So it was almost dark inside the house; I could already smell supper cooking and it was too late now, finished now: Mr de Spain gone out in his new Buick to watch how much money his cotton was making, and Mrs Snopes coming out of the beauty shop with her hair even waved or something or whatever it was, maybe for a party at her house tonight so maybe it hadn’t even begun; maybe old Mr Varner wasn’t even in town at all, not only wasn’t coming but never had aimed to and so all the Riddell boy did by catching polio was just to give us a holiday we didn’t expect and didn’t know what to do with; until I heard Uncle Gavin come in and come up the stairs and I met him in the upstairs hall with the envelope in my hand: just the shape of him coming up the stairs and along the hall until even in that light I saw his face all of a sudden and all of a sudden I said:
“You’re not going to be here for supper.”
“No,” he said. “Will you tell your mother?”
“Here,” I said and held out the envelope and he took it.
TWENTY
Gavin Stevens
THOUGH YOU HAVE to eat. So after I went back and unlocked the office and left the door on the latch, I drove out to Seminary Hill, to eat cheese and crackers and listen to old Mr Garraway curse Calvin Coolidge while he ran the last loafing Negroes out of the store and closed it for the night.
Or so I thought. Because you simply cannot go against a community. You can stand singly against any temporary unanimity of even a city-full of human behavior, even a mob. But you cannot stand against the cold inflexible abstraction of a long-suffering community’s moral point of view. Mr Garraway had been one of the first — no: the first — to move his account from Colonel Sartoris’s bank to the Bank of Jefferson, even before Flem Snopes ever thought or had reason to think of his tenant-farmer panic. He had moved it in fact as soon as we — the town and county — knew that Manfred de Spain was definitely to be president of it.
Because he — Mr Garraway — had been one of that original small inflexible unreconstructible puritan group, both Baptist and Methodist, in the county who would have moved their fiscal allegiance also from Jefferson while De Spain was mayor of it, to escape the moral contamination and express their opinion of that liaison which he represented, if there had been another fiscal town in the county to have moved it to. Though later, a year or two afterward, he moved the account back, perhaps because he was just old or maybe he could stay in his small dingy store out at Seminary Hill and not have to come to town, have to see with his own eyes and so be reminded of his county’s shame and disgrace and sin if he didn’t want to be. Or maybe once you accept something, it doesn’t really matter anymore whether you like it or not. Or so I thought.
The note said ten oclock. That was all: Please meet me at your office at ten tonight. Not if convenient, let alone when could you see me at your office? but simply at ten tonight please. You see. Because in the first place, Why me? Me? To say that to all of them, all three of them — no, all four, taking De Spain with me: Why cant you let me alone? What more can you want of me than I have already failed to do? But there would be plenty of time for that; I would have plenty of time to eat the sardines and crackers and say What a shame to the account of whatever the recent outrage the President and his party had contrived against Mr Garraway, when he — Mr Garraway — said suddenly (an old man with an old man’s dim cloudy eyes magnified and enormous behind the thick lenses of his iron-framed spectacles): “Is it so that Will Varner came in to town this morning?”
“Yes,” I said.
“So he caught them.” Now he was trembling, shaking, standing there behind the worn counter which he had inherited from his father, racked with tins of meat and spools of thread and combs and needles and bottles of cooking extract and malaria tonic and female compound some of which he had probably inherited too, saying in a shaking voice: “Not the husband! The father himself had to come in and catch them after eighteen years!”
“But you put your money back,” I said. “You took it out at first, when you just heard at second hand about the sin and shame and outrage. Then you put it back. Was it because you saw her too at last? She came out here one day, into your store, and you saw her yourself, got to know her, to believe that she at least was innocent? Was that it?”
“I knew the husband,” he said, cried almost, holding his voice down so the Negroes couldn’t hear what we — he was talking about. “I knew the husband! He deserved it!”
Then I remembered. “Yes,” I said, “I thought I saw you in town this afternoon.” Then I knew. “You moved it again today, didn’t you? You drew it out again and put it back into the Bank of Jefferson today, didn’t you?” and he standing there, shaking even while he tried to hold himself from it. “Why?” I said. “Why again today?”
“She must go,” he said. “They must both go — she and De Spain too.”
“But why?” I said, muttered too, not to be overheard: two white men discussing in a store full of Negroes a white woman’s adultery. More: adultery in the very top stratum of a white man’s town and bank. “Why only now? It was one thing as long as the husband accepted it; it became another when somebody — how did you put it? — catches them, blows the gaff? They become merely sinners then, criminals then, lepers then? nothing for constancy, nothing for fidelity, nothing for devotion, unpoliced devotion, eighteen years of devotion?”
“Is that all you want?” he said. “I’m tired. I want to go home.” Then we were on the gallery where a few of the Negroes still lingered, the arms and faces already fading back into the darkness behind the lighter shades of shirts and hats and pants as if they were slowly vacating them, while his shaking hands fumbled the heavy padlock through the hasp and fumbled it shut; until suddenly I said, quite loud:
“Though if anything the next one will be worse because the next president will probably be Governor Smith and you know who Governor Smith is of course: a Catholic,” and would have stopped that in time in very shame but could not, or maybe should have stopped it in time in very shame but would not.
Since who was I, what anguish’s missionary I that I must compound it blindly right and left like some blind unrational minor force of nature? who had already spoiled supper and ruined sleep both for the old man standing there fumbling with his clumsy lock as if I had actually struck him, — the old man who in his fashion, in a lot of people’s fashion, really was a kindly old man who never in his life wittingly or unwittingly harmed anyone black or white, not serious harm: not more than adding a few extra cents to what it would have been for cash, when the article went on credit; or selling to a Negro for half-price or often less (oh yes, at times even giving it to him) the tainted meat or rancid lard or weevilled flour or meal he would not have permitted a white man — a Protestant gentile white man of course — to eat at all out of his store; standing there with his back turned fumbling at the giant padlock as though I had actually struck him, saying,
“They must go. They must go, both of them.”
There is a ridge; you drive on beyond Seminary Hill and in time you come upon it: a mild unhurried farm road presently mounting to cross the ridge and on to join the main highway leading from Jefferson to the world. And now, looking back and down, you see all Yoknapatawpha in the dying last of day beneath you. There are stars now, just pricking out as you watch them among the others already coldly and softly burning; the end of day is one vast green soundless murmur up the northwest toward the zenith. Yet it is as though light were not being subtracted from earth, drained from earth backward and upward into that cooling green, but rather had gathered, pooling for an unmoving moment yet, among the low places of the ground so that ground, earth itself is luminous and only the dense clumps of trees are dark, standing darkly and immobile out of it.
Then, as though at signal, the fireflies — lightning-bugs of the Mississippi child’s vernacular — myriad and frenetic, random and frantic, pulsing; not questing, not quiring, but choiring as if
