Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

maybe because of the war in Europe the State Department still hadn’t let his mother and father come back from China or wherever it was yet; at least once every week on the way home across the Square he would meet Ratliff, almost like Ratliff was waiting for him, and Gowan would tell Ratliff the news from Uncle Gavin and Ratliff would say:

“Tell him to watch close. Tell him I’m doing the best I can here.”

“The best you can what?” Gowan said.

“Holding and toting,” Ratliff said.

“Holding and toting what?” Gowan said. That was when Gowan said he first noticed that you didn’t notice Ratliff hardly at all, until suddenly you did or anyway Gowan did. And after that, he began to look for him. Because the next time, Ratliff said:

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” Gowan said.

“Then of course your aunt lets you drink coffee,” Ratliff said. “What do you say—”

“She’s not my aunt, she’s my cousin,” Gowan said. “Sure. I drink coffee. I dont specially like it. Why?”

“I like a occasional icecream cone myself,” Ratliff said.

“What’s wrong with that?” Gowan said.

“What say me and you step in the drugstore here and have a icecream cone?” Ratliff said. So they did. Gowan said Ratliff always had strawberry when they had it, and that he could expect Ratliff almost any afternoon now and now Gowan said he was in for it, he would have to eat the cone whether he wanted it or not, he and Ratliff now standing treat about, until finally Ratliff said, already holding th pink-topped cone in his brown hand:

“This here is jest about as pleasant a invention as any I know about. It’s so pleasant a feller jest dont dare risk getting burnt-out on it. I cant imagine no tragedy worse than being burnt-out on strawberry ice cream. So what you say we jest make this a once-a-week habit and the rest of the time jest swapping news?”

So Gowan said all right and after that they would just meet in passing and Gowan would give Ratliff Uncle Gavin’s last message: “He says to tell you he’s doing the best he can too but that you were right: just one aint enough. One what?” Gowan said. “Aint enough for what?” But then Gowan was seventeen; he had a few other things to do, whether grown people believed it or not, though he didn’t object to delivering the messages Mother said Uncle Gavin sent in his letters to Ratliff, when he happened to see Ratliff, or that is when Ratliff saw, caught him, which seemed to be almost every day so that he wondered just when Ratliff found time to earn a living. But he didn’t always listen to all Ratliff would be saying at those times, so that afterward he couldn’t even say just how it was or when that Ratliff put it into his mind and he even got interested in it like a game, a contest or even a battle, a war, that Snopeses had to be watched constantly like an invasion of snakes or wildcats and that Uncle Gavin and Ratliff were doing it or trying to because nobody else in Jefferson seemed to recognise the danger. So that winter when the draft finally came and got Byron Snopes out of Colonel Sartoris’s bank, Gowan knew exactly what Ratliff was talking about when he said:

“I dont know how he will do it but I will lay a million to one he dont never leave the United States; I will lay a hundred to one he wont get further away from Mississippi than that first fort over in Arkansas where they first sends them; and if you will give me ten dollars I will give you eleven if he aint back here in Jefferson in three weeks.” Gowan didn’t do it but he said later he wished he had because Ratliff would have lost by two days and so Byron was back in the bank again. But we didn’t know how and even Ratliff never found out how he did it until after he had robbed the bank and escaped to Mexico, because Ratliff said the reason Snopeses were successful was that they had all federated unanimously to remove being a Snopes from just a zoological category into a condition composed of success by means of the single rule and regulation and sacred oath of never to tell anybody how. The way Byron did it was to go to bed every night with a fresh plug of chewing tobacco taped into his left armpit until it ran his heart up to where the army doctor finally discharged him and sent him home.

So at least there was some fresh Snopes news to send Uncle Gavin, which was when Ratliff noticed that it had been months since Uncle Gavin had mentioned Montgomery Ward Snopes. Though by the time Uncle Gavin’s letter got back saying Don’t mention that name to me again. I wont discuss it. I will not we had some fresh Snopes news of our own to send him.

This time it was Eck. “Your uncle was right,” Ratliff said.

“He’s my cousin, I tell you,” Gowan said.

“All right, all right,” Ratliff said. “Eck wasn’t a Snopes. That’s why he had to die. Like there wasn’t no true authentic room for Snopeses in the world they made theirselves one by that pure and simple mutual federation, and the first time one slips or falters or fails in being Snopes, it dont even need the rest of the pack like wolves to finish him: simple environment jest watched its chance and taken it.”

Eck was the one with the steel brace where a log broke his neck one time, the night watchman of the oil company’s storage tank at the depot; I knew about this myself because I was almost four years old now. It was just dust-dark; we were at supper when there came a tremendous explosion, the loudest sound at one time that Jefferson ever heard, so loud that we all knew it couldn’t be anything else but that German bomb come at last that we—Mayor de Spain—had been looking for ever since the Germans sank the Lusitania and we finally had to get into the War too. That is, Mayor de Spain had gone to West Point and had been a lieutenant in Cuba and when this one started he wanted to get into it too. But he couldn’t maybe, so he tried to organize a Home Guard company, except that nobody but him took it very seriously. But at least he had an alarm system to ring the courthouse bell when a German attack came.

So when that tremendous big sound went off and the bell began to ring, we all knew what it was and we were all waiting for the next one to fall, until the people running out into the street hollering “Which way was it?” finally located it down toward the depot. It was the oil storage tank. It was a big round tank, about thirty feet long and ten feet deep, sitting on brick trestles. That is, it had been there because there wasn’t anything there now, not even the trestles. Then about that time they finally got Mrs Nunnery to hush long enough to tell what happened.

She was Cedric Nunnery’s mamma. He was about five years old. They lived in a little house just up the hill from the depot and finally they made her sit down and somebody gave her a drink of whiskey and she quit screaming and told how about five oclock she couldn’t find Cedric anywhere and she came down to where Mr Snopes was sitting in his chair in front of the little house about the size of a privy that he called the office where he night-watched the tank, to ask him if he had seen Cedric. He hadn’t but he got up right away to help her hunt, in all the box cars on the side track and in the freight warehouse and everywhere, hollering Cedric’s name all around; only Mrs Nunnery didn’t remember which of them thought of the oil tank first. Likely it was Mr Snopes since he was the one that knew it was empty, though probably Mrs Nunnery had seen the ladder too still leaning against it where Mr Snopes had climbed up to open the manhole in the top to let fresh air come in and drive the gas out.