It should have been Mr Snopes of course because he was the husband, the squire, the protector in the formal ritual. But it was Uncle Gavin and he wasn’t any husband or squire or knight or defender or protector either except simply and quickly his own: who didn’t really care even how badly Mrs Snopes got battered and bruised in the business provided there was enough of her left when he finally got the last spark of life trampled out of Mr de Spain.
Gowan said how he stepped in and grabbed Mr de Spain by the shoulder and jerked, and now a kind of sound went up and then he said all the men were streaming across the floor toward the back stairs that led down into the back alley and now the ladies were screaming good only Gowan said that a lot of them were streaking after the men too so that he had to kind of burrow along among skirts and legs, down the back stairs; he said he could see Uncle Gavin through the legs just getting up from the alley and he, Gowan, pushed on through to the front and saw Uncle Gavin just getting up from the alley again with his face all bloody and two men helping him or anyway trying to, because he flung them off and ran at Mr de Spain again: and when I was older I knew that too: that Uncle Gavin wasn’t trying anymore to destroy or even hurt Mr de Spain because he had already found out by that time that he couldn’t.
Because now Uncle Gavin was himself again. What he was doing was simply defending forever with his blood the principle that chastity and virtue in women shall be defended whether they exist or not.
“Damn it,” Mr de Spain said, “hold him, some of you fellows, and let me get out of here.” So Father held Uncle Gavin and somebody brought Mr de Spain’s hat and coat and he left; and Gowan said this was the time he expected to hear that cutout again for sure. But he didn’t. There was nothing: just Uncle Gavin standing there wiping the blood from his face on his handkerchief then on Father’s.
“You fool,” Father said. “Dont you know you cant fight? You dont know how.”
“Can you suggest a better way to learn than the one I just tried?” Uncle Gavin said.
And at home too, in his bathroom, where he could take off his vest and collar and tie and shirt and hold a wet towel against the bleeding, when Mother came in. She had a flower in her hand, a red rose from one of the corsages. “Here,” she said. “She sent it to you.”
“You lie,” Uncle Gavin said. “You did it.”
“Lie yourself!” Mother said. “She sent it!”
“No,” Uncle Gavin said.
“Then she should have!” Mother said; and now Gowan said she was crying, half way holding to Uncle Gavin and half way beating him with both fists, crying: “You fool! You fool! They dont deserve you! They aren’t good enough for you! None of them are, no matter how much they look and act like a — like a — like a god damn whorehouse! None of them! None of them!”
Only Mr Snopes left more footprints than them on Jefferson that night; he left another bloody nose and two black eyes. That fourth corsage Mother got that night was from Grenier Weddel. He was a bachelor like Mr de Spain. I mean, he was the kind of bachelor that Uncle Gavin said would still be one no matter how many times who married him.
Maybe that was why Sally Hampton turned him down. Anyway, she sent his ring back and married Maurice Priest instead and so when Uncle Gavin and Mr de Spain started what Father called the Mrs Rouncewell panic that day, Grenier saw his chance too and sent Mrs Priest not just what Father called a standard panic-size corsage, but a triple one. Maybe that was why she didn’t wear it to the ball that night: it was too big to carry.
Anyway she didn’t but anyway after Uncle Gavin and Mr de Spain got through with the alley, Grenier and Maurice Priest went back there and Grenier came out with one of the black eyes and Maurice went home with the bloody nose and the next morning when Sally Priest came to town she had the other black eye. And maybe she didn’t wear the corsage in public but she sure did that eye. She was not only around town all that morning, she came back that afternoon so everybody in Jefferson would have a chance to see it or at least hear about it. Gowan said you would even have thought she was proud of it.
Except that Flem Snopes wasn’t the first Snopes in Jefferson neither.
FOUR
V.K. Ratliff
SHE WAS. HIS aunt (not his two uncles nor his grandpaw, but any of his womenfolks) could have told him why: proud she still had a husband that could and would black her eye; proud her husband had a wife that could still make him need to.
And he was right about Flem not being the first Snopes in Jefferson too. The first one was Mink, that spent two and a half months in the Jefferson jail on his way to his permanent residence in the penitentiary at Parchman for killing Zack Houston. And he spent them two and a half months laboring under a mistake.
I dont mean a mistake in killing Houston. He knowed what he aimed to do then. Zack was a proud man to begin with, and he had just lost his young wife that he had had a considerable trouble persuading her folks to let her marry him — she was old man Cal Bookright’s youngest child, a school teacher, and although Zack owned his place and was a good farmer, that’s all he was: just a farmer without no special schooling, besides being a hard liver when he was a young man and even right up to when he got serious about Letty Bookright and found out that old Cal was serious too. Then when he, or both of them together I reckon, finally beat old Cal down and they was married, he never even had her a whole year before he lost her.
And even then he had to lose her hard, the hardest way: that same blood stallion killed her with his feet in the stall one day that Mink shot him off of that morning — and that made him a little extra morose because he was unhappy. So between being proud to begin with and then unhappy on top of that, he was a little overbearing. But since most of the folks around Frenchman’s Bend knowed he was proud and knowed how hard he had had to work to persuade old Cal to let Letty marry him, he would a still been all right if he hadn’t tangled with Mink Snopes.
Because Mink Snopes was mean. He was the only out-and-out mean Snopes we ever experienced. There was mad short-tempered barn-burners like old Ab, and there was the mild innocent ones like Eck that not only wasn’t no Snopes, no matter what his maw said, he never had no more business being born into a Snopes nest than a sparrow would have in a hawk’s nest; and there was the one pure out-and-out fool like I.O. But we never had run into one before that was just mean without no profit consideration or hope atall.
Maybe that was why he was the only mean Snopes: there wasn’t no sign of any profit in it. Only he was bound or anyway must a had a little of his cousin I.O.’s foolishness too or he wouldn’t have made his mistake. I mean, the mistake not of shooting Houston but of when he picked out to do it; picking out the time to do it while Flem was still off on his Texas honeymoon. Sholy he knowed that Flem hadn’t got back yet.
Or maybe the night before he had got the Snopes grapevine word that he had been waiting for, that Flem would reach Frenchman’s Bend tomorrow, and it was only then that he taken that old wore-out ten gauge britch-loader and hid in that thicket and bushwhacked Houston off the horse when he rid past. But then I dont know. Maybe by that time nothing else mattered to him but seeing Houston over the end of them barrels then feeling that stock jolt back against his shoulder.
Anyhow, that’s what he done. And likely it wasn’t until Houston was laying in the mud in the road and that skeered stallion with the loose reins and the empty saddle and flapping stirrups already tearing on to Varner’s store to spread the news, that he realised with whatever horror it was, that he had done too soon something it was long since too late to undo. Which was why he tried to hide the body and then dropped the gun into that slough and come on to the store, hanging around the store ever day while the sheriff was still hunting for Houston, not to keep up with whether the sheriff was getting warm or not but waiting for Flem to get back from Texas and save him; right up to the time when Houston’s hound led them to the body and some fish-grabblers even found the gun in the slough that ever body knowed was
