“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, sitting (apparently) all 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 dont 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 him 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 saw mill 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 wagon-load of planks is about like embezzling an iron safe or a — yes: that damned 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 bird dog or a wornout mule) and Ratliff told about it: one day, and 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 imbecilic) 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 nigger 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. (“Dont tell me they gave him the dollar,” I said — all right: cried — to Ratliff. “Dont tell me that!”)
Never in this world a Snopes: himself and his wife and son living in the tent behind the restaurant and Eck in his turn in the greasy apron and the steel-and-leather neck harness (behind the counter, frying on the crusted grill the eggs and meat which, because of the rigid brace, he couldn’t even see to gauge the doneness, cooking, as the blind pianist plays, by simple ear), having less business here than even in the saw mill since at the saw mill all he could do was break his own bones where here he was a threat to his whole family’s long tradition of slow and invincible rapacity because of that same incredible and innocent assumption that all people practise
courage and honesty for the simple reason that if they didn’t everybody would be frightened and confused; saying one day, not even privately but right out loud where half a dozen strangers not even kin by marriage to Snopeses heard him: “Aint we supposed to be selling beef in these here hamburgers? I dont know jest what this is yet but it aint no beef.”
So of course they — when I say ‘they’ I mean Snopeses; when you say ‘Snopeses’ in Jefferson you mean Flem Snopes — fired him. They had to; he was intolerable there. Only of course the question rose immediately: where in Jefferson, not in the Jefferson economy but in the Snopes (oh yes, when you say Snopes in Jefferson you mean Flem Snopes) economy would he not be intolerable, would Snopeses be safe from him? Ratliff knew that too. I mean, everybody in Jefferson knew because within twenty-four hours everybody in Jefferson had heard about that hamburger remark and naturally knew that something would have to be done about Eck Snopes and done quick and so of course (being interested) as soon as possible, almost as soon in fact as Flem himself knew, what and where. I mean, it was Ratliff who told me. No: I mean it had to be Ratliff who told me: Ratliff with his damned smooth face and his damned shrewd bland innocent intelligent eyes, too damned innocent, too damned intelligent:
“He’s night watchman now down at Renfrow’s oil tank at the deepo. Where it wont be no strain on his neck like having to look down to see what that was he jest smelled burning. He wont need to look up to see whether the tank’s still there or not, he can jest walk up and feel the bottom of it. Or even set there in his chair in the door and send that boy to look. That horse boy,” Ratliff said.
“That what boy?” I said, cried.
“That horse boy,” Ratliff said. “Eck’s boy. Wallstreet Panic. The day that Texas feller arctioned off them wild Snopes ponies, I was out there. It was jest dust-dark and we had done et supper at Miz Littlejohn’s and I was jest undressing in my room to go to bed when Henry Armstid and Eck and that boy of hisn went in the lot to ketch their horses; Eck had two: the one the Texas feller give him to get the arction started off, and the one Eck felt he had to at least bid on after having been give one for nothing, and won it. So when Henry Armstid left the gate open and the whole herd stampeded over him and out of it, I reckon the hardest instantaneous decision Eck ever had to make in his life was to decide which one of them horses to chase: the one the Texas man give him, which represented the most net profit if he caught it, or the one that he already had five or six dollars of his own money invested in; that is, was a hundred-plus percent. of a free horse worth more than just a hundred percent. of a six-dollar horse? That is, jest how far can you risk losing a horse that no matter what you get for him you will still have to subtract six dollars from it, to jest catch one that will be all net profit?
“Or maybe he decided him and that boy better split up after both of them while he figgered it out. Anyway, the first I knowed, I had done took off my britches and was jest leaning out the window in my shirt-tail trying to see what was going on, when I heerd a kind of sound behind me and looked over my shoulder and there was one of them horses standing in the door looking at me and standing in the hall behind him with a piece of plow-line was that boy of Eck’s. I reckon we both moved at the same moment: me out the window in my shirt-tail and the horse swirling to run on down the hall, me realising I never had no britches on and running around the house toward the front steps jest about the time the horse met Miz Littlejohn coming onto the back gallery with a armful of washing in one hand and the washboard in the other; they claimed she said ‘git out of here you son of a bitch’ and split the washboard down the center of its face and throwed the two pieces at it without even changing hands, it swirling again to run back up the hall jest as I run up the front steps, and jumped clean over that boy still standing in the hall with his plow-line without touching a hair, on to the front gallery again and seen me and never even stopped: jest swirled and run to the end of the gallery and jumped the railing and back into the lot again, looking jest like a big circus-colored hawk, sailing out into the moonlight and across the lot again in about two jumps and out the gate that still hadn’t nobody thought to close yet; I heerd him once more when he hit the wooden bridge jest this side of Bookright’s turn-off. Then that boy come out of the house, still toting the plow-line. ‘Howdy, Mr Ratliff,’ he says. ‘Which way did he go?’ — Except you’re wrong.”
