Complete works of willia.., p.532
Complete Works of William Faulkner, page 532
McKinley built it himself, doing all the rough heavy work, with one professional carpenter to mark off the planks for him to saw, with the seething old man ambushed in the wheel chair behind the window without even the hog any more to vent his rage on. Obviously, as well as from habit, Meadowfill would have to keep the loaded rifle at hand. He could have no way whatever of knowing the hog would not come back; and now the town began to speculate on just how long it would be, how much he would be able to stand, before he fired the rifle at one of them — McKinley or the carpenter. Presently it would have to be the carpenter unless Meadowfill took to jack-lighting, because one day (it was spring now) McKinley had a mule too and the town learned that he had rented a small piece of land two miles from town and was making a cotton crop on it. The house was about finished now, down to the millwork and trim which only the expert carpenter could do, so McKinley would depart on the mule each morning at sunrise, to be gone until nightfall. Which was when old Meadowfill probably touched the absolute of rage and impotence: McKinley might yet have been harried or frightened into selling his unfinished house and lot at any moment, possibly even for a profit. But no man in his senses would buy a cotton crop that hadn’t even sprouted yet. Nothing could help him now but death — his own or McKinley’s.
Then the hog came back. It simply reappeared; probably one morning Meadowfill wheeled himself from the breakfast table to the window, expecting to face nothing save one more day of static outrage, when there was the hog again, rooting for the ghosts of last year’s peaches as though it had never been away. In fact, maybe that’s what Meadowfill wanted to believe at that moment: that the hog had never been away at all and so all that had happened since to outrage him had been only a dream, and even the dream to be exorcised away by the next shot he would deliver. Which was immediately; evidently he had kept the loaded rifle at his hand all the time; some of the neighbours said they heard the vicious juvenile spat while they were still in bed.
The sound of it had spread over the rest of town by noon, though Charles’s Uncle Gavin was one of the few who actually felt the repercussion. He was just leaving the office to go home to dinner when he heard the feet on the stairs. Then Res Snopes entered, the five-dollar bill already in his hand. He laid it on the desk and said, “Good-morning, Lawyer. I won’t keep you long. I jest want a little advice — about five dollars’ worth.” Stevens didn’t touch the bill yet: just looking from it to its owner who had never been known to pay five dollars for anything he didn’t already know he could sell for at least twenty-five cents profit: “It’s that hawg of mine that old gentleman — Mister Meadowfill — likes to shoot with them little bird shot.”
“I heard about it,” his uncle said. “Just what do you want for your five dollars?” Charles uncle told it: Snopes standing beyond the desk, not secret: just polite and inscrutable. “For telling you what you already know? that once you sue him for injuring your hog, he will invoke the law against livestock running loose inside the city limits? For telling you what you already knew over a year ago when he fired the first shot at it? Either fix the fence or get rid of the hog.”
“It costs a right smart to feed a hawg,” Snopes said. “As for getting rid of it, that old gentleman has done shot it so much now, I doubt wouldn’t nobody buy it.”
“Then eat it,” Stevens said.
“A whole hawg, for jest one man? Let alone with going on two years of bird shot in it?”
“Then give it away,” Stevens said, and tried to stop himself but it was too late.
“That’s your legal lawyer’s advice then,” Snopes said. “Give the hawg away. Much obliged,” he said, already turning.
“Here,” Stevens said, “wait;” holding out the bill.
“I come to you for legal lawyer’s advice,” Snopes said. “You give it to me: give the hawg away. I owe the fee for it. If five dollars ain’t enough, say so.” Then he was gone. Stevens was thinking fast now, not Why did he choose me? because that was obvious: he had drawn Essie Meadowfill’s deed to the property under dispute; he was the only person in Jefferson outside Meadowfill’s family with whom old Meadowfill had had anything resembling human contact in almost twenty years. Nor even Why did Snopes need to notify any outsider, lawyer or not, that he intended to give that hog away? Nor even Why did he lead me into saying the actual words first myself, technically constituting them paid-for legal advice? Instead, what Stevens thought was How, by giving that hog away, is he going to compel old Meadowfill to sell that lot?
