Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion

by William Faulkner

  “Mink?” he said. “Mink?” He thought rapidly Oh hell, not this thinking rapidly Nineteen … eight. Twenty years then twenty more on top ofthat. He will he out in two more years anyway. We had for gotten that. Or had we. He didn’t need to write Tell me either; she was already doing that; except for the silence he could, would have asked her what in the world, what stroke of coincidence (he had not yet begun to think chance, fate, destiny) had caused her to think of the man whom she had never seen and whose name she could have heard only in connection with a cowardly and savage murder. But that didn’t matter now: which was the instant when he began to think destiny and fate.

  With the houseman to do the listening, she had taken her father’s car yesterday and driven out to Frenchman’s Bend and talked with her mother’s brother Jody; she stood now facer thrm beside the mantel on which the empty pad lay, telling him: “He had just twenty years at first, which would have been nineteen twenty-eight; he would have got out then. Only in nineteen twenty-three he tried to escape. In a woman’s what Uncle Jody called mother hubbard and a sunbonnet. How did he get hold of a mother hubbard and a sunbonnet in the penitentiary.”

  Except for the silence he could have used gentleness. But all he had now was the yellow pad. Because he knew the answer himself now, writing What did Jody tell you

  “That it was my … other cousin, Montgomery Ward, that had the dirty magic-lantern slides until they sent him to Parchman too, in nineteen twenty-three too, you remember?” Oh yes, he remembered: how he and the then sheriff, old Hub Hampton, dead now, both knew that it was Flem Snopes himself who planted the moonshine liquor in his kinsman’s studio and got him sentenced to two years in Parchman, yet how it was Flem himself who not only had two private interviews with Montgomery Ward while he lay in jail waiting trial, but put up the money for his bond and surety which permitted Montgomery Ward a two-day absence from the jail and Jefferson too before returning to accept his sentence and be taken to Parchman to serve it, after which Jefferson saw him no more nor heard of him until eight or ten years ago the town learned that Montgomery Ward was now in Los Angeles, engaged in some quite lucrative adjunct or correlative to the motion-picture industry or anyway colony. So that’s why Montgomery Ward had to go to Parchman and nowhere else he thought instead of merely Atlanta or Leavenworth where only the dirty post cards would have sent him. Oh yes, he remembered that one, and the earlier one too: in the courtroom also with the little child-sized gaunt underfed maniacal murderer, when the Court itself leaned down to give him his constitutional right to elect his plea, saying, “Dont bother me now; cant you see I’m busy?” then turning to shout again into the packed room: “Flem! Flem Snopes! Wont anybody here get word to Flem Snopes—” Oh yes, he, Stevens, knew now why Montgomery Ward had had to go to Parchman: Flem Snopes had bought twenty more years of life with that five gallons of planted evidence.

  He wrote You want me to get him out now

  “Yes,” she said. “How do you do it?”

  He wrote He will be out in 2 more years why not wait till then He wrote He has known nothing else but that cage for 38 years He wont live a month free like an old lion or tiger At least give him 2 more years

  “Two years of life are not important,” she said. “Two years of jail are.”

  He had even moved the pencil again when he stopped and spoke aloud instead; later he told Ratliff why. “I know why,” Ratliff said. “You jest wanted to keep your own skirts clean. Maybe by this time she had done learned to read your lips and even if she couldn’t you would at least been on your own record anyhow.” “No,” Stevens said. “It was because I not only believe in and am an advocate of fate and destiny, I admire them; I want to be one of the instruments too, no matter how modest.” So he didn’t write: he spoke:

  “Dont you know what he’s going to do the minute he gets back to Jefferslion oranywhere else your father is?”

  “Say it slow and let me try again,” she said.

