Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion

by William Faulkner

“ ‘We checked our figgers twice, Mr Snopes.’

  “ ‘All right,’ he says. And he reaches down and hauls out the money and pays the two hundred and eighteen dollars and fifty-two cents in cash and asks for a receipt.”

  Only by the next summer Gowan was Turl’s student fireman, so now Gowan saw and heard it from Turl at first hand; it was evening when Mr Snopes stood suddenly in the door to the boiler room and crooked his finger at Turl and so this time it was Turl and Snopes facing one another in the office.

  “What’s this trouble about you and Tom Tom?” he said.

  “Me and which?” Turl said. “If Tom Tom depending on me for his trouble, he done quit firing and turned waiter. It takes two folks to have trouble and Tom Tom aint but one, I dont care how big he is.”

  “Tom Tom thinks you want to fire the day shift,” Mr Snopes said.

  Turi was looking at everything now without looking at anything. “I can handle as much coal as Tom Tom,” he said.

  “Tom Tom knows that too,” Mr Snopes said. “He knows he’s getting old. But he knows there aint nobody else can crowd him for his job but you.” Then Mr Snopes told him how for two years now Tom Tom had been stealing brass from the plant and laying it on Turl to get him fired; how only that day Tom Tom had told him, Mr Snopes, that Turl was the thief.

  height="0em" width="1em" align="justify">“That’s a lie,” Turl said. “Cant no nigger accuse me of stealing something I aint, I dont care how big he is.” “Sho,” Mr Snopes said. “So the thing to do is to get that brass back.”

  “Not me,” Turl said. “That’s what they pays Mr Buck Connor for.” Buck Connors was the town marshall.

  “Then you’ll go to jail sho enough,” Snopes said. “Tom Tom will say he never even knowed it was there. You’ll be the only one that knew that. So what you reckon Mr Connor’ll think? You’ll be the one that knowed where it was hid at, and Buck Connor’ll know that even a fool has got more sense than to steal something and hide it in his own corn crib. The only thing you can do is, get that brass back. Go out there in the daytime, while Tom Tom is here at work, and get that brass and bring it to me and I’ll put it away to use as evidence on Tom Tom. Or maybe you dont want that day shift. Say so, if you dont. I can find somebody else.”

  Because Turl hadn’t fired any boilers forty years. He hadn’t done anything at all that long, since he was only thirty. And if he were a hundred, nobody could accuse him of having done anything that would aggregate forty years net. “Unless tomcatting at night would add up that much,” Mr Harker said. “If Turl ever is unlucky enough to get married he would still have to climb in his own back window or he wouldn’t even know what he come after. Aint that right, Turl?”

  So, as Mr Harker said, it was not Turl’s fault so much as Snopes’s mistake. “Which was,” Mr Harker said, “when Mr Snopes forgot to remember in time about that young light-colored new wife of Tom Tom’s. To think how he picked Turl out of all the Negroes in Jefferson, that’s prowled at least once—or tried to—every gal within ten miles of town, to go out there to Tom Tom’s house knowing all the time how Tom Tom is right here under Mr Snopes’s eye wrastling coal until six oclock a m and then with two miles to walk down the railroad home, and expect Turl to spend his time out there” (Gowan was doing nearly all the night firing now. He had to; Turl had to get some sleep, on the coal pile in the bunker after midnight. He was losing weight too, which he could afford even less than sleep.) “hunting anything that aint hid in Tom Tom’s bed. And when I think about Tom Tom in here wrastling them boilers in that-ere same amical cuckolry like what your uncle says Miz Snopes and Mayor de Spain walks around in, stealing brass so he can keep Turl from getting his job away from him, and all the time Turl is out yonder tending by daylight to Tom Tom’s night homework, sometimes I think I will jest die.”

  He was spared that; we all knew it couldn’t last much longer. The question was, which would happen first: if Tom Tom would catch Turl, or if Mr Snopes would catch Turl, or if Mr Harker really would burst a blood vessel. Mr Snopes won. He was standing in the office door that evening when Mr Harker, Turl and Gowan came on duty; once more he crooked his finger at Turl and once more they stood facing each other in the office. “Did you find it this time?” Mr Snopes said.

  “Find it which time?” Turl said.

