Then Ratliff was looking at me. I mean, he always was. I mean I discovered with a kind of terror that for a second I had forgot it. “What?” I said. “What did you say?”
“That you’re wrong. About Eck’s night watchman job at the oil tank. It wasn’t Manfred de Spain this time. It was the Masons.”
“What?” I said, cried.
“That’s right. Eck was one of the biggest ones of Uncle Billy Varner’s Frenchman’s Bend Masons. It was Uncle Billy sent word in to the Masons in Jefferson to find Eck a good light broke-neck job.”
“That bad?” I said. “That bad? The next one in the progression so outrageous and portentous and terrifying that Will Varner himself had to use influence twenty-two miles away to save Frenchman’s Bend?” Because the next one after Eck behind the restaurant counter was I.O., the blacksmith-cum-schoolmaster-cum-bigamist, or -times bigamist, multiplied by bigamy — a thin undersized voluble weasel-faced man talking constantly in a steady stream of worn saws and proverbs usually having no connection with one another nor application to anything else, who even with the hammer would not have weighed as much as the anvil he abrogated and dispossessed; who (Ratliff of course, Ratliff always) entered Frenchman’s Bend already talking, or rather appeared one morning already talking in Varner’s blacksmith shop which an old man named Trumbull had run man and boy for fifty years.
But no blacksmith, I.O. He merely held the living. It was the other one, our Eck, his cousin (whatever the relationship was, unless simply being both Snopes was enough until one proved himself unworthy, as Eck was to do, like two Masons from that moment to apostasy like Eck’s, forever sworn to show a common front to life), who did the actual work.
Until one day, one morning, perhaps the curate, Eck, was not there or perhaps it simply occurred to the vicar, the high priest, for the first time that his actually was the right and the authority to hold a communion service and nobody could really prevent him: that morning, Zack Houston with his gaited stallion until Snopes quicked it with the first nail; whereupon Houston picked Snopes up and threw him hammer and all into the cooling tub and managed somehow to hold the plunging horse and wrench the shoe off and the nail out at the same time, and led the horse outside and tied it and came back and threw Snopes back into the cooling tub again.
And no schoolmaster either. He didn’t merely usurp that as a position among strangers, he actually stole it as a vocation from his own kin. Though Frenchman’s Bend didn’t know that yet. They knew only that he was hardly out of the blacksmith shop (or dried again out of the cooling tub where Houston had flung him) when he was installed as teacher (‘Professor’, the teacher was called in Frenchman’s Bend, provided of course he wore trousers) in the one-room schoolhouse which was an integer of old Varner’s princedom — an integer not because old Varner or anyone else in Frenchman’s Bend considered that juvenile education filled any actual communal lack or need, but simply because his settlement had to have a going schoolhouse to be complete as a freight train has to have a caboose to be complete.
So I.O. Snopes was now the schoolmaster; shortly afterward he was married to a Frenchman’s Bend belle and within a year he was pushing a homemade perambulator about the village and his wife was already pregnant again; here, you would have said, was a man not merely settled but doomed to immobilization, until one day in the third year a vast gray-colored though still young woman, accompanied by a vast gray-colored five-year-old boy, drove up to Varner’s store in a buggy —
“It was his wife,” Ratliff said.
“His wife?” I said, cried. “But I thought—”
“So did we,” Ratliff said. “Pushing that-ere homemade buggy with two of them in it this time, twins, already named Bilbo and Vardaman, besides the first one, Clarence. Yes sir, three chaps already while he was waiting for his other wife with that one to catch up with him — a little dried-up feller not much bigger than a crawfish, and that other wife — no, I mean the one he had now in Frenchman’s Bend when that-ere number one one druv up — wasn’t a big girl neither — Miz Vernon Tull’s sister’s niece by marriage she was — yet he got onto her too them same big gray-colored kind of chaps like the one in the buggy with his ma driving up to the store and saying to whoever was setting on the gallery at the moment: ‘I hear I.O. inside.’ (He was. We could all hear him.) ‘Kindly step in and tell him his wife’s come.’
“That was all. It was enough. When he come to the Bend that day three years ago he had a big carpet-bag, and in them three years he had probably accumulated some more stuff; I mean besides them three new chaps. But he never stopped for none of it. He jest stepped right out the back door of the store.
And Flem had done long since already sold old man Trumbull back to Varner for the blacksmith, but now they was needing a new professor too or anyhow they would as soon as I.O. could get around the first corner out of sight where he could cut across country. Which he evidently done; never nobody reported any dust-cloud travelling fast along a road nowhere. They said he even stopped talking, though I doubt that. You got to draw the line somewhere, aint you?”
You have indeed. Though I.O. didn’t. That is, he was already talking when he appeared in his turn behind the restaurant counter in the greasy apron, taking your order and cooking it wrong or cooking the wrong thing not because he worked so fast but simply because he never stopped talking long enough for you to correct or check him, babbling that steady stream of confused and garbled proverbs and metaphors attached to nothing and going nowhere.
And the wife. I mean the number one wife, what might be called the original wife, who was number one in the cast even though she was number two on the stage. The other one, the number two in the cast even though she was number one on the stage, the Tull’s wife’s sister’s niece wife, who foaled the second set of what Ratliff called gray-colored chaps, Clarence and the twins Vardaman and Bilbo, remained in Frenchman’s Bend.
It was the original one, who appeared in Frenchman’s Bend sitting in the buggy and left Frenchman’s Bend in the buggy, still sitting, and appeared in Jefferson five years later still sitting, translated, we knew not how, and with no interval between from the buggy where Ratliff had seen her twenty-two miles away that day five years ago, to the rocking chair on the front gallery of the boarding house where we saw her now, still at that same right angle enclosing her lap as if she had no movable hinge at the hips at all — a woman who gave an impression of specific density and immobility like lead or uranium, so that whatever force had moved her from the buggy to that chair had not been merely human, not even ten I.O.’s.
Because Snopes was moving his echelons up fast now.
That one — I.O. and the vast gray-colored sitting wife and that vast gray-colored boy (his name was Montgomery Ward) — did not even pause at the tent behind the restaurant where Eck and his wife and two sons now (“Why not?” Ratliff said. “There’s a heap of more things besides frying a hamburger you dont really have to look down for.”) were still living.
They — the I.O.’s — by-passed it completely, the wife already sitting in the rocking chair on the boarding house’s front gallery — a big more-or-less unpainted square building just off the Square where itinerant cattle drovers and horse- and mule-traders stopped and where were incarcerated, boarded and fed, juries and important witnesses during court term, where she would sit rocking steadily — not doing anything, not reading, not particularly watching who passed in or out of the door or along the street: just rocking — for the next five years while and then after the place changed from a boarding house to a warren, with nailed to one of the front veranda posts a pine board lettered terrifically by hand, with both S’s reversed:
NOPE HOTEL
And now Eck, whose innocence or honesty or both had long since eliminated him from the restaurant into his night watchman’s chair beside the depot oil tank, had vacated his wife and sons (Wallstreet Panic: oh yes, I was like Ratliff: I couldn’t believe that one either, though the younger one, Admiral Dewey, we both could) from the tent behind it.
In fact, the restaurant was not sold lock stock barrel and goodwill, but