  He wrote I love you thinking rapidly If I say No she will find somebody else, anybody else, maybe some jackleg who will bleed her to get him out then continue to bleed her for what the little rattlesnake is going to do the moment he is free, and wrote Yes we can get him out it will take a few weeks a petition I will draw them up for you his blood kin the judge sheriff at the time Judge Long and old Hub Hampton are dead but Little Hub will do even if he wont be sheriff again until next election I will take them to the Governor myself

  Ratliff too he thought. Tomorrow the petition lay on his desk, Ratliff standing over it pen in hand. “Go on,” Stevens said. “Sign it. I’m going to take care of that too. What do you think I am—a murderer?”

  “Not yet anyway,” Ratliff said. “How take care of it?”

  “Mrs Kohl is going to,” Stevens said.

  “I thought you told me you never mentioned out loud where she could hear it what Mink would do as soon as he got back inside the same town limits with Flem,” Ratliff said.

  “I didn’t need to,” Stevens said. “Linda and I both agreed that there was no need for him to come back here. After forty years, with his wife dead and his daughters scattered God knows where; that in fact he would be better off if he didn’t. So she’s putting up the money. She wanted to make it a thousand but I told her that much in a lump would destroy him sure. So I’m going to leave two-fifty with the Warden, to be handed to him the minute before they unlock the gate to let him through it, with the understanding that the moment he accepts the money, he has given his oath to cross the Mississippi state line before sundown, and that another two-fifty will be sent every three months to whatever address he selects, provided he never again crosses the Mississippi line as long as he lives.”

  “I see,” Ratliff said. “He cant tech the money a-tall except on the condition that he dont never lay eyes on Flem Snopes again as long as he lives.”

  “That’s right,” Stevens said.

  “Suppose jest money aint enough,” Ratliff said. “Suppose he wont take jest two hundred and fifty dollars for Flem Snopes.”

  “Remember,” Stevens said. “He’s going to face having to measure thirty-eight years he has got rid of, put behind him, against two more years he has still got to spend inside a cage to get rid of. He’s selling Flem Snopes for these next two years, with a thousand dollars a year bonus thrown in free for the rest of his life. Sign it.”

  “Dont rush me,” Ratliff said. “Destiny and fate. They was what you told me about being proud to be a handmaid of, wasn’t they?”

  “So what?” Stevens said. “Sign it.”

  “Dont you reckon you ought to maybe included a little luck into them too?”

  “Sign it,” Stevens said.

  “Have you told Flem yet?”

  “He hasn’t asked me yet,” Stevens said.

  “When he does ask you?” Ratliff said.

  “Sign it,” Stevens said.

  “I already did,” Ratliff said. He laid the pen back on the desk. “You’re right. We never had no alternative not to. If you’d a said No, she would jest got another lawyer that wouldn’t a said No nor even invented that two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar gamble neither. And then Flem Snopes wouldn’t a had no chance a-tall.”

  None of the other requisite documents presented any difficulty either. The judge who had presided at the trial was dead of course, as was the incumbent sheriff, old Hub Hampton. But his son, known as Little Hub, had inherited not only his father’s four-year alternation as sheriff, but also his father’s capacity to stay on the best of political terms with his alternating opposite number, Ephriam Bishop. So Stevens had those two names; also the foreman of the grand jury at the time was a hale (hence still quick) eighty-five, even running a small electric-driven corn mill while he wasn’t hunting and fishing with Uncle Ike McCaslin, another octogenarian: plus a few other select signatures which Stevens compelled onto his petition as simply and ruthlessly as he did Ratliff’s. Though what he considered his strongest card was a Harvard classmate, an amateur in state
politics who had never held any office, who for years had been a sort of friend-of-the-court adviser to governors simply because all the state factions knew he was not only a loyal Mississippian but one already too wealthy to want anything.

