for the name you bear, will you?”

  “All right,” Eck said. “If we got to.” From beneath the leather apron he produced a tremendous leather
purse and opened it and held it in one grimed fist as a child holds the paper sack which it is about to inflate with its breath. “How much?”

  “I’m a single man, unfortunately,” I. O. said. “But you got three children—”

  “Four,” Eck said. “One coming.”

  “Four. So I reckon the only way to figure it is to divide it according to who will get the most benefits from curing him. You got yourself and four children to consider. That will be five to one. So that will be I pay the one-eighty and Eck pays the fifteen because five goes into fifteen three times and three times five is fifteen dollars. And Eck can have the hide and the rest of the beef.”

  “But a beef and hide aint worth fifteen dollars,” Eck said. “And even if it was, I dont want it. I dont want fifteen dollars worth of beef.”

  “It aint the beef and the hide. That’s just a circumstance. It’s the moral value we are going to get out of it.”

  “How do I need fifteen dollars worth of moral value when all you need is a dollar and eighty cents?”

  “The Snopes name. Cant you understand that? That aint never been aspersed yet by no living man. That’s got to be kept pure as a marble monument for your children to grow up under.”

  “But I still dont see why I got to pay fifteen dollars, when all you got to pay is—”

  “Because you got four children. And you make five. And five times three is fifteen.”

  “I aint got but three yet,” Eck said.

  “Aint that just what I said? five times three? If that other one was already here, it would make four, and five times four is twenty dollars, and then I wouldn’t have to pay anything.”

  “Except that somebody would owe Eck three dollars and twenty cents change,” Ratliff said.

  “What?” I. O. said. But he immediately turned back to his cousin or nephew. “And you got the meat and the hide,” he said. “Cant you even try to keep from forgetting that?”