vanished (one hoped) back to wherever it was he had made that aborted
midnight try to regain and had been overtaken and caught in the swamp, not
(as the town knew now) by Sutpen and Sutpen's wild West Indian headman and
Sutpen's bear hounds, nor even by Sutpen's destiny nor even by his (the
architect's) own, but by that of the town: the long invincible arm of
Progress itself reaching into that midnight swamp to pluck him out of that
bayed circle of dogs and naked Negroes and pine torches, and stamped the
town with him like a rubber signature and then released him, not flung him
away like a squeezed-out tube of paint, but rather (inattentive too)
merely opening its fingers, its hand; stamping his (the architect's)
imprint not on just the courthouse and the jail, but on the whole town,
the flow and trickle of his bricks never even faltering, his molds and
kilns building the two churches and then that Female Academy a certificate
from which, to a young woman of North Mississippi or West Tennessee, would
presently have the same mystic significance as an invitation dated from
Windsor castle and signed by Queen Victoria would for a young female from
Long Island or Philadelphia;
That fast now: tomorrow, and the railroad did run unbroken from Memphis
to Carolina, the light-wheeled bulb-stacked wood-burning engines shrieking
among the swamps and canebrakes where bear and panther still lurked, and
through the open woods where browsing deer still drifted in pale bands
like unwinded smoke: because they-the wild animals, the beasts -remained,
they coped, they would endure; a day, and they would flee, lumber, scuttle
across the clearings already overtaken and relinquished by the hawk-shaped
shadows of mail planes; they would endure, only the wild men were gone;
indeed, tomorrow, and there would be grown men in Jefferson who could not
even remember a drunken Indian in the jail; another tomorrow-so quick, so
rapid, so fast-and not even a highwayman any more of the old true
sanguinary girth and tradition of Hare and Mason and the mad Harpes; even
Murrell, their thrice-compounded heir and apothesis, who had taken his
heritage of simple rapacity and bloodlust and converted it into a bloody
dream of outlaw-empire, was gone, finished, as obsolete as Alexander,
checkmated and stripped not even by man but by Progress, by a pierceless
front of middle-class morality which refused him even the dignity of
execution as a felon, but instead merely branded him on the hand like an
Elizabethan pickpocket-until all that remained of the old days for the
jail to incarcerate was the runaway
304 WILLIAM FAULKNER
slave, for his little hour more, his little minute yet while the time, the
land, the nation, the American earth, whirled faster and faster toward the
plunging precipice of its destiny;
That fast, that rapid: a commodity in the land now which until now had dealt
first in Indians: then in acres and sections and boundaries:-an economy:
Cotton: a king: omnipotent and omnipresent: a destiny of which (obvious now)
the plow and the axe had been merely the tools; not plow and axe which had
effaced the wilderness, but Cotton: petty globules of Motion weightless and
myriad even in the hand of a child, incapable even of wadding a rifle, let
alone of charging it, yet potent enough to sever the very taproots of oak
and hickory and gum, leaving the acre-shading tops to wither and vanish in
one single season beneath that fierce minted glare; not the rifle nor the
plow which drove at last the bear and deer and panther into the last jungle
fastnesses of the river bottoms, but Cotton; not the soaring cupola of the
courthouse drawing people into the country, but that same white tide
sweeping them in: that tender skin covering the winter's brown earth,
burgeoning through spring and summer into September's white surf crashing
against the flanks of gin and warehouse and ringing like bells on the marble
counters of the banks: altering not just the face of the land, but the
complexion of the town too, creating its own parasitic aristocracy not only
behind the columned porticoes of the plantation houses, but in the count-
ing-rooms of merchants and bankers and the sanctums of lawyers, and not only
these last, but finally nadir complete: the county offices too: of sheriff
and tax-collector and bailiff and turnkey and clerk; doing overnight to the
old jail what Sutpen's architect with all his brick and iron smithwork, had
not been able to accomplish-the old jail which had been unavoidable, a
necessity, like a public comfort-station, and which, like the public
comfort-station, was not ignored but simply by mutual concord, not seen, not
looked at, not named by its purpose and aim, yet which to the older people
of the town, in spite of Sutpen's architect's face-lifting, was still the
old jail-now translated into an integer, a moveable pawn on the county's
political board like the sheriff's star or the clerk's bond or the bailiff's
wand of office; converted indeed now, elevated (an apotheosis) ten feet
above the level of the town, so that the old buried log walls now contained
the living-quarters for the turnkey's family and the kitchen from which his
wife catered, at so much a meal, to the city's and the county's
prisoners-perquisite not for work or capability for work, but for political
fidelity and the numerality of votable kin by blood or marriage-a jailor or
turnkey, himself someone's
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 305
cousin and with enough other cousins and inlaws of his own to have assured
the election of sheriff or chancery- or circuitclerk-a failed farmer who was
not at all the victim of his time but, on the contrary, was its master,
since his inherited and inescapable incapacity to support his family by his
own eff orts had matched him with an era and a land where government was
founded on the working premise of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude
and indigence, for the private business failures among your or your wife's
kin whom otherwise you yourself would have to support-so much his destiny's
master that, in a land and time where a man's survival depended not only on
his ability to drive a straight furrow and to fell a tree without maiming or
destroying himself, that fate had supplied to him one child: a frail anemic
girl with narrow workless bands lacking even the strength to milk a cow, and
then capped its own vanquishment and eternal subjugation by the paradox of
giving him for his patronymic the designation of the vocation at which he
was to faiclass="underline" Farmer; this was the incumbent, the turnkey, the jailor; the
old tough logs which had known Ikkemotubbe's drunken Chickasaws and brawling
teamsters and trappers and flatboatmen (and-for that one short summer
night-the four highwaymen, one of whom might have been the murderer, Wiley
Harpe), were now the bower framing a window in which mused hour after hour
and day and month and year, the frail blonde girl not only incapable of (or
at least excused from) helping her mother cook, but even of drying the
dishes after her mother (or father perhaps) washed them-musing, not even
waiting for anyone or anything, as far as the town knew, not even pensive,
as far as the town knew: just musing amid her blonde hair in the window
facing the country town street, day after day and month after month and-as
the town remembered it-year after year for what must have been three or four