“That one,” Uncle Gavin said.
“Yep,” Mr Hampton said. “I dropped it into the drawer where I usually keep such, handcuffs and a extra pistol. Anybody could have come in while me and Miss Elma” (she was the office deputy, widow of the sheriff Mr Hampton had succeeded last time) “was out, and taken it.”
“Or the pistol either,” Uncle Gavin said. “You really should start locking that place, Hub. Some day you’ll leave your star in there and come back to find some little boy out on the street arresting people.”
“Maybe I should,” Mr Hampton said. “All right,” he said. “Somebody took that key and planted that whiskey. It could have been any of them — any of the folks that that damned Grover Winbush says was coming from four counties around to sweat over them damn pictures at night.”
“Maybe it’s lucky you at least had that suitcase locked up. I suppose you’ve still got that, since Mr Gombault hasn’t got back yet?”
“That’s right,” Mr Hampton said.
“And Jack Crenshaw and his buddy are just interested in whiskey, not photography. Which means you haven’t turned that suitcase over to anybody yet.”
“That’s right,” Mr Hampton said.
“Are you going to?” Uncle Gavin said.
“What do you think?” Mr Hampton said.
“That’s what I think too,” Uncle Gavin said.
“After all, the whiskey is enough,” Mr Hampton said. “And even if it aint, all we got to do is show Judge Long just any one of them photographs right before he pronounces sentence. Damn it,” he said, “it’s Jefferson. We live here. Jefferson’s got to come first, even before the pleasure of crucifying that damned — —”
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “I’ve heard that sentiment.” Then Mr Hampton left. And all we had to do was just to wait, and not long. You never had to wonder about how much Ratliff had heard because you knew in advance he had heard all of it. He closed the door and stood just inside it.
“Why didn’t you tell him yesterday about Flem Snopes?” he said.
“Because he let Flem Snopes or whoever it was walk right in his office and steal that key. Hub’s already got about all the felonious malfeasance he can afford to compound,” Uncle Gavin said. He finished putting the papers into the brief case and closed it and stood up.
“You leaving?” Ratliff said.
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “Wyott’s Crossing.”
“You aint going to wait for Flem?”
“He wont come back here,” Uncle Gavin said. “He wont dare. What he came here yesterday to try to bribe me to do, is going to happen anyway without the bribe. But he dont dare come back here to find out. He will have to wait and see like anybody else. He knows that.” But still Ratliff didn’t move from the door.
“The trouble with us is, we dont never estimate Flem Snopes right. At first we made the mistake of not estimating him a-tall. Then we made the mistake of over-estimating him. Now we’re fixing to make the mistake of under-estimating him again. When you jest want money, all you need to do to satisfy yourself is count it and put it where cant nobody get it, and forget about it.
But this-here new thing he has done found out it’s nice to have, is different. It’s like keeping warm in winter or cool in summer, or peace or being free or content-ment. You cant jest count it and lock it up somewhere safe and forget about it until you feel like looking at it again. You got to work at it steady, never to forget about it. It’s got to be out in the open, where folks can see it, or there aint no such thing.”
“No such thing as what?” Uncle Gavin said.
“This-here new discovery he’s jest made,” Ratliff said. “Call it civic virtue.”
“Why not?” Uncle Gavin said. “Were you going to call it something else?” Ratliff watched Uncle Gavin, curious, intent; it was as if he were waiting for something. “Go on,” Uncle Gavin said. “You were saying.”
Then it was gone, whatever it had been. “Oh yes,” Ratliff said. “He’ll be in to see you. He’ll have to, to make sho you recognise it too when you see it. He may kind of hang around until middle of the afternoon, to kind of give the dust a chance to settle. But he’ll be back then, so a feller can at least see jest how much he missed heading him off.”
