“By God,” he said, “maybe she won’t talk but I reckon I can find somebody that will. I’ll find all three of them. I’ll — —”
“What for? Just out of curiosity to find out for certain just which of them was and wasn’t diddling her?” Again for a long moment Jody could not speak at all. He stood against the desk, huge, bull-goaded, impotent and outraged, actually suffering, not from lese-Varner but from frustration. Mrs. Varner’s heavy stockinged feet pounded again in the hall; she began now to hammer at the door with the stick of wood.
“You, Will!” she shouted. “Open this door.’ ”
“You mean you ain’t going to do nothing?” Jody said. “Not anything?”
“Do what?” Varner said. “To who? Don’t you know them damn tomcats are halfway to Texas now? Where would you be about now, if it was you? Where would I be, even at my age, if I was footloose enough to prowl any roof I wanted to and could get in when I did?
I know damn well where, and so would you — right where they are and still lathering horsemeat.” He went to the door and unlocked it, though the steady irate tattoo of Mrs. Varner’s stick was so loud that she apparently did not hear the key turn at all. “Now you go on out to the barn and set down until you cool off.
Make Sam dig you some worms and go fishing. If this family needs any head-holding-up done, I’ll tend to it myself.” He turned the knob. “Hell and damnation, all this hullabaloo and uproar because one confounded running bitch finally foxed herself. What did you expect — that she would spend the rest of her life just running water through it?”
That was Saturday afternoon. On the next Monday morning the seven men squatting about the gallery of the store saw the clerk, Snopes, coming on foot down the road from Varner’s house, followed by a second man who was carrying a suitcase.
The clerk not only wore the grey cloth cap and the minute tie but a coat too, and then they saw that the suitcase which the second man carried was the straw one which Snopes had carried new to Varner’s house one afternoon a year ago and left there.
Then they began to look at the man who was carrying it. They saw that the clerk was heeled as by a dog by a man a little smaller than himself but shaped exactly like him. It was as though the two of them were merely graded by perspective.
At first glance even the two faces were identical, until the two of them mounted the steps. Then they saw that the second face was a Snopes face right enough, differing from the other only by that unpredictable variation within the iron kinship to which they had become accustomed — in this case a face not smaller than the other exactly but closer, the features plucked together at the centre of it not by some inner impulse but rather from the outside, as though by a single swift gesture of the fingers of one hand; a face quick and bright and not derisive exactly as profoundly and incorrigibly merry behind the bright, alert, amoral eyes of a squirrel or a chipmunk.
They mounted the steps and crossed the gallery, carrying the suitcase. Snopes jerked his head at them exactly as Will Varner himself did it, chewing; they entered the store. After a while three more men came out of the blacksmith shop opposite, so there was a dozen of them about within sight of the gallery when, an hour later, the Varner surrey came up. The negro, Sam, was driving.
Beside him in front was the tremendous battered telescope bag which Mr. and Mrs. Varner had made their honeymoon to Saint Louis with and which all travelling Varners had used since, even the daughters marrying, sending it back empty, when it would seem to be both symbol and formal notice of moonset, the mundane return, the valedictory of bright passion’s generous impulsive abandon, as the printed card had been of its hopeful dawn.
Varner, in the back seat with his daughter, called a general greeting, short, perfectly inflectionless, unreadable. He did not get out, and those on the gallery looked quietly once and then away from the calm beautiful mask beside him beneath the Sunday hat, the veil, above the Sunday dress, even the winter coat, seeing without looking at him as Snopes came out of the store, carrying the straw suitcase, and mounted to the front seat beside the telescope bag.
The surrey moved on. Snopes turned his head once and spat over the wheel. He had the straw suitcase on his knees like the coffin of a baby’s funeral.
The next morning Tull and Bookwright returned from Jefferson, where they had delivered another drove of cattle to the railroad. By that night the countryside knew the rest of it — how on that Monday afternoon Varner and his daughter and his clerk had visited his bank, where Varner had cashed a considerable cheque. Tull said it was for three hundred dollars.
Bookwright said that meant a hundred and fifty then, since Varner would discount even his own paper to himself fifty per cent. From there they had gone to the courthouse, to the Chancery Clerk’s office, where a deed to the Old Frenchman place was recorded to Flem and Eula Varner Snopes. A Justice of the Peace had a desk in the Circuit Clerk’s office, where they bought the licence.
Tull blinked rapidly, telling it. He coughed. “The bride and groom left for Texas right after the ceremony,” he said.
“That makes five,” a man named Armstid said. “But they say Texas is a big place.”
“It’s beginning to need to be,” Bookwright said. “You mean six.”
Tull coughed. He was still blinking rapidly. “Mr. Varner paid for it too,” he said.
“Paid for what too?” Armstid said.
“The wedding licence,” Tull said.
2
She knew him well. She knew him so well that she never had to look at him any more. She had known him ever since her fourteenth summer, when the people said that he had “passed” her brother. They did not say it to her. She would not have heard them. She would not have cared.
She saw him almost every day, because in her fifteenth summer he began to come to the house itself, usually after supper, to sit with her father on the veranda, not talking but listening, spitting his tobacco neatly over the railing. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons he would come and squat against a tree beside the wooden hammock where her father lay in his stockings, still not talking and still chewing; she would see him there from where she sat on the veranda surrounded by her ravening crowd of that year’s Sunday beaux.
By then she had learned to recognise the mute hissing of his tennis shoes on the veranda planks; without rising or even turning her head she would call toward the interior of the house: “Papa, here’s that man,” or, presently, “the man”— “papa, here’s the man again,” though sometimes she said Mr. Snopes, saying it exactly as she would have said Mr. Dog.
In the next summer, her sixteenth, she not only did not look at him, she never saw him again because he now lived in the same house, eating at the same table, using her brother’s saddle-horse to attend to his and her father’s interminable business. He would pass her in the hall where her brother held her, dressed to go out to the waiting buggy, while his hard raging hand explored to see if she had the corset on, and she would not see him.
She faced him across the table to eat twice a day because she ate her own breakfast in the kitchen, at whatever midmorning hour her mother finally got her up, though once she was awake it was no further trouble to get her down to the table; harried at last from the kitchen by the negress or her mother, the last half-eaten biscuit in her hand and her face unwashed and looking, in the rich deshabille of her loose hair and the sloven and not always clean garments she had groped into between bed and breakfast-table, as if she had just been surprised from a couch of illicit love by a police raid, she would meet and pass him returning to his noon meal, in the hall, and he had never been.
And so one day they clapped her into her Sunday clothes and put the rest of her things — the tawdry mail-order negligées and nightgowns, the big cheap flimsy shoes and what toilet things she had — into the tremendous bag and took her to town in the surrey and married her to him.
Ratliff was in Jefferson that Monday afternoon too. He saw the three of them cross the Square from the bank to the courthouse and followed them. He walked past the door to the Chancery Clerk’s office and saw them inside; he could have waited and seen them go from there to the Circuit Clerk’s office and he could have witnessed the marriage, but he did not. He did not need to. He knew what was happening now and he had already gone on to the station, there waiting an hour before the train was due, and he was not wrong; he saw the straw suitcase and the big telescope bag go into the
