white hair that always needed cutting and the stained bitt of the corncob pipe sticking out of his breast pocket and the eyes and the face that you never did quite know what they were going to say next except that when you heard it you realised it was always true, only a little cranksided that nobody else would have said it quite that way.
“Well, well,” he said, “if that’s what a mind with no more aptitude for gossip and dirt than yours is inventing and thinking, just imagine what the rest of Jefferson, the experts, have made of it by now. By Cicero, it makes me feel young already; when I go to town this morning I believe I will buy myself a red necktie.” He looked at the back of Mother’s head. “Thank you, Maggie,” he said. “It will need all of us of good will. To save Jefferson from Snopeses is a crisis, an emergency, a duty. To save a Snopes from Snopeses is a privilege, an honor, a pride.”
“Especially a sixteen-year-old female one,” Mother said.
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “Do you deny it?”
“Have I tried to?” Mother said.
“Yes, you have tried.” He moved quick and put his hand on the top of her head, still talking. “And bless you for it. Tried always to deny that damned female instinct for uxorious and rigid respectability which is the backbone of any culture not yet decadent, which remains strong and undecadent only so long as it still produces an incorrigible unreconstructible with the temerity to assail and affront and deny it—like you—” and for a second both of us thought he was going to bend down and kiss her; maybe all three of us thought it. Then he didn’t, or anyway Mother said:
“Stop it. Let me alone. Make up your mind: do you want me to telephone her, or will you do it?”
“I’ll do it,” he said. He looked at me. “Two red ties: one for you. I wish you were sixteen too. What she needs is a beau.”
“Then if by being sixteen I’d have to be her beau, I’m glad I’m not sixteen,” I said. “She’s already got a beau. Matt Levitt. He won the Golden Gloves up in Ohio or somewhere last year. He acts like he can still use them. Would like to, too. No, much obliged,” I said.
“What’s that?” Mother said.
“Nothing,” Uncle Gavin said.
“You never saw him box then,” I said. &;Or you wouldn’t call him nothing. I saw him once. With Preacher Birdsong.”
“And just which of your sporting friends is Preacher Birdsong?” Mother said.
“He aint sporting,” I said. “He lives out in the country. He learned to box in France in the war. He and Matt Levitt—”
“Let me,” Uncle Gavin said. “He—”
“Which he?” Mother said. “Your rival?”
“—is from Ohio,” Uncle Gavin said. “He graduated from that new Ford mechanics’ school and the company sent him here to be a mechanic in the agency garage—”
“He’s the one that owns that yellow cut-down racer,” I said.
“And Linda rides in it?” Mother said.
“—and since Jefferson is not that large and he has two eyes,” Uncle Gavin said, “sooner or later he saw Linda Snopes, probably somewhere between her home and the school house; being male and about twenty-one, he naturally lost no time in making her acquaintance; the Golden Gloves reputation which he either really brought with him or invented somewhere en route has apparently eliminated what rivals he might have expected—”
“Except you,” Mother said.
“That’s all,” Uncle Gavin said.
“Except you,” Mother said.
“He’s maybe five years her senior,” Uncle Gavin said. “I’m twice her age.”
“Except you,” Mother said. “I dont think you will live long enough to ever be twice any woman’s age, I dont care what it is.”
“All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “What was it I just said? To save Jefferson from a Snopes is a duty; to save a Snopes from a Snopes is a privilege.”
“An honor, you said,” Mother said. “A pride.”
“All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “A joy then. Are you pleased now?” That was all, then. After a while Father came home but Mother didn’t have much to tell him he didn’t already know, so there wasn’t anything for him to do except to keep on needing the wolf whistle that hadn’t been invented yet; not until the next day after dinner in fact.
She arrived a little after twelve, just about when she could have got here after church if she had been to church. Which maybe she had, since she was wearing a hat. Or maybe it was her mother who made her wear the hat on account of Mother, coming up the street from the corner, running. Then I saw that the hat was a little awry on her head, as if something had pulled or jerked at it or it had caught on something in passing, and that she was holding one shoulder with the other hand. Then I saw that her face was mad. IC;What cared too, but right now it was mostly just mad as she turned in the gate, still holding her shoulder but not running now, just walking fast and hard, the mad look beginning to give way to the scared one. Then they both froze into something completely different because then the car passed, coming up fast from the corner—Matt Levitt’s racer because there were other stripped-down racers around now but his was the only one with that big double-barrel brass horn on the hood that played two notes when he pressed the button, going past fast; and suddenly it was like I had smelled something, caught a whiff of something for a second that even if I located it again I still wouldn’t know whether I had ever smelled it before or not; the racer going on and Linda still walking rigid and fast with her hat on a little crooked and still holding her shoulder and still breathing a little fast even if what was on her face now was mostly being scared, on to the gallery where Mother and Uncle Gavin were waiting.
“Good morning, Linda,” Mother said. “You’ve torn your sleeve.”
“It caught on a nail,” Linda said.
