They would wait until he was in the house, lying down maybe to take a nap after dinner, when they would run in and wake him, yelling, hollering that some boys were in the patch, and he would jump up yelling and cursing and grab up the oak cudgel and go tearing out to the patch, and nobody in it or near it except Vardaman and Bilbo behind the corner of the house dying laughing, then dodging and running and still laughing while the old man scrabbled up his piled rocks to throw at them.
Because he never would catch on. No, that’s wrong too: he always caught on. The trouble was, he didn’t dare risk doing nothing when they would run in hollering “Grampaw! Grampaw! Chaps in the melon patch!” because it might be true.
He would have to jump up and grab the stick and run out, knowing before hand he probably wouldn’t find anybody there except Vardaman and Bilbo behind the corner of the house that he couldn’t even catch, throwing the rocks and cursing them until he would give out of rocks and breath both, then standing there gasping and panting with his neck as red as a turkey gobbler’s and without breath anymore to curse louder than whispering.
That’s what we — all the boys in Jefferson between six and twelve years old and sometimes even older — would go out there to hide behind the fence and watch. We never had seen anybody bust a blood vessel and die and we wanted to be there when it happened to see what it would look like.
This was after Uncle Gavin finally got home from rehabilitating Europe. We were crossing the Square when she passed us. I never could tell if she had looked at Uncle Gavin, though I know she never looked at me, let alone spoke when we passed. But then, that was all right; I didn’t expect her either to or not to; sometimes she would speak to me but sometimes she never spoke to anybody and we were used to it. Like she did this time: just walking on past us exactly like a pointer dog walks just before it freezes onto the birds. Then I saw that Uncle Gavin had stopped and turned to look after her. But then I remembered he had been away since 1914 which was eight years ago now so she was only about five or six when he saw her last.
“Who is that?” he said.
“Linda Snopes,” I said. “You know: Mr Flem Snopes’s girl.” And I was still watching her too. “She walks like a pointer,” I said. “I mean, a pointer that’s just — —”
“I know what you mean,” Uncle Gavin said. “I know exactly what you mean.”
EIGHT
Gavin Stevens
I KNEW EXACTLY what he meant. She was walking steadily toward us, completely aware of us, yet not once had she looked at either of us, the eyes not hard and fixed so much as intent, oblivious; fixed and unblinking on something past us, beyond us, behind us, as a young pointer will walk over you if you dont move out of the way, during the last few yards before the actual point, since now it no longer needs depend on clumsy and fumbling scent because now it is actually looking at the huddled trigger-set covey.
She went past us still walking, striding, like the young pointer bitch, the maiden bitch of course, the virgin bitch, immune now in virginity, not scorning the earth, spurning the earth, because she needed it to walk on in that immunity: just intent from earth and us too, not proud and not really oblivious: just immune in intensity and ignorance and innocence as the sleepwalker is for the moment immune from the anguishes and agonies of breath.
She would be thirteen, maybe fourteen now and the reason I did not know her and would not have known her was not because I had possibly not seen her in eight years and human females change so drastically in the years between ten and fifteen. It was because of her mother. It was as though I — you too perhaps — could not have believed but that a woman like that must, could not other than, produce an exact replica of herself.
That Eula Varner — You see? Eula Varner. Never Eula Snopes even though I had — had had to — watched them in bed together. Eula Snopes it could never be simply because it must not simply because I would decline to have it so. — that Eula Varner owed that much at least to the simple male hunger which she blazed into anguish just by being, existing, breathing; having been born, becoming born, becoming a part of Motion; — that hunger which she herself could never assuage since there was but one of her to match with all that hungering.
And that single one doomed to fade; by the fact of that mortality doomed not to assuage nor even negate the hunger; doomed never to efface the anguish and the hunger from Motion even by her own act of quitting Motion and so fill with her own absence from it, the aching void where once had glared that incandescent shape.
That’s what you thought at first, of course: that she must of necessity repeat herself, duplicate herself if she reproduced at all. Because immediately afterward you realised that obviously she must not, must not duplicate: very Nature herself would not permit that to occur, permit two of them in a place no larger than Jefferson, Mississippi in one century, let alone in overlapping succession, within the anguished scope of a single generation.
Because even Nature, loving concupiscent uproar and excitement as even Nature loves it, insists that it at least be reproductive of fresh fodder for the uproar and the excitement. Which would take time, the time necessary to produce that new crop of fodder, since she — Eula Varner — had exhausted, consumed, burned up that one of hers. Whereupon I would remember what Maggie said once to Gowan back there in the dead long time ago when I was in the throes of my own apprenticeship to holocaust: “You dont marry Helen and Semiramis; you just commit suicide for her.”
Because she — the child — didn’t look at all like her mother. And then in that same second I knew exactly who she did resemble. Back there in that time of my own clowning belated adolescence (none the less either for being both), I remember how I could never decide which of the two unbearables was the least unbearable; which (as the poet has it) of the two chewed bitter thumbs was the least bitter for chewing.
That is, whether Manfred de Spain had seduced a chaste wife, or had simply been caught up in passing by a rotating nympholept. This was my anguish. If the first was right, what qualities of mere man did Manfred have that I didn’t? If the second, what blind outrageous fortune’s lightning-bolt was it that struck Manfred de Spain that mightn’t, shouldn’t, couldn’t, anyway didn’t, have blasted Gavin Stevens just as well? Or even also (oh yes, it was that bad once, that comical once) I would even have shared her if I had to, couldn’t have had her any other way.
That was when (I mean the thinking why it hadn’t been me in Manfred’s place to check that glance’s idle fateful swing that day whenever that moment had been) I would say that she must be chaste, a wife true and impeachless. I would think It’s that damned child, that damned baby — that innocent infant which, simply by innocently being, breathing, existing, lacerated and scoriated and reft me of peace: if there had only been no question of the child’s paternity; or better still, no child at all.
Thus I would even get a little relief from my chewed thumbs since I would need both of them for the moment to count with. Ratliff had told me how they departed for Texas immediately after the wedding and when they returned twelve months later, the child was already walking. Which (the walking at least) I did not believe, not because of the anguish, the jealousy, the despair, but simply because of Ratliff. In fact, it was Ratliff who gave me that ease of hope — or if you like, ease from anguish; all right: tears too, peaceful tears but tears, which are the jewel-baubles of the belated adolescence’s clown-comedian — to pant with.
Because even if the child had been only one day old, Ratliff would have invented the walking, being Ratliff. In fact, if there had been no child at all yet, Ratliff would have invented one, invented one already walking for the simple sake of his own paradox and humor, secured as he was from checkable facts by this much miles and time between Frenchman’s Bend and Jefferson two years later. That was when I would rather believe it was Flem’s own child; rather defilement by Manfred de Spain than promiscuity by Eula Varner — whereupon I would need only to taste that thumb again to realise that any other thumb was less bitter, no matter which: let her accept the whole earth’s Manfred de Spains and refuse Gavin Stevens, than to accept one Flem Snopes and still refuse him.
So you see how much effort a man will make and
