Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion

by William Faulkner

  They approached the jail from the rear and drove into the enclosed yard. “Jump,” the sheriff said. “Lift him out.”

  “I’m all right,” he said. But he had to speak twice before he made any sound, and even then it was not his voice. “I can walk.”

  After the doctor had gone, he lay on his cot. There was a small, high, barred window in the wall, but there was nothing beyond the window save twilight. Then he smelled supper cooking somewhere—ham and hot bread and coffee—and suddenly a hot, thin, salty liquid began to run in his mouth, though when he tried to swallow, it was so painful that he sat up, swallowing the hot salt, moving his neck and head rigidly and gingerly to ease the swallowing. Then a loud trampling of feet began beyond the barred door, coming rapidly nearer, and he rose and went to it and looked through the bars into the common room where the Negro victims of a thousand petty white man’s misdemeanors ate and slept together. He could see the head of the stairs; the trampling came from it and he watched a disorderly clump of heads in battered hats and caps and bodies in battered overalls and broken shoes erupt and fill the foul barren room with a subdued uproar of scuffling feet and mellow witless singsong voices—the chain gang which worked on the streets, seven or eight of them, in jail for vagrancy or razor fights or shooting dice for ten or fifteen cents, freed of their shovels and rock hammers for ten hours at least. He held to the bars and looked at them. “It—” he said. His voice made no sound at all. He put his hand to his throat and spoke again, making a dry, croaking sound. The Negroes fell completely still, looking at him, their eyeballs white and still in the already fading faces. “I was all right,” he said, “until it started coming to pieces. I could have handled that dog.” He held his throat, his voice harsh and dry and croaking. “But the son of a bitch started coming to pieces on me.”

  “Who him?” one of the Negroes said. They whispered among themselves, murmuring. The white eyeballs rolled at him.

  “I was all right,” he said. “But the son of a bitch—”

  “Hush, white man,” the Negro said. “Hush. Dont be telling us no truck like that.”

  “I would have been all right,” he said, harsh, whispering. Then his voice failed altogether again and he held to the bars with one hand, holding his throat with the other, while the Negroes watched him, huddled, their eyeballs white and still in the failing light. Then with one accord they turned and rushed toward the stairs and he heard the slow steps too and then he smelled the food, and he clung to the bars, trying to see the stairhead. Are they going to feed them niggers before they do a white man? he thought, smelling the coffee and the ham.

  3

  > That was the fall before the winter from which the people as they became older were to establish time and date events. The summer’s rainless heat—the blazing days beneath which even the oak leaves turned brown and died, the nights during which the ordered stars seemed to glare down in cold and lidless amazement at an earth being drowned in dust—broke at last, and for the three weeks of Indian summer the ardor-wearied earth, ancient Lilith, reigned, throned and crowned amid the old invincible courtesan’s formal defunction. Through these blue and drowsy and empty days filled with silence and the smell of burning leaves and woodsmoke, Ratliff, passing to and fro between his home and the Square, would see the two small grimed hands, immobile and clasping loosely the bars of the jail window at a height not a great deal above that at which a child would have held them. And in the afternoons he would watch his three guests, the wife and the two children, entering or leaving the jail on their daily visit. On the first day, the day he had brought her home with him, she had insisted on doing some of the housework, all of it which his sister would permit, sweeping and washing dishes and chopping wood for fires which his nieces and nephews had heretofore done (and incidentally, in doing so, gaining their juvenile contempt too), apparently oblivious of the sister’s mute and outraged righteousness, big yet not fat, actually slender as Ratliff realised at last in a sort of shocked and sober … not pity: rather, concern; usually barefoot, with the untidy mass of bleached hair long since turning back to dark at the roots, and the cold face in which there was something of a hard not-quite-lost beauty, though it may have been only an ingrained and ineradicable self-confidence or perhaps just toughness. Because the prisoner had refused not only bond (if he could have made one) but counsel. He had stood between two officers—small, his face like a mask of intractability carved in wood, wasted and almost skeleton-thin—before the committing magistrate, and he might not even have been present, hearing or perhaps not hearing himself being arraigned, then at a touch from one of the officers turning back toward the jail, the cell. So the case was pretermitted from sheer desuetude of physical material for formal suttee, like a half-cast play, through the October term of court, to the spring term next May; and perhaps three afternoons a week Ratliff would watch his guests as, the children dressed in cast-off garments of his nephews and nieces, the three of them entered the jail, thinking of the four of them sitting in the close cell rank with creosote and old wraiths of human excreta—the sweat, the urine, the vomit discharged of all the old agonies: terror, impotence, hope. Waiting for Flem Snopes, he thought. For Flem Snopes.

