“What?” I says. “Miz Tubbs?”
“Of course she wants to know about them,” Homer says. “Ain’t she human too, even if she is a woman?”
And three weeks later Montgomery Ward stood up in Judge Long’s court and Judge Long give him two years in the state penitentiary at Parchman for the possession of one developer jug containing one gallon of moonshine whiskey herewith in evidence.
So ever body was wrong. Flem Snopes hadn’t spent no two thousand dollars’ worth of bond money to purify Montgomery Ward outen the U.S.A. America, and he hadn’t spent no twenty-five or thirty dollars’ worth of white-mule whiskey jest to purify the Snopes family name outen Atlanta, Georgia. What he had done was to spend twenty-five or thirty dollars to send Montgomery Ward to Parchman when the government would a sent him to Georgia free. Which was a good deal more curious than jest surprising, and a good deal more interesting than all three.
So the next morning I happened to be on the depot platform when Number Eleven south-bound was due and sho enough, there was Montgomery Ward and Hunter Killegrew, the deputy, and I says to Hunter: “Don’t you need to step into the washroom before you get on the train for such a long trip? I’ll watch Montgomery Ward for you. Besides, a feller that wouldn’t run off three weeks ago under a two-thousand-dollar bond ain’t likely to try it now with nothing on him but a handcuff.”
So Hunter handed me his half of the handcuff and moved a little away and I says to Montgomery Ward:
“So you’re going to Parchman instead. That’ll be a heap better. Not only you won’t be depriving no native-born Missippi grub contractor outen his rightful and natural profit on the native-born Missippi grub they’ll be feeding a native-born Missippi convict, you won’t be lonesome there neither, having a native-born Missippi cousin or uncle to pass the time with when you ain’t otherwise occupied with field work or something. What’s his name? Mink Snopes, your uncle or cousin that got in that little trouble a while back for killing Jack Houston and kept trying to wait for Flem to come back from Texas in time to get him outen it, except that Flem was otherwise occupied too and so Mink acted kind to put out about it? Which was he, your uncle or your cousin?”
“Yeah?” Montgomery Ward says.
“Well, which?” I says.
“Which what?” Montgomery Ward says.
“Is he your uncle or is he your cousin?” I says.
“Yeah?” Montgomery Ward says.
Four
Montgomery Ward Snopes
“SO THE SON of a bitch fooled you,” I said. “You thought they were going to hang him, but all he got was life.”
He didn’t answer. He just sat there in the kitchen chair — he had toted it up himself from Tubbs’s kitchen. For me, there wasn’t anything in the cell but the cot — for me and the bedbugs that is. He just sat there with the shadow of the window bars crisscrossing that white shirt and that damn little ten-cent snap-on bow tie; they said the same one he had worn in from Frenchman’s Bend sixteen years ago. No: they said not the same one he took out of Varner’s stock and put on the day he came in from that tenant farm and went to work as Varner’s clerk and married Varner’s whore of a daughter in and wore to Texas while the bastard kid was getting born and then wore back again; that was when he wore the cloth cap about the size for a fourteen-year-old child.
And the black felt hat somebody told him was the kind of hat bankers wore, that he didn’t throw away the cap: he sold it to a nigger boy for a dime that he took out in work and put the hat on for the first time three years ago and they said had never taken it off since, not even in the house, except in church, and still looked new. No, it didn’t look like it belonged to anybody, even after day and night for three years, not even sweated, which would include while he was laying his wife too which would be all right with her probably since the sort of laying she was used to they probably didn’t even take off their gloves, let alone their hats and shoes and overcoats.
And chewing. They said when he first came in to Frenchman’s Bend as Varner’s clerk it was tobacco. Then he found out about money. Oh, he had heard about money and had even seen a little of it now and then. But now he found out for the first time that there was more of it each day than you could eat up each day if you ate twice as much fried sowbelly and white gravy. Not only that, but that it was solid, harder than bones and heavy like gravel, and that if you could shut your hands on some of it, there was no power anywhere that could make you let go of more of it than you had to let go of, so he found out that he couldn’t afford to chew up ten cents’ worth of it every week because he had discovered chewing gum by then that a nickel’s worth of would last five weeks, a new stick every Sunday.
Then he came to Jefferson and he really saw some money, I mean all at one time, and then he found out that the only limit to the amount of money you could shut your hands on and keep and hold, was just how much money there was, provided you had a good safe place to put that other handful down and fill your fists again. And then was when he found out he couldn’t afford to chew even one cent a week. When he had nothing, he could afford to chew tobacco; when he had a little, he could afford to chew gum; when he found out he could be rich provided he just didn’t die beforehand, he couldn’t afford to chew anything, just sitting there in that kitchen chair with the shadow of the cell bars crisscrossing him, chewing that and not looking at me or not any more anyway.
“Life,” I said. “That means twenty years, the way they figure it, unless something happens between now and then. How long has it been now? Nineteen eight, wasn’t it, when he hung all day long maybe in this same window here, watching the street for you to come on back from Texas and get him out, being as you were the only Snopes then that had enough money and influence to help him as he figured it, hollering down to anybody that passed to get word out to Varner’s store for you to come in and save him, then standing up there in that courtroom on that last day and giving you your last chance, and you never came then either? Nineteen eight to nineteen twenty-three from twenty years, and he’ll be out again. Hell fire, you’ve only got five more years to live, haven’t you? All right. What do you want me to do?”
He told me.
“All right,” I said. “What do I get for it?”
He told me that. I stood there for a while leaning against the wall, laughing down at him. Then I told him.
He didn’t even move. He just quit chewing long enough to say, “Ten thousand dollars.”
“So that’s too high,” I said. “All your life is worth to you is about five hundred, mostly in trade, on the installment plan.” He sat there in that cross-barred shadow, chewing his mouthful of nothing, watching me or at least looking toward me. “Even if it works, the best you can do is get his sentence doubled, get twenty more years added on to it. That means that in nineteen forty-three you’ll have to start all over again worrying about having only five years more to live. Quit sucking and smouching around for bargains. Buy the best: you can afford it. Take ten grand cash and have him killed. From what I hear, for that jack you could have all Chicago bidding against each other. Or ten grand, hell, and Chicago, hell too; for one you could stay right here in Mississippi and have a dozen trusties right there in Parchman drawing straws for him, for which one would shoot him first in the back.”
He didn’t even quit chewing this time.
“Well well,” I said. “So there’s something that even a Snopes won’t do. No, that’s wrong; Uncle Mink never seemed to have any trouble reconciling Jack Houston up in front of that shotgun when the cheese began to bind. Maybe what I mean is, every Snopes has one thing he won’t do to you — provided you can find out what it is before he has ruined and wrecked you. Make it five then,” I said. “I won’t haggle. What the hell, ain’t we cousins or something?”
This time he quit chewing long enough to say, “Five thousand dollars.”
“Okay, I know you haven’t got five grand cash either now,” I said. “You don’t even need it now. That lawyer says you got two years to raise it in, hock or sell or steal whatever you’ll have to hock or sell or steal.”
That got to him — or so I thought then. I’m a pretty slow learner myself sometimes, now and then, mostly now in fact. Because he said something: “You won’t have to stay two years. I can get you out.”
“When?”
