“I’ll see to it,” Snopes said.
“I mean held right here unto I walks in and touches him,” Turl said. “I dont care how late it is.”
“I’ll see to that,” Snopes said.
Except that it had already quit lasting any longer at all; Gowan and Mr Harker had barely reached the plant the next evening when Mr Harker took one quick glance around. But before he could even speak Mr Snopes was standing in the office door, saying, “Where’s Tom Tom?”
Because it wasn’t Tom Tom waiting to turn over to the night crew: it was Tom Tom’s substitute, who fired the boilers on Sunday while Tom Tom was taking his new young wife to church; Gowan said Mr Harker said,
“Hell fire,” already moving, running past Mr Snopes into the office and scrabbling at the telephone.
Then he was out of the office again, not even stopping while he hollered at Gowan: “All right, Otis” — his nephew or cousin or something who had inherited the saw mill, who would come in and take over when Mr Harker wanted a night off— “Otis’ll be here in fifteen minutes. Jest do the best you can until then.”
“Hold up,” Gowan said. “I’m going too.”
“Durn that,” Mr Harker said, still running, “I seen it first:” on out the back where the spur track for the coal cars led back to the main line where Tom Tom would walk every morning and evening between his home and his job, running (Mr Harker) in the moonlight now because the moon was almost full. In fact, the whole thing was full of moonlight when Mr Harker and Turl appeared peacefully at the regular hour to relieve Tom Tom’s substitute the next evening:
“Yes sir,” Mr Harker told Gowan, “I was jest in time. It was Turl’s desperation, you see. This would be his last go-round.
This time he was going to have to find that brass, or come back and tell Mr Snopes he couldn’t, in either case that country picnic was going to be over. So I was jest in time to see him creep up out of that corn patch and cross the moonlight to that back window and tomcat through it; jest exactly time enough for him to creep across the room to the bed and likely fling the quilt back and lay his hand on meat and say, ‘Honeybunch, lay calm.
Papa’s done arrived.’ “ And Gowan said how even twenty-four hours afterward he partook for the instant of Turl’s horrid surprise, who believed that at that moment Tom Tom was two miles away at the power plant waiting for him (Turl) to appear and relieve him of the coal scoop; — Tom Tom lying fully dressed beneath the quilt with a naked butcher knife in his hand when Turl flung it back.
“Jest exactly time enough,” Mr Harker said. “Jest exactly as on time as two engines switching freight cars. Tom Tom must a made his jump jest exactly when Turl whirled to run, Turl jumping out of the house into the moonlight again with Tom Tom and the butcher knife riding on his back so that they looked jest like — What do you call them double-jointed half-horse fellers in the old picture books?”
“Centaur,” Gowan said.
“ — looking jest like a centawyer running on its hind legs and trying to ketch up with itself with a butcher knife about a yard long in one of its extry front hoofs until they run out of the moonlight again into the woods. Yes sir, Turl aint even half as big as Tom Tom, but he sho toted him. If you’d a ever bobbled once, that butcher knife would a caught you whether Tom Tom did or not, wouldn’t it?”
“Tom Tom a big buck man,” Turl said. “Make three of me. But I toted him. I had to. And whenever I would fling my eye back and see the moon shining on that butcher knife I could a picked up two more like him without even slowing down.” Turl said how at first he just ran; it was only after he found himself — or themself — among the trees that he thought about trying to rake Tom Tom off against the trunk of one. “But he helt on so tight with that one arm that whenever I tried to bust him against a tree I busted myself too. Then we’d bounce off and I’d catch another flash of moonlight on that nekkid blade and all I could do was just run.
“ ‘Bout then was when Tom Tom started squalling to let him down. He was holding on with both hands now, so I knowed I had done outrun that butcher knife anyway. But I was good started then; my feets never paid Tom Tom no more mind when he started squalling to stop and let him off than they done me. Then he grabbed my head with both hands and started to wrenching it around like I was a runaway bareback mule, and then I seed the ditch too. It was about forty foot deep and it looked a solid mile across but it was too late then.
My feets never even slowed up. They run as far as from here to that coal pile yonder out into nekkid air before we even begun to fall. And they was still clawing moonlight when me and Tom Tom hit the bottom.”
The first thing Gowan wanted to know was, what Tom Tom had used in lieu of the dropped butcher knife. Turl told that. Nothing. He and Tom Tom just sat in the moonlight on the floor of the ditch and talked.
And Uncle Gavin explained that: a sanctuary, a rationality of perspective, which animals, humans too, not merely reach but earn by passing through unbearable emotional states like furious rage or furious fear, the two of them sitting there not only in Uncle Gavin’s amicable cuckoldry but in mutual and complete federation too: Tom Tom’s home violated not by Tomey’s Turl but by Flem Snopes; Turl’s life and limbs put into frantic jeopardy not by Tom Tom but by Flem Snopes.
“That was where I come in,” Mr Harker said.
“You?” Gowan said.
“He holp us,” Turl said.
“Be durn if that’s so,” Mr Harker said. “Have you and Tom Tom both already forgot what I told you right there in that ditch last night? I never knowed nothing and I dont aim to know nothing, I dont give a durn how hard either one of you try to make me?”
“All right,” Gowan said. “Then what?” Turl told that: how he and Tom Tom went back to the house and Tom Tom untied his wife where he had tied her to a chair in the kitchen and the three of them hitched the mule to the wagon and got the brass out of the corn crib and loaded it to haul it away. There was near a half-ton of it; it took them the rest of the night to finish moving it.
“Move it where?” Gowan said. Only he said he decided to let Mr Snopes himself ask that; it was nearing daylight now and soon Tom Tom would come up the spur track from the main line, carrying his lunch pail to take over for the day shift; and presently there he was, with his little high hard round intractable cannon ball head, when they all turned and there was Mr Snopes too standing in the boiler room door. And Gowan said that even Mr Snopes seemed to know he would just be wasting his time crooking his finger at anybody this time; he just said right out to Turl:
“Why didn’t you find it?”
“Because it wasn’t there,” Turl said.
“How do you know it wasn’t there?” Mr Snopes said.
“Because Tom Tom said it wasn’t,” Turl said.
Because the time for wasting time was over now. Mr Snopes just looked at Tom Tom a minute. Then he said: “What did you do with it?”
“We put it where you said you wanted it,” Tom Tom said.
“We?” Mr Snopes said.
“Me and Turl,” Tom Tom said. And now Mr Snopes looked at Tom Tom for another minute. Then he said:
“Where I said I wanted it when?”
“When you told me what you aimed to do with them safety-valves,” Tom Tom said.
Though by the time the water in the tank would begin to taste brassy enough for somebody to think about draining the tank to clean it, it wouldn’t be Mr Snopes. Because he was no longer superintendent now, having resigned, as Mr de Spain would have said when he was still Lieutenant de Spain, “for the good of the service.” So he could sit all day now on the gallery of his little back street rented house and look at the shape of the tank standing against the sky above the Jefferson roof-line, — looking at his own monument, some might have thought. Except that it was not a monument: it was a footprint. A monument only says At least I got this far while a footprint says This is where I was when I moved again.
“Not even now?” Uncle Gavin said to Ratliff.
“Not even now,” Ratliff said. “Not catching his wife with Manfred de Spain yet is like that twenty-dollar gold piece pinned to your undershirt on your first maiden trip to what you hope is going to be a Memphis whorehouse. He dont need to unpin it yet.”
TWO
Gavin Stevens
HE HADN’T UNPINNED it yet. So we all wondered what
