Though even to the last, no one ever definitely connected Snopes with their ownership. “No no,” Uncle Gavin said. “You were not one of the three that ran from the smell of Will Varner’s shotgun. And dont tell me Flem Snopes traded you one of those horses for your half of that restaurant because I wont believe it. What was it?”
Ratliff sat there with his bland brown smoothly-shaven face and his neat tieless blue shirt and his shrewd intelligent gentle eyes not quite looking at Uncle Gavin. “It was that old house,” he said. Uncle Gavin waited. “The Old Frenchman place.” Uncle Gavin waited. “That buried money.”
Then Uncle Gavin understood: not an old pre-Civil War plantation house in all Mississippi or the South either but had its legend of the money and plate buried in the flower garden from Yankee raiders; — in this particular case, the ruined mansion which in the old time had dominated and bequeathed its name to the whole section known as Frenchman’s Bend, which the Varners now owned.
“It was Henry Armstid’s fault, trying to get even with Flem for that horse that Texas man sold him that broke his leg. No,” Ratliff said, “it was me too as much as anybody else, as any of us. To figger out what Flem was doing owning that old place that anybody could see wasn’t worth nothing. I dont mean why Flem bought it.
I mean, why he even taken it when Uncle Billy give it to him and Eula for a wedding gift. So when Henry taken to following and watching Flem and finally caught him that night digging in that old flower garden, I dont reckon Henry had to persuade me very hard to go back the next night and watch Flem digging myself.”
“So when Flem finally quit digging and went away, you and Henry crawled out of the bushes and dug too,” Uncle Gavin said. “And found it. Some of it. Enough of it. Just exactly barely enough of it for you to hardly wait for daylight to swap Flem Snopes your half of that restaurant for your half of the Old Frenchman place. How much longer did you and Henry dig before you quit?”
“I quit after the second night,” Ratliff said. “That was when I finally thought to look at the money.”
“All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “The money.”
“They was silver dollars me and Henry dug up. Some of them was pretty old. One of Henry’s was minted almost twenty years ago.”
“A salted goldmine,” Uncle Gavin said. “One of the oldest tricks in the world, yet you fell for it. Not Henry Armstid: you.”
“Yes,” Ratliff said. “Almost as old as that handkerchief Eula Varner dropped. Almost as old as Uncle Billy Varner’s shotgun.” That was what he said then. Because another year had passed when he stopped Uncle Gavin on the street and said, “With the court’s permission, Lawyer, I would like to take a exception. I want to change that-ere to ‘still’.”
“Change what-ere to ‘still’?” Uncle Gavin said.
“Last year I said ‘That handkerchief Miz Flem Snopes dropped’. I want to change that ‘dropped’ to ‘still dropping’. They’s one feller I know still following it.”
Because in six months Snopes had not only eliminated the partner from the restaurant, Snopes himself was out of it, replaced behind the greasy counter and in the canvas tent too by another Snopes accreted in from Frenchman’s Bend into the vacuum behind the first one’s next advancement by that same sort of osmosis by which, according to Ratliff, they had covered Frenchman’s Bend, the chain unbroken, every Snopes in Frenchman’s Bend moving up one step, leaving that last slot at the bottom open for the next Snopes to appear from nowhere and fill, which without doubt he had already done though Ratliff had not yet had time to go out there and see.
And now Flem and his wife lived in a small rented house in a back street near the edge of town, and Flem was now superintendent of the town power-plant which pumped the water and produced the electricity. Our outrage was primarily shock; shock not that Flem had the job, we had not got that far yet, but shock that we had not known until now that the job existed; that there was such a position in Jefferson as superintendent of the power-plant.
Because the plant — the boilers and the engines which ran the pump and dynamo — was operated by an old saw mill engineer named Harker, and the dynamos and the electric wiring which covered the town were cared for by a private electrician who worked on a retainer from the town; — a condition which had been completely satisfactory ever since running water and electricity first came to Jefferson. Yet suddenly and without warning, we needed a superintendent for it. And as suddenly and simultaneously and with that same absence of warning, a country man who had not been in town two years now and (we assumed) had probably never seen an electric light until that first night two years ago when he drove in, was that superintendent.
That was the only shock. It wasn’t that the country man was Flem Snopes. Because we had all seen Mrs Snopes by now, what few times we did see her which was usually behind the counter in the restaurant in another greasy apron, frying the hamburgers and eggs and ham and the tough pieces of steak on the grease-crusted kerosene griddle, or maybe once a week on the Square, always alone; not, as far as we knew, going anywhere: just moving, walking in that aura of decorum and modesty and solitariness ten times more immodest and a hundred times more disturbing than one of the bathing suits young women would begin to wear about 1920 or so, as if in the second just before you looked, her garments had managed in one last frantic pell mell scurry to overtake and cover her.
Though only for a moment because in the next one, if only you followed long enough, they would wilt and fail from that mere plain and simple striding which would shred them away like the wheel of a constellation through a wisp and cling of trivial scud.
And we had known the mayor, Major de Spain, longer than that. Jefferson, Mississippi, the whole South for that matter, was still full at that time of men called General or Colonel or Major because their fathers or grandfathers had been generals or colonels or majors or maybe just privates, in Confederate armies, or who had contributed to the campaign funds of successful state governors.
But Major de Spain’s father had been a real major of Confederate cavalry, and De Spain himself was a West Pointer who had gone to Cuba as a second lieutenant with troops and came home with a wound — a long scar running from his hair through his left ear and down his jaw, which could have been left by the sabre or gun-rammer we naturally assumed some embattled Spaniard had hit him with, or by the axe which political tactics during the race for mayor claimed a sergeant in a dice game had hit him with.
Because he had not been long at home and out of his blue Yankee coat before we realised that he and Jefferson were incorrigibly and invincibly awry to one another, and that one of them was going to have to give. And that it would not be him: that he would neither flee Jefferson nor try to alter himself to fit Jefferson, but instead would try to wrench Jefferson until the town fitted him, and — the young people hoped — would succeed.
Until then, Jefferson was like all the other little Southern towns: nothing had happened in it since the last carpetbagger had given up and gone home or been assimilated into another unregenerate Mississippian.
We had the usual mayor and board of aldermen who seemed to the young people to have been in perpetuity since the Ark or certainly since the last Chickasaw departed for Oklahoma in 1820, as old then as now and even now no older: old Mr Adams the mayor with a long patriarchial white beard, who probably seemed to young people like Cousin Gowan older than God Himself, until he might actually have been the first man; Uncle Gavin said there were more than just boys of twelve and thirteen like Cousin Gowan that referred to him by name, leaving off the last s, and to his old fat wife as ‘Miss Eve Adam’, fat old Eve long since free of the danger of inciting a snake or anything else to tempt her.
So we were wondering just what axe Lieutenant de Spain would use to chop the corners off Jefferson and make it fit him. One day he found it. The city electrician (the one who kept the town’s generators and dynamos and transformers working) was a genius. One afternoon in 1904 he drove out of his back yard into the street in the first automobile we had ever seen, made by hand completely, engine and all, from magneto coil to radius rod, and drove into the Square at the moment when Colonel Sartoris the banker’s surrey and blooded matched team were crossing it on the way home. Although Colonel Sartoris and his driver were not hurt and the horses when caught had no scratch on them and the electrician offered to repair the surrey (it was said he even offered to
