So when that tremendous big sound went off and the bell began to ring, we all knew what it was and we were all waiting for the next one to fall, until the people running out into the street hollering “Which way was it?” finally located it down toward the depot. It was the oil storage tank. It was a big round tank, about thirty feet long and ten feet deep, sitting on brick trestles. That is, it had been there because there wasn’t anything there now, not even the trestles. Then about that time they finally got Mrs Nunnery to hush long enough to tell what happened.
She was Cedric Nunnery’s mamma. He was about five years old. They lived in a little house just up the hill from the depot and finally they made her sit down and somebody gave her a drink of whiskey and she quit screaming and told how about five oclock she couldn’t find Cedric anywhere and she came down to where Mr Snopes was sitting in his chair in front of the little house about the size of a privy that he called the office where he night watched the tank, to ask him if he had seen Cedric.
He hadn’t but he got up right away to help her hunt, in all the box cars on the side track and in the freight warehouse and everywhere, hollering Cedric’s name all around; only Mrs Nunnery didn’t remember which of them thought of the oil tank first. Likely it was Mr Snopes since he was the one that knew it was empty, though probably Mrs Nunnery had seen the ladder too still leaning against it where Mr Snopes had climbed up to open the manhole in the top to let fresh air come in and drive the gas out.
And likely Mr Snopes thought all the gas was out by now, though they probably both must have figured there would still be enough left to fix Cedric when he climbed down inside. Because Mrs Nunnery said that’s where they both thought Cedric was and that he was dead; she said she was so sure that she couldn’t even bear to wait and see, she was already running — not running anywhere: just running — when Mr Snopes came out of his little office with the lighted lantern and still running while he was climbing up the ladder and still running when he swung the lantern over into the manhole; that is she said she was still running when the explosion (she said she never even heard it, she never heard anything, or she would have stopped) knocked her down and the air all around her whizzing with pieces of the tank like a swarm of bumble bees.
And Mr Harker from the power-plant that got there first and found her, said she begun to try to run again as soon as he picked her up, shrieking and screaming and thrashing around while they held her, until she sat down and drank the whiskey and the rest of them walked and hunted around among the scattered bricks from the trestles, still trying to find some trace of Cedric and Mr Snopes, until Cedric came at a dead run up the track from where he had been playing in a culvert about a half a mile away when he heard the explosion.
But they never did find Mr Snopes until the next morning when Tom Tom Bird, the day fireman at the power-plant, on his way in to work from where he lived about two miles down the track, saw something hanging in the telegraph wires about two hundred yards from where the tank had been and got a long pole and punched it down and when he showed it to Mr Harker at the plant, it was Mr Snopes’s steel neck-brace though none of the leather was left.
But they never did find anything of Mr Snopes, who was a good man, everybody liked him, sitting in his chair beside the office door where he could watch the tank or walking around the tank when he would let the coal oil run into the cans and drums and delivery tanks, with his neck and head stiff in the steel brace so he couldn’t turn his head at all: he would have to turn all of himself like turning a wooden post. All the boys in town knew him because pretty soon they all found out that he kept a meal sack full of raw peanuts from the country and would holler to any of them that passed and give them a handful.
Besides, he was a Mason too. He had been a Mason such a long time that he was a good one even if he wasn’t very high up in it. So they buried the neck-brace anyway, in a coffin all regular, with the Masons in charge of the funeral, and more people than you would have thought sent flowers, even the oil company too although Mr Snopes had ruined their tank for nothing because Cedric Nunnery wasn’t even in it.
So they buried what they did have of him; there was the Baptist preacher too, and the Masons in their aprons dropping a pinch of dirt into the grave and saying “Alas my brother”, and covered the raw red dirt with the flowers (one of the flower pieces had the Mason signs worked into it); and the tank was insured so when the oil company got through cussing Mr Snopes for being a grown man with no more sense than that, they even gave Mrs Snopes a thousand dollars to show they were sorry for her even if she had married a fool. That is, they gave the money to Mrs Snopes because their oldest boy, Wallstreet, wasn’t but sixteen then. But he was the one that used it.
But that came later. All that happened now was that Mayor de Spain finally got to be a commanding officer long enough to ring his alarm bell at least, and we had some more fresh Snopes news to send Uncle Gavin. By ‘we’ I mean me now. Gowan’s mother and father had finally got home from China or wherever it was and now Gowan was in Washington (it was fall) for the last year anyway at the prep school getting ready for the University of Virginia next year and one afternoon Mother sent for me, into the parlor, and there was Ratliff in his neat faded blue tieless shirt and his smooth brown face, in the parlor like company (there was a tea tray and Ratliff had a teacup and a cucumber sandwich and I know now there were a lot of people in Jefferson, let alone in the county where Ratliff came from, that wouldn’t have known what to do with a cup of tea at four oclock in the afternoon and maybe Ratliff never saw one before then either but you couldn’t have told it by watching him) and Mother said,
“Make your manners to Mister Ratliff, bub.
He’s come to call on us,” and Ratliff said,
“Is that what you call him?” and Mother said,
“No, we just call him whatever is handy yet,” and Ratliff said,
“Sometimes fellers named Charles gets called Chick when they gets to school.” Then he said to me: “Do you like strawberry ice cream cones?” and I said,
“I like any kind of ice cream cones,” and Ratliff said:
“Then maybe your cousin—” and stopped and said to Mother: “Excuse me, Miz Mallison; I done been corrected so many times that it looks like it may take me a spell yet.”
So after that it was me and Ratliff instead of Gowan and Ratliff, only instead of two cones it cost Ratliff three now because when I went to town without Mother, Aleck Sander was with me.
And I dont know how Ratliff did it and of course I cant remember when because I wasn’t even five yet. But he had put into my mind too, just like into Gowan’s, that idea of Snopeses covering Jefferson like an influx of snakes or varmints from the woods and he and Uncle Gavin were the only ones to recognise the danger and the threat and now he was having to tote the whole load by himself until they would finally stop the war and Uncle Gavin could get back home and help. “So you might just as well start listening now,” he said, “whether you aint but five or not. You’re going to have to hear a heap of it before you get old enough or big enough to resist.”
It was November. Then that day, the courthouse bell rang again and all the church bells too this time, wild and frantic too in the middle of the week from the Sunday steeples and a few shotguns and pistols too like the old veterans that were still alive when they unveiled the Confederate monument that day except that the ones this time hadn’t been to a war yet so maybe what they were celebrating this time was that this one finally got over before they had to go to it.
So now Uncle Gavin could come home where Ratliff himself could ask him what Montgomery Ward Snopes had done that his name must not be mentioned or discussed. That was when Ratliff told me, “You might as well get used to hearing it
