And although the Chinese was definitely a colored man even if not a Negro, he was only he, single peculiar and barren; not just kinless but even kindless, half the world or anyway half the continent (we all knew about San Francisco’s Chinatown) sundered from his like and therefore as threatless as a mule.
There is a small Episcopal church in Jefferson, the oldest extant building in town (It was built by slaves and called the best, the finest too, I mean by the Northern tourists who passed through Jefferson now with cameras, expecting — we dont know why since they themselves had burned it and blown it up with dynamite in 1863 — to find Jefferson much older or anyway older looking than it is and faulting us a little because it isn’t.) and a Presbyterian congregation too, the two oldest congregations in the county, going back to the old days of Issetibbeha, the Chickasaw chief, and his sister’s son Ikkemo-tubbe whom they called Doom, before the county was a County and Jefferson was Jefferson.
But nowadays there wasn’t much difference between the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches and Issetibbeha’s old mounds in the low creek bottoms about the county because the Baptists and Methodists had heired from them, usurped and dispossessed; ours a town established and decreed by people neither Catholics nor Protestants nor even atheists but incorrigible Nonconformists, nonconformists not just to everybody else but to each other in mutual accord; a nonconformism defended and preserved by descendants whose ancestors hadn’t quitted home and security for a wilderness in which to find freedom of thought as they claimed and oh yes, believed, but to find freedom in which to be incorrigible and unreconstructible Baptists and Methodists; not to escape from tyranny as they claimed and believed, but to establish one.
And now, after eighteen years, the saw of retribution which we of course called that of righteousness and simple justice, was about to touch that secret hidden unhealed nail buried in the moral tree of our community — that nail not only corrupted and unhealed but unhealable because it was not just sin but mortal sin — a thing which should not exist at all, whose very conception should be self-annihilative, yet a sin which people seemed constantly and almost universally to commit with complete impunity; as witness these two for eighteen years, not only flouting decency and morality but even compelling decency and morality to accept them simply by being discrete: nobody had actually caught them yet; outraging morality itself by allying economics on their side since the very rectitude and solvency of a bank would be involved in their exposure.
In fact, the town itself was divided into two camps, each split in turn into what you might call a hundred individual nonconforming bivouacs: the women who hated Mrs Snopes for having grabbed Mr de Spain first or hated Mr de Spain for having preferred Mrs Snopes to them, and the men who were jealous of De Spain because they were not him or hated him for being younger than they or braver than they (they called it luckier of course); and those of both sexes — no: the same sour genderless sex — who hated them both for having found or made together something which they themselves had failed to make, whatever the reason; and in consequence of which that splendor must not only not exist, it must never have existed — the females of it who must abhor the splendor because it was, had to be, barren; the males of it who must hate the splendor because they had set the cold stability of currency above the wild glory of blood: they who had not only abetted the sin but had kept alive the anguish of their own secret regret by supporting the sinners’ security for the sake of De Spain’s bank.
Two camps: the one that said the sin must be exposed now, it had already lasted eighteen years too long; the other which said it dare not be exposed now and so reveal our own baseness in helping to keep it hidden all this long time.
Because the saw was not just seeking that nail. As far as Jefferson was concerned it had already touched it; we were merely waiting now to see in what direction the fragments of that particular tree in our wood (not the saw itself, never the saw: if that righteous and invincible moral blade flew to pieces at the contact, let us all dissolute too since the very fabric of Baptist and Methodist life were delusion, nothing) would scatter and disintegrate.
That was that whole afternoon while old Mr Varner still stayed hidden or anyway invisible in Mr Snopes’s house. We didn’t even know definitely that he was actually in town, nobody had seen him; we only had Ratliff’s word that he had come in in his son’s automobile at four oclock this morning, and we didn’t know that for sure unless Ratliff had sat up all night watching the Snopes’s front door. But then Mr Varner was there, he had to be or there wouldn’t be any use for the rest of it.
And Mr de Spain’s bank continued its ordinary sober busy prosperous gold-aura-ed course to the closing hour at three oclock, when almost at once the delivery boy from Christian’s drugstore knocked at the side door and was admitted with his ritual tray of four coca colas for the two girl book-keepers and Miss Killebrew the teller and Mr Hovis the cashier.
And presently, at his ordinary hour, Mr de Spain came out and got in his car as usual and drove away to look at one of the farms which he now owned or on which the bank held a mortgage, as he always did: no rush, no panic to burst upon the ordered financial day. And some time during the day, either forenoon or afternoon, somebody claimed to have seen Mr Snopes himself, unchanged too, unhurried and unalarmed, the wide black planter’s hat still looking brand new (the tiny bow tie which he had worn for eighteen years now always did), going about his inscrutable noncommunicable affairs.
Then it was five oclock and nothing had happened; soon now people would begin to go home to eat supper and then it would be too late and at first I thought of going up to the office to wait for Uncle Gavin to walk home, only I would have to climb the stairs and then turn around right away and come back down again and I thought how what a good name spring fever was to excuse not doing something you didn’t want to do, then I thought how maybe spring fever wasn’t an excuse at all because maybe spring fever actually was.
So I just stood on the corner where he would have to pass, to wait for him. Then I saw Mrs Snopes. She had just come out of the beauty parlor and as soon as you looked at her you could tell that’s where she had been and I remembered how Mother said once she was the only woman in Jefferson that never went to one because she didn’t need to since there was nothing in a beauty shop that she could have lacked.
But she had this time, standing there for a minute and she really did look both ways along the street before she turned and started toward me and then she saw me and came on and said, “Hello, Chick,” and I tipped my cap, only she came up and stopped and I took my cap off; she had a bag on her arm like ladies do, already opening it to reach inside.
“I was looking for you,” she said. “Will you give this to your uncle when you go home?”
“Yessum,” I said. It was an envelope.
“Thank you,” she said. “Have they heard any more about the little Riddell boy?”
“I dont know’m,” I said. It wasn’t sealed. It didn’t have any name on the front either.
“Let’s hope they got him to Memphis in time,” she said. Then she said Thank you again and went on, walking like she does, not like a pointer about to make game like Linda, but like water moves somehow. And she could have telephoned him at home and I almost said You dont want me to let Mother see it before I caught myself.
Because it wasn’t sealed. But then, I wouldn’t have anyway. Besides, I didn’t have to. Mother wasn’t even at home yet and then I remembered: Wednesday, she would be out at Sartoris at the meeting of the Byron Society though Mother said it had been a long time now since anybody listened to anybody read anything because they played bridge now but at least she said that when it met with Miss Jenny Du Pre they had toddies or juleps instead of just coffee or coca colas.
So nothing had happened and now it was already too late, the sun going down though the pear tree in the side yard had bloomed and gone a month ago and now the mocking bird had moved over to the pink dogwood, already beginning where he had sung all night long all week until you would begin to wonder why in the world
