Because he was unenchanted now, you see, done freed at last of that fallen seraphim. It was Eula herself had give him a salve, a ointment, for that bitter thumb the poets say ever man once in his life has got to gnaw at: that gal thirteen then fourteen then fifteen setting opposite him in Christian’s drugstore maybe two afternoons a week in the intervals of them coincidental two or three weeks ever year while Miz Flem Snopes and her daughter would be on a holiday somewhere at the same coincidental time Manfred de Spain would be absent on hisn — not Mayor de Spain now but Banker de Spain since Colonel Sartoris finally vacated the presidency of the bank him and De Spain’s paw and Will Varner had established, by letting his grandson run the automobile off into a ditch on the way to town one morning, and now Manfred de Spain was president of the bank, moving outen the mayor’s office into the president’s office at about the same more or less coincidental moment that Flem Snopes moved outen being the ex-superintendent of the power plant, into being vice-president of the bank, vacating simultaneously outen that little cloth cap he come to Jefferson in (jest vacated, not abandoned it, the legend being he sold it to a Negro boy for ten cents.
Which wouldn’t be a bad price, since who knows if maybe some of that-ere financial acumen might not a sweated off on to it.) into a black felt planter’s hat suitable to his new position and avocation.
Oh yes, Lawyer was unenchanted now, even setting alone now and then in Christian’s window while the ice melted into the Coca-Cola until they would get back home, maybe to be ready and in practice when them two simultaneous coincidences was over and school would open again on a whole fresh year of two afternoons a week — providing of course that sixteen- and seventeen-year-old gal never run into a Hoake McCarron or a Manfred de Spain of her own between two of them and Lawyer could say to you like the man in the book: What you see ain’t tears. You jest think that’s what you’re looking at.
Sixteen and seventeen and going on eighteen now and Lawyer still lending her books to read and keeping her stallfed twice a week on ice-cream sundaes and banana splits, so anyhow Jefferson figgered it knowed what Lawyer was up to whether he admitted it out or not. And naturally Eula had already knowed for five or six years what she was after.
Like there’s a dog, maybe not no extra dog but leastways a good sound what you might call a dog’s dog, that don’t seem to belong to nobody else, that seems to show a preference for your vicinity, that even after the five or six years you ain’t completely convinced there won’t never be no other dog available, and that even them five or six years back and even with another five or six years added on to now, you never needed and you ain’t going to need that dog personally, there ain’t any use in simply throwing away and wasting its benefits and accomplishments, even if they ain’t nothing but fidelity and devotion, by letting somebody else get a-holt of it.
Or say you got a gal child coming along, that the older and bigger she gets, the more of a nuisance she’s bound to be on your time and private occupations: in which case not only won’t that fidelity and devotion maybe come into handy use, but even the dog itself might that could still be capable of them long after even hit had give up all expectation of even one bone.
Which is what Jefferson figgered. But not me. Maybe even though she got rid of Hoake McCarron, even after she knowed she was pregnant, there is still moments when even female physical phenomenons is female first whether they want to be or not.
So I believe that women ain’t so different from men: that if it ain’t no trouble nor shock neither for a man to father on to his-self the first child of the woman he loved and lost and still can’t rid outen his mind, no matter how many other men holp to get it, it ain’t no trouble neither for that woman to father a dozen different men’s chillen on to that man that lost her and still never expected nothing of her except to accept his devotion.
And since she was a female too, likely by the time Linda was thirteen or fourteen or even maybe as soon as she got over that first startle, which would a been at the second or third ice-cream sody, she taken for granted she knowed what he was aiming at too. And she would a been wrong. That wasn’t Lawyer. Jest to train her up and marry her wasn’t it. She wouldn’t a been necessary for that — I mean, the simple natural normal following lifetime up to the divorce of steady uxorious hymeneal conflict that any female he could a picked outen that school crowd or from Christian’s sody counter would been fully competent for.
Jest that wouldn’t a been worth his effort. He had to be the sole one masculine feller within her entire possible circumambience, not jest to recognise she had a soul still capable of being saved from what he called Snopesism: a force and power that stout and evil as to jeopardise it jest from her believing for twelve or thirteen years she was blood kin when she actively wasn’t no kin a-tall, but that couldn’t nobody else in range and reach but him save it — that-ere bubble-glass thing somewhere inside her like one of them shimmer-coloured balls balanced on the seal’s nose, fragile yet immune too jest that one constant fragile inch above the smutch and dirt of Snopes as long as the seal don’t trip or stumble or let her attention wander.
So all he aimed to do was jest to get her outen Jefferson or, better, safer still, completely outen Missippi, starting off with the nine months of the school year, until somebody would find her and marry her and she would be gone for good — a optimist pure and simple and undefiled if there ever was one since ever body knowed that the reason Flem Snopes was vice-president of De Spain’s bank was the same reason he was ex-superintendent of the power plant: in the one case folks wanting to smile at Eula Varner had to at least be able to pronounce Flem Snopes, and in the other De Spain has to take Flem along with him to get the use of Will Varner’s voting stock to get his-self president.
And the only reason why Will Varner never used this chance to get back at Flem about that Old Frenchman homesite that Will thought wasn’t worth nothing until Flem sold it to me and Odum Bookwright and Henry Armstid for my half of mine and Grover Winbush’s café and Odum Bookwright’s cash and the two-hundred-dollar mortgage on Henry’s farm less them five or six dollars or whatever they was where Henry’s wife tried to keep them buried from him behind the outhouse, was the same reason why Eula didn’t quit Flem and marry De Spain: that staying married to Flem kept up a establishment and name for that gal that otherwise wouldn’t a had either.
So once that gal was married herself or leastways settled for good away from Jefferson so she wouldn’t need Flem’s name and establishment no more, and in consequence Flem wouldn’t have no holt over her any more, Flem his-self would be on the outside trying to look back in and Flem knowed it.
Only Lawyer didn’t know it. He believed right up to the last that Flem was going to let him get Linda away from Jefferson to where the first strange young man that happened by would marry her and then Eula could quit him and he would be finished. He — I mean Lawyer — had been giving her books to read ever since she was fourteen and then kind of holding examinations on them while the Coca-Cola ice melted. Then she was going on seventeen, next spring she would graduate from the high school and now he was ordering off for the catalogues from the extra-select girls’ schools up there close to Harvard.
Now the part comes that don’t nobody know except Lawyer, who naturally never told it. So as he his-self would say, you got to surmise from the facts in evidence: not jest the mind-improving books and the school catalogues accumulating into a dusty stack in his office, but the ice-cream sessions a thing of the past too. Because now she was going to and from school the back way, up alleys. Until finally in about a week maybe Lawyer realised that she was dodging him. And she was going to graduate from high school in less than two months now and there wasn’t no time to waste.
So that morning Lawyer went his-self to talk to her maw and he never told that neither so now we got to presume on a little more than jest evidence. Because my childhood too come out of that same similar Frenchman’s Bend background and mill-yew that Flem Snopes had lifted his-self out of by his own unaided bootstraps, if you don’t count Hoake McCarron.
So all I had to do was jest to imagine my name was Flem Snopes and that the only holt I had on
