“What do you think I think when I look out that window and watch them sneaking up along that fence?” she said.
“Only all you done was think,” he said. “That new clerk,” he said. “That Snopes encore. Launcelot,” he said. “Lump. I remember his ma.” He remembered her in life, as well as from inquiry—a thin, eager, plain woman who had never had quite enough to eat and showed it and did not even know that she had actually never had enough to eat, who taught school. Out of a moil of sisters and brothers fathered by a congenital failure who between a constant succession of not even successful petty-mercantile bankruptcies, begot on his whining and sluttish wife still more children whom he could not quite clothe and feed. Out of this, through one summer term at the State Teacher’s College and into a one-room country school, and out of the school before the first year was done and into marriage with a man under indictment then because of a drummer’s sample-case of shoes, all for the right foot, which had vanished from a railway baggage-room. And who brought with her into that marriage, as sole equipment and armament, the ability to wash and feed and clothe a swarm of brothers and sisters without ever enough food or clothing or soap to do it with, and a belief that there was honor and pride and salvation and hope too to be found for man’s example between the pages of books, and who bore one child and named it Launcelot, flinging this quenchless defiance into the very jaws of the closing trap, and died. “Launcelot!” Ratliff cried. He did not even curse: not that Mrs Littlejohn would have minded, or perhaps even have heard him. “Lump! Just think of his shame and horror when he got big enough to realise what his ma had done to his family’s name and pride so that he even had to take Lump for folks to call him in place of it! He pulled that plank off! At just exactly the right height! Not child-height and not woman-height: man-height! He just keeps that little boy there to watch and run to the store and give the word when it’s about to start. Oh, he aint charging them to watch it yet, and that’s what’s wrong. That’s what I dont understand. What I am afraid of. Because if he, Lump Snopes, Launcelot Snopes … I said encore,” he cried. “What I was trying to say was echo. Only what I meant was forgery.” He ceased, having talked himself wordless, mute into baffled and aghast outrage, glaring at the man-tall, man-grim woman in the faded wrapper who stared as steadily back at him.
“So that’s it,” she said. “It aint that it is, that itches you. It’s that somebody named Snopes, or that particular Snopes, is making something out of it and you dont know what it is. Or is it because folks come and watch? It’s all right for it to be, but folks mustn’t know it, see it.”
“Was,” he said. “Because it’s finished now. I aint never disputed I’m a pharisee,” he said. “You dont need to tell me he aint got nothing else. I know that. Or that I can sholy leave him have at least this much. I know that too. Or that besides, it aint any of my business. I know that too, just as I know that the reason I aint going to leave him have what he does have is simply because I am strong enough to keep him from it. I am stronger than him. Not righter. Not any better, maybe. But just stronger.”
“How are you going to stop it?”
“I dont know. Maybe I even cant. Maybe I dont even want to. Maybe all I want is just to have been righteouser, so I can tell myself I done the right thing and my conscience is clear now and at least I can go to sleep tonight.” But he seemed to be at no loss as to what to do next. He did stand for a time on Mrs Littlejohn’s front steps, but he was only canvassing the possibilities—or rather, discarding the faces as he called them up: the fierce intractable one barred with the single eyebrow; the high one ruddy and open and browless as a segment of watermelon above the leather blacksmith’s apron; that third one which did not belong to the frock coat so much as it appeared to be attached to it like a toy balloon by its string, the features of which seemed to be in a constant state of disorganised flight from about the long, scholarly, characterless nose as if the painted balloon-face had just been fetched in out of a violent and driving rain—Mink, Eck, I. O.; and then he began to think Lump again, cursing, driving his mind back to the immediate problem with an almost physical effort, though actually standing quite still on the top step, his face familiar and enigmatic, quiet, actually almost smiling, bringing the three possible faces once more into his mind’s eye and watching them elide once more—the one which would not stay at all; the second which would never even comprehend what he was talking about; the third which in that situation would be like one of the machines in railway waiting-rooms, into which you could insert the copper coin or lead slug of impulse to action, and you would get something back in return, you would not know what, except that it would not be worth quite as much as the copper or the slug. He even thought of the older one, or at least the first one: Flem, thinking how this was probably the first time anywhere where breath inhaled and suspired and men established the foundations of their existences on the currency of coin, that anyone had ever wished Flem Snopes were here instead of anywhere else, for any reason, at any price.
It was now nearing noon, almost an hour since he had seen the man he sought emerge from the store. He made inquiries at the store; ten minutes later he turned from a lane, through a gate in a new wire fence. The house was new, one-storey, paintless. There were a few of the summer’s flowers blooming on dustily into the summer’s arid close, all red ones—cannas and geraniums—in a raw crude bed before the steps and in rusted cans and buckets along the edge of the porch. The same little boy was in the yard beyond the house, and a big, strong, tranquil-faced young woman opened the door to him, an infant riding her hip and another child peering from behind her skirt. “He’s in his room, studying,” she said. “Just walk right in.”
The room also was unpainted, of tongue-and-groove planking; it looked and was as airtight as a strong-box and not much larger, though even then he remarked how the odor of it was not a bachelor-uncle smell but was curiously enough that of a closet in which a middle-aged widow kept her clothes. At once he saw the frock coat lying across the bed’s foot, because the man (he really was holding a book, and he wore spectacles) in the chair had given the opening door one alarmed look and sprang up and snatched up the coat and began to put it on. “Never mind,” Ratliff said. “I aint going to stay long. This here cousin of yours. Isaac.” The other finished getting into the coat, buttoning it hurriedly about the paper dickey he wore in place of a shirt (the cuffs were attached to the coat sleeves themselves) then removing the spectacles with that same flustered haste, as if he had hurried into the coat in order to remove the spectacles, so that for that reason Ratliff noticed that the frames had no lenses in them. The other was watching him with that intentness which he had seen before, which (the concentration and intelligence both) seemed actually to be thntegral part either of the organs or the process behind them, but seemed rather to be a sort of impermanent fungus-growth on the surface of the eyeballs like the light down which children blow from the burrs of dandelion blooms. “About that cow,” Ratliff said.
Now the features fled. They streamed away from the long nose which burlesqued ratiocination and firmness and even made a sort of crass Roman holiday of rationalised curiosity, fluid and flowing even about the fixed grimace of glee. Then Ratliff saw that the eyes were not laughing but were watching him and that there was something intelligently alert, or at least competent, behind them, even if it were not firm. “Aint he a sight now?” Snopes cackled, chortled. “I done often thought, since Houston give him that cow and Mrs Littlejohn located them in that handy stall, what a shame it is some of his folks aint running for office. Bread and circuses, as the fellow says, makes hay at the poll-box. I dont know of no cheaper way than Lump’s got to get a man—”
“Beat,” Ratliff said. He did not raise his voice, and he did not speak further than that one word. The other face did not change either: the long, still nose, the fixed grimace, the eyes which partook of the life of neither. After a moment Snopes said:
“Beat?”
“Beat,” Ratliff said.
“Beat,” the other said. If it were not intelligence, Ratliff told himself, it was a good substitute. “Except as it happens, I ain’t—”
