“Hi, Mr. Snopes. You calling me?”
“Yes. If you ain’t doing anything special,” Snopes answered.
“I ain’t,” the boy said. They entered the house and passed the room where the woman labored with drab fury. The reek of the pipe, the lugubrious reiteration of the phonograph, filled the hall, and they mounted stairs carpeted also with linoleum fastened to each step by a treacherous sheet-iron strip treated to resemble brass and scuffed and scarred by heavy feet. The upper hall was lined by two identical rows of doors. They entered one of these.
The room contained a bed, a chair, a dressing table, and a washstand with a slop jar beside it. The floor was covered with straw matting, frayed in places. The single light hung unshaded on a greenish-brown cord. Upon the wall above the paper-filled fireplace a framed lithograph of an Indian maiden in immaculate buckskin leaned her naked bosom above a formal moonlit pool of Italian marble. She held a guitar and a rose, and dusty sparrows sat on the window ledge and watched them brightly through the dusty screen.
The boy entered politely. His pale eyes took in the room and its contents at a comprehensive glance. He said, “That air gun ain’t come yet, has it, Mr. Snopes?”
“No, it ain’t,” Snopes answered. “It’ll be here soon, though.”
“You ordered off after it a long time, now.”
“That’s right. But it’ll be here soon. Maybe they haven’t got one in stock, right now.” He crossed to the dresser and took from a drawer a few sheets of foolscap and laid them on the dresser top and drew a chair up and dragged his suitcase from beneath the bed and set it on the chair. Then he took his fountain pen from his pocket and uncapped it and laid it beside the paper. “It ought to be here any day, now.”
The boy seated himself on the suitcase and took up the pen. “They got ’em at Watts’ hardware store,” he suggested.
“If the one we ordered don’t come soon, we’ll git one there,” Snopes said. “When did we order it, anyway?”
“Week ago Tuesday,” the boy answered glibly. “I wrote it down.”
“Well, it’ll be here soon. You ready?”
The boy squared himself before the paper. “Yes, sir.” Snopes took a folded paper from the top pocket of his trousers and spread it open.
“Code number forty-eight. Mister Joe Butler, Saint Louis, Missouri,” he read, then he leaned over the boy’s shoulder, watching the pen. “That’s right: up close to the top,” he commended. “Now.” The boy dropped down the page about two indies, and as Snopes read, he transcribed in his neat, copybook hand, pausing only occasionally to inquire as to the spelling of a word.
“‘I thought once I would try to forget you. But I cannot forget you because you cannot forget me. I saw my letter in your hand satchel today. Every day I can put my hand out and touch you you do not know it. Just to see you walk down the street. To know what I know what you know. Some day we will both know to gether when you got use to it.
You kept my letter but you do not answer. That is a good sign you do—’” The boy had reached the foot of the page. Snopes removed it, leaving the next sheet ready. He continued to read in his droning, inflectionless voice:
“‘—not forget me you would not keep it. I think of you at night the way you walk down the street like I was dirt. I can tell you something you will be surprised I know more than watch you walk down the street with cloths. I will someday you will not be surprised then. You pass me you do not know it I know it. You will know it someday. Because I will tell you.’ Now,” he said, and the boy dropped on to the foot of the page. “Yours truly Hal Wagner. Code number twenty four.” Again he looked over the boy’s shoulder. “That’s right.” He blotted the final sheet and gathered it up also. The boy recapped the pen and thrust the chair back, and Snopes produced a small paper bag from his coat.
The boy took it soberly. “Much obliged, Mr. Snopes,” he said. He opened it and squinted into it. “It’s funny that air gun don’t come on.”
“It sure is,” Snopes agreed. “I don’t know why it don’t come.”
“Maybe it got lost in the post office,” the boy suggested. “It may have. I reckon that’s about what happened to it, I’ll write ’em again, tomorrow.”
