Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion Read online

  —GEORGE GARRETT

  THE HAMLET

  TO PHIL STONE

  CONTENTS

  BOOK ONE

  FLEM

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  BOOK TWO

  EULA

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  BOOK THREE

  THE LONG SUMMER

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  BOOK FOUR

  THE PEASANTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  BOOK ONE

  FLEM

  CHAPTER ONE

  Frenchman’s Bend was a section of rich river-bottom country lying twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. Hill-cradled and remote, definite yet without boundaries, straddling into two counties and owning allegiance to neither, it had been the original grant and site of a tremendous pre-Civil War plantation, the ruins of which—the gutted shell of an enormous house with its fallen stables and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and promenades—were still known as Old Frenchman’s place, although the original boundaries now existed only on old faded records in the Chancery Clerk’s office in the county courthouse in Jefferson, and even some of the once-fertile fields had long since reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their first master had hewed them.

  He had quite possibly been a foreigner, though not necessarily French, since to the people who had come after him and had almost obliterated all trace of his sojourn, anyone speaking the tongue with a foreign flavor or whose appearance or even occupation was strange, would have been a Frenchman regardless of what nationality he might affirm, just as to their more urban coevals (if he had elected to settle in Jefferson itself, say) he would have been called a Dutchman. But now nobody knew what he had actually been, not even Will Varner, who was sixty years old and now owned a good deal of his original grant, including the site of his ruined mansion. Because he was gone now, the foreigner, the Frenchman, with his family and his slaves and his magnificence. His dream, his broad acres were parcelled out now into small shiftless mortgaged farms for the directors of Jefferson banks to squabble over before selling finally to Will Varner, and all that remained of him was the river bed which his slaves had straightened for almost ten miles to keep his land from flooding and the skeleton of the tremendous house which his heirs-at-large had been pulling down and chopping up—walnut newel posts and stair spindles, oak floors which fifty years later would have been almost priceless, the very clapboards themselves—for thirty years now for firewood. Even his name was forgotten, his pride but a legend about the land he had wrested from the jungle and tamed as a monument to that appellation which those who came after him in battered wagons and on muleback and even on foot, with flintlock rifles and dogs and children and home-made whiskey stills and Protestant psalm-books, could not even read, let alone pronounce, and which now had nothing to do with any once-living man at all—his dream and his pride now dust with the lost dust of his anonymous bones, his legend but the stubborn tale of the money he buried somewhere about the place when Grant overran the country on his way to Vicksburg.

  The people who inherited from him came from the northeast, through the Tennessee mountains by stages marked by the bearing and raising of a generation of children. They came from the Atlantic seaboard and before that, from England and the Scottish and Welsh Marches, as some of the names would indicate—Turpin and Haley and Whittington, McCallum and Murray and Leonard and Little-john, and other names like Riddup and Armstid and Doshey which could have come from nowhere since certainly no man would deliberately select one of them for his own. They brought no slaves and no Phyfe and Chippendale highboys; indeed, what they did bring most of them could (and did) carry in their hands. They took up land and built one- and two-room cabins and never painted them, and married one another and produced children and added other rooms one by one to the original cabins and did not paint them either, but that was all. Their descendants still planted cotton in the bottom land and corn along the edge of the hills and in the secret coves in the hills made whiskey of the corn and sold what they did not drink. Federal officers went into the country and vanished. Some garment which the missing man had worn might be seen—a felt hat, a broadcloth coat, a pair of city shoes or even his pistol—on a child or an old man or woman. County officers did not bother them at all save in the heel of election years. They supported their own churches and schools, they married and committed infrequent adulteries and more frequent homicides among themselves and were their own courts udges and executioners. They were Protestants and Democrats and prolific; there was not one Negro landowner in the entire section. Strange Negroes would absolutely refuse to pass through it after dark.

