Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

struck a match to light it so he could see to wake up the rest of the house and the neighbors.

So I dont know what it was. But it wasn’t no joked-up piece of paper jest in the hopes of skeering Uncle Billy into doing something that until now he hadn’t aimed to do. Because Uncle Billy dont skeer, and Flem Snopes knows it. It had something to do with folks, people, and the only people connected with Jefferson that would make Uncle Billy do something he hadn’t expected until this moment he would do are Eula and Linda. Not Flem; Uncle Billy has knowed for twenty years now exactly what he will do to Flem the first time Flem’s eye falters or his hand slips or his attention wanders.

Let alone going to Uncle Billy hisself with it. Because anything in reference to that bank that Flem would know in advance that jest by handing it or saying it to Miz Varner would be stout enough to move Uncle Billy from Frenchman’s Bend to Jefferson as soon as he heard about it, would sooner or later have to scratch or leastways touch Eula. And maybe Uncle Billy Varner dont skeer and Flem Snopes knows it, but Flem Snopes dont skeer neither and most folks knows that too. And it dont take no especial coward to not want to walk into that store and up to old man Will Varner and tell him his daughter aint reformed even yet, that she’s been sleeping around again for eighteen years now with a feller she aint married to, and that her husband aint got guts enough to know what to do about it.

NINETEEN

CHARLES MALLISON

It was like a circus day or the county fair. Or more: it was like the District or even the whole State field meet because we even had a holiday for it. Only it was more than just a fair or a field day because this one was going to have death in it too though of course we didn’t know that then.

It even began with a school holiday that we didn’t even know we were going to have. It was as if time, circumstance, geography, contained something which must, anyway was going to, happen and now was the moment and Jefferson, Mississippi, was the place, and so the stage was cleared and set for it.

The school holiday began Tuesday morning. Last week some new people moved to Jefferson, a highway engineer, and their little boy entered the second grade. He must have been already sick when his mother brought him because he had to go home; they sent for her and she came and got him that same afternoon and that night they took him to Memphis. That wasThursday but it wasn’t until Monday afternoon that they got the word back that what he had was polio and they sent word around that the school would be closed while they found out what to do next or what to not do or whatever it was while they tried to learn more about polio or about the engineer’s little boy or whatever it was. Anyhow it was a holiday we hadn’t expected or even hoped for, in April; that April morning when you woke up and you would think how April was the best, the very best time of all not to have to go to school, until you would think Except in the fall with the weather brisk and not-cold at the same time and the trees all yellow and red and you could go hunting all day long; and then you would think Except in the winter with the Christmas holidays over and now nothing to look forward to until summer; and you would think how no time is the best time to not have to go to school and so school is a good thing after all because without it there wouldn’t be any holidays or vacations.

Anyhow we had the holiday, we didn’t know how long; and that was fine too because now you never had to say Only two days left or Only one day left since all you had to do was just be holiday, breathe holiday, today and tomorrow too and who knows? tomorrow after that and, who knows? still tomorrow after that. So on Wednesday when even the children who would have been in school except for the highway engineer’s little boy began to know that something was happening, going on inside the president’s office of the bank—not the old one, the Bank of Jefferson, but the other, the one we still called the new bank or even Colonel Sartoris’s bank although he had been dead seven years now and Mr de Spain was president of it—it was no more than we expected, since this was just another part of whatever it was time or circumstance or whatever it was had cleared the stage and emptied the school so it could happen.

No, to say that the stage was limited to just one bank; to say that time, circumstance, geography, whatever it was had turned school out in the middle of April in honor of something it wanted to happen inside just one set of walls was wrong. It was all of Jefferson. It was all the walls of Jefferson, the ground they stood on, the air they rose up in; all the walls and air in Jefferson that people moved and breathed and talked in; we were already at dinner except Uncle Gavin, who was never late unless he was out of town on county business, and when he did come in something was already wrong. I mean, I didn’t always notice when something was wrong with him and it wasn’t because I was only twelve yet, it was because you didn’t have to notice Uncle Gavin because you could always tell from Mother since she was his twin; it was like when you said “What’s the matter?” to Mother, you and she and everybody else knew you were saying What’s wrong with Uncle Gavin?

But we could always depend on Father. Uncle Gavin came in at last and sat down and unfolded his napkin and said something wrong and father glanced at him and then went back to eating and then looked at Uncle Gavin again.

“Well,” he said, “I hear they got old Will Varner out of bed at two this morning and brought him all the way in to town to promote Manfred de Spain. Promote him where?”

“What?” Uncle Gavin said.

“Where do you promote a man that’s already president of the bank?” Father said.

“Charley,” Mother said.

“Or maybe promote aint the word I want,” Father said. “The one I want is when you promote a man quick out of bed—”

“Charley!” Mother said.

“—especially a bed he never had any business in, not to mention having to send all the way out to Frenchman’s Bend for your pa-in-law to pronounce that word—”

“Charles!” Mother said. That’s how it was. It was like we had had something in Jefferson for eighteen years and whether it had been right or whether it had been wrong to begin with didn’t matter any more now because it was ours, we had lived with it and now it didn’t even show a scar, like the nail driven into the tree years ago that violated and outraged and anguished that tree. Except that the tree hasn’t got much choice either: either to put principle above sap and refuse the outrage and next year’s sap both, or accept the outrage and the sap for the privilege of going on being a tree as long as it can, until in time the nail disappears. It dont go away; it just stops being so glaring in sight, barked over, there is a lump, a bump of course, but after a while the other trees forgive that and everything else accepts that tree and that bump too until one day the saw or the axe goes into it and hits that old nail.

Because I was twelve then. I had reached for the second time that point in the looping circles children—boys anyway—make growing up when for a little while they enter, live in, the same civilisation that grown people use, when it occurs to you that maybe the sensible and harmless things they wont let you do really seem as silly to them as the things they seem either to want to do or have to do seem to you. No: it’s when they laugh at you and suddenly you say, Why, maybe I am funny, and so the things they do are not outrageous