Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

valuable to him than what he gave. So you dont really need to imagine this: he and his wife talking together (of course they talked sometimes; they were married, and you have to talk some time to someone even when you’re not married)—or four of them that is since there would be two witnesses waiting in the synthetic hall until she should take up the pen: Sign this document guaranteeing me one half of whatever you will inherit under your father’s will, regardless of whatever your and my status in respect to one another may be at that time, and I will give my permission for Linda to go away from Jefferson to school. All right, granted it could be broken, abrogated, set aside, would not hold. She would not know that. And even if she had never doubted it would hold, had the actual inheritance in her hand at the moment, would she have refused to give him half of it for that in return? Besides, it wasn’t her it was to alarm, spook out of the realm of cool judgment.

That was the “how.” Now remained only the “when”; the rest of the winter and she away at the University now and he still about town, placid, inscrutable, unchanged, in the broad black planter’s hat and the minute bow tie seen somewhere about the Square at least once during the day as regular as the courthouse clock itself, on through the winter and into the spring, until yesterday morning.

That’s right. Just gone. So you will have to imagine this too since there would be no witnesses even waiting in a synthetic hall this time: once more the long, already summer-dusty gravel road (it had been simple dirt when he traversed it that first time eighteen years ago) out to Varner’s store. And in an automobile this time, it was that urgent, “how” and “when” having at last coincided. And secret; the automobile was a hired one. I mean, an imported hired one. Although most of the prominent people in Jefferson and the county too owned automobiles now, he was not one of them. And not just because of the cost, of what more men than he in Yoknapatawpha County considered the foolish, the almost criminal immobilisation of that many dollars and cents in something which, even though you ran it for hire, would not pay for itself before it wore out, but because he was not only not a prominent man in Jefferson yet, he didn’t even want to be: who would have defended as he did his life the secret even of exactly how solvent he really was.

But this was so urgent that he must use one for speed, and so secret that he would have hired one, paid money for the use of one, even if he had owned one, so as not to be seen going out there in his own; too secret even to have ridden out with the mail carrier, which he could have done for a dollar, too secret even to have commandeered from one of his clients a machine which he actually did own since it had been purnged with his money secured by one of his myriad usurious notes. Instead, he hired one. We would never know which one nor where: only that it would not bear Yoknapatawpha County license plates, and drove out there in it, out to Varner’s Crossroads once more and for the last time, dragging, towing a fading cloud of yellow dust along the road which eighteen years ago he had travelled in the mule-drawn wagon containing all he owned: the wife and her bastard daughter, the few sticks of furniture Mrs Varner had given them, the deed to Ratliff’s half of the little back-street Jefferson restaurant and the few dollars remaining from what Henry Armstid (now locked up for life in a Jackson asylum) and his wife had scrimped and hoarded for ten years, which Ratliff and Armstid had paid him for the Old Frenchman place where he had buried the twenty-five silver dollars where they would find them with their spades.

For the last time, completing that ellipsis which would contain those entire eighteen years of his life, since Frenchman’s Bend and Varner’s Crossroads and Varner’s store would be one, perhaps the one, place to which he would never go again as long as he lived, since win or lose he would not need to, and win or lose he certainly would not dare to. And who knows, thinking even then what a shame that he must go to the store and old Will instead of to Varner’s house where at this hour in the forenoon there would be nobody but Mrs Varner and the Negro cook,—must go to the store and beard and beat down by simple immobility and a scrap of signed and witnessed paper that violent and choleric old brigand instead. Because women are not interested in romance or morals or sin and its punishment, but only in facts, the immutable facts necessary to the living of life while you are in it and which they are going to damned well see themselves dont fiddle and fool and back and fill and mutate. How simple to have gone straight to her, a woman (the big hard cold gray woman who never came to town any more now, spending all her time between her home and her church, both of which she ran exactly alike: herself self-appointed treasurer of the collections she browbeat out of the terrified congregation, herself selecting and choosing and hiring the ministers and firing them too when they didn’t suit her; legend was that she chose one of them out of a cotton field while passing in her buggy, hoicked him from between his plow-handles and ordered him to go home and bathe and change his clothes and followed herself thirty minutes later and ordained him).

How simple to ride up to the gate and say to the hired driver: “Wait here. I wont be long,” and go up the walk and enter his ancestral halls (all right, his wife’s; he was on his way now to dynamite his own equity in them) and on through them until he found Mrs Varner wherever she was, and say to her: “Good morning, Ma-in-law. I just found out last night that for eighteen years now our Eula’s been sleeping with a feller in Jefferson named Manfred de Spain. I packed up and moved out before I left town but I aint filed the divorce yet because the judge was still asleep when I passed his house. I’ll tend to that when I get back tonight,” and turn and go back to the car and say to the driver: “All right, son. Back to town,” and leave Mrs. Varner to finish it, herself to enter the lair where old Will sat among the symbolical gnawed bones—the racks of hames and plow-handles, the rank side meat and flour and cheap molasses and cheese and shoes and coal oil and work gloves and snuff and chewing tobacco and flyspecked candy and the liens and mortgages on crops and plow-tools and mules and horses and land—of his fortune. There would be a few loungers though not many since this was planting time and even the ones the should have been in the field, which they would realise, already starting in an alarmed surge of guilt when they saw her, though not fast enough.

“Get out of here,” she would say while they were already moving. “I want to talk to Will.—Wait. One of you go to the sawmill and tell Jody I want his automobile and hurry.” And they would say “Yessum, Miz Varner,” which she would not hear either, standing over old Will now in his rawhide-bottomed chair. “Get up from there. Flem has finally caught Eula, or says he has. He hasn’t filed the suit yet so you will have time before the word gets all over the county. I dont know what he’s after, but you go in there and stop it. I wont have it. We had enough trouble with Eula twenty years ago. I aint going to have her back in my house worrying me now.”

But he couldn’t do that. It wasn’t that simple. Because men, especially one like old Will Varner, were interested in facts too, especially a man like old Will in a fact like the one he, Flem, had signed and witnessed and folded inside his coat pocket. So he had to go, walk himself into that den and reach his own hand and jerk the unsuspecting beard and then stand while the uproar beat and thundered about his head until it spent itself temporarily to where his voice could be heard: “That’s her signature. If you dont know it, them two witnesses do. All you got to do is help me take that bank away from Manfred de Spain—transfer your stock to my name, take my postdated check if you want, the stock to be yourn again as soon as Manfred de Spain is out, or you to vote the stock yourself if you had druther—and you can have this paper. I’ll even hold the match while you burn it.”

That was all. And here was Ratliff again (oh yes, Jefferson could do without Ratliff, but not I—we—us; not I nor the whole damned tribe of Snopes could do without him), all neat and clean and tieless in his blue shirt, blinking a little at me. “Uncle Billy rid into town in Jody’s car about four oclock this morning and went straight to Flem’s. And Flem aint been to town today. What you reckon is fixing to pop now?” He blinked at me. “What do you reckon it was?”

“What what was?” I said.

“What he taken out there to Miz Varner yesterday that was important enough to have Uncle Billy on the road to town at four oclock this morning?”

“To Mrs Varner?” I said. “He gave it to Will.”