  Will Varner, the present owner of the Old Frenchman place, was the chief man of the country. He was the largest landholder and beat supervisor in one county and Justice of the Peace in the next and election commissioner in both, and hence the fountainhead if not of law at least of advice and suggestion to a countryside which would have repudiated the term constituency if they had ever heard it, which came to him, not in the attitude of What must I do but What do you think you think you would like for me to do if you was able to make me do it. He was a farmer, a usurer, a veterinarian; Judge Benbow of Jefferson once said of him that a milder-mannered man never bled a mule or stuffed a ballot box. He owned most of the good land in the country and held mortgages on most of the rest. He owned the store and the cotton gin and the combined grist mill and blacksmith shop in the village proper and it was considered, to put it mildly, bad luck for a man of the neighborhood to do his trading or gin his cotton or grind his meal or shoe his stock anywhere else. He was thin as a fence rail and almost as long, with reddish-gray hair and moustaches and little hard bright innocently blue eyes; he looked like a Methodist Sunday School superintendent who on week days conducted a railroad passenger train or vice versa and who owned the church or perhaps the railroad or perhaps both. He was shrewd secret and merry, of a Rabelaisian turn of mind and very probably still sexually lusty (he had fathered sixteen children to his wife, though only two of them remained at home, the others scattered, married and buried, from El Paso to the Alabama line) as the spring of his hair which even at sixty was still more red than gray, would indicate. He was at once active and lazy; he did nothing at all (his son managed all the family business) and spent all his time at it, out of the house and gone before the son had come down to breakfast even, nobody knew where save that he and the old fat white horse which he rode might be seen anywhere within the surrounding ten miles at any time, and at least once every month during the spring and summer and early fall, the old white horse tethered to an adjacent fence post, he would be seen by someone sitting in a home-made chair on the jungle-choked lawn of the Old Frenchman’s homesite. His blacksmith had made the chair for him by sawing an empty flour barrel half through the middle and trimming out the sides and nailing a seat into it and Varner would sit there chewing his tobacco or smoking his cob pipe, with a brusque word for passers cheerful enough but inviting no company, against his background of fallen baronial splendor. The people (those who saw him sitting there and those who were told about it) all believed that he sat there planning his next mortgage foreclosure in private, since it was only to an itinerant sewing-machine agent named Ratliff—a man less than half his age—that he ever gave a reason: “I like to sit here. I’m trying to find out what it must have felt like to be the fool that would need all this”—he did not move, he did not so much as indicate with his head the rise of old brick and tangled walks topped by the columned ruin behind him—“just to eat and sleep in.” Then he said—and he gave Ratliff no further clue to which might have been the truth—“For a while it looked like I was going to get shut of it, get it cleared up. But by God folks have got so lazy they wont even climb a ladder to pull off the rest of the boards It looks like they will go into the woods and even chop up a tree before they w
ill reach above eyelevel for a scantling of pine kindling. But after all, I reckon I’ll just keep what thee is left of it, just to remind me of my one mistake. This is the only thing I ever bought in my life I couldn’t sell to nobody.”

  The son, Jody, was about thirty, a prime bulging man, slightly thyroidic, who was not only unmarried but who emanated a quality of invincible and inviolable bachelordom as some people are said to breathe out the odor of sanctity or spirituality. He was a big man, already promising a considerable belly in ten or twelve years, though as yet he still managed to postulate something of the trig and unattached cavalier. He wore, winter and summer (save that in the warm season he dispensed with the coat) and Sundays and week days, a glazed collarless white shirt fastened at the neck with a heavy gold collar-button beneath a suit of good black broadcloth. He put on the suit the day it arrived from the Jefferson tailor and wore it every day and in all weathers thereafter until he sold it to one of the family’s Negro retainers, so that on almost any Sunday night one whole one or some part of one of his old suits could be met—and promptly recognised—walking the summer roads, and replaced it with the new succeeding one. In contrast to the unvarying overalls of the men he lived among he had an air not funereal exactly but ceremonial—this because of that quality of invincible bachelorhood which he possessed: so that, looking at him you saw, beyond the flabbiness and the obscuring bulk, the perennial and immortal Best Man, the apotheosis of the masculine Singular, just as you discern beneath the dropsical tissue of the ’09 halfback the lean hard ghost which once carried a ball. He was the ninth of his parents’ sixteen children. He managed the store of which his father was still titular owner and in which they dealt mostly in foreclosed mortgages, and the gin, and oversaw the scattered farm holdings which his father at first and later the two of them together had been acquiring during the last forty years.

