“Is that right? We’ve got to have a federal officer? There’s nothing on our books to touch him with? Come on, think. Nothing on the city books even?” Now it was Uncle Gavin who said By God.
“That automobile law,” he said. “That Sartoris law,” while Mr Hampton stood looking at him. “Hanging right there in that frame on the wall by your own office door? Didn’t you ever look at it? that you cant drive an automobile on the streets of Jefferson—”
“What?” Montgomery Ward said.
“Louder,” Uncle Gavin said. “Mr Hampton cant hear you.”
“But that’s just inside the city!” Montgomery Ward said. “Hampton’s just County Sheriff; he cant make an arrest on just a city charge.”
“So you say,” Mr Hampton said; now he did put his hand on Montgomery Ward’s shoulder; Uncle Gavin said if he had been Montgomery Ward, he’d just as soon Mr Hampton had slapped him again. “Tell your own lawyer, not ours.”
“Wait!” Montgomery Ward said to Uncle Gavin. “You own a car too! So does Hampton!”
“We’re doing this alphabetically,” Uncle Gavin said. “We’ve passed the H’es. We’re in S now, and S-n comes before S-t. Take him on, Hub.”
So Montgomery Ward didn’t have anywhere to go then, he had run completely out; he just stood there now and Uncle Gavin watched Mr Hampton take his hand off Montgomery Ward and pick up the album of pictures and the envelopes that held the rest of them and carry them to the sink where Montgomery Ward really would develop a film now and then, and tumble them in and then start hunting among the bottles and cans of developer stuff on the shelf above it.
“What are you looking for?” Uncle Gavin said.
“Alcohol — coal oil — anything that’ll burn,” Mr Hampton said.
“Burn?” Montgomery Ward said. “Hell, man, those things are valuable. Look, I’ll make a deal: give them back to me and I’ll get to hell out of your damned town and it’ll never see me again. — All right,” he said. “I’ve got close to a hundred bucks in my pocket. I’ll lay it on the table here and you and Stevens turn your backs and give me ten minutes — —”
“Do you want to come back and hit him again?” Uncle Gavin said. “Dont mind me. Besides, he’s already suggested we turn our backs so all you’ll have to do is just swing your arm.” But Mr Hampton just took another bottle down and took out the stopper and smelled it. “You cant do that,” Uncle Gavin said. “They’re evidence.”
“All we need is just one,” Mr Hampton said.
“That depends,” Uncle Gavin said. “Do you just want to convict him, or do you want to exterminate him?” Mr Hampton stopped, the bottle in one hand and the stopper in the other. “You know what Judge Long will do to the man that just owns one of these pictures.” Judge Long was the Federal Judge of our district. “Think what he’ll do to the man that owns a wheelbarrow full of them.”
So Mr Hampton put the bottle back and after a while a deputy came with a suitcase and they put the album and the envelopes into it and locked it and Mr Hampton locked the suitcase in his safe to turn over to Mr Gombault, the U.S. marshal, when he got back to town, and they locked Montgomery Ward up in the county jail for operating an automobile contrary to law in the city of Jefferson, with Montgomery Ward cussing a while then threatening a while then trying again to bribe anybody connected with the jail or the town that would take the money.
And we wondered how long it would be before he sent for Mr de Spain because of that connection. Because we knew that the last person on earth he would hope for help from would be his uncle or cousin Flem, who had already got shut of one Snopes through a murder charge so why should he balk at getting rid of another one with just a dirty postcard.
So even Uncle Gavin, that Ratliff said made a kind of religion of never letting Jefferson see that a Snopes had surprised him, didn’t expect Mr Flem that afternoon when he walked into the office and laid his new black hat on the corner of the desk and sat there with the joints of his jaws working faint and steady like he was trying to chew without unclamping his teeth.
You couldn’t see behind Mr Hampton’s eyes because they looked at you too hard; you couldn’t pass them like you couldn’t pass a horse in a lane that wasn’t big enough for a horse and a man both but just for the horse. You couldn’t see behind Mr Snopes’s eyes because they were not really looking at you at all, like a pond of stagnant water is not looking at you.
