“The trouble with us is, we dont never estimate Flem Snopes right. At first we made the mistake of not estimating him a-tall. Then we made the mistake of over-estimating him. Now we’re fixing to make the mistake of under-estimating him again. When you jest want money, all you need to do to satisfy yourself is count it and put it where cant nobody get it, and forget about it.
But this-here new thing he has done found out it’s nice to have, is different. It’s like keeping warm in winter or cool in summer, or peace or being free or content-ment. You cant jest count it and lock it up somewhere safe and forget about it until you feel like looking at it again. You got to work at it steady, never to forget about it. It’s got to be out in the open, where folks can see it, or there aint no such thing.”
“No such thing as what?” Uncle Gavin said.
“This-here new discovery he’s jest made,” Ratliff said. “Call it civic virtue.”
“Why not?” Uncle Gavin said. “Were you going to call it something else?” Ratliff watched Uncle Gavin, curious, intent; it was as if he were waiting for something. “Go on,” Uncle Gavin said. “You were saying.”
Then it was gone, whatever it had been. “Oh yes,” Ratliff said. “He’ll be in to see you. He’ll have to, to make sho you recognise it too when you see it. He may kind of hang around until middle of the afternoon, to kind of give the dust a chance to settle. But he’ll be back then, so a feller can at least see jest how much he missed heading him off.”
So we didn’t drive up to Wyott’s then, and this time Ratliff was the one who under-estimated. It wasn’t a half an hour until we heard his feet on the stairs and the door opened and he came in. This time he didn’t take off the black hat: he just said “Morning, gentle-men” and came on to the desk and dropped the key to Montgomery Ward’s studio on it and was going back toward the door when Uncle Gavin said:
“Much obliged. I’ll give it back to the sheriff. You’re like me,” he said. “You dont give a damn about truth either. What you are interested in is justice.”
“I’m interested in Jefferson,” Mr Snopes said, reaching for the door and opening it. “We got to live here. Morning, gentlemen.”
ELEVEN
V. K. Ratliff
AND STILL HE missed it, even set — sitting right there in his own office and actively watching Flem rid Jefferson of Montgomery Ward. And still I couldn’t tell him.
TWELVE
Charles Mallison
WHATEVER IT WAS Ratliff thought Mr Snopes wanted, I dont reckon that what Uncle Gavin took up next helped it much either. And this time he didn’t even have Miss Melisandre Backus for Mother to blame it on because Miss Melisandre herself was married now, to a man, a stranger, that everybody but Miss Melisandre (we never did know whether her father, sitting all day long out there on that front gallery with a glass of whiskey-and-water in one hand and Horace or Virgil in the other — a combination which Uncle Gavin said would have insulated from the reality of rural north Mississippi harder heads than his — knew or not) knew was a big rich New Orleans bootlegger.
In fact she still refused to believe it even when they brought him home with a bullet hole neatly plugged up in the middle of his forehead, in a bullet-proof hearse leading a cortege of Packards and Cadillac limousines that Hollywood itself, let alone Al Capone, wouldn’t have been ashamed of.
No, that’s wrong. We never did know whether she knew it or not too, even years after he was dead and she had all the money and the two children and the place which in her childhood had been just another Mississippi cotton farm but which he had changed with white fences and weather-vanes in the shape of horses so that it looked like a cross between a Kentucky country club and a Long Island race track, and plenty of friends who felt they owed it to her that she should know where all that money actually came from; and still, as soon as they approached the subject, she would change it — the slender dark girl still, even though she was a millionairess and the mother of two children, whose terrible power was that defenselessness and helplessness which conferred knighthood on any man who came within range, before he had a chance to turn and flee; — changing the entire subject as if she had never heard her husband’s name or, in fact, as though he had never lived.
I mean, this time Mother couldn’t even say “If he would only marry Melisandre Backus, she would save him from all this”, meaning Linda Snopes this time like she had meant Mrs Flem Snopes before. But at least she thought about saying it because almost at once she stopped worrying. “It’s all right,” she told Father. “It’s the same thing again: dont you remember?
He never was really interested in Melisandre. I mean.… you know: really interested. Books and flowers. Picking my jonquils and narcissus as fast as they bloomed, to send out there where that whole two-acre front yard was full of jonquils, cutting my best roses to take out there and sit in that hammock reading poetry to her. He was just forming her mind: that’s all he wanted.
And Melisandre was only five years younger, where with this one he is twice her age, practically her grandfather. Of course that’s all it is.”
Then Father said: “Heh heh heh. Form is right, only it’s on Gavin’s mind, not hers. It would be on mine too if I wasn’t already married and scared to look. Did you ever take a look at her? You’re human even if you are a woman.” Yes, I could remember a heap of times when Father had been born too soon, before they thought of wolf whistles.
“Stop it,” Mother said.
“But after all,” Father said, “maybe Gavin should be saved from those sixteen-year-old clutches. Suppose you speak to him; tell him I am willing to make a sacrifice of myself on the family altar — —”
“Stop it! Stop it!” Mother said. “Cant you at least be funny?”
“I’m worse than that, I’m serious,” Father said. “They were at a table in Christian’s yesterday afternoon. Gavin just had a saucer of ice cream but she was eating something in a dish that must have set him back twenty or thirty cents. So maybe Gavin knows what he’s doing after all; she’s got some looks of her own, but she still aint quite up with her mother: you know — —” using both hands to make a kind of undulating hourglass shape in the air in front of him while Mother stood watching him like a snake. “Maybe he’s concentrating on just forming her form first you might say, without bothering too much yet about her mind. And who knows? maybe some day she’ll even look at him like she was looking at that banana split or whatever it was when Skeets McGowan set it down in front of her.”
But by that time Mother was gone. And this time she sure needed somebody like Miss Melisandre, with all her friends (all Jefferson for that matter) on the watch to tell her whenever Uncle Gavin and Linda stopped in Christian’s drugstore after school while Linda ate another banana split or ice cream soda, with the last book of poetry Uncle Gavin had ordered for her lying in the melted ice cream or spilled coca cola on the marble table top.
Because I reckon Jefferson was too small for a thirty-five-year-old bachelor, even a Harvard M.A. and a Ph.D. from Heidelberg and his hair already beginning to turn white even at just twenty-five, to eat ice cream and read poetry with a sixteen-year-old high school girl. Though if it had to happen, maybe thirty-five was the best age for a bachelor to buy ice cream and poetry for a sixteen-year-old girl. I told Mother that. She didn’t sound like a snake because snakes cant talk. But if dentists’ drills could talk she would have sounded just like one.
“There’s no best or safe age for a bachelor anywhere between three and eighty to buy ice cream for a sixteen-year-old girl,” she said. “Forming her mind,” she said. But she sounded just like cream when she talked to Uncle Gavin. No: she didn’t sound like anything because she didn’t say anything. She waited for him to begin it. No: she just waited because she knew he would have to begin it. Because Jefferson was that small. No, I mean Uncle Gavin had lived in Jefferson or in little towns all his life so he not only knew what Jefferson would be saying about him and Linda Snopes and those banana splits and ice cream sodas and books of poetry by now, but that Mother had too many good friends to ever miss hearing about it.
So she just waited. It was Saturday. Uncle Gavin walked twice in and out of the office (we still called it that because Grandfather had, except when Mother could hear us. Though after a while even she
