“No,” Uncle Gavin said. He said: “What did Grover Cleveland like for fun back then?”
“For fun?” Ratliff said. Then he said: “Oh. He liked excitement.”
“What excitement?” Uncle Gavin said.
“The excitement of talking about it,” Ratliff said.
“Of talking about what?” Uncle Gavin said.
“Of talking about excitement,” Ratliff said. He didn’t quite look at me. No: he didn’t quite not look at me. No, that’s wrong too because even watching him you couldn’t have said that he had ever stopped looking at Uncle Gavin. He blinked twice. “Female excitement,” he said.
“All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “How?”
“That’s right,” Ratliff said. “How?”
Because I was only eight now, going on nine, and if Uncle Gavin and Ratliff who were three times that and one of them had been all the way to Europe and back and the other had left at least one footprint in every back road and lane and turnrow too probably in Yoknapatawpha County, didn’t know what it was until somebody came and told them, it wasn’t any wonder that I didn’t.
There was another what Ratliff called Snopes industry in town now too, though Uncle Gavin refused to call it that because he still refused to believe that Eck was ever a Snopes. It was Eck’s boy, Wallstreet Panic, and from the way he began to act as soon as he reached Jefferson and could look around and I reckon find out for the first time in his life that you didn’t actually have to act like a Snopes in order to breathe, whether his father was a Snopes or not he sure wasn’t.
Because they said (he was about nine too when they moved in from Frenchman’s Bend) how as soon as he got to town and found out about school, he not only made his folks let him go to it but he took his brother, Admiral Dewey who wasn’t but six, with him, the two of them starting out together in the kindergarten where the mothers brought the little children who were not big enough yet to stay in one place more than just half a day, with Wallstreet Panic sticking up out of the middle of them like a horse in a duck-pond.
Because he wasn’t ashamed to enter the kindergarten: he was just ashamed to stay in it, not staying in it himself much longer than a half a day because in a week he was in the first grade and by Christmas he was in the second and now Miss Vaiden Wyott who taught the second grade began to help him, telling him what Wallstreet Panic meant and that he didn’t have to be named that, so that when she helped him pass the third grade by studying with her the next summer, when he entered the fourth grade that fall his name was just Wall Snopes because she told him that Wall was a good family name in Mississippi with even a general in it and that he didn’t even need to keep the Street if he didn’t want to.
And he said from that first day and he kept right on saying it when people asked him why he wanted to go to school so hard: “I want to learn how to count money,” so that when he heard about it, Uncle Gavin said:
“You see? That proves what I said exactly: no Snopes wants to learn how to count money because he doesn’t have to because you will do that for him — or you had damn well better.”
He, I mean Wall, was going to need to learn to count it. Even during that first winter while he was making up two grades he had a job. The store next to the Snopes café that they lived behind in the tent was a grocery store about the same class as the Snopes café. Every morning Wall would get up before schooltime, as the days got shorter he would get up in the dark, to build a fire in the iron stove and sweep out the store and as soon as he got back after school in the afternoon he would be the delivery boy too, using a wheel barrow until finally the owner of the store bought him a second-hand bicycle and took the money out of his pay each week.
And on Saturdays and holidays he would clerk in the store too, and all that summer while Miss Wyott was helping him pass the third grade; and even that wasn’t enough: he got enough recommendations around the Square to get the delivery route for one of the Memphis papers, only by that time he was so busy with his other affairs that he made his brother the paper boy. And the next fall while he was in the fourth grade he managed to get a Jackson paper too and now he had two more boys besides Admiral Dewey working for him, so that by that time any merchant or stock-trader or revival preacher or candidate that wanted handbills put out always went to Wall because he had an organization already set up.
He could count money and save it too. So when he was sixteen and that empty oil tank blew his father away and the oil company gave Mrs Snopes the thousand dollars, about a month later we found out that Mrs Snopes had bought a half interest in the grocery store and Wall had graduated from high school by now and he was a partner in the store.
Though he was still the one that got up before daylight on the winter mornings to start the fire and sweep. Then he was nineteen years old and his partner had sold the rest of the store to Mrs Snopes and retired, and even if because of Wall’s age the store still couldn’t be in his name, we knew who it really belonged to, with a hired boy of his own now to come before daylight on the winter mornings to build the fire and sweep.
And another one too, except that another Snopes industry wouldn’t be the right word for this one, because there wasn’t any profit in it. No, that’s wrong; we worked at it too hard and Uncle Gavin says that anything people work at as hard as all of us did at this, has a profit, is for profit whether you can convert that profit into dollars and cents or not or even want to.
The last Snopes they brought into Jefferson didn’t quite make it. I mean, this one came just so far, right up to in sight of the town clock in fact, and then refused to go any further; even, they said, threatening to go back to Frenchman’s Bend, like an old cow or a mule that you finally get right up to the open gate of the pen, but not a step more.
He was the old one. Some folks said he was Mr Flem’s father but some said he was just his uncle: a short thick dirty old man with fierce eyes under a tangle of eyebrows and a neck that would begin to swell and turn red before, as Ratliff said, you had barely had time to cross the first word with him. So they bought a little house for him about a mile from town, where he lived with an old maid daughter and the twin sons named Vardaman and Bilbo that belonged to I.O. Snopes’s other wife, the one that Uncle Gavin called the Number Two wife that was different from the Number One one that rocked all day long on the front gallery of the Snopes hotel.
The house had a little piece of ground with it, that old man Snopes made into a truck garden and water-melon patch. The water-melon patch was the industry. No, that’s wrong. Maybe I mean the industry took place because of the watermelon patch. Because it was like the old man didn’t really raise the water-melons to sell or even just to be eaten, but as a bait for the pleasure or sport or contest or maybe just getting that mad, of catching boys robbing it; planting and cultivating and growing water-melons just so he could sit ambushed with a loaded shotgun behind a morning glory vine on his back gallery until he could hear sounds from the melon patch and then shooting at it.
Then one moonlight night he could see enough too and this time he actually shot John Wesley Roebuck with a load of squirrel shot, and the next morning Mr Hub Hampton, the sheriff, rode out there and told old Snopes that if he ever again let that shotgun off he would come back and take it away from him and throw him in jail to boot. So after that, old Snopes didn’t dare use the gun. All he could do now was to stash away piles of rocks at different places along the fence, and just sit behind the vine with a heavy stick and a flashlight.
That was how the industry started. Mr Hampton had passed the word around town to all the mothers and fathers to tell their sons to stay out of that damned patch now; that any time they wanted a water-melon that bad, he, Mr Hampton, would buy them one, because if they kept on making old man
