Eck Snopes

Eck Snopes, the father of Wallstreet Panic and Admiral Dewey Snopes, is described first as "another Snopes accreted in from Frenchman's Bend into the vacuum behind the first one" (9). But to Gavin, he seems too generous and good-hearted to be a member of the Snopes family. Gavin says that Eck is "indubitably and indefensibily not a Snopes," arguing that Eck's mother "had, must have, as the old bucolic poet said, cast a leglin girth herself before she married whatever Snopes was Eck's titular father" (33) - which is Gavin's way of saying he believes Eck is illegitimate, not biologically a Snopes. After breaking his neck saving the life of a Negro mill hand, Eck "was a threat to his whole family's long tradition of slow and invincible rapacity because of that same incredible and innocent assumption that all people practise courage and honesty for the simple reason that if they didn't everybody would be frightened and confused" (34). He loses his job in Flem's cafe when he naively but honestly announces that the hamburgers he cooks "aint [made from] no beef" (34). "All the boys in town" appreciate his willingness to share his "raw peanuts" with them (116). He dies searching for a missing boy when he holds a lantern flame over one of the oil company's open storage tanks.