  Then the winter, the cold, came. By that time she had a job. He had known as well as she that the other arrangement could not last, since in a way it was his sister’s house, even if only by a majority of voting strength. So he was not only not surprised, he was relieved when she came and told him she was going to move. Then, as soon as she told him she was going to leave, something happened to him. He told himself that it was the two children. “That’s all right about the job,” he said. “That’s fine. But you dont need to move. You’ll have to pay board and lodging if you move. And you will need to save. You will need money.”

  “Yes,” she said harshly. “I’ll need money.”

  “Does he still think—” He stopped himself. He said, “You aint heard yet when Flem will be back, have you?01D; She didn’t answer. He didn’t expect her to. “You will need to save all you can,” he said. “So you stay here. Pay her a dollar a week board for the children if that would make you feel better about it. I dont reckon a kid would eat more than four bits’ worth in seven days. But you stay here.”

  So she stayed. He had given up his room to them and he slept with his oldest nephew. Her job was in a rambling shabby side-street boarding house with an equivocal reputation, named the Savoy Hotel. Her work began at daybreak and ended sometime after dark, sometimes well after dark. She swept and made the beds and did some of the cooking, since there was a Negro porter who washed the dishes and kept up the fires. She had her meals there and received three dollars a week. “Only she’s going to keep her heels blistered running barefooted in and out of them horse-traders’ and petty juries’ and agents for nigger insurance’s rooms all night long,” a town wit said. But that was her affair. Ratliff knew nothing about that and cared less and, to his credit, believed even still less than that. So now he would not see her at all save on Sunday afternoons as, the children in the new overcoats which he had bought for them and the woman in his old one which she had insisted on paying him fifty cents for, they would enter the gate to the jail or perhaps emerge from it. That was when it occurred to him how not once had any of his kin—old Ab or the schoolmaster or the blacksmith or the new clerk—come in to see him. And if all the facts about that business was knowed, he thought, There’s one of them that ought to be there in that cell too. Or in another one just like it, since you cant hang a man twice—granted of course that a Snopes carries the death penalty even for another Snopes.

  There was snow on Thanksgiving and though it did not remain two days, it was followed early in December by an iron cold which locked the earth in a frozen rigidity, so that after a week or so actual dust blew from it. Smoke turned white before it left the chimney, unable to rise, becoming the same color as the misty sky itself in which all day long the sun stood pale as an uncooked biscuit and as heatless. Now the
y dont even need to have to not come in to see him, Ratliff told himself. For a man to drive them twenty miles in from Frenchman’s Bend just on a errand of mercy, even a Snopes dont have to excuse himself from it. There was a windowpane now between the bars and the hands; they were not visible now, even if anyone had paused along before the jail to look for them. Instead he would be walking fast when he passed, hunched in his overcoat, holding his ears in turn with his yarn-mitted hands, his breath wisping about the crimson tip of his nose and his watering eyes and into the empty Square across which perhaps one country wagon moved, its occupants wrapped in quilts with a lighted lantern on the seat between them while the frosted windows of the stores seemed to Stare at it without comprehension or regret like the faces of cataracted old men.

