The French Beam was called part of a fertile river valley twenty miles southeast of Jefferson, Yoknapatofa County, Mississippi. Once it was a colossal plantation, the remains of which - the box of a huge house, the destroyed stables and barracks for slaves, overgrown gardens - were now called the estate of the Old Frenchman and belonged to the best land in the area, a bench, a ginning machine and a forge to the sixty-year-old Bill Warner, the main man in these places. Its neighbors were more and more poor farmers who cultivate their plots with their own hands, and very poor tenants. For his laziness, Bill entrusted the ninth of his sixteen children, Jody, with the order of the shop, the ginner and tenant allotments.

It was at this point that Jodi Warner somehow appeared in the evening in a shop and a plain-looking elderly man introduced himself as Ab Snopes and announced that he wanted to rent a farm. Jody did not mind what he regretted when he found out that Snopes was listed, although no one could prove it, several burned sheds - in this way he vented an insult to the owners who didn’t please him. This is what Jody was told by V.K. Ratlif, a traveling sewing machine dealer, in his chaise constantly traveling around the district and therefore possessing a lot of valuable information, thanks to which, moreover, his universally recognized insight, besides the main product, was unsuccessfully traded in cattle, land and all belongings. Not wanting to suffer damage, Jody began to offer various concessions and as a result was forced to take the son of old Snopes, Flem, as a clerk in his shop, which marked the beginning of the victorious invasion of the Snopes on the French Balka, Yoknapatof, and then on Jefferson. Victorious and unstoppable due to the fact that Snowpses were people of a special breed - all of them, with rare exceptions, were endlessly greedy, strong grip, tenacity, as well as the absence of some qualities that seem to be inherently inherent in human nature; in addition, there were a lot of Snoops, and as soon as one of them climbed a little higher on the public ladder, another Snoops found himself in the vacated spot, which, in turn, was pulling more and more relatives.

Very soon, it was no longer understood from the outsiders who - Snopes or Warner - was the true owner of the shop, and even a little later, the Fleet forge somehow appeared in Flem’s hands, and two Snopes, Ek and A.O., settled right there. A little more time passed, and Flem moved from a rented apartment to the Warner House.

Bill Warner's youngest daughter was not even thirteen at that time, but at the same time, Yula was least like an angular teenage girl - with her perfect forms and abundance of flesh, she could be a worthy participant in the Dionysian processions, however, make her marry somewhere or it was a task beyond anyone's strength, for it grew incorrigible, boundless lazy, as if not only was not involved in the surrounding world, but lived in the self-sufficient timeless loneliness of a creature that initially knew all possible wisdom. When Yulia was eight, Jody insisted that she go to school, but for this he had to take his sister on his horse to school and from school, which, as he soon realized, could not be dispensed with, since she was not eight years old , already with might and main all, as one, the loafers stared, whiled away the days on the terrace of the Warner’s bench. Julia was not destined to finish her studies - one fine day, teacher Labove disappeared from school and from the French Beam. Labove went to the teacher just for the sake of being able to pay for his studies at the university, but after graduation he remained at school, bewitched by the dragging Juno, at the same time extremely obscene and untouchable, although he clearly understood that something would happen sooner or later, that he would be destroyed and destroyed . And so it happened: being alone after Yulia's lessons, he pounced on her, hugged her to pain, but she silently and decisively freed herself, doused him with contempt, and calmly went out into the street where her brother was waiting for her. Even making sure that Yula didn’t say anything to Jody, Labove immediately ran away, and since then no one has ever seen him.

