And now, after eighteen years, the saw of retribution, which we of course called that of righteousness and simple justice, was about to touch that secret hidden unhealed nail buried in the moral tree of our community—that nail not only corrupted and unhealed but unhealable because it was not just sin but mortal sin—a thing which should not exist at all, whose very conception should be self-annihilative, yet a sin which people seemed constantly and almost universally to commit with complete impunity; as witness these two for eighteen years, not only flouting decency and morality but even compelling decency and morality to accept them simply by being discreet: nobody had actually caught them yet; outraging morality itself by allying economics on their side since the very rectitude and solvency of a bank would be involved in their exposure.
In fact, the town itself was divided into two camps, each split in turn into what you might call a hundred individual nonconforming bivouacs: the women who hated Mrs Snopes for having grabbed Mr de Spain first or hated Mr de Spain for having preferred Mrs Snopes to them, and the men who were jealous of De Spain because they were not him or hated him for being younger than they or braver than they (they called it luckier of course); and those of both sexes—no: the same sour genderless sex—who hated them both for having found or made together something which they themselves had failed to make, whatever the reason; and in consequence of which that splendor must not only not exist, it must never have existed—the females of it who must abhor the splendor because it was, had to be, barren; the males of it who must hate the splendor because they had set the cold stability of currency above the wild glory of blood: they who had not only abetted the sin but had kept alive the anguish of their own secret regret by supporting the sinners’ security for the sake of De Spain’s bank. Two camps: the one that said the sin must be exposed now, it had already lasted eighteen years too long; the other which said it dare not be exposed now and so reveal our own baseness in helping to keep it hidden all this long time.
Because the saw was not just seeking that nail. As far as Jefferson was concerned it had already touched it; we were merely waiting now to see in what direction the fragments of that particular tree in our wood (not the saw itself, never the saw: if that righteous and invincible moral blade flew to pieces at the contact, we all might as well give up, since the very fabric of Baptist and Methodist life is delusion, nothing) would scatter and disintegrate.
That was that whole afternoon while old Mr Varner still stayed hidden or anyway invisible in Mr Snopes’s house. We didn’t even know definitely that he was actually in town, nobody had seen him; we only had Ratliff’s word that he had come in in his son’s automobile at four oclock this morning, and we didn’t know that for sure unless Ratliff had sat up all night watching the Snopes’s front door. But then Mr Varner was there, he had to be or there wouldn’t be any use for the rest of it. And Mr de Spain’s bank continued its ordinary sober busy prosperous gold-auraed course to the closing hour at three oclock, when almost at once the delivery boy from Christian’s drugstore knocked at the side door and was admitted with his ritual tray of four Coca-Colas for the two girl book-keepers and Miss Killebrew the teller and Mr Hovis the cashier. And presently, at his ordinary hour, Mr de Spain came out and got in his car as usual and drove away to look at one of the farms which he now owned or on which the bank held a mortgage, as he always did: no rush, no panic to burst upon the ordered financial day. And some time during the day, either forenoon or afternoon, somebody claimed to have seen Mr Snopes himself, unchanged too, unhurried and unalarmed, the wide black planter’s hat still looking brand new (the tiny bow tie which he had worn for eighteen years now always did), going about his inscrutable noncommunicable affairs.
Then it was five oclock and nothing had happened; soon now people would begin to go home to eat supper and then it would be too late and at first I thought of going up to the office to wait for Uncle Gavin to walk home, only I would have to climb the stairs and then turn around right away and come back down again and I thought what a good name spring fever was to excuse not doing something you didn’t want to do, then I thought maybe spring fever wasn’t an excuse at all because maybe spring fever actually was.
So I just stood on the corner where he would have to pass, to wait for him. Then I saw Mrs Snopes. She had just come out of the beauty parlor and as soon as you looked at her you could tell that’s where she had been and I remembered how Mother said once she was the only woman in Jefferson that never went to one because she didn’t need to since there was nothing in a beauty shop that she could have lacked. But she had this time, standing there for a minute and she really did look both ways along the street before she turned and started toward me and then she saw me and came on and said, “Hello, Chick,” and I tipped my cap, only she came up and stopped and I took my cap off; she had a bag on her arm like ladies do, already opening in to reach inside.
