“He could still marry Miss Melisandre,” Gowan said.
“It’s too late,” Mother said. “He didn’t know she was there.”
“He sees her every day she comes in to town,” Gowan said.
“You can see things without looking at them, just like you can hear things without listening,” Mother said.
“He sure didn’t just do that when he saw Mrs Snopes that day,” Gowan said. “Maybe he’s waiting for her to have another child besides Linda and for them to grow up?”
“No no,” Mother said. “You dont marry Semiramis: you just commit some form of suicide for her. Only gentlemen with as little to lose as Mr Flem Snopes can risk marrying Semiramis. — It’s too bad you are so old too. A few years ago I could have made you come with me to call on her. Now you’ll have to admit openly that you want to come; you may even have to say ‘Please’.”
But Gowan didn’t.
It was Saturday afternoon and there was a football game and though he hadn’t made the regular team yet you never could tell when somebody that had might break a leg or have a stroke or even a simple condition in arithmetic. Besides, he said Mother didn’t need his help anyway, having the whole town’s help in place of it; he said they hadn’t even reached the Square the next morning on the way to church when the first lady they met said brightly:
“What’s this I hear about yesterday afternoon?” and Mother said just as brightly:
“Indeed?” and the second lady they met said (she belonged to the Byron Society and the Cotillion Club too):
“I always say we’d all be much happier to believe nothing we dont see with our own eyes, and only half of that,” and Mother said still just as brightly:
“Indeed?”
They — the Byron Society and the Cotillion Club, both when possible of course though either alone in a pinch — seemed to be the measure. Now Uncle Gavin stopped talking about Snopeses. I mean, Gowan said he stopped talking at all. It was like he didn’t have time anymore to concentrate on talk in order to raise it to conversation, art, like he believed was everybody’s duty. It was like he didn’t have time to do anything but wait, to get something done that the only way he knew to get it done was waiting.
More than that, than just waiting: not only never missing a chance to do things for Mother, he even invented little things to do for her, so that even when he would talk a little, it was like he was killing two birds with the same stone.
Because when he talked now, in sudden spells and bursts of it that sometimes never had any connection at all with what Father and Mother and Grandfather might have been talking about the minute before, it wouldn’t even be what he called BB gun conversation. It would be the most outrageous praise, praise so outrageous that even Gowan at just thirteen years old could tell that.
It would be of Jefferson ladies that he and Mother had known all their lives, so that whatever ideas either one of them must have had about them, the other must have known it a long time by now. Yet all of a sudden every few days during the next month Uncle Gavin would stop chewing fast over his plate and drag a fresh one of them by the hair you might say into the middle of whatever Grandfather and Mother and Father had been talking about, talking not to Grandfather or Father or Gowan, but telling Mother how good or pretty or intelligent or witty somebody was that Mother had grown up with or anyway known all her life.
Oh yes, members of the Byron Society and the Cotillion Club or maybe just one of them (probably only Mother knew it was the Cotillion Club he was working for) at a pinch, so that each time they would know that another new one had called on Mrs Flem Snopes. Until Gowan would wonder how Uncle Gavin would always know when the next one had called, how to scratch her off the list that hadn’t or add her onto the score that had or whatever it was he kept. So Gowan decided that maybe Uncle Gavin watched Mrs Snopes’s house.
And it was November now, good fine hunting weather, and since Gowan had finally given up on the football team, by rights he and Top (Top was Aleck Sander’s older brother except that Aleck Sander wasn’t born yet either. I mean, he was Guster’s boy and his father was named Top too so they called him Big Top and Top Little Top) would have spent every afternoon after school with the beagles Uncle Gavin gave them after rabbits.
But instead, Gowan spent every afternoon for almost a week in the big ditch behind Mr Snopes’s house, not watching the house but to see if Uncle Gavin was hid somewhere in the ditch too watching to see who called on Mrs Snopes next.
Because Gowan was only thirteen then: he was just watching for Uncle Gavin; it wasn’t until later that he said how he realised that if he had tried harder or longer, he might have caught Mr de Spain climbing in or out of the back window like most of Jefferson was convinced he was doing, and then he really would have had something he could have sold for a dollar or two to a lot of people in town.
But if Uncle Gavin was hid somewhere in that ditch too, Gowan never caught him. Better still, Uncle Gavin never caught Gowan in it. Because if Mother had ever found out Gowan was hiding in that ditch behind Mr Snopes’s house because he thought Uncle Gavin was hidden in it too, Gowan didn’t know what she might have done about Uncle Gavin but he sure knew what would have happened to him. And worse: if Mr Snopes had ever found out Gowan thought Uncle Gavin might be hiding in that ditch spying on his house. Or worse still: if the town ever found out Gowan was hiding in that ditch because he thought Uncle Gavin was.
Because when you are just thirteen you dont have sense enough to realise what you are doing and shudder. Because even now I can remember some of the things Aleck Sander and I did for instance and never think twice about it, and I wonder how any boys ever live long enough to grow up. I remember, I was just twelve; Uncle Gavin had just given me my shotgun; this was after (this is how Father put it) Mrs Snopes had sent him to Heidelberg to finish his education and he had been in the War and then come back home and got himself elected County Attorney in his own right; there were five of us: me and three other white boys and Aleck Sander, hunting rabbits one Saturday.
It was cold, one of the coldest spells we ever had; when we came to Harrykin Creek it was frozen over solid and we begun to talk about how much we would take to jump into it. Aleck Sander said he would do it if each one of us would give him a dollar so we said we would and sure enough, before we could have stopped him, Aleck Sander hauled off and jumped into the creek, right through the ice, clothes and all.
So we got him out and built a fire while he stripped off and wrapped up in our hunting coats while we tried to dry his clothes before they froze solid too and got him dressed again at last and then he said, “All right. Now pay me my money.”
We hadn’t thought about that. Back then, no Jefferson, Mississippi boy or anywhere else in Mississippi that I know of, ever had a whole dollar at one time very often, let alone four at the same time. So we had to trade with him. Buck Connors and Aleck Sander traded first: if Buck jumped through the ice, Aleck Sander would let him off his dollar. So Buck did, and while we dried him off I said,
“If that’s what we got to do, let’s all jump in at once and get it over with,” and we even started for the creek when Aleck Sander said No, that we were all white boys taking advantage of him because he was a Negro by asking him to let us do the same thing he did.
So we had to trade again. Ashley Holcomb was next. He climbed up a tree until Aleck Sander said he was high enough and shut his eyes and jumped out of it, and Aleck Sander let him off his dollar. Then I was next, and somebody said how, because Aleck Sander’s mother was our cook and Aleck Sander and I had more or less lived together ever since we were born, that Aleck Sander would probably let me off light.
But Aleck Sander said No, he had thought of that himself and for that very reason he was going to have to be harder on me than on Ashley and so the tree I would jump out of would be over a brier patch. And I did; it was like jumping into cold fire streaking my hands and face and tearing my britches though my hunting coat was brand new almost (Uncle Gavin had mailed it to me from Germany the day he