His Uncle Gavin always said he was not really interested in truth nor even justice: that all he wanted was just to know, to find out, whether the answer was any of his business or not; and that all means to that end were valid, provided he left neither hostile witnesses nor incriminating evidence. Charles didn’t believe him; some of his methods were not only too hard, they took too long; and there are some things you simply do not do even to find out. But his uncle said that Charles was wrong: that curiosity is another of the mistresses whose slaves decline no sacrifice.
The trouble in this case was, his uncle didn’t know what he was looking for. He had two methods — inquiry and observation — and three leads — Snopes, the hog and Meadowfill — to discover what he might not recognise in time even when he found it. He couldn’t use inquiry, because the only one who might know the answer — Snopes — had already told all he intended for anyone to know. And he couldn’t use observation on the hog because, like Snopes, it could move too. Which left only the one immobile: old Meadowfill. So he picked Charles up the next morning and at daylight they were ambushed also in his uncle’s parked car where they could see the Meadowfill house and orchard and the lane leading to Snopes’s house and, as the other point of the triangle, the little new house which McKinley Smith had almost finished. They sat there for two hours. They watched McKinley depart on his mule for his cotton patch. Then Snopes himself came out of his yard into the lane and went on toward town, the Square. Presently it was time for even Essie Meadowfill to go to work. Then there remained only old Meadowfill ambushed behind his window. Only the hog was missing.
“If that’s what we’re waiting for,” Charles said.
“I agree,” his uncle said.
“I mean, to distract the eyes that have probably been watching us for the last two hours long enough for us to get away.”
“I didn’t want to come either,” his uncle said. “But I had to or give that five dollars back.”
And the next morning was the same. By then it was too late to quit; they both had too much invested now, not even counting Snopes’s five dollars: two days of getting up before dawn, to sit for two hours in the parked car without even a cup of coffee, waiting for what they were not even sure they would recognise when they saw it. It was the third morning; McKinley and his mule had departed on schedule: so regular and normal that he and his uncle didn’t even realise they has not seen Snopes yet until Essie Meadowfill herself came out of the house on her way to work. To Charles it was like one of those shocks, starts such as when you find yourself waking up without knowing until then you were asleep; his uncle was already getting out of the car to begin to run when they saw the hog. That is, it was the hog and it was doing exactly what they expected it to do: moving toward Meadowfill’s orchard at that twinkling purposeful porcine trot. Only it was not where it should have been when it first became visible. It was going where they expected it to be going, but it was not coming from where it should have been coming from. It was coming not from the direction of Snopes’s house but from that of McKinley Smith’s. His uncle was already running, possibly from what Ratliff called his uncle’s simple instinct or affinity for being where something was going to happen, even if he wasn’t always quite on time, hurrying — Charles too of course — across the street and the little yard and into the house before old Meadowfill would see the hog through the window and make the shot.
His uncle didn’t knock; they entered running, his uncle choosing by simple orientation the door beyond which old Meadowfill would have to be to use that particular window, and he was there, leaning forward in the wheel chair at the window, the glass sash of which was already raised though the screen was still down, the little rifle already half raised in one hand, the other hand grasping the handle to the screen to jerk it up. But he — Meadowfill — was just sitting there yet, looking at the hog. The town had got used to seeing meanness and vindictiveness and rage in his face; they were normal. But this time there was nothing in his face but gloating. He didn’t even turn his head when Charles and his uncle entered: he just said, “Come right in; you got a grandstand seat.” Now they could hear him cursing: not hard honest outdoors swearing but the quiet murmuring indoors obscenity which, Charles thought, if he ever had used it, his grey hairs should have forgot it now.
Then he began to stand up from the wheel chair and then Charles saw it too — a smallish lump a little longer than a brick, wrapped in a piece of gunny sack, bound in a crotch of the nearest peach tree about twenty feet from the house so that it pointed at the window, his uncle saying, “Stop! Stop! Don’t raise it!” and even reaching for the screen, but too late; old Meadowfill, standing now, leaned the rifle beside the window and put both hands on the handle and jerked the screen up. Then the light sharp vicious spat of the ·22 cartridge from the peach tree; his uncle said he was actually looking at the rising screen when the wire frayed and vanished before the miniature blast; Charles himself seemed actually to hear the tiny pellets hiss across old Meadowfill’s belly and chest as the old man half-leaped half-fell backward into the chair which rushed from under him, leaving him asprawl on the floor, where he lay for a moment with on his face an expression of incredulous outrage: not pain, not anguish, fright: just outrage, already reaching for the rifle as he sat up.
