It was the original one, who appeared in Frenchman’s Bend sitting in the buggy and left Frenchman’s Bend in the buggy, still sitting, and appeared in Jefferson five years later still sitting, translated, we knew not how, and with no interval between from the buggy where Ratliff had seen her twenty-two miles away that day five years ago, to the rocking chair on the front gallery of the boarding house where we saw her now, still at that same right angle enclosing her lap as if she had no movable hinge at the hips at all — a woman who gave an impression of specific density and immobility like lead or uranium, so that whatever force had moved her from the buggy to that chair had not been merely human, not even ten I.O.’s.
Because Snopes was moving his echelons up fast now.
That one — I.O. and the vast gray-colored sitting wife and that vast gray-colored boy (his name was Montgomery Ward) — did not even pause at the tent behind the restaurant where Eck and his wife and two sons now (“Why not?” Ratliff said. “There’s a heap of more things besides frying a hamburger you dont really have to look down for.”) were still living.
They — the I.O.’s — by-passed it completely, the wife already sitting in the rocking chair on the boarding house’s front gallery — a big more-or-less unpainted square building just off the Square where itinerant cattle drovers and horse- and mule-traders stopped and where were incarcerated, boarded and fed, juries and important witnesses during court term, where she would sit rocking steadily — not doing anything, not reading, not particularly watching who passed in or out of the door or along the street: just rocking — for the next five years while and then after the place changed from a boarding house to a warren, with nailed to one of the front veranda posts a pine board lettered terrifically by hand, with both S’s reversed:
NOPE HOTEL
And now Eck, whose innocence or honesty or both had long since eliminated him from the restaurant into his night watchman’s chair beside the depot oil tank, had vacated his wife and sons (Wallstreet Panic: oh yes, I was like Ratliff: I couldn’t believe that one either, though the younger one, Admiral Dewey, we both could) from the tent behind it.
In fact, the restaurant was not sold lock stock barrel and goodwill, but gutted, moved intact even to the customers and without even a single whole day’s closure, into the new boarding house where Mrs Eck was now the landlady; moved intact past the rocking figure on the gallery which continued to rock there through mere legend and into landmark like the effigy signs before the old-time English public houses, so that country men coming into town and inquiring for the Snopes hotel were told simply to walk in that direction until they came to a woman rocking, and that was it.
And now there entered that one, not whose vocation but at least the designation of whose vocation, I.O. Snopes had usurped. This was the actual Snopes schoolmaster. No: he looked like a schoolmaster.
No: he looked like John Brown with an ineradicable and unhideable flaw: a tall gaunt man in a soiled frock coat and string tie and a wide politician’s hat, with cold furious eyes and the long chin of a talker: not that verbal diarrhea of his cousin (whatever kin I.O. was; they none of them seemed to bear any specific kinship to one another; they were just Snopeses, like colonies of rats or termites are just rats and termites) but a kind of unerring gift for a base and evil ratiocination in argument, and for correctly reading the people with whom he dealt: a demagogue’s capacity for using people to serve his own appetites, all clouded over with a veneer of culture and religion; the very names of his two sons, Byron and Virgil, were not only instances but warnings.
And no schoolmaster himself either. That is, unlike his cousin, he was not even with us long enough to have to prove he was not. Or maybe, coming to us in the summer and then gone before the summer was, he was merely between assignments. Or maybe taking a busman’s holiday from a busman’s holiday.
Or maybe in and about the boarding house and the Square in the mere brief intervals from his true bucolic vocation whose stage and scene were the scattered country churches and creeks and horse-ponds where during the hot summer Sundays revival services and baptisings took place: himself (he had a good baritone voice and probably the last working pitch pipe in north Mississippi) setting the tune and lining out the words, until one day a posse of enraged fathers caught him and a fourteen-year-old girl in an empty cotton house and tarred and feathered him out of the country. There had been talk of castration also though some timid conservative dissuaded them into holding that as a promise against his return.
So of him there remained only the two sons, Byron and Virgil. Nor was Byron with us long either, gone to Memphis now to attend business college. To learn book-keeping; we learned with incredulity that Colonel Sartoris himself was behind that: Colonel Sartoris himself in the back room of the bank which was his office; — an incredulity which demanded, compelled inquiry while we remembered what some of us, the older ones, my father among them, had not forgot: the original Ab Snopes, the (depending on where you stand) patriot horse raider or simple horse thief who had been hanged (not by a Federal provost-marshal but by a Confederate one, the old story was) while a member of the cavalry command of old Colonel Sartoris, the real colonel, father of our present banker-honorary colonel who had been only an uncommissioned A.D.C. on his father’s staff, back in that desperate twilight of 1864–65 when more people than men named Snopes had to choose not survival with honor but simply between empty honor and almost as empty survival.
The horse which came home to roost. Oh yes, we all said that, all us wits: we would not have missed that chance. Not that we believed it or even disbelieved it, but simply to defend the old Colonel’s memory by being first to say aloud among ourselves what we believed the whole Snopes tribe was long since chortling over to one another. Indeed, no Confederate provost-marshal hanged that first Ab Snopes, but Snopeses themselves had immolated him in that skeleton, to put, as the saying is, that monkey on the back of Ab’s commander’s descendant as soon as the lineage produced a back profitable to the monkey; in this case, the new bank which our Colonel Sartoris established about five years ago.
Not that we really believed that, of course. I mean, our Colonel Sartoris did not need to be blackmailed with a skeleton. Because we all in our country, even half a century after, sentimentalise the heroes of our gallant lost irrevocable unreconstructible debacle, and those heroes were indeed ours because they were our fathers and grandfathers and uncles and great-uncles when Colonel Sartoris raised the command right here in our contiguous counties.
And who with more right to sentimentalise them than our Colonel Sartoris, whose father had been the Colonel Sartoris who had raised and trained the command and saved its individual lives when he could in battle and even defended them or at least extricated them from their own simple human lusts and vices while idle between engagements; Byron Snopes was not the first descendant of those old company and battalion and regimental names who knew our Colonel Sartoris’s bounty.
But the horse which at last came home to roost sounded better. Not witty, but rather an immediate unified irrevocably scornful front to what the word Snopes was to mean to us, and to all others, no matter who, whom simple juxtaposition to the word irrevocably smirched and contaminated.
Anyway, he (it: the horse come to roost) appeared in good time, armed and girded with his business college diploma; we would see him through, beyond, inside the grillework which guarded our money and the complex records of it whose custodian Colonel Sartoris was, bowed (he, Snopes, Byron) over the book-keepers’ desk in an attitude not really of prayer, obeisance; not really of humility before the shine, the blind glare of the blind money, but rather of a sort of respectful unhumble insistence, a deferent invincible curiosity and inquiry into the mechanics of its recording; he had not entered crawling into the glare of a mystery so much as, without attracting any attention to himself, he was trying to lift a corner of its skirt.
Using, since he was the low last man in that hierarchy, a long cane fishing-pole until he could accrete close enough for the hand to reach; using, to really mix, really confuse our metaphor, an humble cane out of that same quiver which had contained that power-plant superintendency, since Colonel Sartoris had been of that original group of old Major de Spain’s bear and deer hunters when Major de Spain established his annual hunting camp in the Big Bottom shortly after the war; and when Colonel Sartoris started his bank five years ago, Manfred de Spain used his father’s money to become one of the first stockholders and directors.
Oh yes: the