“ ‘I was looking for you,” she said. “Will you give this to your uncle when you go home?”
“Yessum,” I said. It was an envelope.
‘ “Thank you,” she said. “Have they heard any more about the little Riddell boy?”
“I dont know’m,” I said. It wasn’t sealed. It didn’t have any name on the front either.
“Let’s hope they got him to Memphis in time,” she said. Then she said Thank you again and went on, walking like she does, not like a pointer about to make game like Linda, but like water moves somehow. And she could have telephoned him at home and I almost said You dont want me to let Mother see it before I caught myself. Because it wasn’t sealed. But then, I wouldn’t have anyway. Besides, I didn’t have to. Mother wasn’t even at home yet and then I remembered: Wednesday, she would be out at Sartoris at the meeting of the Byron Society though Mother said it had been a long time now since anybody listened to anybody read anything because they played bridge now but at least she said that when it met with Miss Jenny Du Pre they had toddies or juleps instead of just coffee or Coca-Colas.
So nothing had happened and now it was already too late, the sun going down though the pear tree in the side yard had bloomed and gone a month ago and now the mockingbird had moved over to the pink dogwood, already beginning where he had sung all night long all week until you would begin to wonder why in the world he didn’t go somewhere else and let people sleep. And nobody at home at all yet except Aleck Sander sitting on the front steps with the ball and bat. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll knock you out some flies.” Then he said, “All right, you knock out and I’ll chase um.”
So it was almost dark inside the house; I could already smell supper cooking and it was too late now, finished now: Mr de Spain gone out in his new Buick to watch how much money his cotton was making, and Mrs Snopes coming out of the beauty shop with her hair even waved or something or whatever it was, maybe for a party at her house tonight or maybe it hadn’t even begun; maybe old Mr Varner wasn’t even in town at all, not only wasn’t coming but never had aimed to and so all the Riddell boy did by catching polio was just to give us a holiday we didn’t expect and didn’t know what to do with; until I heard Uncle Gavin come in and come up the stairs and I met him in the upstairs hall with the envelope in my hand: just the shape of him coming up the stairs and along the hall until even in that light I saw his face all of a sudden and all of a sudden I said:
“You’re not going to be here for supper.”
“No,” he said. “Will you tell your mother?”
“Here,” I said and held out the envelope and he took it.
TWENTY
GAVIN STEVENS
Though you have to eat. So after I went back and unlocked the office and left the door on the latch, I drove out to Seminary Hill, to eat cheese and crackers and listen to old Mr Garraway curse Calvin Coolidge while he ran the last loafing Negroes out of the store and closed it for the night.
Or so I thought. Because you simply cannot
go against a community. You can stand singly against any temporary unanimity of even a city full of human
behavior, even a mob. But you cannot stand against the cold inflexible abstraction of long-suffering community’s moral point of view. Mr Garraway had been one of the first—no: the first—to move his account from Colonel Sartoris’s bank to the Bank of Jefferson, even before Flem Snopes ever thought or had reason to think of his tenant-farmer panic. He had moved it in fact as soon as we—the town and county—knew that Manfred de Spain was definitely to be president of it. Because he—Mr Garraway—had been one of that original small inflexible unreconstructible Puritan group, both Baptist and Methodist, in the county who would have moved their fiscal allegiance also from Jefferson while De Spain was mayor of it, to escape the moral contamination and express their opinion of that liaison which he represented, if there had been another fiscal town in the county to have moved it to. Though later, a year or two afterward, he moved the account back, perhaps because he was just old or maybe he could stay in his small dingy store out at Seminary Hill and not have to come to town, have to see with his own eyes and so be reminded of his county’s shame and disgrace and sin if he didn’t want to be. Or maybe once you accept something, it doesn’t really matter any more whether you like it or not. Or so I thought.