  One afternoon he was in the store, cutting lengths of plowline from a spool of new cotton rope and looping them in neat seamanlike bights onto a row of nails in the wall, when at a sound behind him he turned and saw, silhouetted by the open door, a man smaller than common, in a wide hat and a frock coat too large for him, standing with a curious planted stiffness. “You Varner?” the man said, in a voice not harsh exactly, or not deliberately harsh so much as rusty from infrequent use.

  “I’m one Varner,” Jody said, in his bland hard quite pleasant voice. “What can I do for you?”

  “My name is Snopes. I heard you got a farm to rent.”

  “That so?” Varner said, already moving so as to bring the other’s face into the light. “Just where did you hear that?” Because the farm was a new one, which he and his father had acquired through a foreclosure sale not a week ago, and the man was a complete stranger. He had never even heard the name before.

  The other did not answer. Now Varner could see his face—a pair of eyes of a cold opaque gray between shaggy graying irascible brows and a short scrabble of iron-gray beard as tight and knotted as a sheep’s coat. “Where you been farming?” Varner said.

  “West.” He did not speak shortly. He merely pronounced the one word with a complete inflectionless finality, as if he had closed a door behind himself.

  ȁYou mean Texas?”

  “No.”

  “I see. Just west of here. How much family you got?”

  “Six.” Now there was no perceptible pause, nor was there any hurrying on into the next word. But there was something. Varner sensed it even before the lifeless voice seemed deliberately to compound the inconsistency: “Boy and two girls. Wife and her sister.”

  “That’s just five.”

  “Myself,” the dead voice said.

  “A man dont usually count himself among his own field hands,” Varner said. “Is it five or is it seven?”

  “I can put six hands into the field.”

  Now Varner’s voice did not change either, still pleasant, still hard: “I dont know as I will take on a tenant this year. It’s already almost first of May. I figure I might work it myself, with day labor. If I work it at all this year.”

  “I’ll work that way,” the other said. Varner looked at him.

  “Little anxious to get settled, aint you?” The other said nothing. Varner could not tell whether the man was looking at him or not. “What rent were you aiming to pay?”

  “What do you rent for?”

  “Third and fourth,” Varner said. “Furnish out of the store here. No cash.”

  “I see. Furnish in six-bit dollars.”

  “That’s right,” Varner said pleasantly. Now he could not tell if the man were looking at anything at all or not.

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  Standing on the gallery of the store, above the half dozen overalled men sitting or squatting about it with pocket knives and slivers of wood, Varner watched his caller limp stiffly across the porch, looking neither right nor left, and descend and from among the tethered teams and saddled animals below the gallery choose a gaunt saddleless mule in a worn plow bridle with rope reins and lead it to the steps and mount awkwardly and stiffly and ride away, still without once looking to either side. “To hear that ere foot, you’d think he weighed two hundred pounds,” one of them said. “Who’s he, Jody?”

  Varner sucked his teeth and spat into the road. “Name’s Snopes,” he said.

  “Snopes?” a second man said. “Sho now. So that’s him.” Now not only Varner but all the others looked at the speaker—a gaunt man in absolutely clean though faded and patched overalls and even freshly shaven, with a gentle, almost sad face until you unravelled what were actually two separate expressions—a temporary one of static peace and quiet overlaying a constant one of definite even though faint harriedness, and ensitive mouth which had a quality of adolescent freshness and bloom until you realised that this could just as well be the result of a lifelong abstinence from tobacco—the face of the breathing archetype and protagonist of all men who marry young and father only daughters and are themselves but the eldest daughter of their own wives. His name was Tull. “He’s the fellow that wintered his family in a old cottonhouse on Ike McCaslin’s place. The one that was mixed up in that burnt barn of a fellow named Harris over in Grenier County two years ago.”

