Because them five boys (I knowed two of them) never told it, which you might say is proof. That after they broke his arm it was her that taken the loaded end of the buggy-whip and finished the last one or maybe two, and her that turned the buggy around in the road and got it away from there.
Jest far enough; not back home yet: jest far enough; to as the feller says crown the triumph on the still-hot field of the triumph; right there on the ground in the middle of the dark road because somebody had to still hold that skeered horse, with the horse standing over them and her likely having to help hold him up too off of that broke arm; not jest her first time but the time she got that baby. Which folks says aint likely to happen jest the first time but between what did happen and what ought to happened, I dont never have trouble picking ought.
But Lawyer Stevens never understood her and never would: that he never had jest Manfred de Spain to have to cope with, he was faced with a simple natural force repeating itself under the name of De Spain or McCarron or whatever into ever gap or vacancy in her breathing as long as she breathed; and that wouldn’t never none of them be him. And he never did realise that she understood him because she never had no way of telling him because she didn’t know herself how she done it.
Since women learn at about two or three years old and then forget it, the knowledge about their-selves that a man stumbles on by accident forty-odd years later with the same kind of startled amazement of finding a twenty-five cent piece in a old pair of britches you had started to throw away. No, they dont forget it: they jest put it away until ten or twenty or forty years later the need for it comes up and they reach around and pick it out and use it and then hang it up again without no more remembering just which one it was than she could remember today which finger it was she scratched with yesterday: only that tomorrow maybe she will itch again but she will find something to scratch that one with too.
Or I dont know, maybe he did understand all that and maybe he did get what he wanted. I mean, not what he wanted but what he knew he could have, the next best, like any thing is better than nothing, even if that anything is jest a next-best anything.
Because there was more folks among the Helens and Juliets and Isoldes and Guineveres than jest the Launcelots and Tristrams and Romeos and Parises. There was them others that never got their names in the poetry books, the next-best ones that sweated and panted too. And being the next-best to Paris is jest a next-best too, but it aint no bad next-best to be. Not ever body had Helen, but then not ever body lost her neither.
So I kind of happened to be at the deepo that day when Lucius Hogganbeck’s jitney drove up and Lawyer got out with his grips and trunk and his ticket to Mottstown junction to catch the express from Memphis to New York and get on the boat that would take him to that German university he had been talking for two years now about what a good idea it would be to go to it providing you happened to want to go to a university in Germany like that one; until that morning yesterday or maybe it was the day before when he told his paw: “What must I do now, Papa? Papa, what can I do now?” It was still cold so he taken his sister on into the waiting room and then he come back out where I was.
“Good,” he says, brisk and chipper as you could want. “I was hoping to see you before I left, to pass the torch on into your active hand. You’ll have to hold the fort now. You’ll have to tote the load.”
“What fort?” I says. “What load?”
“Jefferson,” he says. “Snopeses. Think you can handle them till I get back?”
“Not me nor a hundred of me,” I says. “The only thing to do is get completely shut of them, abolish them.”
“No no,” he says. “Say a herd of tigers suddenly appears in Yoknapatawpha County; wouldn’t it be a heap better to have them shut up in a mule-pen where we could at least watch them, keep up with them, even if you do lose a arm or a leg ever time you get within ten feet of the wire, than to have them roaming and strolling loose all over ever where in the entire country? No, we got them now; they’re ourn now; I dont know jest what Jefferson could a committed back there whenever it was, to have won this punishment, gained this right, earned this privilege. But we did. So it’s for us to cope, to resist; us to endure, and (if we can) survive.”
“But why me?” I says. “Why out of all Jefferson pick on me?”
“Because you’re the only one in Jefferson I can trust,” Lawyer says.
Except that that one dont really ever lose Helen, because for the rest of her life she dont never actively get rid of him. Likely it’s because she dont want to.
SEVEN
Charles Mallison
I REMEMBER HOW Ratliff once said that the world’s Helens never really lose forever the men who once loved and lost them; probably because they — the Helens — dont want to.
I still wasn’t born when Uncle Gavin left for Heidelberg so as far as I know his hair had already begun to turn white when I first saw him. Because although I was born by then, I couldn’t remember him when he came home from Europe in the middle of the War, to get ready to go back to it.
He said that at first, right up to the last minute, he believed that as soon as he finished his Ph.D. he was going as a stretcher-bearer with the German army; almost up to the last second before he admitted to himself that the Germany he could have loved that well had died somewhere between the Liège and Namur forts and the year 1848. Or rather, the Germany which had emerged between 1848 and the Belgian forts he did not love since it was no longer the Germany of Goethe and Bach and Beethoven and Schiller. This is what he said hurt, was hard to admit, to admit even after he reached Amsterdam and could begin to really ask about the American Field Service of which he had heard.
But he said how we — America — were not used yet to European wars and still took them seriously; and there was the fact that he had been for two years a student in a German university. But the French were different: to whom another Germanic war was just the same old chronic nuisance; a nation of practical and practising pessimists who were willing to let anyone regardless of his politics, who wanted to, do anything — particularly one who was willing to do it free. So he — Uncle Gavin — spent those five months with his stretcher just behind Verdun and presently was himself in a bed in an American hospital until he got over the pneumonia and could come home, in Jefferson again, waiting, he said, until we were in it, which would not be long.
And he was right: the Sartoris boys, Colonel Sartoris’s twin grandsons, had already gone to England into the Royal Flying Corps and then it was April and then Uncle Gavin had his appointment as a Y.M.C.A. secretary, to go back to France with the first American troops; when suddenly there was Montgomery Ward Snopes, the first of what Ratliff called “them big gray-colored chaps of I.O.’s”, the one whose mamma was still rocking in the chair in the front window of the Snopes Hotel because it was still too cold yet to move back onto the front gallery.
And Jackson McLendon had organised his Jefferson company and had been elected captain of it and Montgomery Ward could have joined them. But instead he came to Uncle Gavin, to go to France with Uncle Gavin in the Y.M.C.A.; and that was when Ratliff said what he did about sometimes the men that loved and lost Helen of Troy just thought they had lost her. Only he could have added, All her kinfolks too. Because Uncle Gavin did it. I mean, took Montgomery Ward.
“Confound it, Lawyer,” Ratliff said. “It’s a Snopes.”
“Certainly,” Uncle Gavin said. “Can you suggest a better place for a Snopes today than north-western France? as far west of Amiens and Verdun as you can get him?”
“But why?” Ratliff said.
“I thought of that too,” Uncle Gavin said. “If he had said he wanted to go in order to defend his country, I would have had Hub Hampton handcuff him hand and foot in jail and sit on him while I telephoned Washington. But what he said was, ‘They’re going to pass a law soon to draft us all anyhow, and if I go with you like you’re going, I
