He didn’t know how many years it had been when the letter came, whether it was two or three as he stood in the Warden’s office, turning the stamped pencil-addressed envelope in his hand while the Warden watched him. “You can’t read?” the Warden said.
“I can read reading, but I can’t read writing good.”
“You want me to open it?” the Warden said.
“All right,” he said. So the Warden did.
“It’s from your wife. She wants to know when you want her to come to see you, and if you want her to bring the girls.”
Now he held the letter himself, the page of foolscap out of a school writing-pad, pencilled over, spidery and hieroglyph, not one jot less forever beyond him than Arabic or Sanscrit. “Yettie can’t even read reading, let alone write writing,” he said. “Miz Tull must a wrote it for her.”
“Well?” the Warden said. “What do you want me to tell her?”
“Tell her it ain’t no use in her coming all the way here because I’ll be home soon.”
“Oh,” the Warden said. “You’re going to get out soon, are you?” He looked at the small frail creature not much larger than a fifteen-year-old boy, who had been one of his charges for three years now without establishing an individual entity in the prison’s warp. Not a puzzle, not an enigma: he was not anything at all; no record of run-in or reprimand with or from any guard or trusty or official, never any trouble with any other inmate.
A murderer, in for life, who in the Warden’s experience fell always into one of two categories: either an irreconcilable, with nothing more to lose, a constant problem and trouble to the guards and the other prisoners; or a sycophant, sucking up to whatever of his overlords could make things easiest for him. But not this one: who assumed his assigned task each morning and worked steady and unflagging in the cotton as if it was his own crop he was bringing to fruit. More: he worked harder for this crop from which he would not derive one cent of profit than, in the Warden’s experience, men of his stamp and kind worked in their own. “How?” the Warden said.
Mink told him; it was automatic now after three years; he had only to open his mouth and breathe: “By doing what they tell me to. Not talking back and not fighting. Not to try to escape. Mainly that: not to try to escape.”
“So in either seventeen or twenty-two years you’ll go home,” the Warden said. “You’ve already been here three.”
“Have I?” he said. “I ain’t kept count. — No,” he said. “Not right away. There’s something I got to attend to first.”
“What?” the Warden said.
“Something private. When I finish that, then I’ll come on home. Write her that.” Yes sir he thought. It looks like I done had to come all the way to Parchman jest to turn right around and go back home and kill Flem.
Three
V. K. Ratliff
LIKELY WHAT BOLLIXED Montgomery Ward at first, and for the next two or three days too, was exactly why Flem wanted him specifically in Parchman. Why wouldn’t no other equally secure retired place do, such as Atlanta or Leavenworth or maybe even Alcatraz two thousand miles away out in California, where old Judge Long would a already had him on the first train leaving Jefferson while he was still looking at the top one of them French post cards; jest exactly why wouldn’t no other place do Flem to have Montgomery Ward sent to but Parchman, Missippi.
Because even in the initial excitement, Montgomery Ward never had one moment’s confusion about what was actively happening to him.
The second moment after Lawyer and Hub walked in the door, he knowed that at last something was happening that he had been expecting ever since whenever that other moment was when Flem found out or suspected that whatever was going on up at that alley had a money profit in it.
The only thing that puzzled him was, why Flem was going to all that extra trouble and complication jest to usurp him outen that nekkid-picture business. That was like the story about the coon in the tree that asked the name of the feller aiming the gun at him and when the feller told him, the coon says, “Hell fire, is that who you are? Then you don’t need to waste all this time and powder jest on me. Stand to one side and I’ll climb down.”
Not to mention reckless. Having Flem Snopes take his business away from him was all right. He had been expecting that: that sooner or later his turn would come too, running as he did the same risk with ever body else in Yoknapatawpha County owning a business solvent enough for Flem to decide he wanted it too.
But to let the county attorney and the county sheriff get a-holt of them pictures, the two folks of all the folks in Yoknapatawpha County that not even Grover Winbush would a been innocent enough to dream would ever turn them loose again — Lawyer Stevens, so dedicated to civic improvement and the moral advancement of folks that his purest notion of duty was browbeating twelve-year-old boys into running five-mile foot races when all they really wanted to do was jest to stay at home and set fire to the barn; and Hub Hampton, a meat-eating Hard-Shell-Baptist deacon whose purest notion of pleasure was counting off the folks he personally knowed was already bound for hell.
Why, in fact, Montgomery Ward had to go anywhere, if all his uncle or cousin wanted was jest to take his business away from him, except maybe jest to stay outen sight for a week or maybe a month or two to give folks time to forget about them nekkid pictures, or anyway that anybody named Snopes was connected with them. Flem being a banker now and having to deal not jest in simple usury but in respectability too.
No, what really should a puzzled Montgomery Ward, filled him in fact with delighted surprise, was how he had managed to last even this long. It never needed the Law nor Flem Snopes neither to close out that studio, pull the blinds down (or rather up) for good and all on the French-postcard industry in Jefferson, Missippi. Grover Winbush done that when he let whoever it was ketch him slipping outen that alley at two o’clock that morning. No: Grover Winbush had done already wrecked and ruined that business in Jefferson at the same moment when he found out there was a side door in a Jefferson alley with what you might call a dry whorehouse behind it.
No, that business was wrecked in Jefferson the same moment Grover Winbush got appointed night marshal, Grover having jest exactly enough sense to be a night policeman providing the two wasn’t no bigger and never stayed awake no later than Jefferson, Missippi, since that would be the one job in all paid laborious endeavour — leaning all night against a lamppost looking at the empty Square — you would a thought he could a held indefinitely, providing the influence of whoever got it for him or give it to him lasted that long, without stumbling over anything he could do any harm with, to his-self or the job or a innocent bystander or maybe all three; and so naturally he would be caught by somebody, almost anybody, the second or third time he come slipping outen that alley.
Which was jest a simple unavoidable occupational hazard of running a business like that in the same town where Grover Winbush was night marshal, which Montgomery Ward knowed as well as anybody else that knowed Grover. So when the business had been running over a year without no untoward interruption, Montgomery Ward figgered that whoever had been catching Grover slipping in and out of that alley after midnight once a month for the last nine or ten of them, was maybe business acquaintances Grover had made raiding crap games or catching them with a pint of moonshine whiskey in their hind pockets.
Or who knows? Maybe even Flem his-self had got a-holt of each one of them in time, protecting not so much his own future interests and proposed investments, because maybe at that time he hadn’t even found out he wanted to go into the a-teelyer (that’s what Montgomery Ward called it; he had the name painted on the window: Atelier Monty) business, but simply protecting and defending solvency and moderate profit itself, not jest out of family loyalty to another Snopes but from pure and simple principle, even if he was a banker now and naturally would have to compromise, to a extent at least, profit with respectability, since any kind of solvency redounds to the civic interest providing it don’t get caught, and even respectability can go hand in hand with civic interest providing the civic interest has got sense enough to take place after dark and not make no loud noise at it.
So when the county attorney and the county sheriff walked in on him that morning, Montgomery Ward naturally believed that pure and simple destiny was simply taking
