lived, breathed, but created about herself by just existing, living, breathing. I dont know what word I want: an aura not of license, unchastity, because (this may even be Ratliff; I dont remember now) little petty moral conditions like restraint and purity had no more connection with a woman like Mrs Snopes—or rather, a woman like her had no more concern with or even attention for them—than conventions about what force you use or when or how or where have to do with wars or cyclones. I mean, when a community suddenly discovered that it has the sole ownership of Venus for however long it will last, she cannot, must not be a chaste wife or even a faithful mistress whether she is or not or really wants to be or not. That would be not only intolerable, but a really criminal waste; and for the community so accoladed to even condone, let alone abet, the chastity, continence, would be an affront to the donors deserving their godlike vengeance. Like having all miraculous and matchless season—wind, sun, rain, heat and frost—concentrated into one miraculous instant over the county, then us to try to arrogate to ourselves the puny right to pick and choose and select instead of every man woman and child that could walk turning out to cultivate to the utmost every seed the land would hold. So we—I mean the men and the women both—would not even ask to escape the anguish and uproar she would cause by breathing and existing among us and the jealousy we knew ourselves to be unworthy of, so long as we did have one who could match and cope with her in fair combat and so be our champion and prde like the county ownership of the fastest horse in the country. We would all be on hers and De Spain’s side; we would even engineer and guard the trysts; only the preachers would hate her because they would be afraid of her since the god she represented without even trying to, for the men to pant after and even the women to be proud that at least one of their sex was its ambassador, was a stronger one than the pale and desperate Galilean who was all they had to challenge with.
Because Linda didn’t have that quality; that one was not transferable. So all that remained for her and Gavin was continence. To put it crudely, morality. Because where could they go. Not to her house because between her and her father, the wrong one was deaf. And not to his because the house he lived in wasn’t his but Mother’s and one of the earliest (when the time came of course) principles he taught me was that a gentleman does not bring his paramour into the home of: in this order: His wife. His mother. His sister. His mistress. And they couldn’t make the coincidental trips to the available places in Memphis or New Orleans or maybe as far away as St Louis and Chicago that (we assumed) her mother and Manfred de Spain used to make, since even police morality, not to mention that of that semi-underworld milieu to which they would have had to resort, would have revolted at the idea of seducing a stone-deaf woman from the safety and innocence of her country home town, to such a purpose. So that left only his automobile, concealed desperately and frantically behind a bush—Gavin Stevens, aged fifty, M.A. Harvard, Ph.D. Heidelberg, LI.B. Mississippi, American Field Service and Y.M.C.A., France, 1915-1918, County Attorney; and Linda Kohl, thirty, widow, wounded in action with the communist forces in Spain, fumbling and panting in a parked automobile like they were seventeen years old.
Especially when the police found out (I mean if, of course, if somebody came and told them) that she was a communist. Or Jefferson either, for that matter. We had two Finns who had escaped by the skin of their teeth from Russia in 1917 and from Europe in 1919 and in the early twenties wound up in Jefferson; nobody knew why—one the cobbler who had taken over Mr Nightingale’s little shop, the other a tinsmith—who were not professed communists nor confessed either since they still spoke too little English by the time Mr Roosevelt’s N.R.A. and the labor unions had made “communist” a dirty word referring mostly to John L. Lewis’s C.I.O. In fact, there was no need as they saw it to confess or profess either. They simply took it for granted that there was a proletariat in Jefferson as specific and obvious and recognisable as the day’s climate, and as soon as they learned English they would find it and, all being proletarians together, they would all be communists together too as was not only their right and duty but they couldn’t help themselves. That was fifteen years ago now, though the big one, the cobbler, the one slower at learning English, was still puzzled and bewildered, believing it was simply the barrier of language instead of a condition in which the Jefferson proletariat declined not only to know it was the proletariat but even to be content as the middle class, being convinced instead that it was merely in a temporary interim state toward owning in its turn Mr Snopes’s bank or Wallstreet Snopes’s wholesale grocery chain or (who knows?) on the way to the governor’s mansion in Jackson or even the White House in Washington.
