So we thought of course that her father, a small though thrifty farmer, had found the money somehow. Because Wallstreet saved his business. And he had not only learned about solvency from that experience, he had learned something more about success too.
In another year he had rented (then bought it) the store next door and converted it into a warehouse, stock room, so he could buy in larger wholesale lots for less money; another few years and he had rented what had been the last livery stable in Jefferson for his warehouse and knocked down the wall between the two stores and now we had in Jefferson the first self-service grocery store we had ever seen, built on the pattern which the big chain grocery stores were to make nation-wide in the purveying of food; the street his store faced on made an L with the alley where the old Snopes restaurant had been so that the tent in which he had passed his first night in Jefferson was directly behind his store too; he either bought or rented that lot (there were more automobiles in Jefferson now) and made a parking lot and so taught the housewives of Jefferson to come to town and seek his bargains and carry them home themselves.
That is, we — or that is, I — thought that it was his father-in-law who had found the money to save him, until now. “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “So it was you.”
“That’s right,” Ratliff said. “All I wanted was just a note for it. But he insisted on making me a partner. And I’ll tell you something else we’re fixing to do. We’re fixing to open a wholesale.”
“A what?” I said.
“A wholesale company like the big ones in St Louis, right here in Jefferson, so that instead of either having to pay high freight on a little shirt-tail full of stuff, or risk overloading on something perishable to save freight, a merchant anywhere in the county can buy jest what he needs at a decent price without having to add no freight a-tall.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” I said. “Why didn’t you think of that yourself years ago?”
“That’s right,” Ratliff said. “Why didn’t you?”
“Well I’ll be damned,” I still said. Then I said: “Hell fire, are you still selling stock? Can I get in?”
“Why not?” he said. “Long as your name aint Snopes. Maybe you could even buy some from him if your name wasn’t jest Flem Snopes. But you got to pass that-ere little gal first. His wife. You ought to stop in there sometime and hear her say Them goddamn Snopes once. Oh sho, all of us have thought that, and some of us have even said it out loud. But she’s different. She means it. And she aint going to never let him change neither.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve heard about that. I wonder why she never changed their name.”
“No no,” he said. “You dont understand. She dont want to change it. She jest wants to live it down. She aint trying to drag him by the hair out of Snopes, to escape from Snopes. She’s got to purify Snopes itself. She’s got to beat Snopes from the inside. Stop in there and listen sometimes.”
“A wholesale house,” I said. “So that’s why Flem — —” But that was foolish, as Ratliff himself saw even before I said it.
“ — why Flem changed his account from his own bank to the other one? No no. We aint using the banks here. We dont need them. Like Flem was the first feller in Jefferson to find out that. Wall’s credit is too good with the big wholesalers and brokers we deal with. The way they figger, he aint cutting into nobody’s private business: he’s helping all business. We dont need no bank. But we — he — still aims to keep it home-made. So you see him if you want to talk about stock.”
“I will,” I said. “But what is Flem himself up to? Why did he pull his money out of De Spain’s bank as soon as he got to be vice president of it? Because he’s still that, so he still owns stock in it. But he doesn’t keep his own money in it. Why?”
“Oh,” he said, “is that what you’re worried about? Why, we aint sho yet. All we’re doing now is watching the bushes shake.” Between the voice and the face there was always two Ratliffs: the second one offering you a fair and open chance to divine what the first one really meant by what it was saying, provided you were smart enough. But this time that second Ratliff was trying to tell me something which for whatever reason the other could not say in words.
“As long as that little gal lives, Flem aint got no chance to ever get a finger-hold on Wall. So Eck Snopes is out. And I.O. Snopes never was in because I.O. never was worth nothing even to I.O., let alone for anybody else to take a cut of the profit. So that jest about exhausts all the Snopes in reach that a earnest hardworking feller might make a forced share-crop on.”
“There’s that—” I said.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll say it for you. Montgomery Ward. The photograph gallery. If Flem aint been in that thing all the time from the very first, he dont never aim to be. And the fact that there aint been a new photograph in his show window in over a year now, let alone Jason Compson collecting his maw’s rent prompt on time since the second month after Montgomery Ward opened up, is proof enough that Flem seen from the first day that there wasn’t nothing there for him to waste his time on. So I cant think of but one Snopes object that he’s got left.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll bite.”
“That-ere twenty-dollar gold piece.”
“What twenty-dollar gold piece?”
“Dont you remember what I said that day, about how when a country boy makes his first Sad-dy night trip to Memphis, that-ere twenty-dollar bill he wears pinned inside his undershirt so he can at least get back home?”
“Go on,” I said. “You cant stop now.”
“What’s the one thing in Jefferson that Flem aint got yet? The one thing he might want. That maybe he’s been working at ever since they taken Colonel Sartoris out of that wrecked car and he voted Uncle Billy Varner’s stock to make Manfred de Spain president of that bank?”
“To be president of it himself,” I said. “No!” I said. “It cant be! It must not be!” But he was just watching me. “Nonsense,” I said.
“Why nonsense?” he said.
“Because, to use what you call that twenty-dollar gold piece, he’s got to use his wife too. Do you mean to tell me you believe for one moment that his wife will side with him against Manfred de Spain?” But still he just looked at me. “Dont you agree?” I said. “How can he hope for that?”
Yes, he was just looking at me. “That would jest be when he finally runs out of the bushes,” he said. “Out to where we can see him. Into the clearing. What’s that clearing?”
“Clearing?” I said.
“That he was working toward? — All right,” he said. “That druv him to burrow through the bushes to get out of them?”
“Rapacity,” I said. “Greed. Money. What else does he need? want? What else has ever driven him?”
But he just looked at me, and now I could actually watch that urgency fade until only the familiar face remained, bland, smooth, impenetrable and courteous. He drew out the dollar watch looped on a knotted shoelace between his button hole and his breast pocket. “I be dog if it aint almost dinner time,” he said. “Jest about time to walk to it.”
NINE
V. K. Ratliff
BECAUSE HE MISSED it. He missed it completely.
TEN
Charles Mallison
THEY FINALLY CAUGHT Montgomery Ward Snopes. I mean, they caught Grover Cleveland Winbush. Like Ratliff said, anybody bootlegging anything that never had any more sense than to sell Grover Cleveland Winbush some of it, deserved to be caught.
Except Uncle Gavin said that, even without Grover Cleveland, Montgomery Ward was bound to be caught sooner or later, since there simply wasn’t any place in Jefferson, Mississippi culture for a vocation or hobby or interest like the one Montgomery Ward had tried to establish among us. In Europe, yes; and maybe among the metropolitan rich or bohemians, yes too. But not in a land composed mainly of rural Baptists.
So they caught Grover Cleveland. It was one night, not very late. I mean, the stores were all closed but folks were still going home from the second running of the picture show; and some of them, I reckon anybody that passed and happened to look inside, saw the two fellows inside Uncle Willy Christian’s drug store working at the prescription case where Uncle Willy kept the medicines; and even though they were strangers — that is, nobody passing recognised them — the ones that looked in and saw them said the next day that they never thought anything of it, being that early and the lights on and Grover Cleveland not having anything to do as night marshal except to walk around the Square and look in the windows, that sooner or later he would have to see them if they never had any business there.
So it wasn’t until the next morning when Uncle Willy opened up for business, that he