  “Huh?” Varner said. “What’s that? Burnt barn?”

  “I never said he done it,” Tull said. “I just said he was kind of involved in it after a fashion you might say.”

  “How much involved in it?”

  “Harris had him arrested into court.”

  “I see,” Varner said. “Just a pure case of mistaken identity. He just hired it done.”

  “It wasn’t proved,” Tull said. “Leastways, if Harris ever found any proof afterward, it was too late then. Because he had done left the country. Then he turned up at McCaslin’s last September. Him and his family worked by the day, gathering for McCaslin, and McCaslin let them winter in a old cottonhouse he wasn’t using. That’s all I know. I aint repeating nothing.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Varner said. “A man dont want to get the name of a idle gossip.” He stood above them with his broad bland face, in his dingy formal black-and-white—the glazed soiled white shirt and the bagging and uncared-for trousers—a costume at once ceremonial and negligee. He sucked his teeth briefly and noisily. “Well well well,” he said. “A barn burner. Well well well.”

  That night he told his father about it at the supper table. With the exception of the rambling half-log half-sawn plank edifice known as Littlejohn’s hotel, Will Varner’s was the only house in the country with more than one storey. They had a cook too, not only the only Negro servant but the only servant of any sort in the whole district. They had had her for years yet Mrs Varner still said and apparently believed that she could not be trusted even to boil water unsupervised. He told it that evening while his mother, a plump cheery bustling woman who had borne sixteen children and already outlived five of them and who still won prizes for preserved fruits and vegetables at the annual County Fair, bus
tled back and forth between dining room and kitchen, and his sister, a soft ample girl with definite breasts even at thirteen and eyes like cloudy hothouse grapes and a full damp mouth always slightly open, sat at her place in a kind of sullen bemusement of rife young female flesh, apparently not even having to make any effort not to listen.

  “You already contracted with him?” Will Varner said.

  “I hadn’t aimed to at all till Vernon Tull told me what he did. Now I figure I’ll take the paper up there tomorrow and let him sign.”

  “Then you can point out to him which house to burn too. Or are you going to leave that to him?”

  “Sho,” Jody said. “We’ll discuss that too.” Then he said—and now all levity was gone from his voice, all poste and riposte of humor’s light whimsy, tierce quarto and prime: “All I got to do is find out for sho about that barn. But then it will be the same thing, whether he actually did it or not. All he’ll need will be to find out all of a sudden at gathering time that I think he did it. Listen. Take a case like this.” He leaned forward now, over the table, bulging, protuberant, intense. The mother had bustled out, to the kitchen, where her brisk voice could be heard scolding cheerfully at the Negro cook. The daughter was not listening at all. “Here’s a piece of land that the folks that own it hadn’t actually figured on getting nothing out of this late in the season. And here comes a man and rents it on shares that the last place he rented on a barn got burnt up. It dont matter whether he actually burnt that barn or not, though it will simplify matters if I can find out for sho he did. The main thing is, it burnt while he was there and the evidence was such that he felt called on to leave the country. So here he comes and rents this land we hadn’t figured on nothing out of this year nohow and we furnish him outen the store all regular and proper. And he makes his crop and the landlord sells it all regular and has the cash waiting and the fellow comes in to get his share and the landlord says, ‘What’s this I heard about you and that barn?’ That’s all. ‘What’s this I just heard about you and that barn?’ ” They stared at one another—the slightly protuberant opaque eyes and the little hard blue ones. “What will he say? What can he say except ‘All right. What do you aim to do?’ ”