So I said, “What does she want to come back home for? There’s nothing for her to join. What would she want in a Ladies’ Auxiliary, raffling off home-made jam and lamp-shades. Even if she could make jam, since obviously cooking is the last thing a sculptor would demand of his girl. Who was just passing time anyway between Communist meetings until somebody started a Fascist war he could get into.
Not to mention the un-kosher stuff she would have had to learn in Jefferson, Mississippi. Especially if where she learned to cook was in that Dirty Spoon her papa beat Ratliff out of back there when they first came to town.” But I was wrong. It wouldn’t be municipal: only private: just three people only incidentally from Jefferson because they were mainly out of her mother’s past: my uncle, her father, and Ratliff. Then I saw there would be only two. Ratliff wouldn’t even get in the car.
“Come on,” Uncle Gavin said. “Go with us.”
“I’ll wait here,” Ratliff said. “I’ll be the local committee. Until next time,” he said at me.
“What?” Uncle Gavin said.
“Nothing,” Ratliff said. “Jest a joke Chick told me that I’m reminding him of.”
Then I saw it wasn’t going to be even two out of her mother’s past. We were not even going by the bank, let alone stop at it. I said, “What the hell would Mr Snopes want, throwing away at least six hours of good usury to make a trip all the way to Memphis to meet his daughter, after all the expense he had to go to get her out of Jefferson — not only butchering up De Spain’s house, but all that imported Italian marble over her mother’s grave to give her something worth going away from or not coming back to if you like that better.”
I said: “So it’s my fault I wasn’t born soon enough either to defend Das Democracy in your war or Das Kapital in hers. Meaning there’s still plenty of time for me yet. Or maybe what you mean is that Hitler and Mussolini and Franco all three working together cannot get an authentic unimpeachable paid-up member of the Harvard R.O.T.C. into really serious military trouble. Because I probably won’t make Porcellian either; F.D.R. didn’t.”
I said: “That’s it. That’s why you insisted on me coming along this morning: although she hasn’t got any eardrums now and can’t hear you say No or Please No or even For God’s sake No, at least she can’t marry you before we get back to Jefferson with me right here in the car too. But there’s the rest of the afternoon when you can chase me out, not to mention the eight hours of the night when Mother likes to believe I am upstairs asleep. Not to mention I’ve got to go back to Cambridge next month — unless you believe your . . . is it virginity or just celibacy? is worth even that sacrifice? But then why not, since it was your idea to send me all the way to Cambridge, Mass, for what we laughingly call an education. Being as Mother says she’s been in love with you all her life, only she was too young to know it and you were too much of a gentleman to tell her. Or does Mother really always know best?”
By this time we had reached the airport; I mean Memphis. Uncle Gavin said, “Park the car and let’s have some coffee. We’ve probably got at least a half-hour yet.” We had the coffee in the restaurant; I don’t know why they don’t call it the Skyroom here too. Maybe Memphis is still off quota. Ratliff said she would have to marry somebody sooner or later, and every day that passed made it that much sooner. No, that wasn’t the way he put it: that he — Uncle Gavin — couldn’t escape forever, that almost any day now some woman would decide he was mature and dependable enough at last for steady work in place of merely an occasional chore; and that the sooner this happened the better, since only then would he be safe. I said, “How safe? He seems to me to be doing all right; I never knew anybody that scatheless.”
“I don’t mean him,” Ratliff said. “I mean us, Yoknapatawpha County; that he would maybe be safe to live with then because he wouldn’t have so much time for meddling.”
In which case, saving us would take some doing. Because he — Gavin — had one defect in his own character which always saved him, no matter what jeopardy it left the rest of us in. I mean, the fact that people get older, especially young girls of fifteen or sixteen, who seem to get older all of a sudden in six months or one year than they or anybody else ever does in about ten years.
I mean, he always picked out children, or maybe he was just vulnerable to female children and they chose him, whichever way you want it. That the selecting or victim-falling was done at an age when the oath of eternal fidelity would have ceased to exist almost before the breath was dry on it.
I’m thinking now of Melisandre Backus naturally, before my time and Linda Snopes’s too. That is, Melisandre was twelve and thirteen and fourteen several years before she vacated for Linda to take her turn in the vacuum, Gavin selecting and ordering the books of poetry to read to Melisandre or anyway supervise and check on, which was maybe how by actual test, trial and error, he knew which ones to improve Linda’s mind and character with when her turn came, or anyway alter them.
Though pretty soon Melisandre committed the irrevocable error of getting a year older and so quitting forever that fey unworld of Spenser and the youth Milton, for the human race where even the sort of girl that he picked out or that picked out him, when a man talked about fidelity and devotion to her, she was in a position to tell him either to put up or shut up.
Anyway, he was saved that time. Though I wasn’t present to remember exactly what the sequence was: whether Gavin went off to Harvard first or maybe it was between Harvard and Heidelberg, or whether she got married first. Anyway, when he got back from his war, she was married.
To a New Orleans underworld big shot named Harriss with two esses. And how in the world or where on earth she ever managed to meet him — a shy girl, motherless and an only child, who lived on what used to be one of our biggest plantations two or three miles from town but that for years had been gradually going to decay, with her widowered father who spent all his time on the front gallery in summer and in the library in winter with a bottle of whiskey and a volume of Horace.
Who (Melisandre) had as far as we knew never been away from it in her life except to be driven daily in to town by a Negro coachman in a victoria while she graduated from the grammar school then the high school then the Female Academy. And a man about whom all we knew was what he said: that his name was Harriss with two esses, which maybe it was, and that he was a New Orleans importer. Which we knew he was, since (this was early 1919, before Uncle Gavin got back home) even Jefferson recognised when it saw one a bullet-proof Cadillac that needed two chauffeurs, both in double-breasted suits that bulged a little at the left armpit.
Not to mention the money. Mr Backus died about then and of course there were some to say it was with a broken heart over his only child marrying a bootleg czar. Though apparently he waited long enough to make sure his son-in-law was actually a czar or anyway the empire a going and solvent one, since the money had already begun to show a little before he died — the roofs and galleries patched and shored up even if Mr Backus evidently balked at paint on the house yet, and gravel in the drive so that when she came home to spend that first Christmas, she and the nurse and the czarevitch could go back and forth to town in an automobile instead of the old victoria drawn by a plough team.
Then Mr Backus died and the house and outbuildings too got painted. And now Harriss with both his esses began to appear in Jefferson, making friends even in time though most of Yoknapatawpha County was unsold still, just neutral, going out there in the Model T’s and on horses and mules, to stand along the road and watch what had been just a simple familiar red-ink north Mississippi cotton plantation being changed into a Virginia or Long Island horse farm, with miles of white panel fence where the rest of us were not a bit too proud for what we called bobwire and any handy sapling post, and white stables with electric light and steam heat and running water and butlers and footmen for the horses where a lot of the rest of us still depended on coal-oil lamps for light and our wives to tote firewood and water from the nearest woodlot
