The Snopes Trilogy by William Faulkner

Author:William Faulkner [Faulkner, William]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307791412
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 1994-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

IXTEEN

CHARLES MALLISON

This is what Ratliff said happened up to where Uncle Gavin could see it.

It was January, a gray day though not cold because of the fog. Old Het ran in Mrs Hait’s front door and down the hall into the kitchen, already hollering in her strong bright happy voice, with strong and childlike pleasure:

“Miss Mannie! Mule in the yard!”

Nobody knew just exactly how old old Het really was. Nobody in Jefferson even remembered just how long she had been in the poorhouse. The old people said she was about seventy, though by her own counting, calculated from the ages of various Jefferson ladies from brides to grandmothers that she claimed to have nursed from infancy, she would be around a hundred and, as Ratliff said, at least triplets.

That is, she used the poorhouse to sleep in or anyway pass most or at least part of the night in. Because the rest of the time she was either on the Square or the streets of Jefferson or somewhere on the mile-and-a-half dirt road between town and the poorhouse; for twenty-five years at least ladies, seeing her through the front window or maybe even just hearing her strong loud cheerful voice from the house next door, had been locking themselves in the bathroom. But even this did no good unless they had remembered first to lock the front and back doors of the house itself. Because sooner or later they would have to come out and there she would be, tall, lean, of a dark chocolate color, voluble, cheerful, in tennis shoes and the long rat-colored coat trimmed with what forty or fifty years ago had been fur, and the purple toque that old Mrs Compson had given her fifty years ago while General Compson himself was still alive, set on the exact top of her headrag (at first she had carried a carpetbag of the same color and apparently as bottomless as a coal mine, though since the ten-cent store came to Jefferson the carpetbag had given place to a succession of the paper shopping bags which it gave away), already settled in a chair in the kitchen, having established already upon the begging visitation a tone blandly and incorrigibly social.

She passed that way from house to house, travelling in a kind of moving island of alarm and consternation as she levied her weekly toll of food scraps and cast-off garments and an occasional coin for snuff, moving in an urbane uproar and as inescapable as a tax-gatherer. Though for the last year or two since Mrs Hait’s widowing, Jefferson had gained a sort of temporary respite from her because of Mrs Hait. But even this was not complete. Rather, old Het had merely established a kind of local headquarters or advanced foraging post in Mrs Hait’s kitchen soon after Mr Hait and five mules belonging to Mr I. O. Snopes died on a sharp curve below town under the fast northbound through freight one night and even the folks at the poorhouse heard that Mrs Hait had got eight thousand dollars for him.

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