“You’re going to save her,” Mother said, not looking at Uncle Gavin now: just watching the sock she was darning.
“Yes!” Uncle Gavin said, fast, quick: no in-breathe this time, so quick he almost said the rest of it before he could stop himself, so that all Mother had to do was say it for him:
“ — from Manfred de Spain.”
But Uncle Gavin had caught himself by now; his voice was just harsh now. “You too,” he said. “You and your husband too. The best people, the pure, the unimpugnable. Charles who by his own affirmation has never even looked at her; you by that same affirmation not only Judge Stevens’s daughter, but Caesar’s wife.”
“Just what—” Mother said, then Gowan said she stopped and looked at him. “Dont you really want to be excused a little while? as a personal favor?” she said.
“Nome,” Gowan said.
“You cant help it either, can you?” she said. “You’ve got to be a man too, haven’t you?” She just talked to Uncle Gavin then: “Just what is it about this that you cant stand? That Mrs Snopes may not be chaste, or that it looks like she picked Manfred de Spain out to be unchaste with?”
“Yes!” Uncle Gavin said. “I mean no! It’s all lies — gossip. It’s all — —”
“Yes,” Mother said. “You’re right. It’s probably all just that. Saturday’s not a very good afternoon to get in the barbershop, but you might think about it when you pass.”
“Thanks,” Uncle Gavin said. “But if I’m to go on this crusade with any hope of success, the least I can do is look wild and shaggy enough to be believed. You’ll do it, then?”
“Of course,” Mother said.
“Thank you,” Uncle Gavin said. Then he was gone.
“I suppose I could be excused now,” Gowan said.
“What for now?” Mother said. She was still watching Uncle Gavin, down the walk and into the street now. “He should have married Melisandre Backus,” she said. Melisandre Backus lived on a plantation about six miles from town with her father and a bottle of whiskey. I dont mean he was a drunkard. He was a good farmer. He just spent the rest of his time sitting on the gallery in summer and in the library in winter with the bottle, reading Latin poetry.
Miss Melisandre and Mother had been in school together, at high school and the Seminary both. That is, Miss Melisandre was always four years behind Mother. “At one time I thought he might; I didn’t know any better then.”
“Cousin Gavin?” Gowan said. “Him married?”
“Oh yes,” Mother said. “He’s just too young yet. He’s the sort of man doomed to marry a widow with grown children.”
“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
