Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  And likely Mr Snopes thought all the gas was out by now, though they probably both must have figured there would still be enough left to fix Cedric when he climbed down inside. Because Mrs Nunnery said that’s where they both thought Cedric was and that he was dead; she said she was so sure that she couldn’t even bear to wait and see, she was already running — not running anywhere: just running — when Mr Snopes came out of his little office with the lighted lantern and still running while he was climbing up the ladder and still running when he swung the lantern over into the manhole; that is she said she was still running when the explosion (she said she never even heard it, she never heard anything, or she would have stopped) knocked her down and the air all around her whizzing with pieces of the tank like a swarm of bumble bees. And Mr Harker from the power-plant that got there first and found her, said she begun to try to run again as soon as he picked her up, shrieking and screaming and thrashing around while they held her, until she sat down and drank the whiskey and the rest of them walked and hunted around among the scattered bricks from the trestles, still trying to find some trace of Cedric and Mr Snopes, until Cedric came at a dead run up the track from where he had been playing in a culvert about a half a mile away when he heard the explosion.

  But they never did find Mr Snopes until the next morning when Tom Tom Bird, the day fireman at the power-plant, on his way in to work from where he lived about two miles down the track, saw something hanging in the telegraph wires about two hundred yards from where the tank had been and got a long pole and punched it down and when he showed it to Mr Harker at the plant, it was Mr Snopes’s steel neck-brace though none of the leather was left.

  But they never did find anything of Mr Snopes, who was a good man, everybody liked him, sitting in his chair beside the office door where he could watch the tank or walking around the tank when he would let the coal oil run into the cans and drums and delivery tanks, with his neck and head stiff in the steel brace so he couldn’t turn his head at all: he would have to turn all of himself like turning a wooden post. All the boys in town knew him because pretty soon they all found out that he kept a meal sack full of raw peanuts from the country and would holler to any of them that passed and give them a handful.

  Besides, he was a Mason too. He had been a Mason such a long time that he was a good one even if he wasn’t very high up in it. So they buried the neck-brace anyway, in a coffin all regular, with the Masons in charge of the funeral, and more people than you would have thought sent flowers, even the oil company too although Mr Snopes had ruined their tank for nothing because Cedric Nunnery wasn’t even in it.

  So they buried what they did have of him; there was the Baptist preacher too, and the Masons in their aprons dropping a pinch of dirt into the grave and saying “Alas my brother”, and covered the raw red dirt with the flowers (one of the flower pieces had the Mason signs worked into it); and the tank was insured so when the oil company got through cussing Mr Snopes for being a grown man with no more sense than that, they even gave Mrs Snopes a thousand dollars to show they were sorry for her even if she had married a fool. That is, they gave the money to Mrs Snopes because their oldest boy, Wallstreet, wasn’t but sixteen then. But he was the one that used it.

  But that came later. All that happened now was that Mayor de Spain finally got to be a commanding officer long enough to ring his alarm bell at least, and we had some more fresh Snopes news to send Uncle Gavin. By ‘we’ I mean me now. Gowan’s mother and father had finally got home from China or wherever it was and now Gowan was in Washington (it was fall) for the last year anyway at the prep school getting ready for the University of Virginia next year and one afternoon Mother sent for me, into the parlor, and there was Ratliff in his neat faded blue tieless shirt and his smooth brown face, in the parlor like company (there was a tea tray and Ratliff had a teacup and a cucumber sandwich and I know now there were a lot of people in Jefferson, let alone in the county where Ratliff came from, that wouldn’t have known what to do with a cup of tea at four oclock in the afternoon and maybe Ratliff never saw one before then either but you couldn’t have told it by watching him) and Mother said,

  “Make your manners to Mister Ratliff, bub. He’s come to call on us,” and Ratliff said,

  “Is that what you call him?” and Mother said,

  “No, we just call him whatever is handy yet,” and Ratliff said,

  “Sometimes fellers named Charles gets called Chick when they gets to school.” Then he said to me: “Do you like strawberry ice cream cones?” and I said,