The boy rose, but he stood yet with his straw-colored hair and his bland, innocent face. He took a piece of candy from the sack and ate it without enthusiasm. “I reckon I better tell papa to go to the post office and ask ’em if it got lost.”
“No, I wouldn’t do that,” Snopes said quickly. “You wait; I’ll ’tend to it. We’ll get it, all right.”
“Papa wouldn’t mind. He could go over there soon’s he comes home and see about it. I could find him right now, and ask him to do it, I bet.”
“He couldn’t do no good,” Snopes answered. “You leave it to me. I’ll get that gun, all right.”
“I could tell him I been working for you,” the boy pursued. “I remember them letters.”
“No, no, you wait and let me ’tend to it. I’ll see about it first thing tomorrow.”
“All right, Mr. Snopes.” He ate another piece of candy, without enthusiasm. He moved toward the door. “I remember ever’ one of them letters. I bet I could sit down and write ’em all again. I bet I could. Say, Mr. Snopes, who is Hal Wagner? Does he live in Jefferson?”
“No, no. You never seen him. He don’t hardly never come to town. That’s the reason I’m ’tending to his business for him. I’ll see about that air gun, all right.”
The boy opened the door, then he paused again. “They got em at Watts’ hardware store. Good ones. I’d sure like to have one of ’em. Yes, sir, I sure would.”
“Sure, sure,” Snopes repeated. “Ourn’ll be here tomorrow. You just wait; I’ll see you git that gun.”
The boy departed. Snopes locked the door, and for a while he stood beside it with his head bent, his hands slowly knotting and writhing together. Then he took up the folded sheet and burned it over the hearth and ground the carbonized ash to dust under his heel.
With his knife he cut the address from the top of the first sheet and the signature from the bottom of the second, and folded them and inserted them in a cheap envelope. He sealed this and stamped it, and took out his pen and with his left hand he addressed the envelope in labored printed characters. That night he took it to the station and mailed it on the train.
The next afternoon Virgil Beard killed a mockingbird. It was singing in the peach tree that grew in the corner of the chicken yard.
5
At times, as Simon puttered about the place during the day, he could look out across the lot and into the pasture and see the carriage horses growing daily shabbier and less prideful with idleness and lack of their daily grooming, or he would pass the carriage motionless in its shed, its tongue propped at an accusing angle, and in the harness room the duster and the top hat gathered slow dust on the nail in the wall, holding too in their mute waiting a patient and questioning uncomplaint.
And at times, when he stood shabby and stooped a little with stubborn bewilderment and age, on the veranda with its ancient roses and wistaria and all its spacious and steadfast serenity, and watched Sartorises come and go in a machine a gentleman of his day would have scorned and which any pauper could own and any fool would ride in, it seemed to him that John Sartoris stood beside him, with his bearded and hawklike face and an expression of haughty and fine contempt.
And as he stood so, with afternoon slanting athwart the southern end of the porch and the heady and myriad odors of the waxing spring and the drowsy humming of insects and the singing of birds steady upon it, Isom within the cool doorway or at the corner of the house would hear his grandfather mumbling in a monotonous sing-song in which was incomprehension and petulance and querulousness; and Isom would withdraw to the kitchen where his mother with her placid yellow face and her endless crooning labored steadily.
“Pappy out dar talkin’ to Ole Marster again,” Isom told her. “Gimme dem cole ’taters, mammy.”
“Ain’t Miss Jenny got some work fer you dis evenin’?” Elnora demanded, giving him the potatoes.
“No’m. She gone off in de cyar again.”
“Hit’s de Lawd’s blessin’ you and her ain’t bofe gone in it, like you is whenever Mist’ Bayard’ll let you. You git on outen my kitchen, now. I got dis flo’ mopped and I don’t want it tracked up.”
Quite often these days Isom could hear his grandfather talking to John Sartoris as he labored about the stable or the flower beds or the lawn, mumbling away to that arrogant shade which dominated the house and the life that went on there and the whole scene itself, across which