Like wasps around a ripe peach, around Yula they constantly curled at first - when she was fourteen - fifteen to seventeen year olds, the next year - almost adult men of eighteen to twenty years old; in the seventeenth year of Yula’s life, it was the turn of independent people with their own trotters and spans. Of these, she, perhaps, singled out the young planter Hawke McCaron, for which the village admirers of Yula tried to teach him a lesson and somehow in a deserted place stopped the span in which McCaron drove her home from dancing, but he fought off their whole gang, and that at night, for Yul’s broken arm in the fight, she donated to her knight what she could not give to anyone else with all the desire. Three months later, all the spans, including Mackaronov, as one, disappeared without a trace from the environs of the French Beam, and a few days later, Bill Warner drove his daughter and his clerk to Jefferson, where he quickly arranged for the marriage of Yula and Flem Snopes, and also straightened out the name of the latter is a deed of gift to the estate of the Old Frenchman. Immediately after that, the young went to Texas. The idiot Ike Snopes, Flem's cousin, had his own hair-wrapped Juno - the Mink Snowes cow, which Bill Warner awarded to farmer Houston for letting Mink graze on the Houston pasture month after month. Houston drove the lover away from his passion every time, and Ike took the cow away, since the idiot was also striving for happiness, but the fugitives were returned and separated. Seeing, however, how God’s resentful Ike was suffering, Ratlif persuaded Houston to give Ike the cow, and both of them were settled in Mrs. Littlejohn’s outhouse stall, for which Ike was doing some dirty housework. But the new Snopes, Lamp, who took Flem's place as a clerk in the shop after Flem's departure, began to benefit from this - he broke a board in the back of the stall and, for a moderate fee, allowed neighboring farmers to admire the life of Ike and his unusual girlfriend. Ratlif always had human dignity dear, and he decided to stop mocking the idiot, for which he prompted the two remaining interested Snoops - Ek and A.O. - supposedly an old way to rid the cousin of unnatural passion: I had to feed Ike the meat of this very cow, but for this should have been redeemed at first, and the Snoops reluctantly threw themselves together, and A.O., the real Snoops, shamelessly furnished Ek - Snoops, which later turned out to be not quite real.

This deal was not the only continuation of the story with the cow, as Mink Snowps, the only one from the clan who did not have the ability to make money, but at the same time, perhaps the most stubborn and fierce of all Snowes, could not forgive Houston for taking over the cattle. One fine day, he took a gun and laid Houston in the chest on a forest trail. Mink hid the corpse in a rotten inside deck and at first thought that he had nothing to fear, because Houston was completely alone - his young wife died tragically and ridiculously. But there was still a dog, which became nightly, heartbreaking howling at the place where the owner's body was hidden. And besides, Mink’s wife, immediately guessing what had happened, went to the village and assured everyone that Mink was not guilty of anything, which, of course, aroused the sheriff’s suspicions.

For several days, Mink sat on his farm waiting for the money to escape, but Lamp, whom he hoped for, did not make himself felt, and then Mink went to the village. Kindred was extremely surprised that Mink had not yet run - on the day Houston disappeared, Lamp saw the farmer in his wallet at least fifty dollars and was confident that Mink had used this money to get out of the way. Realizing that the money was still in the pocket of the deceased, Lamp wished to enter into a share with his cousin and went with him to the farm, but there Mink tied it up and went into the forest, with great difficulty pulled Houston from the deck and carried it into the river. But when he returned for the body that had fallen off, the sheriff and his assistants were waiting for him at the deck. In Jefferson Prison, Mink repeated and repeated that he did everything right, but, unfortunately, Houston began to fall apart ...

At the end of winter, Yula returned to the French Balka with a baby who looked older than her intended age. Flem, however, was not there — as everyone thought, he did not want to spend money on Mink’s rescue and waited until it was all over with him. But even before the trial, he showed up, and not alone, but with some Texan and a herd of motley unbroken Texas horses. The news of the opportunity to make a cheap purchase instantly flew around the entire district, and the very next day the Texan began bidding. Soon the matter was over, the Texan received the money and was like that, and all the horses in the corral had their owners, who, however, had to catch and break in the newly acquired property themselves. However, as soon as the farmer got into the corral, the horses rushed out of it, and in the end it ended with several injuries, not one of the horses could be caught, and for a long time they walked on their own along the surrounding hills. Flem profited greatly, but answered all claims that the product was not his, but the Texan. Everyone was convinced that this was not true, but no one could prove anything like that.

Only Mink's fault was proved, in which Flem did not intervene, and the judges in Jefferson sentenced him to life in prison. The last act of Flem Snopes in the French Beam, which allowed him to leave this place and move to Jefferson, is remarkable because this time he managed to carry out V.K. Ratlif himself. The fact is that between farmers there has long been a belief that the former owners of the estate of the Old Frenchman before the arrival of the northerners buried innumerable treasures in the garden. So Ratlif with Burkraite and Henry Armstead, local farmers, found out that someone rummages through the manor garden night after night again. For the first time, when they themselves tried their luck, each of the three came across a bag with twenty-five full-weighted silver dollars. Wanting to get rid of competitors, the comrades immediately the next day persuaded Flem to sell them the estate - Ratlif was worth a share in a Jefferson restaurant, Armstead was mortgaged to the farm, Burkright paid in cash. After a couple of days, however, it became clear that Flem himself was digging in the garden and he tossed up the money - among the coins there was not one minted before the war. Ratlif and Burkraite immediately spat on this matter, Armstead became completely mad and continued to dig deep pits day after day. Flem Snopes on the way to Jefferson stopped by to admire him for this occupation.