full glare of the stump-pocked clearing during those first summers,
solitary on its side of the dusty widening marked with an occasional wheel
but mostly by the prints of horses and men: Pettigrew's private pony
express until he and it were replaced by a monthly stagecoach from
Memphis, the race horse which Jason Compson traded to Ikkemotubbe, old
Mohataha's son and the last ruling Chickasaw chief in that section, for
a square of land so large that, as the first formal survey revealed, the
new courthouse would have been only another of Compson's outbuildings had
not the town Corporation bought enough of it (at Compson's price) to
forefend themselves being trespassers, and the saddle-mare
298 WILLIAM FAULKNER
which bore Doctor Habersham's worn black bag (and which drew the buggy
after Doctor Habersham got too old and stiff to mount the saddle), and the
mules which drew the wagon in which, seated in a rocking chair beneath a
French parasol held by a Negro slave girl, old Mohataha would come to town
on Saturdays (and came that last time to set her capital X on the paper
which ratified the dispossession of her people forever, coming in the
wagon that time too, barefoot as always but in the purple silk dress which
her son, Ikkemotubbe, had brought her back from France, and a hat crowned
with the royal-colored plume of a queen, beneath the slave-held parasol
still and with another female slave child squatting on her other side
holding the crusted slippers which she had never been able to get her feet
into, and in the back of the wagon the petty rest of the unmarked Empire
flotsam her son had brought to her which was small enough to be moved;
driving for the last time out of the woods into the dusty widening before
Ratcliffe's store where the Federal land agent and his marshal waited for
her with the paper, and stopped the mules and sat for a little time, the
young men of her bodyguard squatting quietly about the halted wagon after
the eight-mile walk, while from the gallery of the store and of Holston's
tavern the settlement-the Ratcliffes and Compsons and Peabodys and
Pettigrews ((not Grenier and Holston and Habersham, because Louis Grenier
declined to come in to see it, and for the same reason old Alec Holston
sat alone on that hot afternoon before the smoldering log in the fireplace
of his taproom, and Doctor Habersham was dead and his son had already
departed for the West with his bride, who was Mohataha's granddaughter,
and his father-in-law, Mohataha's son, Ikkemotubbe) )-looked on, watched:
the inscrutable ageless wrinkled face, the fat shapeless body dressed in
the cast-off garments of a French queen, which on her looked like the Sun-
day costume of the madam of a rich Natchez or New Orleans brothel, sitting
in a battered wagon inside a squatting ring of her household troops, her
young men dressed in their Sunday clothes for traveling too: then she
said, 'Where is this Indian territoryT And they told her: West. 'Turn the
mules west,' she said, and someone did so, and she took the pen from the
agent and made her X on the paper and handed the pen back and the wagon
moved, the young men rising too, and she vanished so across that summer
afternoon to that terrific and infinitesimal creak and creep of ungreased
wheels, herself immobile beneath the rigid parasol, grotesque and regal,
bizarre and moribund, like obsolescence's self riding off the stage
enthroned on its own obsolete catafalque, looking not once back, not once
back toward home);
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 299
But most of all, the prints of men-the fitted shoes which Doctor Habersham
and Louis Grenier had brought from the Atlantic seaboard, the cavalry
boots in which Alec Holston had ridden behind Francis Marion, and-more
myriad almost than leaves, outnumbering all the others lumped togetherthe
moccasins, the deerhide sandals of the forest, worn not by the Indians but
by white men, the pioneers, the long hunters, as though they had not only
vanquished the wilderness but had even stepped into the very footgear of
them they dispossessed (and mete and fitting so, since it was by means of
his feet and legs that the white man conquered America; the closed and
split U's of his horses and cattle overlay his own prints always, merely
consolidating his victory);-(the jail) watched them all, red men and white
and black-the pioneers, the hunters, the forest men with rifles, who made
the same light rapid soundless toed-in almost heelless prints as the red
men they dispossessed and who in fact dispossessed the red men for that
reason: not because of the grooved barrel but because they could enter the
red man's milieu and make the same footprints that he made; the husbandman
printing deep the hard heels of his brogans because of the weight he bore
on his shoulders: axe and saw and plow-stock, who dispossessed the forest
man for the obverse reason: because with his saw and axe he simply
removed, obliterated, the milieu in which alone the forest man could
exist; then the land speculators and the traders in slaves and whiskey who
followed the husbandmen, and the politicians who followed the land specu-
lators, printing deeper and deeper the dust of that dusty widening, until
at last there was no mark of Chickasaw left in it any more; watching (the
jail) them all, from the first innocent days when Doctor Habersham and his
son and Alec Holston and Louis Grenier were first guests and then friends
of Ikkemotubbe's Chickasaw clan; then an Indian agent and a land-office
and a trading-post, and suddenly Ikkemotubbe and his Chickasaws were
themselves the guests without being friends of the Federal Government;
then Ratcliffe, and the trading-post was no longer simply an Indian
trading-post, though Indians were still welcome, of course (since, after
all, they owned the land or anyway were on it first and claimed it), then
Compson with his race horse and presently Compson began to own the Indian
accounts for tobacco and calico and jeans pants and cooking-pots on
Ratcliffe's books (in time he would own Ratcliffe's books too) and one day
Ikkemotubbe owned the race horse and Compson owned the land itself, some
of which the city fathers would have to buy from him at his price in order
to establish a town; and Pettigrew with his tri-weekly mail, and then a
monthly stage and the new faces
300 WILLIAM FAULKNER
coming in faster than old Alec Holston, arthritic and irascible, hunkered
like an old surly bear over his smoldering hearth even in the heat of
summer (he alone now of that original three, since old Grenier no longer
came in to the settlement, and old Doctor Habersham was dead, and the old
doctor's son, in the opinion of the settlement, had already turned Indian
and renegade even at the age of twelve or fourteen) any longer made any
effort, wanted, to associate names with; and now indeed the last moccasin
print vanished from that dusty widening, the last toed-in heelless light
soft quick longstriding print pointing west for an instant, then trodden
from the sight and memory of man by a heavy leather heel engaged not in
the traffic of endurance and hardihood and survival, but in money-taking
with it (the print )not only the moccasins but the deer-hide leggins and
jerkin too, because Ikkemotubbe's Chickasaws now wore Eastern factory-made
jeans and shoes sold them on credit out of Ratcliffe's and Compson's