Whereupon, now that the only child was not only secure but was actually contributing to the family budget, old Meadowfill soared to heights of outrageousness of which even he hadn’t dreamed. Up to this time he had done the grocery shopping himself, walking to town each morning with an empty jute feed sack, to haggle in the small dingy back- and side-street stores which catered mostly to Negroes, for wilted and damaged leftovers of food which even Negroes would have scorned.
The rest of the day he would spend, not lurking exactly but certainly in wait, ambushed, about his yard to shout and curse at the stray dogs which crossed his unfenced property, and the small boys who had a game of raiding the few sorry untended fruit trees which he called his orchard. Now he stopped that.
He waited exactly one year, as though to be really sure Essie had her job for good. Then on the morning following the death of a paralytic old lady neighbour, he went and bought from the family the wheel chair she had inhabited for years, not even waiting until the funeral had left the house, and pushed the chair home along the street for his last appearance on it, and retired into the chair. Not completely at first. Although Charles’s uncle said that Essie now did the daily shopping, Meadowfill could still be seen in the yard, still snarling and cursing at the small boys or throwing rocks (he kept a small pile handy, like the cannon balls of a war memorial) at the stray dogs.
But he never left his own premises any more and presently he seemed to have retired permanently into the wheel chair, sitting in it like it was a rocking chair in a window which looked out over the vegetable patch he no longer worked at all now, and the scraggy fruit trees he had always been either too stingy or too perverse to spray and tend enough to produce even an edible crop, let alone a saleable one.
Then Flem Snopes let Jason Compson overreach himself out of his ancestral acres, and Res Snopes built a hog lot along the boundary of old Meadowfill’s orchard and made a new man of old Meadowfill. Because the trespassing of little boys merely broke a limb now and then, and stray dogs merely dug up flower beds if he had had flower beds. But one rooting hog could foul and sour and make sterile the very dirt itself. So now Meadowfill had a reason for staying alive. He even abandoned the wheel chair temporarily, it would have been in his way now, spending all day while Res and a hired Negro built the wire fence along his boundary, watching the digging of every post hole and the setting and tamping of the post, grasping the post in both hands to shake and test it, on the verge of apoplexy, a little mad by this time, shouting at Snopes and his helper as they stretched the wire: “Tighter! Tighter!
Hell fire, what do you figger you’re doing? hanging a hammock?” until Snopes — a lean gangling man with a cast in one sardonic eye — would say,
“Now, Mr Meadowfill, don’t you worry a-tall. Before I would leave a old broke-down wheel chair gentleman like you to have to climb this fence by hand, I aim to put slip bars in it that you could even get down and crawl under when you don’t feel like opening them,” with Meadowfill almost past speech now, saying,
“If ara one of them hogs — if jest ara durn one of them hogs—” and Snopes:
“Then all you got to do is jest ketch it and shut it up in your kitchen or bedroom or any other handy place and the pound law will make me pay you a dollar for it. In fact, that might even be good easy work for a retired wheel chair old gentleman—”
By which time Meadowfill would be in such a state that Snopes would call toward the kitchen, from the window or door of which by this time the grey wife would be watching or anyway hovering: “Maybe you better come and git him away from here.”
Which she would do — until the next day. But at last the fence was finished. Or at least Snopes was no longer where Meadowfill could curse at him: only the hogs rooting and rubbing along the new fence which did hold them, or anyway so far. But only so far, only up to the moment it got too dark to see the orchard last night.
So now he had something to stay alive for, to get up in the morning for, hurry out of bed and across to the window as soon as darkness thinned, to see if perhaps darkness itself hadn’t betrayed him in which he couldn’t have seen a hog in his orchard even if he had been able to stay awake twenty-four hours a day watching for it; to get into his chair and wheel himself across to the window and see his orchard for one more night anyway unravished; for one more night at least he had been spared. Then to begrudge the very time he would have to spend at table eating, since this would leave the orchard unguarded, unwatched of course he meant.
Because, as Charles’s uncle said, Meadowfill wasn’t worrying at all about what he would do next when he did look out the window and actually see a hog on his property — an old bastard who, as Charles himself remembered, had already alienated all his neighbours before he committed himself to invalidism and the wheel chair, so that not one of them would have raised a hand to eject the hog for him or do anything else for him except maybe hide the body if and when his grey drab of a wife did what she should have done years ago: murdered him some night. Meadowfill hadn’t thought about what to do with the hog at all. He didn’t need to.
He was happy, for the first time in his life probably, Charles’s Uncle Gavin said: that you are happy when your life is filled, and any life is filled when it is so busy living from moment to moment that it has no time over to remember yesterday or dread tomorrow. Which of course couldn’t last, his uncle said. That in time Meadowfill would reach the point where if he didn’t look out that window some morning and see a hog in his orchard, he would die of simply hope unbearably deferred; and if he did some morning look out and see one, he would surely die because he would have nothing else left.
The atom bomb saved him. Charles meant that at last the Japs quit too and now the troops could come home from all directions, back to the women they had begun to marry before the echo of the first Pearl Harbour bomb had died away, and had been marrying ever since whenever they could get two days’ leave, coming back home now either to already going families or to marry the rest of the women they hadn’t got around to yet, the blood money already in the hands of the government housing loan (as his Uncle Gavin put it: “The hero who a year ago was rushing hand grenades and Garand clips up to front-line foxholes, is now rushing baskets of soiled didies out of side- and back-street Veterans Administration tenements.”) and now Jason Compson was undergoing an anguish which he probably believed not only no human should suffer, but no human could really bear.
Because when Charles reached home in September of ‘45, Jason’s old lost patrimony was already being chopped up into a subdivision of standardised Veterans’ Housing matchboxes; within the week Ratliff came to the office and told him and his uncle the official name of the subdivision: Eula Acres.
Not Jason’s old triumphant jeering gibe of Snopes Field, Snopes’s Demolitional Jump-off, but Eula Acres, Eula’s Uxorious Nestplace. And Charles didn’t know whether old Flem Snopes had named it that himself or not but he would remember his uncle’s face while Ratliff was telling them.
But even without that he, Charles, would still prefer to believe it was not really Flem but his builder and (the town assumed) partner Wat Snopes who thought of it, maybe because Charles still wanted to believe that there are some things, at least one thing, that even Flem Snopes wouldn’t do, even if the real reason was that Flem himself never thought of naming it anything because to him it couldn’t matter whether it had a name or not.
By Christmas it was already dotted over with small brightly painted pristinely new hutches as identical (and about as permanent) as squares of gingerbread or teacakes, the
