and control. Because he dared not let her marry anybody at all until God or the devil or justice or maybe simple nature herself, wearied to death of him, removed old Will Varner from the surface at least of the earth. Because the moment she married, the wife who had taken him for her husband for the single reason of providing her unborn child with a name (a little perhaps because of old Will’s moral outrage and fury, a good deal maybe just to escape the noise he was probably making at the moment, but mostly, almost all, for the child) would quit him too, either with her present lover or without; in any case, with her father’s will drawn eighteen years before she married Flem Snopes and ten or twelve before she ever heard of him, still unchanged.
She must not marry at all yet. Which was difficult enough to prevent even while she was at home in Jefferson, what with half the football and baseball teams escorting her home from school in the afternoon and squiring her in gangs to the picture show during her junior and senior highschool years. Because at least she was living at home where her father could more or less control things either by being her father (oh yes, her father; she knew no different and in fact would have denied, repudiated the truth if anyone had tried to tellher it, since women are not interested in truth or romance but only in facts whether they are true or not, just so they fit all the other facts, and to her the fact was that he was her father for the simple fact that all the other girls, boys too of course, had fathers unless they were dead beneath locatable tombstones) or by threatening to call in or foreclose a usurious note or mortgage bearing the signature of the father or kin of the would-be bridegroom, or—if he, Flem, were lucky—that of the groom himself.
Then who must appear but this meddling whiteheaded outsider plying her with icecream sodas and out-of-state college catalogues and at last convincing her that not only her pleasure and interest but her duty too lay in leaving Jefferson, getting out of it the moment she graduated from high school. Upon which, she would carry that rich female provocation which had already drawn blood (ay, real blood once anyway) a dozen times in Jefferson, out into a world rifely teeming with young single men vulnerable to marriage whether they knew it or not before they saw her. Which he forestalled or rather stalled off for still another year which he compelled, persuaded (I dont know what he used; tears even perhaps; certainly tears if he could have found any to use) her to waste at the Academy (one of the last of those gentle and stubbornly fading anachronisms called Miss So-and-So’s or The So-and-So Female Academy or Institute whose curriculum included deportment and china-painting, which continue to dot the South though the rest of the United States knows them no more); this, while he racked his brain for how to eliminate this menace and threat to his wife’s inheritance which was the middle-aged country lawyer with his constant seduction of out-of-state school brochures. The same middle-aged lawyer in fact who had evicted the preceding menace of the Ohio garage mechanic. But none appeared to eliminate the lawyer save him, the embattled father, and the only tool he knew was money. So I can imagine this: Flem Snopes during all that year, having to remain on constant guard against any casual stranger like a drummer with a line of soap or hardware stopping off the train overnight, and at the same time wring and rack his harassed imagination for some means of compelling me to accept a loan of enough money at usurious enough interest to be under his control.
Which was what I expected of course. I had even reached the point of planning, dreaming what I would do with the money, what buy with the money for which I would continue to betray him. But he didn’t do that. He fooled me. Or perhaps he did me that honor too: not just to save my honor for me by withholding the temptation to sully it, but assuming that I would even sell honor before I would sully it and so temptation to do the one would be automatically refused because of the other. Anyway, he didn’t offer me the bribe. And I know why now. He had given up. I mean, he realised at last that he couldn’t possibly keep her from marriage even though he kept her in Jefferson, and that the moment that happened, he could kiss good-bye forever to old Will Varner’s money.
Because some time during that last summer—this last summer or fall rather, since school had opened again and she had even begun her second year at the Academy, wasting another year within the fading walls where Miss Melissa Hogganbeck still taught stubbornly to the dwindling few who were present, that not just American history but all history had not yet reached Christmas Day, 1865, since although General Lee (and other soldiers too, including her own grandfather) had surrendered, the war itself was not done and in fact the next ten years would show that even those token surrenders were mistakes—he sat back long enough to take sto Indeed, he—or any other male—had only to look at her to know that this couldn’t go on much longer, even if he never let her out of the front yard—that girl (woman now; she will be nineteen this month) who simply by moving, being, promised and demanded and would have not just passion, not her mother’s fierce awkward surrender in a roadside thicket at night with a lover still bleeding from a gang fight; but love, something worthy to match not just today’s innocent and terrified and terrifying passion, but tomorrow’s strength and capacity for serenity and growth and accomplishment and the realisation of hope and at last the contentment of one mutual peace and one mutual conjoined old age. It—the worst, disaster, catastrophe, ruin, the last irrevocable chance to get his hands on any part of old Will Varner’s money—could happen at any time now; and who knows what relief there might have been in the simple realization that at any moment now he could stop worrying not only about the loss of the money but having to hope for it, like when the receptionist opens the door to the dentist’s torture-chamber and looks at you and says “Next” and it’s too late now, simple face will not let you leap up and flee.
You see? Peace. No longer to have to waste time hoping or even regretting, having canvassed all the means and rejected all, since who knows too if during that same summer while he racked his harassed and outraged brain for some means to compel me to accept a loan at a hundred percent interest he had not also toyed with the possibility of finding some dedicated enthusiast panting for martyrdom in the simple name of Man who would shoot old Will some night through his kitchen window and then rejected that too, relinquishing not hope so much as just worry.
And not just peace, but joy too since, now that he could relinquish forever that will-o’-the-wisp of his father-in- law’s money, he could go back to his original hope and dream of vengeance and revenge on the man responsible for the situation because of which he must give over all hope of his wife’s inheritance. In fact he knew now why he had deferred that vengeance so long, dodged like a coward the actual facing of old Will’s name in the canvass of possibilities. It was because he had known instinctively all the time that only Will could serve him, and once he had employed Will for his vengeance, by that same stroke he himself would have destroyed forever any chance of participating in that legacy.
But now that was all done, finished, behind him. He was free. Now there remained only the method to compel, force, cajole, persuade, trick—whichever was handiest or quickest or most efficient—the voting power of old Will’s stock, plus the weight of that owned by others who were too afraid of old Will to resist him, in addition to his— Flem’s—own stock and his corps of one-gallused depositors and their whispering campaign, to remove De Spain’s bank from under him by voting him out of its presidency.
All that remained was how, how to handle in a word, lick—Will Varner. And who to dispute that he already knew that too, that plan already tested and retested back in the very time while he was still dodging the facing of old Will’s name. Because apparently once his mind was made up and he had finally brought himself to cut out and cauterise with his own hand that old vain hope of his wife’s inheritance, he didn’t hesitate. Here was the girl, the one pawn which could wreck his hopes of the Varner money, whom he had kept at home where he could delay to that extent at least the inevitable marriage which would ruin him, keeping her at home not only against her own wishes but against those of her mother too (not to mention the meddling neighbor); keeping her at home even when to him too probably it meant she was wasting her time in that anachronistic vacuum which was the Female Academy. This for one entire year and up to the Christmas holidays in the second one; then suddenly, without warning, overnight, he gives his permission for her to go, leave Jefferson and enter the State University; only fifty miles away to be sure, yet they were fifty miles, where it would be impossible for her to report back home every night and where she would pass all her waking hours among a thousand young men, all bachelors and all male.
Why? It’s obvious. Why did he ever do any of the things he did? Because he got something in return more