  “Just before dark tonight,” Mr Snopes said. “I was standing at the corner of the crib when you crawled out of that corn patch and climbed in that back window.” And now indeed Turl was looking everywhere fast at nothing. “Maybe you are still looking in the wrong place,” Mr Snopes said. “If Tom Tom had hid that iron in his bed, you ought to found it three weeks ago. You take one more look. If you dont find it this time, maybe I better tell Tom Tom to help you.” Turl was looking fast at nothing now.

  “I’m gonter have to have three or four extra hours off tomorrow night,” he said. “And Tom Tom gonter have to be held right here unto I gets back.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Snopes said.

  “I mean held right here unto I walks in and touches him,” Turl said. “I dont care how late it is.”

  “I’ll see to that,” Snopes said.

  Except that it had already quit lasting any longer at all; Gowan and Mr Harker had barely reached the plant the next evening when Mr Harker took one quick glance around. But before he could even speak Mr Snopes was standing in the office door, saying, “Where’s Tom Tom?” Because it wasn’t Tom Tom waiting to turn over to the night crew: it was Tom Tom’s substitute, who fired the boilers on Sunday while Tom Tom was taking his new young wife to church; Gowan said Mr Harker said,

  “Hell fire,” already moving, running past Mr Snopes into the office and scrabbling at the telephone. Then he was out of the office again, not even stopping while he hollered at Gowan: “All right, Otis”—his nephew or cousin or something who had inherited the saw mill, who would come in and take over when Mr Harker wanted a night off—“Otis’ll be here in fifteen minutes. Jest do the best you can until then.”

  “Hold up,” Gowan said. “I’m going too.”

  “Durn that,” Mr Harker said, still running, “I seen it first:” on out the back where the spur track for the coal cars led back to the main line where Tom Tom would walk every morning and evening between his home and his job, running (Mr Harker) in the moonlight now because the moon was almost full. In fact, the whole thing was full of moonlight when Mr Harker and Turl appeared peacefully at the regular hour to relieve Tom Tom’s substitute the next evening:

  “Yes sir,” Mr Harker told Gowan, “I was jest in time. It was Turl’s desperation, you see. This would be his last go-round. This time he was going to have to find that brass, or come back and tell Mr Snopes he couldn’t; in either case that country picnic was going to be over. So I was jest in time to see him creep up out of that corn patch and cross the moonlight to that back window and tomcat through it; jest exactly time enough for him to creep across the room to the bed and likely fling the quilt back and lay his hand on meat and say, ‘Honey-bunch, lay calm. Papa’s done arrived.’ ” And Gowan said how even twenty-four hours afterward he partook for the instant of Turl’s horrid surprise, who believed that at that moment Tom Tom was two miles away at the power plant waiting for him (Turi) to appear and relieve him of the coa scoop—Tom Tom lying fully dressed beneath the quilt with a naked butcher knife in his hand when Turl flung it back.

  “Jest exactly time enough,” Mr Harker said. “Jest exactly as on time as two engines switching freight cars. Tom Tom must a made his jump jest exactly when Turl whirled to run, Turl jumping out of the house into the moonlight again with Tom Tom and the butcher knife riding on his back so that they looked jest like—what do you call them double-jointed half-horse fellers in the old picture books?”

  “Centaur,” Gowan said.

  “—looking jest like a centawyer running on its hind legs and trying to ketch up with itself with a butcher knife about a yard long in one of its extry front hoofs until they run out of the moonlight ag
ain into the woods. Yes sir, Turl aint even half as big as Tom Tom, but he sho toted him. If you’d a ever bobbled once, that butcher knife would a caught you whether Tom Tom did or not, wouldn’t it?”

  “Tom Tom a big buck man,” Turl said. “Make three of me. But I toted him. I had to. And whenever I would fling my eye back and see the moon shining on that butcher knife I could a picked up two more like him without even slowing down.” Turl said how at first he just ran; it was only after he found himself—or themself—among the trees that he thought about trying to rake Tom Tom off against the trunk of one. “But he helt on so tight with that one arm that whenever I tried to bust him against a tree I busted myself too. Then we’d bounce off and I’d catch another flash of moonlight on that nekkid blade and all I could do was just run.