The little one, the tinsmith, was quicker than that. Maybe, as distinct from the cobbler’s sedentary and more meditative trade, he got around more. Anyway he had learned some time ago y iany proletariat he became a member of in Jefferson he would have to manufacture first. So he set about it. The only means he had was to recruit, convert communists, and the only material he had were Negroes. Because among us white male Jeffersons there was one concert of unanimity, no less strong and even louder at the bottom, extending from the operators of Saturday curb-side peanut-and popcorn-vending machines, through the side-street and back-alley grocers, up to the department-store owners and automobile and gasoline agencies, against everybody they called communists now— Harry Hopkins, Hugh Johnson and everybody else associated with N.R.A., Eugene Debs, the I.W.W, the C.I.O.—any and everybody who seemed even to question our native-born Jefferson right to buy or raise or dig or find anything as cheaply as cajolery or trickery or threat or force could do it, and then sell it as dear as the necessity or ignorance or timidity of the buyer would stand. And that was what Linda had, all she had in our alien capitalist waste this far from home if she really was a communist and communism really is not just a political ideology but a religion which has to be practised in order to stay alive—two Arctic Circle immigrants: one practically without human language, a troglodyte, the other a little quick-tempered irreconcilable hornet because of whom both of them were already well advanced outside the Jefferson pale, not by being professed communists (nobody would have cared how much of a communist the little one merely professed himself to be so long as he didn’t actually interfere with local wage scales, just as they could have been Republicans so long as they didn’t try to interfere with our Democratic town and county elections or Catholics as long as they didn’t picket churches or break up prayer meetings) but Negro lovers: consorters, political affiliators with Negroes. Not social consorters: we would not have put up with that from even them and the little one anyway knew enough Jefferson English to know it. But association of any sort was too much; the local police were already looking cross-eyed at them even though we didn’t really believe a foreigner could do any actual harm among our own loyal colored.
So, you see, all they—Gavin and Linda—had left now was marriage. Then it was Christmas 1938, the last one before the lights began to go out, and I came home for the holidays and she came to supper one night. Not Christmas dinner. I dont know what happened there: whether Mother and Gavin decided it would be more delicate to ask her and let her decline, or not ask her at all. No, that’s wrong. I’ll bet Mother invited them both—her and old Snopes too. Because women are marvellous. They stroll perfectly bland and serene through a fact that the men have been bloodying their heads against for years; whereupon you find that the fact not only wasn’t important, it wasn’t really there. She invited them both, exactly as if she had been doing it whenever she thought of it maybe at least once a month for the last hundred years, whenever she decided to give them a little pleasure by having them to a meal, or whenever she decided it would give her pleasure to have them whether they thought so or not; and Linda declined for both of them in exactly the same way.
So you can imagine that Christmas dinner in that house that nobody I knew had seen the inside of except Mother (oh yes, she would have by now, with Linda home again) and Uncle Gavin: the dining room—table chairs sideboard cabinets chandeliers and all—looking exactly as it had looked in the Memphis interior decorator’s warehouse when he—Snopes—traded in Major de Spain’s mother’s furniture for it, with him at one end of the table and Linda at the other and the yardman in a white coat serving hem—the old fish-blooded son of a bitch who had a vocabulary of two words, one being No and the other Foreclose, and the bride of silence more immaculate in that chastity than ever Caesar’s wife because she was invulnerable too, forever safe, in that chastity forever pure, that couldn’t have heard him if he had had anything to say to her, any more than he could have heard her, since he wouldn’t even recognise the language she spoke in. The two of them sitting there face to face through the long excruciating ritual which the day out of all the days compelled; and nobody to know why they did it, suffered it, why she suffered and endured it, what ritual she served or compulsion expiated—or who knows? what portent she postulated to keep him reminded. Maybe that was why. I mean, why she came back to Jefferson. Evidently it wasn’t to marry Gavin Stevens. Or at least not yet.
So it would be just an ordinary supper, though Mother would have said (and unshakably believed) that it was in
