“I don’t know,” Ratliff said. And now he not only didn’t sound like Ratliff, answering he didn’t know to any question, he didn’t even look like Ratliff: the customary bland smooth quizzical inscrutable face not quite baffled maybe but certainly questioning, certainly sober. “I jest dont know. We got to figger. That’s why I come up here to see you: in case you did know. Hoping you knowed.” Then he was Ratliff again, humorous, quizzical, invincibly … maybe the word I want is not optimism or courage or even hope, but rather of sanity or maybe even of innocence. “But naturally you dont know neither. Confound it, the trouble is we dont never know beforehand, to anticipate him. It’s like a rabbit or maybe a bigger varmint, one with more poison or anyhow more teeth, in a patch or a brake: you can watch the bushes shaking but you cant see what it is or which-away it’s going until it breaks out. But you can see it then, and usually it’s in time. Of course you got to move fast when he does break out, and he’s got the advantage of you because he’s already moving because he knows where he’s going, and you aint moving yet because you dont. But it’s usually in time.”
That was the first time the bushes shook. The next time was almost a year later; he came in, he said “Good morning Lawyer,” and he was Ratliff again, bland, smooth, courteous, a little too damned intelligent. “I figgered you might like to hear the latest news first, being as you’re a member of the family too by simple bad luck and exposure, you might say. Being as so far dont nobody know about it except the directors of the Bank of Jefferson.”
“The Bank of Jefferson?” I said.
“That’s right. It’s that non-Snopes boy of Eck’s, that other non-Snopes that blowed hisself up in that empty oil tank back while you was away at the war, wasting his time jest hunting a lost child that wasn’t even lost, jest his maw thought he was—”
“Yes,” I said. “Wallstreet Panic.” Because I already knew about that: the non-Snopes son of a non-Snopes who had had the good fortune to discover (or be discovered by) a good woman early in life: the second-grade teacher who, obviously recognising that un-Snopes anomaly, not only told him what Wallstreet Panic meant, but that he didn’t really have to have it for his name if he didn’t want to; but if he thought a too-violent change might be too much, then he could call himself simply Wall Snopes since Wall was a good name, having been carried bravely by a brave Mississippi general at Chicka-mauga and Lookout Mountain, and though she didn’t think that, being a non- Snopes, he would particularly need to remember courage, remembering courage never hurt anyone.
And how he had taken the indemnity money the oil company paid for his father’s bizarre and needless and un- Snopesish death and bought into the little -street grocery store where he had been the after-school-and-Saturday clerk and errand boy, and continued to save his money until, when the old owner died at last, he, Wallstreet, owned the store. And how he got married who was never a Snopes, never in this world a Snopes: doomed damned corrupted and self-convicted not merely of generosity but of taste; holding simple foolish innocent rewardless generosity, not to mention taste, even higher than his own repute when the town should learn he had actually proposed marriage to a woman ten years his senior.
That’s what he did, not even waiting to graduate—the day, the moment when in the hot stiff brand-new serge suit, to walk sweating through the soundless agony of the cut flowers, across the highschool rostrum and receive his diploma from the hand of the principal—but only for the day when he knew he was done with the school, forever more beyond the range of its help or harm (he was nineteen. Seven years ago he and his six-year-old brother had entered the same kindergarten class. In this last year his grades had been such that they didn’t even ask him to take the examinations.)— to leave the store of which he was now actual even if not titular proprietor, just in time to be standing at the corner when the dismissal bell rang, standing there while the kindergarten then the first-grade children streamed past him, then the second grade, standing there while the Lilliputian flow divided around them like a brook around two herons, while without even attempting to touch her in this all juvenile Jefferson’s sight, he proposed to the second-grade teacher and then saw her, as another teacher did from a distance, stare at him and partly raise one defending hand and then burst into tears, right then in plain view of the hundred children who at one time within the last three or four years had been second-graders too, to whom she had been mentor, authority, infallible.
Until he could lead her aside, onto the vacating playground, himself to screen her while she used his handkerchief to regain composure, then, against all the rules of the school and of respectable decorum too, back into the empty room itself smelling of chalk and anguished cerebration and the dry inflexibility of facts, she leading the way, but not for the betrothing kiss, not to let him touch her even and least of all to remind him that she had already been twenty-two years old that day seven years ago and that twelve months from now he would discover that all Jefferson had been one year laughing at him. Who had been divinitive enough to see seven years beyond that Wallstreet panic, but was more, much more than that: a lady, the tears effaced now and she once more the Miss Wyott, or rather the “Miss Vaiden” as Southern children called their teacher, telling him, feeding him none of those sorry reasons: saying simply that she was already engaged and some day she wanted him to know her fiance because she knew they would be friends.
So that he would not know better until he was much older and had much more sense. Nor learning it then when it was too late because it was not too late, since didn’t I just say that she was wise, more than just wise: divinitive? Also, remember her own people had come from the country (her own branch of it remained there where they had owned the nearest ford, crossing, ferry before Jefferson even became Jefferson) so without doubt she even knew in advance the girl, which girl even, since she seems to have taken him directly there, within the week, almost as though she said “This is she. Marry her” and within the month he didn’t even know probably that he had not remarked that Miss Vaiden Wyott had resigned from the Jefferson school where she had taught the second grade for a decde, to accept a position in a school in Bristol, Virginia, since when that fall day came he was two months husband to a tense fierce not quite plain-faced girl with an ambition equal to his and a will if anything even more furious against that morass, that swamp, that fetid seethe from which her husband (she naturally believed) had extricated himself by his own suspenders and boot straps, herself clerking in the store now so that the mother- in-law could now stay at home and do the cooking and housework; herself, although at that time she didn’t weigh quite a hundred pounds, doing the apprentice chores—sweeping, wrestling the barrels of flour and molasses, making the rounds of the town on the bicycle in which the telephone orders were delivered until they could afford to buy the secondhand Model T Ford—during the hours while the younger one, Admiral Dewey, was in school where it was she now, his sister-in-law, who made him go whether he would or not.
Yes, we all knew that; that was a part of our folklore, or Snopes-lore, if you like: how Flem himself was anyway the second one to see that here was a young man who was going to make money by simple honesty and industry, and tried to buy into the business or anyway lend Wallstreet money to expand it; and we all knew who had refused the offer. That is, we liked to believe, having come to know Wallstreet a little now, that he would have declined anyway. But since we had come to know his wife, we knew that he was going to decline. And how he had learned to be a clerk and a partner the hard way, and he would have to learn to be a proprietor the hard way too: and sure enough in time he overbought his stock; and how he went to Colonel Sartoris’s bank for help.
That was when we first realised that Flem Snopes actually was a member of the board of directors of a Jefferson bank. I mean, that a Flem Snopes actually could be. Oh, we had seen his name among the others on the annual bank report above the facsimile of Colonel Sartoris’s illegible signature as president, but we merely drew the logical conclusion that that was simply old man Will Varner’s voting proxy to save him a trip to town; all we thought was, “That means that Manfred de Spain will have Uncle Billy’s stock too in case he ever wants anything.”
And obviously we knew, believed, that Flem had tried again to buy into Wallstreet’s business, save him with a personal private loan before he, as a director, blocked the loan from the bank. Because we thought we saw it all now; all we seemed to have missed was, what hold he could have had over the drummer to compel him to persuade Wallstreet to overbuy, and over the wholesale house in St. Louis to persuade it to accept the sale—very