The note said ten oclock. That was all, Please meet me at your office at ten tonight. Not if convenient, let alone when could you see me at your office? but simply at ten tonight please. You see. Because in the first place, Why me? Me? To say that to all of them, all three of them—no, all four, taking De Spain with me: Why cant you let me alone? What more can you want ofme than I have already failed to do? But there would be plenty of time for that; I would have plenty of time to eat the sardines and crackers and say What a shame to the account of whatever the recent outrage the President and his party had contrived against Mr Garraway, when he—Mr Garraway—said suddenly (an old man with an old man’s dim cloudy eyes magnified and enormous behind the thick lenses of his iron-framed spectacles): “Is it so that Will Varner came in to town this morning?”
“Yes,” I said.
“So he caught them.” Now he was trembling, shaking, standing there behind the worn counter which he had inherited from his father, racked with tins of meat and spools of thread and combs and needles and bottles of cooking extract and malaria tonic and female compound some of which he had probably inherited too, saying in a shaking voice: “Not the husband! The father himself had to come in and catch them after eighteen years!”
“But you put your money back,” I said. “You took it out at first, when you just heard at second hand about the sin and shame and outrage. Then you put it back. Was it because you saw her too at last? She came out here one day, into your store, and you saw her yourself, got to know her, to believe that she at least was innocent? Was that it?”
“I knew the husband,” he said, cried almost, holding his voice down so the Negroes couldn’t hear what we—he was talking about. “I knew the husband! He deserved it!”
Then I remembered. “Yes,” I said. “I thought I saw you in town this afternoon.” Then I knew. “You moved it again today, didn’t you? You drew it out again and put it back into the Bank of Jefferson today, didn’t you?” and he standing there, shaking even while h tried to hold himself from it. “Why?” I said. “Why again today?”
“She must go,” he said. “They must both go—she and De Spain too.”
“But why?” I said, muttered too, not to be overheard: two white men discussing in a store full of Negroes a white woman’s adultery. More: adultery in the very top stratum of a white man’s town and bank. “Why only now? It was one thing as long as the husband accepted it; it became another when somebody—how did you put it?—catches them, blows the gaff? They become merely sinners then, criminals then, lepers then? Nothing for constancy, nothing for fidelity, nothing for devotion, unpoliced devotion, eighteen years of devotion?”
“Is that all you want?” he said. “I’m tired. I want to go home.” Then we were on the gallery where a few of the Negroes still lingered, the arms and faces already fading back into the darkness behind the lighter shades of shirts and hats and pants as if they were slowly vacating them, while his shaking hands tumbled the heavy padlock through the hasp and fumbled it shut; until suddenly I said, quite loud:
“Though if anything the next one will be worse because the next president will probably be Governor Smith and you know who Governor Smith is of course: a Catholic,” and would have stopped that in time in very shame but could not, or maybe should have stopped it in time in very shame but would not. Since who was I, what anguish’s missionary I that I must compound it blindly right and left like some blind unrational minor force of nature? Who had already spoiled supper and ruined sleep both for the old man standing there fumbling with his clumsy lock as if I had actually struck him—the old man who in his fashion, in a lot of people’s fashion, really was a kindly old man who never in his life wittingly or unwittingly harmed anyone black or white, not serious harm: not more than adding a few extra cents to what it would have been for cash, when the article went on credit; or selling to a Negro for half-price or often less (oh yes, at times even giving it to him) the tainted meat or rancid lard or wee-villed flour or meal he would not have permitted a white man—a Protestant gentile white man of course—to eat at all out of his store; standing there with his back turned fumbling at the giant padlock as though I had actually struck him, saying,
“They must go. They must go, both of them.”
There is a ridge; you drive on beyond Seminary Hill and in time you come upon it: a mild unhurried farm road presently mounting to cross the ridge and on to join the main highway leading from Jefferson to the world. And now, looking back and down, you see all Yoknapatawpha in the dying last of day beneath you. There are stars now, just pricking out as you watch them among the others already coldly and softly burning; the end of day is one vast green soundless murmur up the northwest toward the zenith. Yet it is as though light were not being subtracted from earth, drained from earth backward and upward into that cooling green, but rather had gathered, pooling for an unmoving moment yet, among the low places of the ground so that ground, earth itself is luminous and only the dense clumps of trees are dark, standing darkly and immobile out of it.