“Somebody shot me!” he said.
“Certainly,” his uncle said, taking the rifle away from him. “That hog did. Can you blame it? Just lie still now until we can see.”
“Hog, hell,” old Meadowfill said. “It was that blank blank blank McKinley Smith!”
He wasn’t hurt: just burned, blistered, the tiny shot which had had to penetrate not only his pants and shirt but his winter underwear too, barely under his skin. But mad as a hornet, raging, bellowing and cursing and still trying to take the rifle away from Charles’s uncle (Mrs Meadowfill was in the room now, the shawl already clutched about her head as if some fatalistic hopeless telepathy communicated to her the instant the hog crossed their unfenced boundary, like the electric eye that opens doors) until at last he exhausted himself into what would pass with him for rationality. Then he told it: how Snopes had told Essie two days ago that he had given the hog to McKinley as a housewarming present or maybe even — Snopes hoped — a wedding gift some day soon, with Charles’s uncle saying, “Hold on a minute. Did Essie say Mr Snopes gave the hog to McKinley, or did she say Mr Snopes told her he had?”
“What?” Meadowfill said. “What?” Then he just began to curse again.
“Lie still,” Charles’s uncle said. “You’ve been shooting that hog for over a year now without hurting it so I reckon you can stand one shot yourself. But we’ll have a doctor on your wife’s account.”
His uncle had the gun too: a very neat home-made booby trap: a cheap single-shot ·22 also, sawed-off barrel and stock and fastened to a board, the whole thing wrapped in the piece of feed sack and bound in the crotch of the tree, a black strong small-gauge length of reel-backing running from the trigger through a series of screw eyes to the sash of the window screen, the muzzle trained at the centre of the window about a foot above the sill.
“If he hadn’t stood up before he raised that screen, the charge would have hit him square in the face,” Charles said.
“So what?” his uncle said. “Do you think who put it there cared? Whether it merely frightened and enraged him into rushing at Smith with that rifle” — it had a solid bullet in it this time, the big one: the long rifle; this time old Meadowfill aimed to hurt what he shot— “and compelling Smith to kill him in self-defence, or whether the shot blinded him or killed him right there in his wheel chair and so solved the whole thing? Her father dead and her sweetheart in jail for murdering him, and only Essie to need to deal with?”
“It was pretty smart,” Charles said.
“It was worse. It was bad. Nobody would ever have believed anyone except a Pacific veteran would have invented a booby trap, no matter how much he denied it.”
“It was still smart,” Charles said. “Even Smith will agree.”
“Yes,” his uncle said. “That’s why I wanted you along. You were a soldier too. I may need an interpreter to talk to him.”
“I was just a major,” Charles said. “I never had enough rank to tell anything to any sergeant, let alone a Marine one.”
“He was just a corporal,” his uncle said.
“He was still a Marine,” Charles said.
Only they didn’t go to Smith first; he would be in his cotton patch now anyway. And, Charles told himself, if Snopes had been him, there wouldn’t be anybody in Snopes’s house either. But there was. Snopes opened the door himself; he was wearing an apron and carrying a frying pan; there was even a fried egg in it. But there wasn’t anything in his face at all. “Gentle-men,” he said. “Come in.”
“No thanks,” Charles’s uncle said. “It won’t take that long. This is yours, I think.” There was a table; his uncle laid the sack-wrapped bundle on it and flipped the edge of the sacking, the mutilated rifle sliding across the table. And still there was nothing whatever in Snopes’s face or voice:
“That-ere is what you lawyers call debateable, ain’t it?”
“Oh yes,” Charles’s uncle said. “Everybody knows about fingerprints now, just as they do about booby traps.”
“Yes,” Snopes said. “Likely you ain’t making me a present of it.”
“That’s right,” his uncle said. “I’m selling it to you. For a deed to Essie Meadowfill for that strip of your lot the oil company wants to buy, plus that thirteen feet that Mr Meadowfill thought he owned.” And now indeed Snopes didn’t move, immobile with the cold egg in the frying pan. “That’s right,” his uncle said. “In that case, I’ll see if McKinley Smith wants to buy it.”
Snopes looked at his uncle a moment. He was smart; you would have to give him that, Charles thought. “I reckon you would,” he said. “Likely that’s what I would do myself.”