Horse boy, dog boy, cat boy, monkey boy, elephant boy: anything but Snopes boy. And then suppose, just suppose; suppose and tremble: one generation more removed from Eck Snopes and his innocence; one generation more until that innocent and outrageous belief that courage and honor are practical, has had time to fade and cool so that merely the habit of courage and honor remain; add to that then that generation’s natural heritage of cold rapacity as instinctive as breathing, and tremble at that prospect: the habit of courage and honor compounded by rapacity or rapacity raised to the absolute nth by courage and honor: not horse boy but a lion or tiger boy: Genghis Khan or Tamerlane or Attila in the defenseless midst of indefensible Jefferson. Then Ratliff was looking at me. I mean, he always was. I mean I discovered with a kind of terror that for a second I had forgot it. “What?” I said. “What did you say?”
“That you’re wrong. About Eck’s night watchman job at the oil tank. It wasn’t Manfred de Spain this time. It was the Masons.”
“What?” I said, cried.
“That’s right. Eck was one of the biggest ones of Uncle Billy Varner’s Frenchman’s Bend Masons. It was Uncle Billy sent word in to the Masons in Jefferson to find Eck a good light broke-neck job.”
“That bad?” I said. “That bad? The next one in the progression so outrageous and portentous and terrifying that Will Varner himself had to use influence twenty-two miles away to save Frenchman’s Bend?” Because the next one after Eck behind the restaurant counter was I.O., the blacksmith-cum-schoolmaster-cum-bigamist, or -times bigamist, multiplied by bigamy — a thin undersized voluble weasel-faced man talking constantly in a steady stream of worn saws and proverbs usually having no connection with one another nor application to anything else, who even with the hammer would not have weighed as much as the anvil he abrogated and dispossessed; who (Ratliff of course, Ratliff always) entered Frenchman’s Bend already talking, or rather appeared one morning already talking in Varner’s blacksmith shop which an old man named Trumbull had run man and boy for fifty years.
But no blacksmith, I.O. He merely held the living. It was the other one, our Eck, his cousin (whatever the relationship was, unless simply being both Snopes was enough until one proved himself unworthy, as Eck was to do, like two Masons from that moment to apostasy like Eck’s, forever sworn to show a common front to life), who did the actual work. Until one day, one morning, perhaps the curate, Eck, was not there or perhaps it simply occurred to the vicar, the high priest, for the first time that his actually was the right and the authority to hold a communion service and nobody could really prevent him: that morning, Zack Houston with his gaited stallion until Snopes quicked it with the first nail; whereupon Houston picked Snopes up and threw him hammer and all into the cooling tub and managed somehow to hold the plunging horse and wrench the shoe off and the nail out at the same time, and led the horse outside and tied it and came back and threw Snopes back into the cooling tub again.
And no schoolmaster either. He didn’t merely usurp that as a position among strangers, he actually stole it as a vocation from his own kin. Though Frenchman’s Bend didn’t know that yet. They knew only that he was hardly out of the blacksmith shop (or dried again out of the cooling tub where Houston had flung him) when he was installed as teacher (‘Professor’, the teacher was called in Frenchman’s Bend, provided of course he wore trousers) in the one-room schoolhouse which was an integer of old Varner’s princedom — an integer not because old Varner or anyone else in Frenchman’s Bend considered that juvenile education filled any actual communal lack or need, but simply because his settlement had to have a going schoolhouse to be comp
lete as a freight train has to have a caboose to be complete.
So I.O. Snopes was now the schoolmaster; shortly afterward he was married to a Frenchman’s Bend belle and within a year he was pushing a homemade perambulator about the village and his wife was already pregnant again; here, you would have said, was a man not merely settled but doomed to immobilization, until one day in the third year a vast gray-colored though still young woman, accompanied by a vast gray-colored five-year-old boy, drove up to Varner’s store in a buggy —
“It was his wife,” Ratliff said.
“His wife?” I said, cried. “But I thought—”
“So did we,” Ratliff said. “Pushing that-ere homemade buggy with two of them in it this time, twins, already named Bilbo and Vardaman, besides the first one, Clarence. Yes sir, three chaps already while he was waiting for his other wife with that one to catch up with him — a little dried-up feller not much bigger than a crawfish, and that other wife — no, I mean the one he had now in Frenchman’s Bend when that-ere number one one druv up — wasn’t a big girl neither — Miz Vernon Tull’s sister’s niece by marriage she was — yet he got onto her too them same big gray-colored kind of chaps like the one in the buggy with his ma driving up to the store and saying to whoever was setting on the gallery at the moment: ‘I hear I.O. inside.’ (He was. We could all hear him.) ‘Kindly step in and tell him his wife’s come.’
“That was all. It was enough. When he come to the Bend that day three years ago he had a big carpet-bag, and in them three years he had probably accumulated some more stuff; I mean besides them three new chaps. But he never stopped for none of it. He jest stepped right out the back door of the store. And Flem had done long since already sold old man Trumbull back to Varner for the blacksmith, but now they was needing a new professor too or anyhow they would as soon as I.O. could get around the first corner out of sight where he could cut across country. Which he evidently done; never nobody reported any dust-cloud travelling fast along a road nowhere. They said he even stopped talking, though I doubt that. You got to draw the line somewhere, aint you?”
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 463