drive her on to Memphis to take the New York train with her packed grips already in the car, and Flem leaning back in the seat with that black hat on that even after five years still didn’t look like it actively belonged to him, chewing, and Linda beside him in her dark going-away dress and hat with her head bent a little and them little white gloves shut into fists on her lap. And there it was: thatere white monument with on the front of it that face that even if it was carved outen dead stone, was still the same face that ever young man no matter how old he got would still never give up hope and belief that some day before he died he would finally be worthy to be wrecked and ruined and maybe even destroyed by it, above the motto that Flem hisself had picked:
A VIRTUOUS WIFE IS A CROWN TO HER HUSBAND
HER CHILDREN RISE AND CALL HER BLESSED
Until at last Flem leaned out the window and spit and then set back in the car and tells her: “All right. You can go now.”
Yes sir, Lawyer was free now. He never had nothing to worry him now: him and Chick and me driving back to the office and him talking about how the game of football could be brought up to date in keeping with the progress of the times by giving ever body a football too so ever body would be in the game; or maybe better still, keep jest one football but abolish the boundaries so that a smart feller for instance could hide the ball under his shirttail and slip off into the bushes and circle around town and come in through a back alley and cross the goal before anybody even missed he was gone; right on into the office where he set down behind the desk and taken up one of the cob pipes and struck three matches to it until Chick taken it away from him and filled it from the tobacco jar and handed it back and Lawyer says, “Much obliged,” and dropped the filled pipe into the wastebasket and folded his hands on the desk, still talking, and I says to Chick:
“Watch him. I won’t be long,” and went around into the alley; I never had much time so what was in the pint bottle was pretty bad but leastways it had something in it that for a moment anyhow would feel like alcohol. And I got the sugar bowl and glass and spoon from the cabinet and made the toddy and set it on the desk by him and he says,
“Much obliged,” not even touching it, jest setting there with his hands folded in front of him, blinking quick and steady like he had sand in his eyes, saying: “All us civilised people date our civilisation from the discovery of the principle of distillation. And even though the rest of the world, at least that part of it in the United States, rates us folks in Mississippi at the lowest rung of culture, what man can deny that, even if this is as bad as I think it’s going to be, we too grope toward the stars? Why did she do it, V.K.? That—all that—that she walked in, lived in, breathed in—it was only loaned to her; it wasn’t hers to destroy and throw away. It belonged to too many. It belonged to all of us. Why, V.K.?” he says. “Why?”
“Maybe she was bored,” I says, and he says:
“Bored. Yes, bored.” And that was when he begun to cry. “She loved, had the capacity to love, to give and to take it. Only she tried twice and failed twice not jest to find somebody strong enough to deserve it but even brave enough to accept it. Yes,” he says, setting there bolt upright with jest the tears running down his face, at peace now, with nothing nowhere in the world any more to anguish or grieve him. “Of course she was bored.”
SEVEN
“Yes. A little place without physical boundaries located as far as she is concerned in New York City, where young people of all ages below ninety go in search of dreams.” Except I says,
“Except she never had to leave Missippi to locate that place.” And then I said it, what Eula herself must have, had to have, said to him that day: “Why didn’t you marry her?”
“Because she wasn’t but nineteen,” he says.
“And you are all of thirty-five aint you,” I says. “When the papers are full of gals still carrying a doll in one hand marrying folks of sixty and seventy, providing of course they got a little extra money.”
“I mean, she’s got too much time left to run into something where she might need me. How many papers are full of people that got married because someday they might need the other one?”
“Oh,” I says. “So all you got to do now is jest stay around close where you can hear the long-distance telephone or the telegram boy can find you. Because naturally you wont be waiting for her to ever come back to Missippi. Or maybe you are?”
“Naturally not,” he says. “Why should she?”
“Thank God?” I says. He didn’t answer. “Because who knows,” I says, “she may d in ready found that dream even in jest these … two days, aint it? three? Maybe he was already settled there when she arrived. That’s possible in Grinnich Village, aint it?”
Then he said it too. “Yes,” he says, “thank God.” So he was free. And in fact, when you had time to look around a little, he never had nothing no more to do but jest rest in peace and quiet and content ment. Because not only him but all Jefferson was free of Snopeses; for the first time in going on twenty years, Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County too was in what you might call a kind of Snopes doldrum. Because at last even Flem seemed to be satisfied: setting now at last in the same chair the presidents of the Merchants and Farmers Bank had been setting in ever since the first one, Colonel Sartoris, started it twenty-odd years ago, and actively living in the very house the second one of it was born in, so that all he needed to do too after he had done locked up the money and went home was to live in solitary peace and quiet and contentment too, not only shut of the daughter that had kept him on steady and constant tenterhooks for years whether she might not escape at any moment to where he couldn’t watch her and the first male feller that come along would marry her and he would lose her share of Will Varner’s money, but shut of the wife that at any time her and Manfred de Spain would get publicly caught up with and cost him all the rest of Varner’s money and bank voting stock too.
In fact, for the moment Flem was the only true Snopes actively left in Jefferson. Old man Ab never had come no closer than that hill two miles out where you could jest barely see the water tank, where he taken the studs that day back about 1910 and hadn’t moved since. And four years ago Flem had ci-devanted I.O. back to Frenchman’s Bend for good. And even before that Flem had eliminated Montgomery Ward into the penitentiary at Parchman where Mink already was (Mink hadn’t really resided in Jefferson nohow except jest them few months in the jail waiting for his life sentence to be awarded). And last month them four half-Snopes Indians that Byron Snopes, Colonel Sartoris’s bank clerk that resigned by the simple practical expedient of picking up as much of the loose money he could tote and striking for the nearest U.S. border, sent back collect from Mexico until somebody could get close enough to fasten the return prepaid tags on them before whichever one had it at the moment could get out that switch-blade knife. And as for Eck’s boys, Wallstreet Panic and Admiral Dewey, they hadn’t never been Snopeses to begin with, since all Wallstreet evidently wanted to do was run a wholesale grocery business by the outrageous un-Snope-sish method of jest selling ever body exactly what they thought they was buying, for exactly