  “I like any kind of ice cream cones,” and Ratliff said:

  “Then maybe your cousin—” and stopped and said to Mother: “Excuse me, Miz Mallison; I done been corrected so many times that it looks like it may take me a spell yet.” So after that it was me and Ratliff instead of Gowan and Ratliff, only instead of two cones it cost Ratliff three now because when I went to town without Mother, Aleck Sander was with me. And I dont know how Ratliff did it and of course I cant remember when because I wasn’t even five yet. But he had put into my mind too, just like into Gowan’s, that idea of Snopeses covering Jefferson like an influx of snakes or varmints from the woods and he and Uncle Gavin were the only ones to recognise the danger and the threat and now he was having to tote the whole load by himself until they would finally stop the war and Uncle Gavin could get back home and help. “So you might just as well start listening now,” he said, “whether you aint but five or not. You’re going to have to hear a heap of it before you get old enough or big enough to resist.”

  It was November. Then that day, the courthouse bell rang again and all the church bells too this time, wild and frantic too in the middle of the week from the Sunday steeples and a few shotguns and pistols too like the old veterans that were still alive when they unveiled the Confederate monument that day except that the ones this time hadn’t been to a war yet so maybe what they were celebrating this time was that this one finally got over before they had to go to it. So now Uncle Gavin could come home where Ratliff himself could ask him what Montgomery Ward Snopes had done that his name must not be mentioned or discussed. That was when Ratliff told me, “You might as well get used to hearing it even if you aint but five.” That was when he said: “What do you reckon it was he done? Your cousin has been watching Snopeses for going on ten years now; he even taken one all the way to France with him to keep his-self abreast and up-to-date. What you reckon a Snopes could a done after ten years to shock and startle him so much he couldn’t bear even to discuss it?”

  Or this was when he meant it because when Uncle Gavin came home it was for only two weeks. He was out of the uniform, the army, the Y.M.C.A. now but as soon as he was out they put him into some kind of board or committee or bureau for war rehabilitation in Europe because he had lived in Europe all that time, especially the two years as a student in Germany. And possibly the only reason he came home at all was that Grandfather had died during the last year of the war and he came home to see us as people do in bereavement. Though I believed then that the reason he came was to tell Ratliff what it was about Montgomery Ward Snopes that was too bad to write on paper. Which was when Ratliff said about all the listening I would have to do, meaning that with him, Ratliff, alone again to tote the load, anyway I could do that much.

  It was one day; sometimes Mother let me go to town by myself now. I mean, when she wasn’t noticing enough to say Come back here. No: I mean, when she found out I had now she didn’t jump on me too hard. — it was one day, Ratliff’s voice said, “Come here.” He had traded off his buckboard and team and now he had a Model T, with the little painted house with the sewing machine in it fastened to the back in place of a back seat; what they call pickup trucks now though Ratliff and Uncle Noon Gatewood had made this one. He was sitting in it with the door already open and I got in and he shut the door and we drove right slow along the back streets around the edge of town. “How old did you say you was?” he said. I told him again: five. “Well, we cant help
that, can we?”

  “Cant help what?” I said. “Why?”

  “Come to think of it, maybe you’re right at that,” he said. “So all we got to do now is jest take a short ride. So what happened to Montgomery Ward Snopes was, he quit the fighting army and went into business.”

  “What business?” I said.

  “The … canteen business. Yes, the canteen business. That’s what he done while he was with your cousin. They was at a town named Châlons, only your cousin had to stay in the town to run the office, so he give Montgomery Ward, since he had the most spare time, the job of running the canteen at another little town not far away that would be more convenient for the soldiers — a kind of a shack with counters like a store where soldiers could buy the candy bars and sody pop and hand-knitted socks like your cousin told us about that time last week when they wasn’t busy fighting, you remember? Except that after a while Montgomery Ward’s canteen got to be jest about the most popular canteen the army or even the Y.M.C.A. either ever had in France or anywhere else; it got so popular that finally your cousin went his-self and looked at it and found that Montgomery Ward had cut off the back end and fixed it up as a new fresh entertainment room with a door in the back and a young French lady he happened to know in it, so that any time a soldier got tired of jest buying socks or eating chocolate bars he could buy a ticket from Montgomery Ward and go around through the back door and get his-self entertained.

