Walking; I had impressed that on him: not to run, but walk; as forlorn and lonely and fragile and alien in that empty penitentiary compound as a paper doll blowing across a rolling-mill; still walking even after he had passed the point where he couldn’t come back and knew it; even still walking on past the moment when he knew that he had been sold and that he should have known all along he was being sold, not blaming anybody for selling him nor even needing to sell him because hadn’t he signed — he couldn’t read but he could sign his name — that same promissory note too to breathe a little while, since his name was Snopes?
So he even ran before he had to. He ran right at them before I even saw them, before they stepped out of the ambush. I was proud, not just to be kin to him but of belonging to what Reba called all of us poor son of a bitches. Because it took five of them striking and slashing at his head with pistol barrels and even then it finally took the blackjack to stop him, knock him out.
The Warden sent for me. “Don’t tell me anything,” he said. “I wish I didn’t even know as much already as I suspect. In fact, if it was left to me, I’d like to lock you and him both in a cell and leave you, you for choice in handcuffs. But I’m under a bond too so I’m going to move you into solitary for a week or so, for your own protection. And not from him.”
“Don’t brag or grieve,” I said. “You had to sign one of them too.”
“What?” he said. “What did you say?”
“I said you don’t need to worry. He hasn’t got anything against me. If you don’t believe me, send for him.”
So he came in. The bruises and slashes from the butts and the blades of the sights were healing fine. The blackjack of course never had showed. “Hidy,” he said. To me. “I reckon you’ll see Flem before I will now.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Tell him he hadn’t ought to used that dress. But it don’t matter. If I had made it out then, maybe I would a changed. But I reckon I won’t now. I reckon I’ll jest wait.”
So Flem should have taken that suggestion about the ten grand. He could still do it. I could write him a letter: Sure you can raise ten thousand. All you need to do is swap Manfred de Spain a good jump at your wife. No: that won’t do: trying to peddle Eula Varner to Manfred de Spain is like trying to sell a horse to a man that’s already been feeding and riding it for ten or twelve years. But you got that girl, Linda. She ain’t but eleven or twelve but what the hell, put smoked glasses and high heels on her and rush her in quick and maybe De Spain won’t notice it.
Except that I wasn’t going to. But it wasn’t that that worried me. It was knowing that I wasn’t, knowing I was going to throw it away — I mean my commission of the ten grand for contacting the Chi syndicate for him. I don’t remember just when it was, I was probably pretty young, when I realised that I had come from what you might call a family, a clan, a race, maybe even a species, of pure sons of bitches. So I said, Okay, okay, if that’s the way it is, we’ll just show them. They call the best of lawyers, lawyers’ lawyers and the best of actors an actor’s actor and the best of athletes a ballplayer’s ballplayer. All right, that’s what we’ll do: every Snopes will make it his private and personal aim to have the whole world recognise him as THE son of a bitch’s son of a bitch.
But we never do it. We never make it. The best we ever do is to be just another Snopes son of a bitch. All of us, every one of us — Flem, and old Ab that I don’t even know exactly what kin he is, and Uncle Wes and mine and Clarence’s father I.O., then right on down the line: Clarence and me by what you might call simultaneous bigamy, and Virgil and Vardaman and Bilbo and Byron and Mink. I don’t even mention Eck and Wallstreet and Admiral Dewey because they don’t belong to us. I have always believed that Eck’s mother took some extracurricular night work nine months before he was born. So the one true bitch we had was not a bitch at all but a saint and martyr, the one technically true pristine immaculate unchallengeable son of a bitch we ever produced wasn’t even a Snopes.
Five
When his nephew was gone, the Warden said, “Sit down.” He did so. “You got in the paper,” the Warden said. It was folded on the desk facing him:
TRIES PRISON BREAK
DISGUISED IN WOMEN’S CLOTHES
Parchman, Miss. Sept 8, 1923 M. C.
“Mink” Snopes, under life sentence for
murder from Yoknapatawpha County . . .
“What does the ‘C’ in your name stand for?” the Warden said. His voice was almost gentle. “We all thought your name was just Mink. That’s what you told us, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Mink Snopes.”
“What does the ‘C’ stand for? They’ve got it M. C. Snopes here.”
“Oh,” he said. “Nothing. Just M. C. Snopes like I.C. Railroad. It was them young fellers from the paper in the hospital that day. They kept on asking me what my name was and I said Mink Snopes and they said Mink ain’t a name, it’s jest a nickname. What’s your real name? And so I said M. C. Snopes.”
“Oh,” the Warden said. “Is Mink all the name you’ve got?”
“That’s right. Mink Snopes.”
“What did your mother call you?”
“I don’t know. She died. The first I knowed my name was just Mink.” He got up. “I better go. They’re likely waiting for me.”
“Wait,” the Warden said. “Didn’t you know it wouldn’t work? Didn’t you know you couldn’t get away with it?”
“They told me,” he said. “I was warned.” He stood, not moving, relaxed, small and frail, his face downbent a little, musing, peaceful, almost like faint smiling. “He hadn’t ought to fooled me to get caught in that dress and sunbonnet,” he said. “I wouldn’t a done that to him.”
“Who?” the Warden said. “Not your . . . is it nephew?”
“Montgomery Ward?” he said. “He was my uncle’s grandson. No. Not him.” He waited a moment. Then he said again, “Well, I better—”
“You would have got out in five more years,” the Warden said. “You know they’ll probably add on another twenty now, don’t you?”
“I was warned of that too,” he said.
“All right,” the Warden said. “You can go.”
This time it was he who paused, stopped. “I reckon you never did find out who sent me them forty dollars.”
“How could I?” the Warden said. “I told you that at the time. All it said was From a Friend. From Memphis.”
“It was Flem,” he said.
“Who?” the Warden said. “The cousin you told me refused to help you after you killed that man? That you said could have saved you if he had wanted to? Why would he send you forty dollars now, after fifteen years?”
“It was Flem,” he said. “He can afford it. Besides, he never had no money hurt against me. He was jest getting a holt with Will Varner then and maybe he figgered he couldn’t rest getting mixed up with a killing, even if hit was his blood kin. Only I wish he hadn’t used that dress and sunbonnet. He never had to do that.”
They were picking the cotton now; already every cotton county in Mississippi would be grooming their best fastest champions to pick against the best of Arkansas and Missouri for the championship picker of the Mississippi Valley. But he wouldn’t be here. No champion at anything would ever be here because only failures wound up here: the failures at killing and stealing and lying.
He remembered how at first he had cursed his bad luck for letting them catch him, but he knew better now: that there was no such thing as bad luck or good luck: you were either born a champion or not a champion, and if he had been born a champion Houston not only couldn’t, he wouldn’t have dared, misuse him about that cow to where he had to kill him; that some folks were born to be failures and get caught always, some folks were born to be lied to and believe it, and he was one of them.
It was a fine crop, one of the best he remembered, as though everything had been exactly right: season: wind and sun and rain to sprout it, the fierce long heat of summer to grow and ripen it. As though back there in the spring the ground itself had said, All right, for once let’s confederate instead of fighting — the ground, the dirt which any and every tenant farmer and sharecropper knew to be his sworn foe and mortal enemy — the hard implacable land which wore out his youth and his tools and then his body itself.
And not just his body but that soft mysterious one
