Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“That’s right,” I said. “Just five more years. That’s practically nothing to a man that has already put in fifteen years with a man with a shotgun watching him plow cotton that aint his whether he feels like plowing that day or not, and another man with a shotgun standing over him while he eats grub that he either ate it or not whether he felt like eating or not, and another man with a shotgun to lock him up at night so he could either go to sleep or stay awake whether he felt like doing it or not. Just five years more, then you’ll be out where the free sun and air can shine on you without any man with a shotgun’s shadow to cut it off. Because you’ll be free.”

“Free,” he said, not loud: just like that: “Free.” That was all. It was that easy. Of course the guard I welshed to cursed me; I had expected that: it was a free country; every convict had a right to try to escape just as every guard and trusty had the right to shoot him in the back the first time he didn’t halt. But no unprintable stool pigeon had the right to warn the guard in advance.

I had to watch it too. That was on the bill too: the promissory note of breathing in a world that had Snopeses in it. I wanted to turn my head or anyway shut my eyes. But refusing to not look was all I had left now: the last sorry lousy almost worthless penny—the damn little thing looking like a little girl playing mama in the calico dress and sunbonnet that he believed was Flem’s idea (that had been difficult; he still wanted to believe that a man should be permitted to run at his fate, even if that fate was doom, in the decency and dignity of pants; it took a little doing to persuade him that a petticoat and a woman’s sunbonnet was all Flem could get). Walking; I had impressed that on him: not to run, but walk; as forlorn and lonely and fragile and alien in that empty penitentiary compound as a paper doll blowing across a rolling mill; still walking even after he had passed the point where he couldn’t come back and knew it; even still walking on past the moment when he knew that he had been sold and that he should have known all along he was being sold, not blaming anybody for selling him nor even needing to sell him because hadn’t he signed—he couldn’t read but he could sign his name—that same promissory note too to breathe a little while, since his name was Snopes?

So he even ran before he had to. He ran right at them before I even saw them, before they stepped out of the ambush. I was proud, not just to be kin to him but of belonging to what Reba called all of us poor son of a bitches. Because it took five of them striking and slashing at his head with pistol barrels and even then it finally took the blackjack to stop him, knock him out.

The Warden sent for me. “Dont tell me anything,” he said. “I wish I didn’t even as much already as I suspect. In fact, if it was left to me, I’d like to lock you and him both in a cell and leave you, you for choice in handcuffs. But I’m under a bond too so I’m going to move you into solitary for a week or so, for your own protection. And not from him.”

“Dont brag or grieve,” I said. “You had to sign one of them too.”

“What?” he said. “What did you say?”

“I said you dont need to worry. He hasn’t got anything against me. If you dont believe me, send for him.”

So he came in. The bruises and slashes from the butts and the blades of the sights were healing fine. The blackjack of course never had showed. “Hidy,” he said. To me. “I reckon you’ll see Flem before I will now.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Tell him he hadn’t ought to used that dress. But it dont matter. If I had made it out then, maybe I would a changed. But I reckon I wont now. I reckon I’ll jest wait.”

So Flem should have taken that suggestion about the ten grand. He could still do it. I could write him a letter: Sure you can raise ten thousand. All you need to do is swap Manfred de Spain a good jump at your wife. No: that wont do: trying to peddle Eula Varner to Manfred de Spain is like trying to sell a horse to a man that s already been feeding and riding it for ten or twelve years. But you got that girl, Linda. She aint but eleven or twelve but what the hell, put smoked glasses and high heels on her and rush her in quick and maybe De Spain wont notice it.

Except that I wasn’t going to. But it wasn’t that that worried me. It was knowing that I wasn’t, knowing I was going to throw it away—I mean my commission of the ten grand for contacting the Chi syndicate for him. I dont remember just when it was, I was probably pretty young, when I realised that I had come from what you might call a family, a clan, a race, maybe even a species, of pure sons of bitches. So I said, Okay, okay, if that’s the way it is, we’ll just show them. They call the best of lawyers, lawyers’ lawyers and the best of actors an actor’s actor and the best of athletes a ballplayer’s ballplayer. All right, that’s what we’ll do: every Snopes will make it his private and personal aim to have the whole world recognise him as THE son of a bitch’s son of a bitch.

But we never do it. We never make it. The best we ever do is to be just another Snopes son of a bitch. All of us, every one of us—Flem, and old Ab that I dont even know exactly what kin he is, and Uncle Wes and mine and Clarence’s father I.O., then right on down the line: Clarence and me by what you might call simultaneous bigamy, and Virgil and Vardaman and Bilbo and Byron and Mink. I dont even mention Eck and Wallstreet and Admiral Dewey because they dont belong to us. I have always believed that Eck’s mother took some extracurricular night work nine months before he was born. So the one true bitch we had was not a bitch at all but a saint and martyr, the one technically true pristine immaculate unchallengeable son of a bitch we ever produced wasn’t even a Snopes.

FIVE

When his nephew was gone, the Warden said, “Sit down.” He did so. “You got in the paper,” the Warden said. It was folded on the desk facing him:

TRIES PRISON BREAK

DISGUISED IN WOMEN’S CLOTHES

Parchman, Miss. Sept 8, 1923 M.C. “Mink” Snopes, under life sentence for murder from Yoknapatawpha County…

“What does the ‘C’ in your name stand for?” the Warden said. His voice was almost gentle. “We all thought your name was just Mink. That’s what you told us, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right,” he said. “Mink Snopes.”

“What does the ‘C stand for? They’ve got it M.C. Snopes here.”

“Oh,” he said. “Nothing. Just M.C. Snopes like I. C. Railroad. It was them young fellers from the paper in the hospital that day. They kept on asking me what my name was and I said Mink Snopes and they said Mink aint a name, it’s jest a nickname. What’s your real name? And so I said M.C. Snopes.”

“Oh,” the Warden said. “Is Mink all the name you’ve got?”

“That’s right. Mink Snopes.”

“What did your mother call you?”