  “That was what your cousin found out. Only the army and the Y.M.C.A. had some kind of a rule against entertainment; they figgered that a soldier ought to be satisfied jest buying socks and sody pop in a canteen. Or maybe it was your cousin; likely it was him. Because if the army and the Y.M.C.A. had found out about that back room, they would a fired Montgomery Ward so hard he would likely a come back to Jefferson in handcuffs — providing he never stopped off at Leavenworth, Kansas, first. Which reminds me of something I may have said to your other cousin Gowan once when likely you wasn’t present: about how some of the folks that lost Helen of Troy might someday wish they hadn’t never found her to begin with.”

  “Why?” I said. “Where was I if I wasn’t there then?”

  “It was your cousin. Montgomery Ward might have even saved enough out of the back-room entertainment tickets to bought his-self out of it. But he never needed to. He had your cousin. He was the hair-shirt of your cousin’s lost love and devotion, whether he knowed it or not or cared or not. Or maybe it was Jefferson. Maybe your cousin couldn’t bear the idea of Jefferson being represented in Leavenworth prison even for the reward of one Snopes less in Jefferson itself. So likely it was him, and afterwards saying, ‘But dont never let me see your face again in France.’

  “That is, dont never bring your face to me again. Because Montgomery Ward was the hair-shirt; likely your cousin taken the same kind of proud abject triumphant submissive horror in keeping up with his doings that them old hermits setting on rocks out in the hot sun in the desert use to take watching their blood dry up and their legs swivelling, keeping up from a distance while Montgomery Ward added more and more entertaining ladies to that-ere new canteen he set up in Paris—”

  “They have chocolate bars and soda pop in canteens,” I said. “Uncle Gavin said so. Chewing gum too.”

  “That was the American army,” Ratliff said. “They had been in the war such a short time that likely they hadn’t got used to it yet. This new canteen of Montgomery Ward’s was you might say a French canteen, with only private American military connections. The French have been in enough wars long enough to find out that the best way to get shut of one is not to pay too much attention to it. In fact the French probably thought the kind of canteen Montgomery Ward was running this time was just about the most solvent and economical and you might say self-perpetuating kind he could a picked out, since, no matter how much money you swap for ice cream and chocolate candy and sody pop, even though the money still exists, that candy and ice cream and sody pop dont anymore because it has been consumed and will cost some of that money to produce and replenish, where in jest strict entertainment there aint no destructive consumption at all that’s got to be replenished at a definite production labor cost: only a normal natural general overall depreciation which would have took place anyhow.”

  “Maybe Montgomery Ward wont come back to Jefferson,” I said.

  “If I was him, I wouldn’t,” Ratliff said.

  “Unless he can bring the canteen with him,” I said.

  “In that case I sholy wouldn’t,” Ratliff said.

  “Is it Uncle Gavin you keep on talking about?” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Ratliff said.

  “Then why dont you say so?” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Ratliff said. “Your uncle. It was your cousin Gowan (I’m right this time, aint I?) got me mixed up but I’ll remember now. I promise it.”

  Montgomery Ward didn’t come home for two years. Though I had to be older than that before I understood what Ratliff meant when he said Montgomery Ward had done the best he knew to bring an acceptable Mississippi version of his Paris canteen back home with him. He was the last Yoknapatawpha soldier to return. One of Captain McLendon’s company was wounded in the first battle in which American troops were engaged and was back in uniform with his wound stripe in 1918. Then early in 1919 the rest of the company except two dead from flu and a few in hospital, were all home again to wear their uniforms too around the Square for a little while. Then in May one of Colonel Sartoris’s twin grandsons (the other one had been shot down in July last year) got home from the British Air Force though he didn’t have on a uniform at all: just a big low-slung racing car that made the little red E.M.F. that Mayor de Spain used to own look like a toy, driving it fast around town between the times when Mr Connors would have to arrest him for speeding, but mostly about once a week back and forth to Memphis while he was getting settled down again. That is, that’s what Mother said he was trying to do.