  “ ‘Bout then was when Tom Tom started squalling to let him down. He was holding on with both hands now, so I knowed I had done outrun that butcher knife anyway. But I was good started then; my feets never paid Tom Tom no more mind when he started squalling to stop and let him off than they done me. Then he grabbed my head with both hands and started to wrenching it around like I was a runaway bareback mule, and then I seed the ditch too. It was about forty foot deep and it looked a solid mile across but it was too late then. My feets never even slowed up. They run as far as from here to that coal pile yonder out into nekkid air before we even begun to fall. And they was still clawing moonlight when me and Tom Tom hit the bottom.”

  The first thing Gowan wanted to know was, what Tom Tom had used in lieu of the dropped butcher knife. Turl told that. Nothing. He and Tom Tom just sat in the moonlight on the floor of the ditch and talked. And Uncle Gavin explained that: a sanctuary, a rationality of perspective, which animals, humans too, not merely reach but earn by passing through unbearable emotional states like furious rage or furious fear, the two of them sitting there not only in Uncle Gavin’s amicable cuckoldry but in mutual and complete federation too: Tom Tom’s home violated not by Tomey’s Turl but by Flem Snopes; Turl’s life and limbs put into frantic jeopardy not by Tom Tom but by Flem Snopes.

  “That was where I come in,” Mr Harker said.

  “You?” Gowan said.

  “He holp us,” Turl said.

  “Be durn ito t’s so,” Mr Harker said. “Have you and Tom Tom both already forgot what I told you right there in that ditch last night? I never knowed nothing and I dont aim to know nothing, I dont give a durn how hard either one of you try to make me.”

  “All right,” Gowan said. “Then what?” Turl told that: how he and Tom Tom went back to the house and Tom Tom untied his wife where he had tied her to a chair in the kitchen and the three of them hitched the mule to the wagon and got the brass out of the corn crib and loaded it to haul it away. There was near a half-ton of it; it took them the rest of the night to finish moving it.

  “Move it where?” Gowan said. Only he said he decided to let Mr Snopes himself ask that; it was nearing daylight now and soon Tom Tom would come up the spur track from the main line, carrying his lunch pail to take over for the day shift; and presently there he was, with his little high hard round intractable cannon-ball head, when they all turned and there was Mr Snopes too standing in the boiler-room door. And Gowan said that even Mr Snopes seemed to know he would just be wasting his time crooking his finger at anybody this time; he just said right out to Turl:

  “Why didn’t you find it?”

  “Because it wasn’t there,” Turl said.

  “How do you know it wasn’t there?” Mr Snopes said.

  “Because Tom Tom said it wasn’t,” Turl said.

  Because the time for wasting time was over now. Mr Snopes just looked at Tom Tom a minute. Then he said: “What did you do with it?”

  “We put it where you said you wanted it,” Tom Tom said.

  “We?” Mr Snopes said.

  “Me and Turl,” Tom Tom said. And now Mr Snopes looked at Tom Tom for another minute. Then he said:

  “Where I said I wanted it when?”

  “When you told me what you aimed to do with them safety-valves,” Tom Tom said.

  Though by the time the water in the tank would begin to taste brassy enough for somebody to think about draining the tank to clean it, it wouldn’t be Mr Snopes. Because he was no longer superintendent now, having resigned, as Mr de Spain would have said when he was still Lieutenant de Spain, “for the good of the service.” So he could sit all day now on the gallery of his little back-street rented house and look at the shape of the tank standing against the sky above the Jefferson roof-line—looking at his own monument, some might have thought. Except that it was not a monument: it was a footprint. A monument only says At least I got this far while a footprint says This is where I was when I moved again.

  “Not even now?” Uncle Gavin said to Ratliff.

  “Not even now,” Ratliff said. “Not catching his wife with Manfred de Spain yet is like that twenty-dollar gold piece pinned to your undershirt on your first maiden trip to what you hope is going to be a Memphis whorehouse. He dont need to unpin it yet.”

  TWO

  GAVIN STEVENS

  He hadn’t unpinned it yet. So we all wondered what he was using to live on, for money, sitt

  ing (apparently) day long day after day through the rest of that summer on the flimsy porch of that little rented house, looking at his water tank. Nor would we ever know, until the town would decide to drain the tank and clean it and so rid the water of the brassy taste, exactly how much brass he had used one of the Negro firemen to blackmail the other into stealing for him and which the two Negroes, confederating for simple mutual preservation, had put into the tank where he could never, would never dare, recover it.