“That’s what I thought,” his uncle said.
“I reckon I’ll have to go and see Cousin Flem,” Snopes said.
“I reckon not,” his uncle said. “I just came from the bank.”
“I reckon I would have done that myself too,” Snopes said. “What time will you be in your office?”
And he and his uncle could have met Smith at his house at sundown too. Instead, it was not even noon when Charles and his uncle stood at the fence and watched McKinley and the mule come up the long black shear of turning earth like the immobilised wake of the plough’s mould board. Then he was standing across the fence from them, naked from the waist up in his overalls and combat boots. Charles’s uncle handed him the deed. “Here,” his uncle said.
Smith read it. “This is Essie’s.”
“Then marry her,” his uncle said. “Then you can sell the lot and buy a farm. Ain’t that what you both want? Haven’t you got a shirt or a jumper here with you? Get it and you can ride back with me; the major here will bring the mule.”
“No,” Smith said; he was already shoving, actually ramming the deed into his pocket as he turned back to the mule. “I’ll bring him in. I’m going home first. I ain’t going to marry nobody without a necktie and a shave.”
Then they had to wait for the Baptist minister to wash his hands and put on his coat and necktie; Mrs Meadowfill was already wearing the first hat anybody had ever seen on her; it looked a good deal like the first hat anybody ever made. “But papa,” Essie said.
“Oh,” Charles’s uncle said. “You mean that wheel chair. It belongs to me now. It was a legal fee. I’m going to give it to you and McKinley for a christening present as soon as you earn it.”
Then it was two days later, in the office.
“You see?” his uncle said. “It’s hopeless. Even when you get rid of one Snopes, there’s already another one behind you even before you can turn around.”
“That’s right,” Ratliff said serenely. “As soon as you look, you see right away it ain’t nothing but jest another Snopes.”
FIFTEEN
LINDA KOHL WAS already home too when Charles got back. From her war also: the Pascagoula shipyard where she finally had her way and became a riveter; his Uncle Gavin told him, a good one. At least her hands, fingernails, showed it: not bitten, gnawed down, but worn off. And now she had a fine, a really splendid dramatic white streak in her hair running along the top of her skull almost like a plume. A collapsed plume; in fact, maybe that was what it was, he thought: a collapsed plume lying flat athwart her skull instead of cresting upward first then back and over; it was the fall of 1945 now and the knight had run out of tourneys and dragons, the war itself had slain them, used them up, made them obsolete.
In fact Charles thought how all the domestic American knights-errant liberal reformers would be out of work now, with even the little heretofore lost places like Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, fertilised to overflowing not only with ex-soldiers’ blood money but with the two or three or four dollars per hour which had been forced on the other ex-riveters and -bricklayers and -machinists like Linda Kohl Snopes, he meant Linda Snopes Kohl, so fast that they hadn’t had time to spend it. Even the two Finn communists, even the one that still couldn’t speak English, had got rich during the war and had had to become capitalists and bull-market investors simply because they had not yet acquired any private place large enough to put that much money down while they turned their backs on it. And as for the Negroes, by now they had a newer and better high school building in Jefferson than the white folks had. Plus an instalment-plan automobile and radio and refrigerator full of canned beer down-paid with the blood money which at least drew no colour line in every unwired unscreened plumbingless cabin: double-plus the new social-revolution laws which had abolished not merely hunger and inequality and injustice, but work too by substituting for it a new self-compounding vocation or profession for which you would need no schooling at all: the simple production of children. So there was nothing for Linda to tilt against now in Jefferson. Come to think of it, there was nothing for her to tilt against anywhere now, since the Russians had fixed the Germans and even they didn’t need her any more. In fact, come to think of it, there was really nothing for her in Jefferson at all any more, now that his Uncle Gavin was married — if she had ever wanted him for herself. Because maybe Ratliff was right and whatever she had ever wanted of him, it wasn’t a husband. So in fact you would almost have to wonder why she stayed in Jefferson at all now, with nothing to do all day long but wait, pass the time somehow until night and sleep came, in that Snopes-colonial mausoleum with that old son of a bitch that needed a daughter or anybody else about as much as he needed a spare bow tie or another hat. So maybe everybody was right this time and she wasn’t going to stay in Jefferson much longer, after all.
