But he said how we — America — were not used yet to European wars and still took them seriously; and there was the fact that he had been for two years a student in a German university. But the French were different: to whom another Germanic war was just the same old chronic nuisance; a nation of practical and practising pessimists who were willing to let anyone regardless of his politics, who wanted to, do anything — particularly one who was willing to do it free. So he — Uncle Gavin — spent those five months with his stretcher just behind Verdun and presently was himself in a bed in an American hospital until he got over the pneumonia and could come home, in Jefferson again, waiting, he said, until we were in it, which would not be long.
And he was right: the Sartoris boys, Colonel Sartoris’s twin grandsons, had already gone to England into the Royal Flying Corps and then it was April and then Uncle Gavin had his appointment as a Y.M.C.A. secretary, to go back to France with the first American troops; when suddenly there was Montgomery Ward Snopes, the first of what Ratliff called “them big gray-colored chaps of I.O.’s”, the one whose mamma was still rocking in the chair in the front window of the Snopes Hotel because it was still too cold yet to move back onto the front gallery.
And Jackson McLendon had organised his Jefferson company and had been elected captain of it and Montgomery Ward could have joined them. But instead he came to Uncle Gavin, to go to France with Uncle Gavin in the Y.M.C.A.; and that was when Ratliff said what he did about sometimes the men that loved and lost Helen of Troy just thought they had lost her. Only he could have added, All her kinfolks too. Because Uncle Gavin did it. I mean, took Montgomery Ward.
“Confound it, Lawyer,” Ratliff said. “It’s a Snopes.”
“Certainly,” Uncle Gavin said. “Can you suggest a better place for a Snopes today than north-western France? as far west of Amiens and Verdun as you can get him?”
“But why?” Ratliff said.
“I thought of that too,” Uncle Gavin said. “If he had said he wanted to go in order to defend his country, I would have had Hub Hampton handcuff him hand and foot in jail and sit on him while I telephoned Washington. But what he said was, ‘They’re going to pass a law soon to draft us all anyhow, and if I go with you like you’re going, I figger I’ll get there first and have time to look around’.”
“To look around,” Ratliff said. He and Uncle Gavin looked at one another. Ratliff blinked two or three times.
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. Ratliff blinked two or three times again.
“To look around,” he said.
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. And Uncle Gavin took Montgomery Ward Snopes with him and that was the exact time when Ratliff said about the folks that thought they had finally lost Helen of Troy. But Gowan was still living with us maybe because of the war in Europe the State Department still hadn’t let his mother and father come back from China or wherever it was yet; at least once every week on the way home across the Square he would meet Ratliff, almost like Ratliff was waiting for him, and Gowan would tell Ratliff the news from Uncle Gavin and Ratliff would say:
“Tell him to watch close. Tell him I’m doing the best I can here.”
“The best you can what?” Gowan said.
“Holding and toting,” Ratliff said.
“Holding and toting what?” Gowan said. That was when Gowan said he first noticed that you didn’t notice Ratliff hardly at all, until suddenly you did or anyway Gowan did. And after that, he began to look for him. Because the next time, Ratliff said:
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” Gowan said.
“Then of course your aunt lets you drink coffee,” Ratliff said. “What do you say — —”
“She’s not my aunt, she’s my cousin,” Gowan said. “Sure. I drink coffee. I dont specially like it. Why?”
“I like a occasional ice cream cone myself,” Ratliff said.
“What’s wrong with that?” Gowan said.
“What say me and you step in the drugstore here and have a ice cream cone?” Ratliff said. So they did. Gowan said Ratliff always had strawberry when they had it, and that he could expect Ratliff almost any afternoon now and now Gowan said he was in for it, he would have to eat the cone whether he wanted it or not, he and Ratliff now standing treat about, until finally Ratliff said, already holding the pink-topped cone in his brown hand:
“This here is jest about as pleasant a invention as any I know about. It’s so pleasant a feller jest dont dare risking getting burnt-out on it. I cant imagine no tragedy worse than being burnt-out on strawberry ice cream. So what you say we jest make this a once-a-week habit and the rest of the time jest swapping news?”
So Gowan said all right and after that they would just meet in passing and Gowan would give Ratliff Uncle Gavin’s last message: “He says to tell you he’s doing the best he can too but that you were right: just one aint enough. One what?” Gowan said. “Aint enough for what?” But then Gowan was seventeen; he had a few other things to do, whether grown people believed it or not, though he didn’t object to delivering the messages Mother said Uncle Gavin sent in his letters to Ratliff, when he happened to see Ratliff, or that is when Ratliff saw, caught him, which seemed to be almost every day so that he wondered just when Ratliff found time to earn a living.
But he didn’t always listen to all Ratliff would be saying at those times, so that afterward he couldn’t even say just how it was or when that Ratliff put it into his mind and he even got interested in it like a game, a contest or even a battle, a war, that Snopeses had to be watched constantly like an invasion of snakes or wild cats and that Uncle Gavin and Ratliff were doing it or trying to because nobody else in Jefferson seemed to recognise the danger.
So that winter when the draft finally came and got Byron Snopes out of Colonel Sartoris’s bank, Gowan knew exactly what Ratliff was talking about when he said:
“I dont know how he will do it but I will lay a million to one he dont never leave the United States; I will lay a hundred to one he wont get further away from Mississippi than that first fort over in Arkansas where they first sends them; and if you will give me ten dollars I will give you eleven if he aint back here in Jefferson in three weeks.”
Gowan didn’t do it but he said later he wished he had because Ratliff would have lost by two days and so Byron was back in the bank again. But we didn’t know how and even Ratliff never found out how he did it until after he had robbed the bank and escaped to Mexico, because Ratliff said the reason Snopeses were successful was that they had all federated unanimously to remove being a Snopes from just a zoological category into a condition composed of success by means of the single rule and regulation and sacred oath of never to tell anybody how.
The way Byron did it was to go to bed every night with a fresh plug of chewing tobacco taped into his left armpit until it ran his heart up to where the army doctors finally discharged him and sent him home.
So at least there was some fresh Snopes news to send Uncle Gavin, which was when Ratliff noticed that it had been months since Uncle Gavin had mentioned Montgomery Ward Snopes. Though by the time Uncle Gavin’s letter got back saying Dont mention that name to me again. I wont discuss it. I will not we had some fresh Snopes news of our own to send him.
This time it was Eck. “Your uncle was right,” Ratliff said. “He’s my cousin, I tell you,” Gowan said.
“All right, all right,” Ratliff said. “Eck wasn’t a Snopes. That’s why he had to die. Like there wasn’t no true authentic room for Snopeses in the world and they made their-selves one by that pure and simple mutual federation, and the first time one slips or falters or fails in being Snopes, it dont even need the rest of the pack like wolves to finish him: simple environment jest watched its chance and taken it.”
Eck was the one with the steel brace where a log broke his neck one time, the night watchman of the oil company’s storage tank at the depot; I knew about this myself because I was almost four years old now. It was just dust-dark; we were at supper when there came a tremendous explosion, the loudest sound at one time that Jefferson ever heard, so loud that we all knew it couldn’t be anything else but that German bomb come at last that we — Mayor de Spain anyway — had been looking for ever since the Germans sank the Lusitania and we finally had to get into the war too.
That is, Mayor de Spain had gone to West Point and had been a lieutenant in Cuba and when this one started he wanted to get into it too. But he couldn’t maybe so