  So Stevens would have—indeed, intended to have—nothing but progress to report to his client after he sent the documents in to the state capital and the rest of the summer passed toward and into fall—September, when Mississippi (including governors and legislatures and pardon boards) would put their neckties and coats back on and assume work again. Indeed, he felt he could almost select the specific day and hour he preferred to have the prisoner freed, choosing late September and explaining why to his client on the pad of yellow office foolscap, specious, voluble, convincing since he himself was convinced. September, the mounting apex of the cotton-picking season when there would be not only work, familiar work, but work which of all the freed man had the strongest emotional ties with, which after thirty-eight years of being compelled to it by loaded shotguns, he would now be paid by the hundredweight for performing it. This, weighed against being freed at once, back in June, with half a summer of idleness plus the gravitational pull back to where he was born; not explaining to Linda his reasons why the little child-size creature who must have been mad to begin with and whom thirty-eight years in a penitentiary could not have improved any, must not come back to Jefferson; hiding that too behind the rational garrulity of the pencil flying along the ruled lines—until suddenly he would look up (she of course had heard nothing) and Ratliff would be standing just inside the office door looking at them, courteous, bland, inscrutable, and only a little grave and thoughtful too now. So little in fact that Linda anyway never noticed it, at least not before Stevens, touching, jostling her arm or elbow as he rose (though this was never necessary; she had felt the new presence by now), saying, “Howdy, V.K. Come in. Is it that time already?”

  “Looks like it,” Ratliff would say. “Mawnin, Linda.”

  “Howdy, V.K.,” she would answer in her deaf voice but almost exactly with Stevens’s inflection: who could not have heard him greet Ratliff since, and even he could not remember when she could have heard him before. Then Stevens would produce the gold lighter monogrammed G L S though L was not his initial, and light her cigarette, then at the cabinet above the wash basin he and Ratliff would assemble the three thick tumblers and the sugar basin and the single spoon and a sliced lemon and Ratliff would produce from his clothing somewhere the flask of corn whiskey a little of which old Mr Calvin Bookwright still made and aged each year and shared now and then with the few people tactful enough to retain his precarious irascible friendship. Then, Linda with her cigarette and Stevens with his cob pipe, the three of them would sit and sip the toddies, Stevens still talking and scribbling now and then on the pad for her to answer, until she would set down her empty glass and rise and say good-bye and leave them. Then Ratliff said:

  “So you aint told Flem yet.” Stevens smoked. “But then of course you dont need to, being as it’s pretty well over the county now that Mink Snopes’s cousin Linda or niece Linda or whichever it is, is getting him out.” Stevens smoked. Ratliff picked up one of the toddy glasses. “You want another one?”

  “No much obliged,” Stevens said.

  “So you aint lost your voice,” Ratliff said. “Except, maybe back there in that vault in the bank where he would have to be counting his money, he cant hear what’s going on. Except maybe that one trip he would have to make outside.” Stevens smoked. “To go across to the sheriff’s office.” Stevens smoked. “You right sho you dont want another toddy?”

  “All right,” Stevens said. “Why?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you. You’d a thought the first thing Flem would a done would been to go to the sheriff and remind him of them final words of Mink’s before Judge Long invited him to Parchman. Only he aint done that. Maybe because at least Linda told him about them two hundred and fifty dollars and even Flem Snopes can grab a straw when there aint nothing else in sight? Because naturally Flem cant walk right up to her and write on that tablet, The minute you let that durn little water moccasin out he’s going to come straight back here and pay you up to date for your maw’s grave and all the rest of it that these Jefferson meddlers have probably already persuaded you I was to blame for; naturally he dont dare risk putting no such idea as that in her head and have her grab a-holt of you and go to Parchman and take him out tonight and have him back in Jefferson by breakfast tomorrow, when as it is he’s still got three more weeks, during which anything might happen: Linda or Mink or the Governor or the pardon board might die or Parchman itself might blow up. When did you say it would be?”

  “When what will be?” Stevens said.

  “The day they will let him out.”

  “Oh. Some time after the twentieth. Probably the twenty-sixth.”

  “The twenty-sixth,” Ratliff said. “And you’re going down there before?”

  “Next week,” Stevens said. “To leave the money and talk with the Warden myself. That he is not to touch the money until he promises to leave Mississippi before sundown and never come back.”