  And even now we don’t know whether or not that brass was all. We will never know exactly how much he might have stolen and sold privately (I mean before he thought of drafting Tom Tom or Turl to help him) either before or after someone—Buffaloe probably, since if old Harker had ever noticed those discarded fittings enough to miss any of them he would probably have beat Snopes to the market; very likely, for all his pretence of simple spectator enjoyment, his real feeling was rage at his own blindness—notified somebody at the city hall and had the auditors in. All we knew was that one day the three safety-valves were missing from the boilers; we had to assume, imagine, what happened next: Manfred de Spain—it would be Manfred—sending for him and saying, “Well, Bud,” or Doc or Buster or whatever Manfred would call his … you might say foster husband; who knows? maybe even Superintendent: “Well, Superintendent, this twenty-three dollars and eighty-one cents’ worth of brass”—naturally he would have looked in the catalogue before he sent for him—“was missing during your regime, which you naturally wish to keep spotless as Caesar’s wife: which a simple C.O.D. tag addressed to you will do.” And that, according to Harker, the two auditors hemmed and hawed around the plant for two days before they got up nerve enough to tell Snopes what amount of brass they thought to the best of their knowledge was missing, and that Snopes took the cash out of his pocket and paid them.

  That is, disregarding his salary of fifty dollars a month, the job cost Snopes two hundred and forty-two dollars and thirty-three cents out of his own pocket or actual cash money you might say. And even if he had saved every penny of his salary, less that two-hundred-plus-dollar loss, and assuming there had been two hundred dollars more of brass for him to have stolen successfully during that time, that was still not enough for him to support his family on very long. Yet for two years now he had been sitting on that little front gallery, looking (as far as we knew) at that water tank. So I asked Ratliff.

  “He’s farming,” Ratliff said. “Farming?” I said (all right, cried if you like). “Farming what? Sitting there on that gallery from sunup to sundown watching that water tank?”

  Farming Snopeses, Ratliff said. Farming Snopeses: the whole rigid hierarchy moving intact upward one step as he vacated ahead of it except that one who had inherited into the restaurant was not
a Snopes. Indubitably and indefensibly not a Snopes; even to impugn so was indefensible and outrageous and forever beyond all pale of pardon, whose mother, like her incredible sister-by-marriage a generation later, had, must have, as the old bucolic poet said, cast a leglin girth herself before she married whatever Snopes was Eck’s titular father.

  That was his name: Eck. The one with the broken neck; he brought it to town when he moved in as Flem’s immediate successor, rigid in a steel brace and leather harness. Never in the world a Snopes. Ratliff told it; it happened at the saw mill. (You see, even his family—Flem—knew he was not a Snopes: sending, disposing of him into a sawmill where even the owner must be a financial genius to avoid bankruptcy and there is nothing for a rogue at all since all to steal is lumber, and to embezzle a wagonload of planks is about like embezzling an iron safe or a—yes: that dammed water tank itself.)

  So Flem sent Eck to Uncle Billy Varner’s saw mill (it was that I suppose or chloroform or shoot him as you do a sick dog or a wornout mule) and Ratliff told about it: one day Eck made the proposition that for a dollar each, he and one of the Negro hands (one of the larger ones and of course the more imbecillc) would pick up a tremendous cypress log and set it onto the saw-carriage. And they did (didn’t I just say that one was not even a Snopes and the other already imbecile), had the log almost safely on, when the Negro slipped, something, anyway went down; whereupon all Eck had to do was let go his end and leap out from under. But not he: no Snopes nor no damned thing else, bracing his shoulder under and holding his end up and even taking the shock when the Negro’s end fell to the ground, still braced under it until it occurred to someone to drag the Negro out.

  And still without sense enough to jump, let alone Snopes enough, not even knowing yet that even Jody Varner wasn’t going to pay him anything for saving even a Varner Negro: just standing there holding that whole damned log up, with a little blood already beginning to run out of his mouth, until it finally occurred again to them to shim the log up with another one and pull him from under too, where he could sit hunkered over under a tree, spitting blood and complaining of a headache. (“Don’t tell me they gave him the dollar,” I said—all right: cried—to Ratliff. “Don’t tell me that!”)