Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“All right,” I said. When Mr Snopes first came to Jefferson he rented the house. Then he must have bought it because since he became vice president of the bank they had begun to fix it up. It was painted now and Mrs Snopes I reckon had had the wistaria arbor in the side yard fixed up and when I came through the gate Linda called me and I saw the hammock under the arbor. The wistaria was still in bloom and I remember how she looked with her black hair under it because her eyes were kind of the color of wistaria and her dress almost exactly was: lying in the hammock reading and I thought Uncle Gavin didn’t need to send this book because she hasn’t finished the other one yet. Then I saw the rest of her school books on the ground beneath the hammock and that the one she was reading was geometry and I wondered if knowing she would rather study geometry than be out with him would make Matt Levitt feel much better than having her eat ice cream with Uncle Gavin.

So I gave her the book and went on home. That was Friday. The next day, Saturday, I went to the baseball game and then I came back to the office to walk home with Uncle Gavin. We hethe feet coming up the outside stairs, more than two of them, making a kind of scuffling sound and we could even hear hard breathing and something like whispering, then the door kind of banged open and Matt Levitt came in, quick and fast, holding something clamped under his arm, and shoved the door back shut against whoever was trying to follow him inside, holding the door shut with his braced knee until he fumbled at the knob until he found how to shoot the bolt and lock it. Then he turned. He was good-looking. He didn’t have a humorous or happy look, he had what Ratliff called a merry look, the merry look of a fellow that hadn’t heard yet that they had invented doubt. But he didn’t even look merry now and he took the book—it was the John Donne I had taken to Linda yesterday—and kind of shot it onto the desk so that the ripped and torn pages came scuttering and scattering out across the desk and some of them even on down to the floor.

“How do you like that?” Matt said, coming on around the desk where Uncle Gavin had stood up. “Dont you want to put up your dukes?” he said. “But that’s right, you aint much of a fighter, are you? But that’s O.K.; I aint going to hurt you much anyway: just mark you up a little to freshen up your memory.” He didn’t, he didn’t seem to hit hard, his fists not travelling more than four or five inches it looked like, so that it didn’t even look like they were drawing blood from Uncle Gavin’s lips and nose but just instead wiping the blood onto them; two or maybe three blows before I could seem to move and grab up Grandfather’s heavy walking stick where it still stayed in the umbrella stand behind the door and raise it to swing at the back of Matt’s head as hard as I could.

“You, Chick!” Uncle Gavin said. “Stop! Hold it!” Though even with that, I wouldn’t have thought Matt could have moved that fast. Maybe it was the Golden Gloves that did it. Anyway he turned and caught the stick and jerked it away from me almost before I knew it and naturally I thought he was going to hit me or Uncle Gavin or maybe both of us with it so I had already crouched to dive at his legs when he dropped the point of the stick like a bayoneted rifle, the point touching my chest just below the throat as if he were not holding me up but had really picked me up with the stick like you would a rag or a scrap of paper.

“Tough luck, kid,” he said. “Nice going almost; too bad your uncle telegraphed it for you,” and threw the stick into the corner and stepped around me toward the door, which was the first time I reckon that any of us realised that whoever it was he had locked out was still banging on it, and shot the bolt back and opened it, then stepped back himself as Linda came in, blazing; yes, that’s exactly the word for it: blazing: and without even looking at Uncle Gavin or me, whirled onto her tiptoes and slapped Matt twice, first with her left hand and then the right, panting and crying at the same time:

“You fool! You ox! You clumsy ignorant ox! You clumsy ignorant stupid son of a bitch!” Which was the first time I ever heard a sixteen-year-old girl say that. No: the first time I ever heard any woman say that, standing there facing Matt and crying hard now, like she was too mad to even know what to do next, whether to slap him again or curse him again, until Uncle Gavin came around the desk and touched her and said,

“Stop it. Stop it now,” and she turned and grabbed him, her face against his shirt where he had bled onto i still crying hard, saying,

“Mister Gavin, Mister Gavin, Mister Gavin.”

“Open the door, Chick,” Uncle Gavin said. I opened it. “Get out of here, boy,” Uncle Gavin said to Matt. “Go on.” Then Matt was gone. I started to close the door. “You too,” Uncle Gavin said.

“Sir?” I said.

“You get out too,” Uncle Gavin said, still holding Linda where she was shaking and crying against him, his nose bleeding onto her too now.

THIRTEEN

GAVIN STEVENS

Go on,” I said. “You get out too.” So he did, and I stood there holding her. Or rather, she was gripping me, quite hard, shuddering and gasping, crying quite hard now, burrowing her face into my shirt so that I could feel my shirt front getting wet. Which was what Ratliff would have called tit for tat, since what Victorians would have called the claret from my nose had already stained the shoulder of her dress. So I could free one hand long enough to reach around and over her other shoulder to the handkerchief in my breast pocket and do a little emergency work with it until I could separate us long enough to reach the cold-water tap.

“Stop it,” I said. “Stop it now.” But she only cried the harder, clutching me, saying,

“Mister Gavin. Mister Gavin. Oh, Mister Gavin.”

“Linda,” I said. “Can you hear me?” She didn’t answer, just clutching me; I could feel her nodding her head against my chest. “Do you want to marry me?” I said.

“Yes!” she said. “Yes! All right! All right!”

This time I got one hand under her chin and lifted her face by force until she would have to look at me. Ratliff had told me that McCarron’s eyes were gray, probably the same hard gray as Hub Hampton’s. Hers were not gray at all. They were darkest hyacinth, what I have always imagined that Homer’s hyacinthine sea must have had to look like.

“Listen to me,” I said. “Do you want to get married?” Yes, they dont need minds at all, except for conversation, social intercourse. And I have known some who had charm and tact without minds even then. Because when they deal with men, with human beings, all they need is the instinct, the instinct, the intuition before it became battered and dulled, the infinite capacity for devotion untroubled and unconfused by cold moralities and colder facts.

“You mean I dont have to?” she said.

“Of course not,” I said. “Never if you like.”

“I dont want to marry anybody!” she said, cried; she was clinging to me again, her face buried again in the damp mixture of blood and tears which seemed nowcompose the front of my shirt and tie. “Not anybody!” she said. “You’re all I have, all I can trust. I love you! I love you!”