  “In that case,” Ratliff said, “everything’s all right. Especially if I—” He stopped.

  “If you what?” Stevens said.

  “Nothing,” Ratliff said. “Fate, and destiny, and luck, and hope, and all of us mixed up in it—us and Linda and Flem and that durn little half-starved wildcat down there in Parchman, all mixed up in the same luck and destiny and fate and hope until cant none of us tell where it stops and we begin. Especially the hope. I mind I used to think that hope was about all folks had, only now I’m beginning to believe that that’s about all anybody needs—jest hope. The pore son of a bitch over yonder in that bank vault counting his money because that’s the one place on earth Mink Snopes cant reach him in, and long as he’s got to stay in it he might as well count money to be doing something, have something to do. And I wonder if maybe he wouldn’t give Linda back her two hundred and fifty dollars without even charging her no interest on it, for them two years of pardon. And I wonder jest how much of the rest of the money in that vault he would pay to have another twenty years added onto them. Or maybe jest ten more. Or maybe jest one more.”

  Ten days later Stevens was in the Warden’s office at the state penitentiary. He had the money with him—twenty-five ten-dollar notes, quite new. “You dont want to see him yourself?” the Warden said.

  “No,” Stevens said. “You can do it. Anybody can. Simply offer him his choice: take the pardon and the two hundred and fifty dollars and get out of Mississippi as fast as he can, plus another two hundred and fifty every three months for the rest of his life if he never crosses the state line again; or stay here in Parchman another two years and rot and be damned to him.”

  “Well, that ought to do it,” the Warden said. “It certainly would with me. Why is it whoever owns the two hundred and fifty dollars dont want him to come back home so bad?”

  Stevens said rapidly, “Nothing to come back to. Family gone and scattered, wife died twenty-five or thirty years ago and nobody knows what became of his two daughters. Even the tenant house he lived in either collapsed of itself or maybe somebody found it and chopped it up and hauled it away for firewood.”

  “That’s funny,” the Warden said. “Almost anybody in Mississippi has got at least one cousin. In fact, it’s hard not to have one.”

  “Oh, distant connections, relations,” Stevens said. “Yes, it seems to have been the usual big vault ttered country clan.”

  “So one of these big scattered connections dont want him back home enough to pay two hundred and fifty dollars for it.”

  “He’s mad,” Stevens said. “Somebody here during the last thirty-eight years must have had that idea occur to them and suggested it to you even if you hadn’t noticed it yourself.”

  “We’re all mad here,” the Warden said. “Even the prisoners too. Maybe it’s the climate. I wouldn’t worry, if I were
you. They all make these threats at the time—big threats, against the judge or the prosecuting lawyer or a witness that stood right up in public and told something that any decent man would have kept to himself; big threats: I notice there’s no place on earth where a man can be as loud and dangerous as handcuffed to a policeman. But even one year is a long time sometimes. And he’s had thirty-eight of them. So he dont get the pardon until he agrees to accept the money. Why do you know he wont take the money and double-cross you?”

  “I’ve noticed a few things about people too,” Stevens said. “One of them is, how a bad man will work ten times as hard and make ten times the sacrifice to be credited with at least one virtue no matter how Spartan, as the upright man will to avoid the most abject vice provided it’s fun. He tried to kill his lawyer right there in the jail during the trial when the lawyer suggested pleading him crazy. He will know that the only sane thing to do is to accept the money and the pardon, since to refuse the pardon because of the money, in two more years he not only wouldn’t have the two thousand dollars, he might even be dead. Or, what would be infinitely worse, he would be alive and free at last and poor, and Fie—” and stopped himself.

  “Yes?” the Warden said. “Who is Fleh, that might be dead himself in two more years and so out of reach for good? The one that owns the two hundred and fifty dollars? Never mind,” he said. “I’ll agree with you. Once he accepts the money, everything is jake, as they say. That’s what you want?”