Uncle Gavin said that was why it took him a minute or two to realise that he and Mr Snopes were looking at exactly the same thing: it just wasn’t with the same eye.
“I’m thinking of Jefferson,” Mr Snopes said.
“So am I,” Uncle Gavin said. “Of that damned Grover Winbush and every other arrested adolescent between fourteen and fifty-eight in half of north Mississippi with twenty-five cents to pay for one look inside that album.”
“I forgot about Grover Winbush,” Mr Snopes said. “He wont only lose his job but when he does folks will want to know why and this whole business will come out.” That was Mr Snopes’s trouble. I mean, that was our trouble with Mr Snopes: there wasn’t anything to see even when you thought he might be looking at you. “I dont know whether you know it or not. His ma lives out at Whiteleaf. He sends her a dollar’s worth of furnish by the mail rider every Saturday morning.”
“So to save one is to save both,” Uncle Gavin said. “If Grover Winbush’s mother is to keep on getting that dollar’s worth of fatback and molasses every Saturday morning, somebody will have to save your cousin, nephew — which is he, anyway? — too.”
Like Ratliff said, Mr Snopes probably missed a lot folks said to him behind his back, but he never missed what folks didn’t say to him to his face. Anyway, irony and sarcasm were not one of them. Or anyway it wasn’t this time. “That’s how I figgered it,” he said. “But you’re a lawyer. Your business is to know how to figger different.”
Uncle Gavin didn’t miss much of what wasn’t quite said to his face either. “You’ve come to the wrong lawyer,” he said. “This case is in federal court. Besides, I couldn’t take it anyway; I draw a monthly salary to already be on the other side. Besides,” he said (while he was just City Attorney he talked Harvard and Heidelberg.
But after that summer he and I spent travelling about the county running for County Attorney, he began to talk like the people he would lean on fences or squat against the walls of country stores with, saying ‘drug’ for ‘dragged’ and ‘me and you’ instead of ‘you and I’ just like they did, even saying figgered just like Mr Snopes just said it), “let’s you and me get together on this. I want him to go to the penitentiary.”
And that’s when Uncle Gavin found out that he and Mr Snopes were looking at exactly the same thing: they were just standing in different places because Mr Snopes said, as quick and calm as Uncle Gavin himself: “So do I.” Because Montgomery Ward was his rival just like Wallstreet was, both of them alike in that there just wasn’t room in Jefferson for either one of them and Mr Snopes too. Because according to Ratliff, Uncle Gavin was missing it. “So do I,” Mr Snopes said. “But not this way. I’m thinking of Jefferson.”
“Then it’s just too bad for Jefferson,” Uncle Gavin said. “He will get Judge Long and when Judge Long sees even one of those pictures, let alone a suitcase full of them, I will almost feel sorry even for Montgomery Ward. Have you forgotten about Wilbur Provine last year?”
Wilbur Provine lived in Frenchman’s Bend too. Ratliff said he was really a Snopes; that when Providence realised that Eck Snopes was going to fail his lineage and tradition, it hunted around quick and produced Wilbur Provine to plug the gap.
He ran a still in the creek bottom by a spring about a mile and a half from his house, with a path worn smooth as a ribbon and six inches deep from his back door to the spring where he had walked it twice a day for two years until they caught him and took him to federal court before Judge Long, looking as surprised and innocent as if he didn’t even know what the word ‘still’ meant while the lawyer questioned him, saying No, he never had any idea there was a still within ten miles, let alone a path leading from his back door to it because he himself hadn’t been in that creek bottom in ten years, not even to hunt and fish since he was a christian and he believed that no christian should destroy God’s creatures, and he had burned out on fish when he was eight years old and hadn’t been able to eat it since.
Until Judge Long himself asked him how he accounted for that path, and Wilbur blinked at Judge Long once or twice