  Christmas passed beneath that same salt-colored sky, without even any surface softening of the iron ground, but in January a wind set up out of the northwest and blew the sky clear. The sun drew shadows on the frozen ground and for three days patches of it thawed a little at noon, for an inch or so, like a spreading of butter or axle-grease; and toward noon people would emerge, like rats or roaches, Ratliff told himself, amazed and tentative at the sun or at the patches of earth soft again out of an old, almost forgotten time, capable again of taking a footprint. “It wont freeze again tonight,” they told one another. “It’s clouding up from the outhwest. It will rain and wash the frost out of the ground and we will be all right again.” It did rain. The wind moved counter-clockwise into the east. “It will go through to the northwest again and freeze again. Even that would be better than snow,” they told one another, even though the rain had already begun to solidify and by nightfall had become snow, falling for two days and dissolving into the mud as it fell until the mud itself froze at last and still the snow fell and stopped too finally and the windless iron cold came down upon it without even a heatless wafer of sun to preside above a dead earth cased in ice; January and then February, no movement anywhere save the low constant smoke and the infrequent people unable to stand up on the sidewalks creeping townward or homeward in the middle of the streets where no horse could have kept its feet, and no sound save the chopping of axes and the lonely whistles of the daily trains and Ratliff would seem to see them, black, without dimension and unpeopled and plumed with fading vapor, rushing without purpose through the white and rigid solitude. At home now, sitting over his own fire on those Sunday afternoons, he would hear the woman arrive for the children after dinner and put the new overcoats on them above the outgrown garments in which regardless of temperature they had gone to Sunday school (his sister saw to that) with the nephew and nieces who had discarded them; and he would think of the four of them sitting, huddled still in the coats, about the small ineffective sheet-iron stove which did not warm the cell but merely drew from the walls like tears the old sweat of the old agonies and despairs which had harbored there. Later they would return. She would never stay for supper, but once a month she would bring to him the eight dollars she had saved out of her twelve-dollar salary, and the other coins and bills (once she had nine dollars more) which he never asked how she had come by. He was her banker. His sister may or may not have known this, though she probably did. The sum mounted up. “But it will take a lot of weeks,” he said. She didn’t answer. “Maybe he might answer a letter,” he said. “After all, blood is blood.”

  The freeze could not last forever. On the ninth of March it even snowed again and this snow even went away without turning to ice. So people could move about again, and one Saturday he entered the restaurant of which he was half owner and saw Bookwright sitting again before a plate containing a mass of jumbled food a good deal of which was eggs. They had not seen one another in almost six months. No greeting passed between them. “She’s back home again,” Bookwright said. “Got in last week.”

  “She gets around fast,” Ratliff said. “I just saw her toting a scuttle of ashes out of the back door of the Savoy Hotel five minutes ago.”

  “I mean the other one,” Bookwright said, eating. “Flem’s wife. Will drove over to Mottstown and picked them up last week.”

  “Them?”

  “Not Flem. Her and the baby.”

  So he has already heard, Ratliff thought. Somebody has done already wrote him. He said: “The baby. Well well. February, January, December, November, October, September, August. And some of March. It aint hardly big enough to be chewing tobacco yet, I reckon.”

  “It wouldn’t chew,” Bookwright said. “It’s a girl.”

  So for a while he didn’t know what to do, though it did not take him long to decide. Better now, he told himself. Even if she was ever hoping without knowing she was. He waited at home the next afternoon until she came for the children. “His wife’s back,” he said. For just an instant she did not move at all. “You never really expected nothing else, did you?” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  Then even that winter was over at last. It ended as it had begun, in rain, not cold rain but loud fierce gusts of warm water washing out of the earth the iron enduring frost, the belated spring hard on its bright heels and all coming at once, pell mell and disordered, fruit and bloom and leaf, pied meadow and blossoming wood and the long fields shearing dark out of winter’s slumber, to the shearing plow. The school was already closed for the planting year when he passed it and drove up to the store and hitched his team to the old familiar post and mounted among the seven or eight men squatting and lounging about the gallery as if they had not moved since he had looked back last at them almost six months ago. “Well, men,” he said. “School’s already closed I see. Chillen can go to the field now and give you folks a chance to rest.”

  “It’s been closed since last October,” Quick said. “Teacher quit.”