  Only he couldn’t seem to either, like the war had been too much for him too. I mean, Montgomery Ward Snopes couldn’t seem to settle down enough from it to come back home, and Bayard Sartoris came home all right but he couldn’t settle down, driving the car so fast between Sartoris Station and Jefferson that finally Colonel Sartoris, who hated automobiles almost as much as Grandfather did, who wouldn’t even lend the bank’s money to a man who was going to buy one, gave up the carriage and the matched team, to ride back and forth into town with Bayard in the car, in hopes that maybe that would make Bayard slow it down before he killed himself or somebody else.

  So when Bayard finally did kill somebody, as we (all Yoknapatawpha County grown folks) all expected he would, it was his grandfather. Because we didn’t know that either: that Colonel Sartoris had a heart condition; Doctor Peabody had told him that three years ago, and that he had no business in an automobile at all. But Colonel Sartoris hadn’t told anybody else, not even his sister, Mrs Du Pre that kept house for him: just riding in that car back and forth to town every day to keep Bayard slowed down (they even managed somehow to persuade Miss Narcissa Benbow to marry him in hopes maybe that would settle him down) until that morning they came over a hill at about fifty miles an hour and there was a Negro family in a wagon in the road and Bayard said, “Hold on, Grandfather,” and turned the car off into the ditch; it didn’t turn over or even wreck very bad: just stopped in the ditch with Colonel Sartoris still sitting in it with his eyes still open.

  So now his bank didn’t have a president anymore. Then we found out just who owned the stock in it: that Colonel Sartoris and Major de Spain, Mayor de Spain’s father until he died, had owned two of the three biggest blocks, and old man Will Varner out in Frenchman’s Bend owned the other one. So we thought that maybe it wasn’t just Colonel Sartoris’s father’s cavalry command that got Byron Snopes his job in the bank, but maybe old Will Varner had something to do with it too. Except that we never really believed that since we knew Colonel Sartoris well enough to know that any single o
ne of those old cavalry raids or even just one night around a bivouac fire would have been enough.

  Of course there was more of it, that much again and even more scattered around in a dozen families like the Compsons and Benbows and Peabodys and Miss Eunice Habersham and us and a hundred others that were farmers around in the county. Though it wasn’t until Mayor de Spain got elected president of it to succeed Colonel Sartoris (in fact, because of that) that we found out that Mr Flem Snopes had been buying the stock in lots anywhere from one to ten shares for several years; this, added to Mr Varner’s and Mayor de Spain’s own that he had inherited from his father, would have been enough to elect him up from vice president to president (There was so much going on that we didn’t even notice that when the dust finally settled Mr Flem Snopes would be vice president of it too.) even if Mrs Du Pre and Bayard’s wife (Bayard had finally got himself killed testing an aeroplane at an Ohio testing field that they said nobody else would fly and that Bayard himself didn’t have any business in) hadn’t voted theirs for him.

  Because Mayor de Spain resigned from being mayor and sold his automobile agency and became president of the bank just in time. Colonel Sartoris’s bank was a national bank because Ratliff said likely Colonel Sartoris knew that would sound safer to country folks with maybe an extra ten dollars to risk in a bank, let alone the female widows and orphans since females never had much confidence in menfolks’ doings about anything, let alone money, even when they were not widows too. So with a change of presidents like that, Ratliff said the government would have to send somebody to inspect the books even if the regular inspection wasn’t about due; the two auditors waiting in front of the bank at eight oclock that morning for somebody to unlock the door and let them in, which would have been Byron Snopes except that he didn’t show up. So they had to wait for the next one with a key: which was Mr de Spain.