THE DARK SIDE: Faulkner knows how to write a good bailment story

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It’s a pity I’m not as great a writer as William Faulkner.

Of course, no one is, so I’m not too upset about it. Nevertheless, it would be nice.

Consider the issue of bailments. Last week, I wrote an article about a Wisconsin Court of Appeals case involving bailments. The basic facts of the case were that a deadbeat, after taking his car to a mechanic for repairs, chose not to pay, and instead abandoned the car.

So when Toyota Motor Credit Corp., which had financed and repossessed the car, tried to get it from the mechanic, he refused to release it until Toyota paid up thousands of dollars in storage fees. The court ruled in favor of the mechanic.

The article I wrote about the case was, I must confess, not the most fascinating.

Now consider how Faulkner handles bailments. In the novel “The Hamlet,” a Mississippi redneck named Mink Snopes discovers a cow has escaped and made his way onto the property of a neighbor named Jack Houston.

Rather than going and getting his cow back, Mink decides to let Houston feed the cow for him over the winter, figuring he’ll go get it back in spring. But when spring comes, and Mink finally shows up to get his cow (now fat and well-nourished for the first time in its life), Houston refuses to let it go, claiming that he is entitled to reimbursement for having fed the cow all winter.

That certainly seems reasonable, and the court agreed with Houston, ordering Mink to pay $3 for the bailment. So, Mink does what any good Mississippi redneck would do after losing a court case. He shoots and kills the prevailing party.

He then spends the next 20 years in prison. The first thing he does upon release – in “The Mansion,” the final novel of the trilogy – is buy a gun and kill his cousin, Flem Snopes. You see, Flem was the most powerful man in the county, and yet he didn’t lift a finger to help his poor cousin Mink beat the rap for murdering Houston. Why wouldn’t Mink try to kill him?

Now, perhaps it is just easier to write about post-bellum rednecks in Mississippi than it is to write about modern credit corporations. I’m sure Toyota will just pay the mechanic whatever it is ordered to pay by the court, and then move on to repossessing some other deadbeat’s car.

And let’s face it — if I wrote a novel about a credit corporation killing a mechanic on account of a couple thousand dollar bailment, I don’t think my readers would find that very realistic.

But it’s not as if we don’t have any murders here in Wisconsin that I could write about that are even more senseless than Mink’s murder of Houston. In one Wisconsin Supreme Court case, the defendant beat a woman to death with a baseball bat, because the woman wanted fifty cents in exchange for a cigarette, and he only wanted to pay a quarter for the smoke. State v. Tomlinson, 2002 WI 91, 254 Wis.2d 502, 647 N.W.2d 177.

And yet, Faulkner managed to write the greatest novels ever written by a non-Russian, while I sit here writing articles of little interest to anyone outside the Wisconsin legal community.

On the other hand, I’m sure plenty of those readers are just relieved I chose to write about the legal problems of Mink Snopes, rather than the shenanigans of his cousin, Ike.

Look for more from The Dark Side on David Ziemer’s new blog. Coming to wislawjournal.com.