Then, as though at signal, the fireflies—lightning-bugs of the Mississippi child’s vernacular—myriad and frnetic, random and frantic, pulsing; not questing, not quiring, but choiring as if they were tiny incessant appeaseless voices, cries, words. And you stand suzerain and solitary above the whole sum of your life beneath that incessant ephemeral spangling. First is Jefferson, the center, radiating weakly its puny glow into space; beyond it, enclosing it, spreads the County, tied by the diverging roads to that center as is the rim to the hub by its spokes, yourself detached as God Himself for this moment above the cradle of your nativity and of the men and women who made you, the record and chronicle of your native land proffered for your perusal in ring by concentric ring like the ripples on living water above the dreamless slumber of your past; you to preside unanguished and immune above this miniature of man’s passions and hopes and disasters—ambition and fear and lust and courage and abnegation and pity and honor and sin and pride—all bound, precarious and ramshackle, held together by the web, the iron-thin warp and woof of his rapacity but withal yet dedicated to his dreams.
They are all held here, supine beneath you, stratified and superposed, osseous and durable with the frail dust and the phantoms—the rich alluvial river-bottom land of Issetibbeha, the wild Chickasaw king, with his Negro slaves and his sister’s son called Doom who murdered his way to the throne and, legend said (record itself said since there were old men in the county of my own childhood who had actually seen it), stole an entire steamboat and had it dragged intact eleven miles overland to convert into a palace proper to aggrandise his state; the same fat black rich plantation earth still synonymous of the proud fading white plantation names whether we—I mean of course they—ever actually owned a plantation or not: Sutpen and Sartoris and Co
mpson and Edmonds and McCaslin and Beauchamp and Grenier and Habersham and Holston and Stevens and De Spain, generals and governors and judges, soldiers (even if only Cuban lieutenants) and statesmen failed or not, and simple politicians and over-reachers and just simple failures, who snatched and grabbed and passed and vanished, name and face and all. Then the roadless, almost pathless perpendicular hill-country of the McCallum and Gowrie and Frazier and Muir translated intact with their pot stills and speaking only the old Gaelic and not much of that, from Culloden to Carolina, then from Carolina to Yoknapatawpha still intact and not speaking much of anything except that they now called the pots “kettles” though the drink (even I can remember this) was still usquebaugh; then and last on to where Frenchman’s Bend lay beyond the southeastern horizon, cradle of Varners and ant-heap for the northwest crawl of Snopes.
And you stand there—you, the old man, already whiteheaded (because it doesn’t matter if they call your gray hairs premature because life itself is always premature which is why it aches and anguishes) and pushing forty, only a few years from forty—while there rises up to you, proffered up to you, the spring darkness, the unsleeping darkness which, although it is of the dark itself, declines the dark since dark is of the little death called sleeping. Because look how, even though the last of west is no longer green and all of firmament is now one unlidded studded slow-wheeling arc and the last of earth-pooled visibility has drained away, there still remains one faint diffusion, since everywhere you look about the dark panorama you still see them, faint as whispers: the faint and shapeless lambence of blooming dogwood returning loaned light to light as the phantoms of candles would.
And you, the old man, standing there while there rises to you, about you, suffocating you, the spring dark peopleand myriad, two and two seeking never at all solitude but simply privacy, the privacy decreed and created for them by the spring darkness, the spring weather, the spring which an American poet, a fine one, a woman and so she knows, called girls’ weather and boys’ luck. Which was not the first day at all, not Eden morning at all because girls’ weather and boys’ luck is the sum of all the days: the cup, the bowl proffered once to the lips in youth and then no more; proffered to quench or sip or drain that lone one time and even that sometimes premature, too soon. Because the tragedy of life is, it must be premature, inconclusive and inconcludable, in order to be life; it must be before itself, in advance of itself, to have been at all.
Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion Page 72