I said, “Sit down, Linda.” But she just stood there. “Cry,” I said. “Let yourself go and cry.”
“I cant,” she said. “I tried.” She looked at me. “He’s not my father,” she said.
“Of course he’s your father,” I said. “Certainly he is. What in the world aou talking about?”
“No,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Do you want me to swear? All right. I swear he’s your father.”
“You were not there. You dont know. You never even saw her until she—we came to Jefferson.”
“Ratliff did. Ratliff was there. He knows. He knows who your father is. And I know from Ratliff. I am sure. Have I ever lied to you?”
“No,” she said. “You are the one person in the world I know will never lie to me.”
“All right,” I said. “I swear to you then. Flem Snopes is your father.” And now she didn’t move: it was just the tears, the water, not springing, just running quietly and quite fast down her face. I moved toward her.
“No,” she said, “dont touch me yet,” catching, grasping both my wrists and gripping, pressing my hands hard in hers against her breast. “When I thought he wasn’t my father, I hated her and Manfred both. Oh yes, I knew about Manfred: I have … seen them look at each other, their voices when they would talk to each other, speak one another’s name, and I couldn’t bear it, I hated them both. But now that I know he is my father, it’s all right. I’m glad. I want her to have loved, to have been happy.—I can cry now,” she said.
TWENTY-THREE
No, not a contest. Not a contest with Flem Snopes anyway because it takes two to make a contest and Flem Snopes wasn’t the other one. He was a umpire, if he was anything in it. No, he wasn’t even a umpire. It was like he was running a little mild game against hisself, for his own amusement, like solitaire. He had ever thing now that he had come to Jefferson to get. He had more. He had things he didn’t even know he was going to want until he reached Jefferson because he didn’t even know what they was until then. He had his bank and his money in it and hisself to be president of it so he could not only watch his money from ever being stole by another twenty-two- calibre rogue like his cousin Byron, but nobody could ever steal from him the respectability that being president of one of the two Yoknapatawpha County banks toted along with it. And he was going to have one of the biggest residences in the county or maybe Mississippi too when his carpenters got through with Manfred de Spain’s old home. And he had got rid of the only two downright arrant outrageous Snopeses when he run Montgomery Ward and I.O. finally out of town so that now, for the time being at least, the only other Snopes actively inside the city limit and Fa wholesale grocer not only as respectable but maybe even more solvent than jest a banker. So you would think he would a been satisfied now. But he wasn’t. He had to make a young girl (woman now) that wasn’t even his child, say “I humbly thank you, Papa, for being so good to me.”
That’s right, a contest. Not even against Linda, and last of all against Lawyer Stevens, since he had already milked out of Lawyer Stevens all he needed from him, which was to get his wife buried all right and proper and decorous and respectable, without no uproarious elements making a unseemly spectacle in the business. His game of solitare was against Jefferson. It was like he was trying to see jest exactly how much Jefferson would stand, put up with. It was like he knowed that his respectability depended completely on Jefferson not jest accepting but finally getting used to the fact that he not only had evicted Manfred de Spain from his bank but he was remodeling to move into it De Spain’s birthsite likewise, and that the only remaining threat now was what might happen if thatere young gal that believed all right so far that he was her paw, might stumble onto something that would tell her different. That she might find out by accident that the man that was leastways mixed up somehow in her mother’s suicide, whether he actively caused it or not, wasn’t even her father, since if somebody’s going to be responsible why your maw killed herself, at least let it be somebody kin to you and not jest a outright stranger.
So you would a thought that the first thing he would do soon as the dust settled after that funeral would be to get her clean out of Jefferson and as far away as he could have suh-jested into her mind she wanted to go. But not him. And the reason he give was that monument. And naturally that was Lawyer Stevens too. I mean, I dont know who delegated Lawyer into the monument business, who gave it to him or if he jest taken it or if maybe by this time the relationship between him and anybody named Snopes, or anyway maybe jest the Flem Snopeses (or no: it was that for him Eula Varner hadn’t never died and never would because oh yes, I know about that too) was like that one between a feller out in a big open field and a storm of rain: there aint no being give nor accepting to it: he’s already got it.
Anyway it was him—Lawyer—that helped Linda hunt through that house and her mother’s things until they found the right photograph and had it—Lawyer still—enlarged, the face part, and sent it to Italy to be carved into a … yes, medallion to fasten onto the front of the monument, and him that the practice drawings would come back to to decide and change here and there and send back. Which would a been his right by his own choice even if Flem had tried to interfere in and stop him because he wanted that monument set up where Flem could pass on it more than anybody wanted it because then Flem would let her go. But it was Flem’s monument; dont make no mistake about that. It was Flem that paid for it, first thought of it, planned and designed it, picked out what size and what was to be wrote on it—the face and the letters and never once mentioned price. Dont make no mistake about that. It was Flem. Because this too was a part of what he had come to Jefferson for and went through all he went through afterward to get it.
Oh yes, Lawyer had it all arranged for Linda to leave, get away at last; all they was hung on was the monument because Flem had give his word he would let her go then. It was to a place named Greenwich Village in New York; Lawyer had it all arranged, friends he knowed in Harvard to meet the ain at the depot and take care of her, get her settled and ever thing.
“Is it a college?” I says. “Like out at Seminary Hill?”
“No no,” he says. “I mean, yes. But not the kind you are talking about.”
“I thought you was set on her going to a college up there.”
“That was before,” he says. “Too much has happened to her since. Too much, too fast, too quick. She outgrew
