“She’s right. She’s absolutely right, and thank God for it. Nothing is ever lost. Nothing. Nothing.” Except Linda of course. Gavin said how Kohl had been a big man, I don’t mean just a hunk of beef, but virile, alive; a man who loved what the old Greeks meant by laughter, who would have been a match for, competent to fulfil, any woman’s emotional and physical life too.
And Linda was just thirty now and oh yes, the eyes were beautiful, and more than just the eyes; maybe it never mattered to Kohl what was inside her clothes, nor would to anyone else lucky enough to succeed him, including Uncle Gavin.
So now I understood at last what I was looking at: neither Mother nor Linda either one needed to look at what Mother thought she was scribbling on that damned ivory slate, since evidently from the second day after Linda got home Mother had been as busy and ruthless and undevious as one of the old Victorian head-hunting mamas during the open season at Bath or Tunbridge Wells in Fielding or Dickens or Smollett. Then I found out something else.
I remembered how not much more than a year ago we were alone in the office and Ratliff said,
“Look-a-here, what you want to waste all this good weather being jealous of your uncle for? Somebody’s bound to marry him sooner or later. Someday you’re going to outgrow him and you’ll be too busy yourself jest to hang around and protect him. So it might jest as well be Linda.” You see what I mean? that evidently it was transferable. I mean, whatever it was her mother had had. Gavin had seen her once when she was thirteen years old, and look what happened to him.
Then Barton Kohl saw her once when she was nineteen years old, and look where he was now. And now I had seen her twice, I mean after I was old enough to know what I was looking at: once at the Memphis airport last summer, and here tonight at the supper table, and now I knew it would have to be me to take Uncle Gavin off to the library or den or wherever such interview happen, and say:
“Look here, young man. I know how dishonourable your intentions are. What I want to know is, how serious they are.” Or if not him, at least somebody. Because it wouldn’t be him. Ratliff had told me how Gavin said her doom would be to love once and lose him and then to mourn.
Which could have been why she came back to Jefferson: since if all you want is to grieve, it doesn’t matter where you are. So she was lost; she had even lost that remaining one who should have married her for no other reason than that he had done more than anybody else while she was a child to make her into what she was now. But it wouldn’t be him; he had his own prognosis to defend, make his own words good no matter who anguished and suffered.
Yes, lost. She had been driving that black country-banker-cum-Baptist-deacon’s car ever since she got home; apparently she had assumed at first that she would drive it alone, until old Snopes himself objected because of the deafness.
So each afternoon she would be waiting in the car when the bank closed and the two of them would drive around the adjacent country while he could listen for the approaching horns if any. Which — the country drives — was in his character since the county was his domain, his barony — the acres, the farms, the crops — since even where he didn’t already hold the mortgage, perhaps already in process of foreclosure even, he could measure and calculate with his eye the ones which so far had escaped him.
That is, except one afternoon a week, usually Wednesday. Old Snopes neither smoked nor drank nor even chewed tobacco; what his jaws worked steadily on was, as Ratliff put it, the same little chunk of Frenchman’s Bend air he had brought in his mouth when he moved to Jefferson thirty years ago.
Yes, lost: it wasn’t even to Uncle Gavin: it was Ratliff she went to that afternoon and said, “I can’t find who sells the whiskey now.” No, not lost so much, she had just been away too long, explaining to Ratliff why she hadn’t gone to Uncle Gavin: “He’s the County Attorney; I thought—” and Ratliff patting her on the back right there in the street, saying for anybody to hear it since obviously she couldn’t:
“You been away from home too long. Come on. We’ll go git him.”
So the three of them in Gavin’s car drove up to Jakeleg Wattman’s so-called fishing camp at Wyott’s Crossing so she would know where and how herself next time. Which was to drive up to Jakeleg’s little unpainted store (Jakeleg kept it unpainted so that whenever a recurrent new reform-administration sheriff would notify him he had to be raided again, Jakeleg wouldn’t have a lot of paint to scratch up in drawing the nails and dismantling the sections and carrying them another mile deeper into the bottom until the reform reached its ebb and he could move back convenient to the paved road and the automobiles) and get out of the car and step inside where the unpainted shelves were crowded with fishhooks and sinkers and lines and tobacco and flashlight batteries and coffee and canned beans and shotgun shells and the neat row of United States Internal Revenue Department liquor licences tacked on the wall and Jakeleg in the flopping rubber hip boots he wore winter and summer with a loaded pistol in one of them, behind the chicken-wire-barricaded counter, and you would say, “Howdy, Jake.
What you got today?” And he would tell you: the same one brand like he didn’t care whether you liked that brand or not, and the same one price like he didn’t give a damn whether that suited you either. And as soon as you said how many the Negro man (in the flopping hip boots Jakeleg had worn last year) would duck out or down or at least out of sight and reappear with the bottles and stand holding them until you had given Jakeleg the money and got your change (if any) back and Jakeleg would open the wicket in the wire and shove the bottles through and you would return to your car and that was all there was to it; taking (Uncle Gavin) Linda right on in with him, saying as likely as not: “Howdy, Jake. Meet Mrs Kohl.
She can’t hear but there’s nothing wrong with her taste and swallowing.” And maybe Linda said,
“What does he have?” and likely what Uncle Gavin wrote on the pad for that was That’s fighting talk here This is a place where you take it or leave it Just give him eight dollars or sixteen if you want 2.
So next time maybe she came alone. Or maybe Uncle Gavin himself walked into the bank and on to that little room at the back and said, “Look here, you old fish-blooded son of a bitch, are you going to just sit here and let your only female daughter that won’t even hear the trump of doom, drive alone up yonder to Jakeleg Wattman’s bootleg joint to buy whiskey?” Or maybe it was simple coincidence: a Wednesday afternoon and he — Mr Snopes — can’t say, “Here, hold on; where the hell you going? This ain’t the right road.”
Because she can’t hear him and in fact I don’t know how he did talk to her since I can’t imagine his hand writing anything except adding a percent symbol or an expiration date; maybe they just had a county road map he could point to that worked up until this time.
So now he had not one dilemma but three: not just the bank president’s known recognisable car driving up to a bootleg joint, but with him in it; then the dilemma of whether to let every prospective mortgagee in Yoknapatawpha County hear how he would sit there in the car and let his only female child walk into a notorious river-bottom joint to buy whiskey, or go in himself and with his own Baptist deacon’s hand pay out sixteen dollars’ worth of his own life’s blood.
Lost. Gavin told me how over a year ago the two Finn communists had begun to call on her at night (at her invitation of course) and you can imagine this one. It would be the parlour. Uncle Gavin said she had fixed up a sitting-room for herself upstairs, but this would be in the parlour diagonally across the hall from the room where old Snopes was supposed to spend all his life that didn’t take place in the bank.
The capitalist parlour and the three of them, the two Finnish immigrant labourers and the banker’s daughter, one that couldn’t speak English and another that couldn’t hear any language, trying to communicate through the third one who hadn’t yet learned to spell, talking of hope, millennium, dream: of the emancipation of man from his tragedy, the liberation at last and forever from pain and hunger and injustice, of the human condition.
While two doors away in the room where he did everything but eat and keep the bank’s cash money, with his feet propped on that little unpainted ledge nailed to his Adam fireplace and chewing steadily at what Ratliff called his little chunk of Frenchman’s Bend air — the capitalist himself who
