“Who is that?” he said.
“Linda Snopes,” I said. “You know: Mr Flem Snopes’s girl.” And I was still watching her too. “She walks like a pointer,” I said. “I mean, a pointer that’s just — —”
“I know what you mean,” Uncle Gavin said. “I know exactly what you mean.”
EIGHT
Gavin Stevens
I KNEW EXACTLY what he meant. She was walking steadily toward us, completely aware of us, yet not once had she looked at either of us, the eyes not hard and fixed so much as intent, oblivious; fixed and unblinking on something past us, beyond us, behind us, as a young pointer will walk over you if you dont move out of the way, during the last few yards before the actual point, since now it no longer needs depend on clumsy and fumbling scent because now it is actually looking at the huddled trigger-set covey.
She went past us still walking, striding, like the young pointer bitch, the maiden bitch of course, the virgin bitch, immune now in virginity, not scorning the earth, spurning the earth, because she needed it to walk on in that immunity: just intent from earth and us too, not proud and not really oblivious: just immune in intensity and ignorance and innocence as the sleepwalker is for the moment immune from the anguishes and agonies of breath.
She would be thirteen, maybe fourteen now and the reason I did not know her and would not have known her was not because I had possibly not seen her in eight years and human females change so drastically in the years between ten and fifteen. It was because of her mother. It was as though I — you too perhaps — could not have believed but that a woman like that must, could not other than, produce an exact replica of herself.
That Eula Varner — You see? Eula Varner. Never Eula Snopes even though I had — had had to — watched them in bed together. Eula Snopes it could never be simply because it must not simply because I would decline to have it so. — that Eula Varner owed that much at least to the simple male hunger which she blazed into anguish just by being, existing, breathing; having been born, becoming born, becoming a part of Motion; — that hunger which she herself could never assuage since there was but one of her to match with all that hungering.
And that single one doomed to fade; by the fact of that mortality doomed not to assuage nor even negate the hunger; doomed never to efface the anguish and the hunger from Motion even by her own act of quitting Motion and so fill with her own absence from it, the aching void where once had glared that incandescent shape.
That’s what you thought at first, of course: that she must of necessity repeat herself, duplicate herself if she reproduced at all. Because immediately afterward you realised that obviously she must not, must not duplicate: very Nature herself would not permit that to occur, permit two of them in a place no larger than Jefferson, Mississippi in one century, let alone in overlapping succession, within the anguished scope of a single generation.
Because even Nature, loving concupiscent uproar and excitement as even Nature loves it, insists that it at least be reproductive of fresh fodder for the uproar and the excitement. Which would take time, the time necessary to produce that new crop of fodder, since she — Eula Varner — had exhausted, consumed, burned up that one of hers. Whereupon I would remember what Maggie said once to Gowan back there in the dead long time ago when I was in the throes of my own apprenticeship to holocaust: “You dont marry Helen and Semiramis; you just commit suicide for her.”
Because she — the child — didn’t look at all like her mother. And then in that same second I knew exactly who she did resemble. Back there in that time of my own clowning belated adolescence (none the less either for being both), I remember how I could never decide which of the two unbearables was the least unbearable; which (as the poet has it) of the two chewed bitter thumbs was the least bitter for chewing.
That is, whether Manfred de Spain had seduced a chaste wife, or had simply been caught up in passing by a rotating nympholept. This was my anguish. If the first was right, what qualities of mere man did Manfred have that I didn’t? If the second, what blind outrageous fortune’s lightning-bolt was it that struck Manfred de Spain that mightn’t, shouldn’t, couldn’t, anyway didn’t, have blasted Gavin Stevens just as well? Or even also (oh yes, it was that bad once, that comical once) I would even have shared her if I had to, couldn’t have had her any other way.
That was when (I mean the thinking why it hadn’t been me in Manfred’s place to check that glance’s idle fateful swing that day whenever that moment had been) I would say that she must be chaste, a wife true and impeachless. I would think It’s that damned child, that damned baby — that innocent infant which, simply by innocently being, breathing, existing, lacerated and scoriated and reft me of peace: if there had only been no question of the child’s paternity; or better still, no child at all.
Thus I would even get a little relief from my chewed thumbs since I would need both of them for the moment to count with. Ratliff had told me how they departed for Texas immediately after the wedding and when they returned twelve months later, the child was already walking. Which (the walking at least) I did not believe, not because of the anguish, the jealousy, the despair, but simply because of Ratliff. In fact, it was Ratliff who gave me that ease of hope — or if you like, ease from anguish; all right: tears too, peaceful tears but tears, which are the jewel-baubles of the belated adolescence’s clown-comedian — to pant with.
Because even if the child had been only one day old, Ratliff would have invented the walking, being Ratliff. In fact, if there had been no child at all yet, Ratliff would have invented one, invented one already walking for the simple sake of his own paradox and humor, secured as he was from checkable facts by this much miles and time between Frenchman’s Bend and Jefferson two years later. That was when I would rather believe it was Flem’s own child; rather defilement by Manfred de Spain than promiscuity by Eula Varner — whereupon I would need only to taste that thumb again to realise that any other thumb was less bitter, no matter which: let her accept the whole earth’s Manfred de Spains and refuse Gavin Stevens, than to accept one Flem Snopes and still refuse him.
So you see how much effort a man will make and trouble he will invent, to guard and defend himself from the boredom of peace of mind. Or rather perhaps the pervert who deliberately infests himself with lice, not just for the simple pleasure of being rid of them again, since even in the folly of youth we know that nothing lasts; but because even in that folly we are afraid that maybe Nothing will last, that maybe Nothing will last forever, and anything is better than Nothing, even lice.
So now, as another poet sings, That Fancy passed me by And nothing will remain; which, praise the gods, is a damned lie since, praise, O gods! Nothing cannot remain anywhere since nothing is vacuum and vacuum is paradox and unbearable and we will have none of it even if we would, the damned-fool poet’s Nothing steadily and perennially full of perennially new and perennially renewed anguishes for me to measure my stature against whenever I need reassure myself that I also am Motion.
Because the second premise was much better. If I was not to have her, then Flem Snopes shall never have. So instead of the poet’s Fancy passes by And nothing remaining, it is Remaining which will always remain, never to be completely empty of that olden anguish. So no matter how much more the blood will slow and remembering grow more lascerant, the blood at least will always remember that once it was that capable, capable at least of anguish. So that girl-child was not Flem Snopes’s at all, but mine; my child and my grandchild both since the McCarron boy who begot her (oh yes, I can even believe Ratliff when it suits me) in that lost time, was Gavin Stevens in that lost time; and, since remaining must remain or quit being remaining, Gavin Stevens is fixed by his own child forever at that one age in that one moment. So since the son is father to the man, the McCarron fixed forever and timeless in that dead youth as Gavin Stevens, is of necessity now the son of Gavin Stevens’s age, and McCarron’s child is Gavin Stevens’s grandchild.
Whether Gavin Stevens intended to be that father-grandfather or not, of course. But then neither did he dream that that one idle glance of Eula Varner’s eye which didn’t even mark him in passing, would confer on him foster-uncleship over every damned Snopes wanting to claim it out of that whole entire damned connection she married into. I mean foster-uncleship in the sense that simple enragement and outrage and obsession per se take care of their own just as simple per se poverty and (so they say)
