“Yes,” she said. “That’s where I met Chick.”
“But not inside,” I said, already trying to stop. “Not where water and soap are coeval, conjunctive,” still trying to stop. “Not for a few years yet,” and did. “All right,” I said. “Tell me. What was it he took out there to your mother yesterday that had old Will on the road to town at two oclock this morning?”
“There’s your cob pipe,” she said. They were in the brass bowl beside the tobacco jar. “You’ve got three of them. I’ve never seen you smoke one. When do you smoke them?”
“All right,” I said. “Yes. What was it he took out there?”
“The will,” she said.
“No no,” I said. “I know about the will; Ratliff told me. I mean, what was it Flem took out there to your mother yesterday morning—”
“I told you. The will.”
“Will?” I said.
“Linda’s will. Giving her share of whatever she would inherit from me, to her — him.” And I sat there and she too, opposite one another across the desk, the lamp between us low on the desk so that all we could really see of either probably was just the hands: mine on the desk and hers quite still, almost like two things asleep, on the bag in her lap, her voice almost like it was asleep too so that there was no anguish, no alarm, no outrage anywhere in the little quiet dingy mausoleum of human passions, high and secure, secure even from any random exigency of what had been impressed on Otis Harker as his duty for which he was paid his salary, since he already knew it would be me in it: “The will. It was her idea. She did it herself. I mean, she believes she thought of it, wanted to do it, did it, herself. Nobody can tell her otherwise. Nobody will. Nobody. That’s why I wrote the note.”
“You’ll have to tell me,” I said. “You’ll have to.”
“It was the … school business. When you told her she wanted to go, get away from here; all the different schools to choose among that she hadn’t even known about before, that it was perfectly natural for a young girl — young people to want to go to them and to go to one of them, that until then she hadn’t even thought about, let alone known that she wanted to go to one of them. Like all she needed to do to go to one of them was just to pick out the one she liked the best and go to it, especially after I said Yes. Then her — he said No.
“As if that was the first time she ever thought of No, ever heard of No. There was a … scene. I dont like scenes. You dont have to have scenes. Nobody needs to have a scene to get what you want. You just get it.
But she didn’t know that, you see. She hadn’t had time to learn it maybe, since she was just seventeen then. But then you know that yourself. Or maybe it was more than not knowing better. Maybe she knew too much. Maybe she already knew, felt even then that he had already beat her. She said: ‘I will go! I will! You cant stop me! Damn your money; if Mamma wont give it to me, Grandpa will — Mr Stevens (oh yes, she said that too) will—’ While he just sat there — we were sitting then, still at the table; only Linda was standing up — just sat there saying, ‘That’s right. I cant stop you.’ Then she said, ‘Please.’ Oh yes, she knew she was beaten as well as he did. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want you to stay at home and go to the Academy.’
“And that was all. I mean … nothing. That was just all. Because you — a girl anyway — dont really hate your father no matter how much you think you do or should or should want to because people expect you to or that it would look well to because it would be romantic to—”
“Yes,” I said, “ — because girls, women, are not interested in romance but only facts. Oh yes, you were not the only one: Ratliff told me that too, that same day in fact.”
“Vladimir too?” she said.
“No: Ratliff,” I said. Then I said, “Wait.” Then I said: “Vladimir? Did you say Vladimir? V.K. Is his name Vladimir?” And now she did sit still, even the hands on the bag that had been like things asleep and breathing their own life apart, seemed to become still now.
“I didn’t intend to do that,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “I know: nobody else on earth knows his name is Vladimir because how could anybody named Vladimir hope to make a living selling sewing machines or anything else in rural Mississippi? But he told you: the secret he would have defended like that of insanity in his family or illegitimacy. Why? — No, dont answer that. Why shouldn’t I know why he told you; didn’t I breathe one blinding whiff of that same liquor too? Tell me. I wont either. Vladimir K. What K?”
“Vladimir Kyrilytch.”
“Vladimir Kyrilytch what? Not Ratliff. Kyrilytch is only his middle name; all Russian middle names are itch or ovna. That’s just son or daughter of. What was his last name before it became Ratliff?”
“He doesn’t know. His … six or eight or ten times grandfather was … not lieutenant—”
“Ensign.”
“ — in a British army that surrendered in the Revolution—”
“Yes,” I said. “Burgoyne. Saratoga.”
“ — and was sent to Virginia and forgotten and Vla — his grandfather escaped. It was a woman of course, a girl, that hid him and fed him. Except that she spelled it R-a-t-c-l-i-f-f-e and they married and had a son or had the son and then married. Anyway he learned to speak English and became a Virginia farmer.
And his grandson, still spelling it with a c and an e at the end but with his name still Vladimir Kyrilytch though nobody knew it, came to Mississippi with old Doctor Habersham and Alexander Holston and Louis Grenier and started Jefferson. Only they forgot how to spell it Ratcliffe and just spelled it like it sounds but one son is always named Vladimir Kyrilytch. Except that like you said, nobody named Vladimir Kyrilytch could make a living as a Mississippi country man—”
“No,” I said, cried. “Wait. That’s wrong. We’re both wrong. We’re completely backward. If only everybody had known his name was really Vladimir Kyrilytch, he would be a millionaire by now since any woman anywhere would have bought anything or everything he had to sell or trade or swap. Or maybe they already do?” I said, cried. “Maybe they already do? — All right,” I said. “Go on.”
“But one in each generation still has to have the name because Vla — V.K. says the name is their luck.”
“Except that it didn’t work against Flem Snopes,” I said. “Not when he tangled with Flem Snopes that night in that old Frenchman’s garden after you came back from Texas. — All right,” I said. “ ‘So that was all because you dont really hate your father—’”
“He did things for her. That she didn’t expect, hadn’t even thought about asking for. That young girls like, almost as though he had put himself inside a young girl’s mind even before she thought of them. He gave me the money and sent us both to Memphis to buy things for her graduation from high school — not just a graduating dress but one for dancing too, and other things for the summer; almost a trousseau. He even tried — offered, anyway told her he was going to — to have a picnic for her whole graduating class but she refused that.
You see? He was her father even if he did have to be her enemy. You know: the one that said ‘Please’ accepting the clothes, while the one that defied him to stop her refused the picnic.
“And that summer he gave me the money and even made the hotel reservation himself for us to go down to the coast — you may remember that—”
“I remember,” I said.
“ — to spend a month so she could swim in the ocean and meet people, meet young men; he said that himself: meet young men. And we came back and that fall she entered the Academy and he started giving her a weekly allowance. Would you believe that?”
“I do now,” I said. “Tell me.”
“It was too much, more than she could need, had any business with, too much for a seventeen-year-old girl to have every week just in Jefferson. Yet she took that too that she didn’t really need just like she took the Academy that she didn’t want. Because he was her father, you see. You’ve got to remember that. Can you?”
“Tell me,” I said.
“That was the fall, the winter. He still gave her things — clothes she didn’t need, had no business with, seventeen years old in Jefferson; you may have noticed that too; even a fur coat until she refused to let him, said No in time. Because you see, that was the You cant stop me again; she had to remind him now and then that she had defied him; she could accept the daughter’s due but not the enemy’s bribe.
“Then it was summer, last summer. That was when
