The Town, William Faulkner

The Town

First published in 1957, this novel forms the second part of the Snopes Trilogy, following the history of the fictional family from Mississippi. Each chapter is narrated from the point of view of one of three characters: Chick Mallison, Gavin Stevens, or V.K. Ratliff. The Snopes family serves as the author’s symbol for the grasping and destructive element of the post-bellum South. Like its predecessor The Hamlet and its successor The Mansion, The Town is a self-contained narrative. It details Flem Snopes’ ruthless struggle to take over the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. Rich in typically Faulknerian episodes of humour and of profundity, the novel fashions a realistic social milieu compared to some of the author’s other works.

The first edition
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty one
Twenty two
Twenty three
Twenty four

To Phil Stone

He did half the laughing for thirty years

ONE

Charles Mallison

I WASN’T BORN yet so it was Cousin Gowan who was there and big enough to see and remember and tell me afterward when I was big enough for it to make sense. That is, it was Cousin Gowan plus Uncle Gavin or maybe Uncle Gavin rather plus Cousin Gowan. He — Cousin Gowan — was thirteen. His grandfather was Grandfather’s brother so by the time it got down to us, he and I didn’t know what cousin to each other we were.

So he just called all of us except Grandfather ‘cousin’ and all of us except Grandfather called him ‘cousin’ and let it go at that.

They lived in Washington, where his father worked for the State Department, and all of a sudden the State Department sent his father to China or India or some far place, to be gone two years; and his mother was going too so they sent Gowan down to stay with us and go to school in Jefferson until they got back. ‘Us’ was Grandfather and Mother and Father and Uncle Gavin then. So this is what Gowan knew about it until I got born and big enough to know about it too.

So when I say ‘we’ and ‘we thought’ what I mean is Jefferson and what Jefferson thought.
At first we thought that the water tank was only Flem Snopes’s monument. We didn’t know any better then. It wasn’t until afterward that we realised that that object low on the sky above Jefferson, Mississippi, wasn’t a monument at all. It was a footprint.

One day one summer he drove up the southeast road into town in a two-mule wagon containing his wife and baby and a small assortment of house-furnishings. The next day he was behind the counter of a small back-alley restaurant which belonged to V. K. Ratliff. That is, Ratliff owned it with a partner, since he — Ratliff — had to spend most of his time in his buckboard (this was before he owned the Model T Ford) about the county with his demonstrator sewing machine for which he was the agent.

That is, we thought Ratliff was still the other partner until we saw the stranger in the other greasy apron behind the counter — a squat uncommunicative man with a neat minute bow tie and opaque eyes and a sudden little hooked nose like the beak of a small hawk; a week after that, Snopes had set up a canvas tent behind the restaurant and he and his wife and baby were living in it. And that was when Ratliff told Uncle Gavin:
“Just give him time. Give him six months and he’ll have Grover Cleveland” (Grover Cleveland Winbush was the partner) “out of that café too.”

That was the first summer, the first Summer of the Snopes, Uncle Gavin called it. He was in Harvard now, working for his M.A. After that he was going to the University of Mississippi law school to get ready to be Grandfather’s partner. But already he was spending the vacations helping Grandfather be City Attorney; he had barely seen Mrs Snopes yet so he not only didn’t know he would ever go to Germany to enter Heidelberg University, he didn’t even know yet that he would ever want to: only to talk about going there someday as a nice idea to keep in mind or to talk about.

He and Ratliff talked together a lot. Because although Ratliff had never been to school anywhere much and spent his time travelling about our county selling sewing machines (or selling or swapping or trading anything else for that matter), he and Uncle Gavin were both interested in people — or so Uncle Gavin said. Because what I always thought they were mainly interested in was curiosity. Until this time, that is. Because this time it had already gone a good deal further than just curiosity. This time it was alarm.

Ratliff was how we first began to learn about Snopes. Or rather, Snopeses. No, that’s wrong: there had been a Snopes in Colonel Sartoris’s cavalry command in 1864 — in that part of it whose occupation had been raiding Yankee picket-lines for horses.

Only this time it was a Confederate picket which caught him — that Snopes — raiding a Confederate horse-line and, it was believed, hung him. Which was evidently wrong too, since (Ratliff told Uncle Gavin) about ten years ago Flem and an old man who seemed to be his father appeared suddenly from nowhere one day and rented a little farm from Mr Will Varner who just about owned the whole settlement and district called Frenchman’s Bend about twenty miles from Jefferson. It was a farm so poor and small and already wornout that only the most trifling farmer would undertake it, and even they stayed only one year.

Yet Ab and Flem rented it and evidently (this is Ratliff) he or Flem or both of them together found it ——
“Found what?” Uncle Gavin said.

“I dont know,” Ratliff said. “Whatever it was Uncle Billy and Jody had buried out there and thought was safe.” — because that winter Flem was the clerk in Uncle Billy’s store. And what they found on that farm must have been a good one, or maybe they didn’t even need it anymore; maybe Flem found something else the Varners thought was hidden and safe under the counter of the store itself.

Because in another year old Ab had moved into Frenchman’s Bend to live with his son and another Snopes had appeared from somewhere to take over the rented farm; and in two years more still another Snopes was the official smith in Mr Varner’s blacksmith shop. So there were as many Snopeses in Frenchman’s Bend as there were Varners; and five years after that, which was the year Flem moved to Jefferson, there were even more Snopeses than Varners because one Varner was married to a Snopes and was nursing another small Snopes at her breast.

Because what Flem found that last time was inside Uncle Billy’s house. She was his only daughter and youngest child, not just a local belle but a belle throughout that whole section. Nor was it just because of old Will’s land and money. Because I saw her too and I knew what it was too, even if she was grown and married and with a child older than I was and I only eleven and twelve and thirteen. (“Oh ay,” Uncle Gavin said.

“Even at twelve dont think you are the first man ever chewed his bitter thumbs for that like reason such as her.”) She wasn’t too big, heroic, what they call Junoesque. It was that there was just too much of what she was for any just one human female package to contain and hold: too much of white, too much of female, too much of maybe just glory, I dont know: so that at first sight of her you felt a kind of shock of gratitude just for being alive and being male at the same instant with her in space and time, and then in the next second and forever after a kind of despair because you knew that there never would be enough of any one male to match and hold and deserve her; grief forever after because forever after nothing less would ever do.

That was what he found this time. One day, according to Ratliff, Frenchman’s Bend learned that Flem Snopes and Eula Varner had driven across the line into the next county the night before and bought a license and got married; the same day, still according to Ratliff, Frenchman’s Bend learned that three young men, three of Eula’s old suitors, had left the country suddenly by night too, for Texas it was said, or anyway west, far enough west to be longer than Uncle Billy or Jody Varner could have reached if they had needed to try.

Then a month later Flem and Eula also departed for Texas (that bourne, Uncle Gavin said, in our time for the implicated the insolvent or the merely hopeful), to return the next summer with a girl baby a little larger than you would have expected at only three months ——
“And the horses,” Uncle Gavin said. Because we did know about that, mainly because Flem Snopes had not been the first to import them. Every year or so someone brought into the county a string of wild unbroken plains ponies from somewhere in the west and auctioned them off.

This time the ponies arrived, in the charge of a man who was obviously from Texas, at the same time that Mr and Mrs Snopes returned home from that state. This string however seemed to be uncommonly wild, since the resultant scattering of the untamed and