“Here’s where he keeps that mortgage record,” the storekeeper (his name is Bidwell) said. He went to the table and opened the Bible. The front page was the births and deaths, two columns. The girl’s name was Sophie. I found her name in the birth column, and on the death side it was next to the last one. Mrs Starnes had written it. It looked like it might have taken her ten minutes to write it down. It looked like this:
Sofy starnes Dide april 16 th 1905
Hawkshaw wrote the last one himself; it was neat and well written, like a bookkeeper’s hand:
Mrs Will Starnes. April 23, 1916.
“The record will be in the back,” Bidwell said.
We turned to the back. It was there, in a neat column, in Hawkshaw’s hand. It began with April 16, 1917, $200.00. The next one was when he made the next payment at the bank: April 16, 1918, $200.00; and April 16, 1919, $200.00; and April 16, 1920, $200.00; and on to the last one: April 16, 1930, $200.00. Then he had totaled the column and written under it:
“Paid in full. April 16, 1930.”
It looked like a sentence written in a copy book in the old-time business colleges, like it had flourished, the pen had, in spite of him. It didn’t look like it was written boastful; it just flourished somehow, the end of it, like it had run out of the pen somehow before he could stop it.
“So he did what he promised her he would,” Stevens said.
“That’s what I told Bidwell,” I said.
Stevens went on like he wasn’t listening to me much.
“So the old lady could rest quiet. I guess that’s what the pen was trying to say when it ran away from him: that now she could lie quiet. And he’s not much over forty-five. Not so much anyway. Not so much but what, when he wrote ‘Paid in full’ under that column, time and despair rushed as slow and dark under him as under any garlanded boy or crownless and crestless girl.”
“Only the girl went bad on him,” I said. “Forty-five’s pretty late to set out to find another. He’ll be fifty-five at least by then.”
Stevens looked at me then. “I didn’t think you had heard,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “That is, I looked in the barber shop when I passed. But I knew he would be gone. I knew all the time he would move on, once he had that mortgage cleared. Maybe he never knew about the girl, anyway. Or likely he knew and didn’t care.”
“You think he didn’t know about her?”
“I dont see how he could have helped it. But I dont know. What do you think?”
“I dont know. I dont think I want to know. I know something so much better than that.”
“What’s that?” I said. He was looking at me. “You keep on telling me I haven’t heard the news. What is it I haven’t heard?”
“About the girl,” Stevens said. He looked at me.
“On the night Hawkshaw came back from his last vacation, they were married. He took her with him this time.”
The End
Centaur in Brass, William Faulkner
Centaur in Brass
IN OUR TOWN Flem Snopes now has a monument to himself, a monument of brass, none the less enduring for the fact that, though it is constantly in sight of the whole town and visible from three or four points miles out in the country, only four people, two white men and two Negroes, know that it is his monument, or that it is a monument at all.
He came to Jefferson from the country, accompanied by his wife and infant daughter and preceded by a reputation for shrewd and secret dealing. There lives in our county a sewing-machine agent named Suratt, who used to own a half interest in a small back-street restaurant in town — himself no mean hand at that technically unassailable opportunism which passes with country folks — and town folks, too — for honest shrewdness.
He travels about the county steadily and constantly, and it was through him that Snope’s doings first came to our ears: how first, a clerk in a country store, Snopes one day and to everyone’s astonishment was married to the store owner’s daughter, a young girl who was the belle of the countryside. They were married suddenly, on the same day upon which three of the girl’s erstwhile suitors left the county and were seen no more.
Soon after the wedding Snopes and his wife moved to Texas, from where the wife returned a year later with a well-grown baby. A month later Snopes himself returned, accompanied by a broad-hatted stranger and a herd of half-wild mustang ponies, which the stranger auctioned off, collected the money, and departed.
Then the purchasers discovered that none of the ponies had ever had a bridle on. But they never learned if Snopes had had any part in the business, or had received any part of the money.
The next we heard of him was when he appeared one day in a wagon laden with his family and household goods, and with a bill-of-sale for Suratt’s half of the restaurant. How he got the bill-of-sale, Suratt never told, and we never learned more than that there was somehow involved in the affair a worthless piece of land which had been a portion of Mrs. Snopes’s dowry.
But what the business was even Suratt, a humorous, talkative man who was as ready to laugh at a joke on himself as at one on anyone else, never told. But when he mentioned Snopes’s name after that, it was in a tone of savage and sardonic and ungrudging admiration.
“Yes, sir,” he said, “Flem Snopes outsmarted me. And the man that can do that, I just wish I was him, with this whole State of Mississippi to graze on.”
In the restaurant business Snopes appeared to prosper. That is, he soon eliminated his partner, and presently he was out of the restaurant himself, with a hired manager to run it, and we began to believe in the town that we knew what was the mainspring of his rise and luck. We believed that it was his wife; we accepted without demur the evil which such little lost towns like ours seem to foist even upon men who are of good thinking despite them. She helped in the restaurant at first.
We could see her there behind the wooden counter worn glass-smooth by elbows in their eating generations: young, with the rich coloring of a calendar; a face smooth, unblemished by any thought or by anything else: an appeal immediate and profound and without calculation or shame, with (because of its unblemishment and not its size) something of that vast, serene, impervious beauty of a snowclad virgin mountain flank, listening and not smiling while Major Hoxey, the town’s lone rich middle-aged bachelor, graduate of Yale and soon to be mayor of the town, incongruous there among the collarless shirts and the overalls and the grave, country-eating faces, sipped his coffee and talked to her.
Not impregnable: impervious. That was why it did not need gossip when we watched Snopes’s career mount beyond the restaurant and become complement with Major Hoxey’s in city affairs, until less than six months after Hoxey’s inauguration Snopes, who had probably never been close to any piece of machinery save a grindstone until he moved to town, was made superintendent of the municipal power plant. Mrs. Snopes was born one of those women the deeds and fortunes of whose husbands alone are the barometers of their good name; for to do her justice, there was no other handle for gossip save her husband’s rise in Hoxey’s administration.
But there was still that intangible thing: partly something in her air, her face; partly what we had already heard about Flem Snopes’s methods. Or perhaps what we knew or believed about Snopes was all; perhaps what we thought to be her shadow was merely his shadow falling upon her.
But anyway, when we saw Snopes and Hoxey together we would think of them and of adultery in the same instant, and we would think of the two of them walking and talking in amicable cuckoldry.
Perhaps, as I said, this was the fault of the town. Certainly it was the fault of the town that the idea of their being on amicable terms outraged us more than the idea of the adultery itself. It seemed foreign, decadent, perverted: we could have accepted, if not condoned, the adultery had they only been natural and logical and enemies.
But they were not. Yet neither could they have been called friends. Snopes had no friends; there was no man nor woman among us, not even Hoxey or Mrs. Snopes, who we believed could say, “I know his thought” — least of all, those among whom we saw him now and then, sitting about the stove in the rear of a certain smelly, third-rate grocery, listening and not talking, for an hour or so two or three nights a week. And so we believed that, whatever his wife was, she was not fooling him. It was another woman who did that: a Negro woman, the new young wife of Tom-Tom, the day fireman in the power plant.
Tom-Tom was black: a big bull of a man weighing two hundred pounds and sixty years old and looking about forty. He had been married about a year to his third wife, a young woman whom he kept with the strictness of a Turk in a cabin two miles from town and from the
