“All right,” I said. “All right. Just tell me this. When you went home first and changed before you met me in the drugstore that afternoon. It was your idea to go home first and change to the other dress. But it was your mother who insisted on the lipstick and the perfume and the silk stockings and the high heels. Isn’t that right?” And she still wrenching and jerking faintly at the arm I held, whispering:
“Please. Please.”
SIXTEEN
Charles Mallison
THIS IS WHAT Ratliff said happened up to where Uncle his is what Ratliff said happened up to where Uncle Gavin could see it.
It was January, a gray day though not cold because of the fog. Old Het ran in Mrs Hait’s front door and down the hall into the kitchen, already hollering in her strong bright happy voice, with strong and childlike pleasure:
“Miss Mannie! Mule in the yard!”
Nobody knew just exactly how old old Het really was. Nobody in Jefferson even remembered just how long she had been in the poorhouse. The old people said she was about seventy, though by her own counting, calculated from the ages of various Jefferson ladies from brides to grandmothers that she claimed to have nursed from infancy, she would be around a hundred and, as Ratliff said, at least triplets.
That is, she used the poorhouse to sleep in or anyway pass most or at least part of the night in. Because the rest of the time she was either on the Square or the streets of Jefferson or somewhere on the mile-and-a-half dirt road between town and the poorhouse; for twenty-five years at least ladies, seeing her through the front window or maybe even just hearing her strong loud cheerful voice from the house next door, had been locking themselves in the bathroom.
But even this did no good unless they had remembered first to lock the front and back doors of the house itself. Because sooner or later they would have to come out and there she would be, tall, lean, of a dark chocolate color, voluble, cheerful, in tennis shoes and the long rat-colored coat trimmed with what forty or fifty years ago had been fur, and the purple toque that old Mrs Compson had given her fifty years ago while General Compson himself was still alive, set on the exact top of her headrag (at first she had carried a carpetbag of the same color and apparently as bottomless as a coal mine, though since the ten cent store came to Jefferson the carpetbag had given place to a succession of the paper shopping bags which it gave away), already settled in a chair in the kitchen, having established already upon the begging visitation a tone blandly and incorrigibly social.
She passed that way from house to house, travelling in a kind of moving island of alarm and consternation as she levyed her weekly toll of food scraps and castoff garments and an occasional coin for snuff, moving in an urbane uproar and as inescapable as a tax-gatherer. Though for the last year or two since Mrs Hait’s widowing, Jefferson had gained a sort of temporary respite from her because of Mrs Hait.
But even this was not complete. Rather, old Het had merely established a kind of local headquarters or advanced foraging post in Mrs Hait’s kitchen soon after Mr Hait and five mules belonging to Mr I.O. Snopes died on a sharp curve below town under the fast north-bound through freight one night and even the folks at the poorhouse heard that Mrs Hait had got eight thousand dollars for him. She would come straight to Mrs Hait’s as soon as she reached town, sometimes spending the entire forenoon there, so that only after noon would she begin her implacable rounds. Now and then when the weather was bad she spent the whole day with Mrs Hait.
On these days her regular clients or victims, freed temporarily, would wonder if in the house of the man-charactered and man-tongued woman who as Ratliff put it had sold her husband to the railroad company for eight thousand percent. profit, who chopped her own firewood and milked her cow and plowed and worked her own vegetable garden; — they wondered if maybe old Het helped with the work in return for her entertainment or if even now she still kept the relationship at its social level of a guest come to divert and be diverted.
She was wearing the hat and coat and was carrying the shopping bag when she ran into Mrs Hait’s kitchen, already hollering: “Miss Mannie! Mule in the yard!”
Mrs Hait was squatting in front of the stove, raking live ashes from it into a scuttle. She was childless, living alone now in the little wooden house painted the same color that the railroad company used on its stations and boxcars — out of respect to and in memory of, we all said, that morning three years ago when what remained of Mr Hait had finally been sorted from what remained of the five mules and several feet of new manila rope scattered along the right-of-way.
In time the railroad claims adjuster called on her, and in time she cashed a check for eight thousand five hundred dollars, since (as Uncle Gavin said, these were the halcyon days when even the railroad companies considered their southern branches and divisions the rightful legitimate prey of all who dwelt beside them) although for several years before Mr Hait’s death single mules and pairs (by coincidence belonging often to Mr Snopes too; you could always tell his because every time the railroad killed his mules they always had new strong rope on them) had been in the habit of getting themselves killed on that same blind curve at night, this was the first time a human being had — as Uncle Gavin put it — joined them in mutual apotheosis.
Mrs Hait took the money in cash; she stood in a calico wrapper and her late husband’s coat sweater and the actual felt hat he had been wearing (it had been found intact) on that fatal morning and listened in cold and grim silence while the bank teller then the cashier then the president (Mr de Spain himself) tried to explain to her about bonds, then about savings accounts, then about a simple checking account, and put the money into a salt sack under her apron and departed; that summer she painted her house that serviceable and time-defying color which matched the depot and the boxcars, as though out of sentiment or (as Ratliff said) gratitude, and now she still lived in it, alone, in the calico wrapper and the sweater coat and the same felt hat which her husband had owned and wore until he no longer needed them; though her shoes by this time were her own: men’s shoes which buttoned, with toes like small tulip bulbs, of an archaic and obsolete pattern which Mr Wildermark himself ordered especially for her once a year.
She jerked up and around, still clutching the scuttle, and glared at old Het and said — her voice was a good strong one too, immediate too —
“That son of a bitch,” and, still carrying the scuttle and with old Het still carrying the shopping bag and following, ran out of the kitchen into the fog. That’s why it wasn’t cold: the fog: as if all the sleeping and breathing of Jefferson during that whole long January night was still lying there imprisoned between the ground and the mist, keeping it from quite freezing, lying like a scum of grease on the wooden steps at the back door and on the brick coping and the wooden lid of the cellar stairs beside the kitchen door and on the wooden planks which led from the steps to the wooden shed in the corner of the back yard where Mrs Hait’s cow lived; when she stepped down onto the planks, still carrying the scuttle of live ashes, Mrs Hait skated violently before she caught her balance. Old Het in her rubber soles didn’t slip.
“Watch out!” she shouted happily. “They in the front!” One of them wasn’t. Because Mrs Hait didn’t fall either. She didn’t even pause, whirling and already running toward the corner of the house where, with silent and apparition-like suddenness, the mule appeared. It belonged to Mr. I.O. Snopes too. I mean, until they finally unravelled Mr Hait from the five mules on the railroad track that morning three years ago, nobody had connected him with Mr Snopes’s mule business, even though now and then somebody did wonder how Mr Hait didn’t seem to need to do anything steady to make a living.
Ratliff said the reason was that everybody was wondering too hard about what in the world I.O. Snopes was doing in the livestock business. Though Ratliff said that on second thought maybe it was natural: that back in Frenchman’s Bend I.O. had been a blacksmith without having any business at that, hating horses and mules both since he was deathly afraid of them, so maybe it was natural for him to take up the next thing he wouldn’t have any business in or sympathy or aptitude for, not to mention being six or eight or a dozen times as scared since now, instead of just one horse or mule tied to a post and with its owner
