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 got Mother’s cable that I was born; it was the best hunting coat in Jefferson everybody said when I finally got big enough to wear it) so it didn’t tear except for one pocket.
So that left only John Wesley Roebuck and maybe all of a sudden Aleck Sander realised that here was his last dollar going because John Wesley suggested everything but Aleck Sander still said No. Finally John Wesley offered to do all of them: jump through the ice then out of Ashley’s tree and then out of mine but Aleck Sander still said No.
So this is how they finally traded though in a way that still wasn’t fair to Aleck Sander because old man Ab Snopes had already shot John Wesley in the back once about two years ago and so John Wesley was used to it, which may have been one of the reasons why he agreed to the trade. This was it.
John Wesley borrowed my hunting coat to put on top of his because we had already proved that mine was the toughest, and he borrowed Ashley’s sweater to wrap around his head and neck, and we counted off twenty-five steps for him and Aleck Sander put one shell in his gun and somebody, maybe me, counted One Two Three slow and when whoever it was said One John Wesley broke and ran and when whoever it was said Three Aleck Sander shot John Wesley in the back and John Wesley gave me and Ashley back the sweater and my hunting coat and (it was late by then) we went home.
Except that I had to run all the way (it was cold, the coldest spell I ever remember) because we had to burn up my hunting coat because it would be easier to explain no hunting coat at all than one with the back full of Number Six shot.
Then we found out how Uncle Gavin would find out which one called next. It was Father did the scoring for him. I dont mean Father was Uncle Gavin’s spy. The last thing Father was trying to do was to help Uncle Gavin, ease Uncle Gavin’s mind.
If anything, he was harder against Uncle Gavin even than he had thought he was that first day against Mother going to call on Mrs Snopes; it was like he was trying to take revenge on Mother and Uncle Gavin both: on Uncle Gavin for even wanting Mother to call on Mrs Snopes, and on Mother for saying right out loud in front of Uncle Gavin and Gowan both that she not only was going to do it, she didn’t see any harm in it.
In fact, Gowan said it was Father’s mind that Mrs Snopes seemed to stay on now, more than on Uncle Gavin’s. Almost any time now Father would walk in rubbing his hands and saying “oh you kid” or “twenty-three skiddoo” and they knew that he had just seen Mrs Snopes again on the street or had just heard that another Cotillion or Byron Society member had called on her; if they had invented wolf whistles then, Father would have been giving one.
Then it was December; Mother had just told how the Cotillion Club had finally voted to send Mr and Mrs Snopes an invitation to the Christmas Ball and Grandfather had got up and put his napkin down and said, “Thank you for the meal, Margaret,” and Gowan went and held the door for him to go out, then Father said:
“Dance? Suppose she dont know how?” and Gowan said,
“Does she have to?” and now they all stopped; he said they all stopped at exactly the same time and looked at him and he said that even if Mother and Uncle Gavin were brother and sister one was a woman and the other was a man and Father wasn’t any kin to either one of them. Yet he said they all three looked at him with exactly the same expression on their faces.
Then Father said to Mother:
“Hold him while I look at his teeth again. You told me he wasn’t but thirteen.”
“What have I said now?” Gowan said.
“Yes,” Father said. “What were we saying? Oh yes, dancing, the Christmas Cotillion.” He was talking to Uncle Gavin now. “Well by godfrey, that puts you one up on Manfred de Spain, dont it?
He’s a lone orphan; he hasn’t got a wife or a twin sister who was one of the original founders of Jefferson literary and snobbery clubs; all he can do to Flem Snopes’s wife is — —” Gowan said how until now Mother was always between Father and Uncle Gavin, with one hand on each of their chests to hold them apart. He said that now Mother and Uncle Gavin were both at Father, with Mother holding one hand on Father’s mouth and reaching for his, Gowan’s, ears with the other, and she and Uncle Gavin both saying the same thing, only Uncle Gavin was just using another set of words for it:
“Dont you dare!”
“Go on. Say it.”
So Father didn’t. But even he didn’t anticipate what Uncle Gavin would do next: try to persuade Mother to make the Cotillion committee not invite Mr de Spain to the ball at all. “Hell fire,” Father said. “You cant do that.”
“Why cant we?” Mother said.
“He’s the mayor!” Father said.
“The mayor of a town is a servant,” Mother said. “He’s the head servant of course: the butler. You dont invite a butler to a party because he’s a butler. You invite him in spite of it.”
But Mayor de Spain got his invitation too. Maybe the reason Mother didn’t stop it like Uncle Gavin wanted her to, was simply for that reason she had already given, explained, described: that she and the Cotillion Club didn’t have to invite him because he was Mayor, and so they invited him just to show it, prove it.
Only Father didn’t think that was the reason. “No sir,” he said. “You damned gals aint fooling me or anybody else. You want trouble. You want something to happen. You like it. You want two red-combed roosters strutting at one another, provided one of you hens is the reason for it.
And if there’s anything else you can think of to shove them in to where one of them will have to draw blood in self defense, you’ll do that too because every drop of that blood or every black eye or every public-torn collar or split or muddy britches is another item of revenge on that race of menfolks that hold you ladies thralled all day long day after day with nothing to do between meals but swap gossip over the telephone.
By godfrey,” he said, “if there wasn’t any club to give a Christmas dance two weeks from now, you all would probably organise one just to invite Mrs Snopes and Gavin and Manfred de Spain to it. Except you are wasting your time and money this trip. Gavin dont know how to