So we didn’t drive up to Wyott’s then, and this time Ratliff was the one who under-estimated. It wasn’t a half an hour until we heard his feet on the stairs and the door opened and he came in. This time he didn’t take off the black hat: he just said “Morning, gentle-men” and came on to the desk and dropped the key to Montgomery Ward’s studio on it and was going back toward the door when Uncle Gavin said:
“Much obliged. I’ll give it back to the sheriff. You’re like me,” he said. “You dont give a damn about truth either. What you are interested in is justice.”
“I’m interested in Jefferson,” Mr Snopes said, reaching for the door and opening it. “We got to live here. Morning, gentlemen.”
ELEVEN
V. K. Ratliff
AND STILL HE missed it, even set — sitting right there in his own office and actively watching Flem rid Jefferson of Montgomery Ward. And still I couldn’t tell him.
TWELVE
Charles Mallison
WHATEVER IT WAS Ratliff thought Mr Snopes wanted, I dont reckon that what Uncle Gavin took up next helped it much either. And this time he didn’t even have Miss Melisandre Backus for Mother to blame it on because Miss Melisandre herself was married now, to a man, a stranger, that everybody but Miss Melisandre (we never did know whether her father, sitting all day long out there on that front gallery with a glass of whiskey-and-water in one hand and Horace or Virgil in the other — a combination which Uncle Gavin said would have insulated from the reality of rural north Mississippi harder heads than his — knew or not) knew was a big rich New Orleans bootlegger.
In fact she still refused to believe it even when they brought him home with a bullet hole neatly plugged up in the middle of his forehead, in a bullet-proof hearse leading a cortege of Packards and Cadillac limousines that Hollywood itself, let alone Al Capone, wouldn’t have been ashamed of.
No, that’s wrong. We never did know whether she knew it or not too, even years after he was dead and she had all the money and the two children and the place which in her childhood had been just another Mississippi cotton farm but which he had changed with white fences and weather-vanes in the shape of horses so that it looked like a cross between a Kentucky country club and a Long Island race track, and plenty of friends who felt they owed it to her that she should know where all that money actually came from; and still, as soon as they approached the subject, she would change it — the slender dark girl still, even though she was a millionairess and the mother of two children, whose terrible power was that defenselessness and helplessness which conferred knighthood on any man who came within range, before he had a chance to turn and flee; — changing the entire subject as if she had never heard her husband’s name or, in fact, as though he had never lived.
I mean, this time Mother couldn’t even say “If he would only marry Melisandre Backus, she would save him from all this”, meaning Linda Snopes this time like she had meant Mrs Flem Snopes before. But at least she thought about saying it because almost at once she stopped worrying. “It’s all right,” she told Father. “It’s the same thing again: dont you remember?
He never was really interested in Melisandre. I mean.… you know: really interested. Books and flowers. Picking my jonquils and narcissus as fast as they bloomed, to send out there where that whole two-acre front yard was full of jonquils, cutting my best roses to take out there and sit in that hammock reading poetry to her. He was just forming her mind: that’s all he wanted.
And Melisandre was only five years younger, where with this one he is twice her age, practically her grandfather. Of course that’s all it is.”
Then Father said: “Heh heh heh. Form is right, only it’s on Gavin’s mind, not hers. It would be on mine too if I wasn’t already married and scared to look. Did you ever take a look at her? You’re human even if you are a woman.” Yes, I could remember a heap of times when Father had been born too soon, before they thought of wolf whistles.
“Stop it,” Mother said.
“But after all,” Father said, “maybe Gavin should be saved from those sixteen-year-old clutches. Suppose you speak to him; tell him I am willing to make a sacrifice of myself on the family altar — —”
“Stop it! Stop it!” Mother said. “Cant you at least be funny?”
“I’m worse than that, I’m serious,” Father said. “They were at a table in Christian’s yesterday afternoon. Gavin just had a saucer of ice cream but she was eating something in a dish that must have set him back twenty or thirty cents. So maybe Gavin knows what he’s doing after all; she’s got some looks of her own,
