general store, walking in to the settlement on the white man's Saturday,
carrying the alien shoes rolled neatly in the alien pants under their
arms, to stop at the bridge over Compson's creek long enough to bathe
their legs and feet before donning the pants and shoes, then coming on to
squat all day on the store gallery eating cheese and crackers and
peppermint candy (bought on credit too out of Compson's and Ratcliffe's
showcase) and now not only they but Habersham and Holston and Grenier too
were there on sufferance, anachronistic and alien, not really an annoyance
yet but simply a discomfort;
Then they were gone; the jail watched that: the halted ungreased unpainted
wagon, the span of underfed mules attached to it by fragments of Eastern
harness supplemented by raw deer-bide thongs, the nine young men-the wild
men, tameless and proud, who even in their own generation's memory had
been free and, in that of their fathers, the heirs of kings-squatting
about it, waiting, quiet and composed, not even dressed in the ancient
forest-softened deerskins of their freedom but in the formal regalia of
the white man's inexplicable ritualistic sabbaticals: broadcloth trousers
and white shirts with boiled-starch bosoms (because they were traveling
now; they would be visible to outworld, to strangers:-and carrying the New
England-made shoes under their arms too since the distance would be long
and walking was better barefoot), the shirts collarless and cravatless
true enough and with the tails worn outside, but still board-rigid,
gleaming, pristine, and in the rocking chair in the wagon, beneath the
slave-borne parasol, the fat shapeless old matriarch in the
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 301
regal sweat-stained purple silk and the plumed hat, barefoot too of course
but, being a queen, with another slave to carry her slippers, putting her
cross to the paper and then driving on, vanishing slowly and terrifically
to the slow and terrific creak and squeak of the ungreased
wagon-apparently and apparently only, since in reality it was as though,
instead of putting an inked cross at the foot of a sheet of paper, she had
lighted the train of a mine set beneath a dam, a dyke, a barrier already
straining, bulging, bellying, not only towering over the land but leaning,
looming, imminent with collapse, so that it only required the single light
touch of the pen in that brown illiterate hand, and the wagon did not
vanish slowly and terrifically from the scene to the terrific sound of its
ungreased wheels, but was swept, hurled, flung not only out of Yok-
napatawpha County and Mississippi but the United States too, immobile and
intact-the wagon, the mules, the rigid shapeless old Indian woman and the
nine heads which surrounded her-like a float or a piece of stage property
dragged rapidly into the wings across the very backdrop and amid the very
bustle of the property-men setting up for the next scene and act before
the curtain had even had time to fall;
There was no time; the next act and scene itself clearing its own stage
without waiting for property-men; or rather, not even bothering to clear
the stage but commencing the new act and scene right in the midst of the
phantoms, the fading wraiths of that old time which had been exhausted,
used up, to be no more and never return: as though the mere and simple
orderly ordinary succession of days was not big enough, comprised not
scope enough, and so weeks and months and years had to be condensed and
compounded into one burst, one surge, one soundless roar filled with one
word: town: city: with a name: Jefferson; men's mouths and their in-
credulous faces (faces to which old Alec Holston had long since ceased
trying to give names or, for that matter, even to recognise) were filled
with it; that was only yesterday, and by tomorrow the vast bright rush and
roar had swept the very town one block south, leaving in the tideless
backwater of an alley on a side-street the old jail which, like the old
mirror, had already looked at too much too long, or like the patriarch
who, whether or not he decreed the conversion of the mudchinked cabin into
a mansion, had at least foreseen it, is now not only content but even
prefers the old chair on the back gallery, free of the rustle of
blueprints and the uproar of bickering architects in the already
dismantled living-room;
It (the old jail) didn't care, tideless in that backwash, in-
302 WILLIAM FAULKNER
sulated by that city block of space from the turmoil of the town's birthing,
the mud-chinked log walls even carcerant of the flotsam of an older time
already on its rapid way out too: an occasional runaway slave or drunken
Indian or shoddy would-be heir of the old tradition of Mason or Hare or
Harpe (biding its time until, the courthouse finished, the jail too would be
translated into brick, but, unlike the courthouse, merely a veneer of brick,
the old mud-chinked logs of the ground floor still intact behind the
patterned and symmetric sheath); no longer even watching now, merely
cognizant, remembering: only yesterday was a wilderness ordinary, a store,
a smithy, and already today was not a town, a city, but the town and city:
named; not a courthouse but the courthouse, rising surging like the fixed
blast of a rocket, not even finished yet but already looming, beacon focus
and lodestar, already taller than anything else, out of the rapid and fading
wilderness-not the wilderness receding from the rich and arable fields as
tide recedes, but rather the fields themselves, rich and inexhaustible to
the plow, rising sunward and airward out of swamp and morass, themselves
thrusting back and down brake and thicket, bayou and bottom and forest,
along with the copeless denizens-the wild men and animals-which once haunted
them, wanting, dreaming, imagining, no other-lodestar and pole, drawing the
people-the men and women and children, the maidens, the marriageable girls
and the young men, flowing, pouring in with their tools and goods and cattle
and slaves and gold money, behind ox- or mule-teams, by steamboat up
Ikkemotubbe's old river from the Mississippi; only yesterday Pettigrew's
pony express had been displaced by a stage-coach, yet already there was talk
of a railroad less than a hundred miles to the north, to run all the way
from Memphis to the Atlantic Ocean;
Going fast now: only seven years, and not only was the courthouse finished,
but the jail too: not a new jail of course but the old one veneered over
with brick, into two storeys, with white trim and iron-barred windows: only
its face lifted, because behind the veneer were still the old ineradicable
bones, the old ineradicable remembering: the old logs immured intact and
lightness between the tiered symmetric bricks and the whitewashed plaster,
immune now even to having to look, see, watch that new time which in a few
years more would not even remember that the old logs were there behind the
brick or had ever been, an age from which the drunken Indian had vanished,
leaving only the highwayman, who bad wagered his liberty on his luck, and
the runaway nigger, who having no freedom to stake, had wagered merely his
milieu; that rapid,
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that fast: Sutpen's untameable Paris architect long since departed,