  “I. O.? Quit?”

  “His wife come in one day. He looked up and saw her and lit out.”

  “His what?” Ratliff said.

  “His wife,” Tull said. “Or so she claimed. A kind of big gray-colored woman with a—”

  “Ah shucks,” Ratliff said. “He aint married. Aint he been here three years? You mean his mother.”

  “No, no,” Tull said. “She was young all right. She just had a kind of gray color all over. In a buggy. With a baby about six months old.”

  “A baby?” Ratliff said. He looked from face to face among them, blinking. “Look here,” he said. “What’s all this anyway? How’d he get a wife, let alone a baby six months old? Aint he been right here three years? Hell a mile, he aint been out of hearing long enough to done that.”

  “Wallstreet says they are his,” Tull said.

  “Wallstreet?” Ratliff said. “Who’s Wallstreet?”

  “That boyofEck’s.”

  “That boy about ten years old?” Ratliff blinked at Tull now. “They never had that panic until a year or two back. How’d a boy ten years old get to be named Wall street?”

  “I dont know,” Tull said.

  “I reckon it’s his all right,” Quick said. “Leastways he taken one look at that buggy ad he aint been seen since.”

  “Sho now,” Ratliff said. “A baby is one thing in pants that will make any man run, provided he’s still got room enough to start in. Which it seems I. O. had.”

  “He needed room,” Bookwright said in his harsh, abrupt voice. “This one could have held him, provided somebody just throwed I. O. down first and give it time to get a hold. It was bigger than he was already.”

  “It might hold him yet,” Quick said.

  “Yes,” Tull said. “She just stopped long enough to buy a can of sardines and crackers. Then she druv on down the road in the same direction somebody told her I. O. had been going. He was walking. Her and the baby both et the sardines.”

  “Well, well,” Ratliff said. “Them Snopeses. Well, well—” He ceased. They watched quietly as the Varner surrey came up the road, going home. The Negro was driving; in the back seat with her mother, Mrs Flem Snopes sat. The beautiful face did not even turn as the surrey drew
abreast of the store. It passed in profile, calm, oblivious, incurious. It was not a tragic face: it was just damned. The surrey went on.

  “Is he really waiting in that jail yonder for Flem Snopes to come back and get him out?” the fourth man said.

  “He’s still in jail,” Ratliff said.

  “But is he waiting for Flem?” Quick said.

  “No,” Ratliff said. “Because Flem aint corning back here until that trial is over and finished.” Then Mrs Littlejohn stood on her veranda, ringing the dinner bell, and they rose and began to disperse. Ratliff and Bookwright descended the steps together.

  “Shucks,” Bookwright said. “Even Flem Snopes aint going to let his own blood cousin be hung just to save money.”

  “I reckon Flem knows it aint going to go that far. Jack Houston was shot from in front, and everybody knows he never went anywhere without that pistol, and they found it laying there in the road where they found the marks where the horse had whirled and run, whether it had dropped out of his hand or fell out of his pocket when he fell or not. I reckon Flem had done inquired into all that. And so he aint coming back until it’s all finished. He aint coming back here where Mink’s wife can worry him or folks can talk about him for leaving his cousin in jail. There’s some things even a Snopes wont do. I dont know just exactly what they are, but they’s some somewhere.”

  Then Bookwright went on, and he untied the team and drove the buckboard on into Mrs Littlejohn’s lot and unharnessed and carried the harness into the barn. He had not seen it since that afternoon in September either, and something, he did not know what, impelled and moved him; he hung the gear up and went on through the dim high ammoniac tunnel, between the empty stalls, to the last one and looked into it and saw the thick, female, sitting buttocks, the shapeless figure quiet in the gloom, the blasted face turning and looking up at him, and for a fading instant there was something almost like recotion even if there could have been no remembering, in the devastated eyes, and the drooling mouth slacking and emitting a sound, hoarse, abject, not loud. Upon the overalled knees Ratliff saw the battered wooden effigy of a cow such as children receive on Christmas.