Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

even needing to see the open window and the dangling screen, his now frantic hand scrabbling from the bib pocket of the overalls the wad of newspaper beneath which the ten-dollar bill had been pinned, his voice making a puny whimpering instead of the cursing he was trying for, beating his fists on the locked door until it jerked open and Goodyhay stood in it, also taking one look at the ravished window.

“So the son of a bitch robbed you,” Goodyhay said.

“It was ten dollars,” Mink said. “I got to ketch him. Let me out.”

“Hold it,” Goodyhay said, still barring the doorway. “You cant catch him now.”

“I got to,” he said. “I got to have that ten dollars.”

“You mean you’ve got to have ten dollars to get home?”

“Yes!” he said, cursing again. “I cant do nothing without it. Let me out.”

“How long since you been home?” Goodyhay said.

“Thirty-eight years. Tell me which way you figger he went.”

“Hold it,” Goodyhay said, still not moving. “All right,” he said. “I’ll see you get your ten dollars back Sunday. Can you cook?”

“I can fry eggs and meat,” Mink said.

“All right. You cook breakfast and I’ll load the truck. Come on.” Goodyhay showed him how to light the stove and left him; he filled up last night’s coffee pot with water as his tradition was until the grounds had lost all flavor and color too, and sliced the fatback and dusted it with meal into the skillet in his tradition also, and got eggs out to fry, standing for a while with the door in his hand while he looked, mused, at the heavy holstered pistol beneath the helmet, thinking quietly If I jest had that for two days I wouldn’t need no ten dollars thinking I done been robbed in good faith without warning; why aint that enough to free me to rob in my turn. Not to mention my need being ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times more despaired than ara other mans need for jest ten dollars thinking quietly peacefully indeed now No. I aint never stole. I aint never come to that and I wont never.

When he went to the door to call them, Goodyhay and another man had the truck loaded with intact sections of wall and disassembled planks; he rode on top of the load, once more on the highway toward Memphis; he thought Maybe they’ll even go through Memphis and if I jest had the ten dollars and then quit, just riding, in motion, until the truck turned into a side road; now they were passing, perhaps entering, already on, a big place, domain, plantation—broad cotton fields still white for the pickers; presendy they turned into a farm road across a field and came to a willow-grown bayou and another pickup truck and another stack of dismembered walls and a group of three or four men all curiously similar somehow to Goodyhay and the driver of his—their—truck; he, Mink, couldn’t have said how nor why, and not even speculating: remarking without attention another battle jacket, remarking without much attention either a rectangle of taut string between driven stakes in the dimensions of whatever it was they were going to build, where they unloaded the truck and Goodyhay said, “All right. You and Albert go back for another load.”

So he rode in the cab this time, back to the parsonage or whatever it was, where he and Albert loaded the truck and they returned to the bayou, where by this time, with that many folks working—if any of the other four worked half as fast and as hard as Goodyhay did—they would probably have one wall already up. Instead, the other truck and Goodyhay and the stake-and-string rectangle were gone and only three men sat quietly beside the pile of lumber. “Well?” Albert said.

“Yep,” one of the others said. “Somebody changed his mind.”

“Who?” Mink said. “Changed what? I got to get on. I’m already late.”

“Fellow that owns this place,” Albert said. “That gave us permission to put the chapel here. Somebody changed his mind for him. Maybe the bank that holds his mortgage. Maybe the Legion.”

“What Legion?” he said.

“The American Legion. That’s still holding the line at 1918. You never heard of it?”

“Where’s Reverend Goodyhay?” he said. “I got to get on.”

“All right,” Albert said. “So long.” So he waited. Now it was early afternoon when the other truck returned, being driven fast, Goodyhay already getting out of it before it stopped.

“All right,” he said. “Load up.” Then they were on the Memphis highway again, going fast now to keep at least in sight of Goodyhay, as fast as any of the traffic they dashed among, he thinking If I jest had the ten dollars, even if we aint going all the way to Memphis this time neither. They didn’t. Goodyhay turned off and they ran again, faster than they dared except that Goodyhay in the front truck would have lost them, into a region of desolation, the lush Delta having played out now into eroded barren clay hills; into a final, the uttermost of desolation, where Goodyhay stopped—a dump, a jumbled plain of rusted automobile bodies and boilers and gin machinery and brick and concrete rubble; already the stakes had been re-driven and the rectangular string tautened rigid between them, Goodyhay standing beside his halter truck beckoning his arm, shouting, “All right. Here we are. Let’s go.”

So there was actual work again at last. But it was already late; most of the day was gone and tomorrow was Saturday, only one more full day. But Goodyhay didn’t even give him a chance to speak. “Didn’t I tell you you’d get your ten dollars Sunday? All right then.” Nor did Goodyhay say, “Can you cook supper?” He just jerked, flung open the refrigerator door and jerked out the bloodstained paper of hamburger meat and left the kitchen. And now Mink remembered from somewhere that he had cooked grits once and found grits and the proper vessel. And tonight Goodyhay didn’t lock the door; he, Mink, tried it to see, then closed it and lay down, again peacefully on his back, his hands folded on his breast like a corpse, until Goodyhay waked him to fry the side meat and the eggs again. The pickup truck was already there and a dozen men were on hand this time and now you could begin to see what the chapel (they called it) was going to look like; until dark. He said: “It aint cold tonight and besides I can lay under thatere roofing paper and get started at daylight until the rest of them—”

“We dont work on Sunday,” Goodyhay said. “Come on. Come on.” Then it was Sunday. It was raining: the thin steady drizzle of early fall. A man and his wife called for them, not a pickup this time but a car, hard-used and a little battered. They turned again into a crossroad, not into desolate country this time but simply empty, coming at last to an unpainted box of a building which something somewhere back before the thirty-eight years in the penitentiary recognised, remembered. It’s a nigger schoolhouse he thought, getting out among five or six other stained and battered cars and pickup trucks and a group of people already waiting, a few older ones but usually men and women about the age of Goodyhay or a little younger; again he sensed that identity, similarity among them even beyond the garments they wore—more battle jackets, green army slickers, one