of them, inscribing at some moment the fragile and indelible signature of
her meditation in one of the panes of it (the window): her frail and
workless name, scratched by a diamond ring in her frail and workless hand,
and the date: Cecilia Farmer April 16th 1861;
At which moment the destiny of the land, the nation, the South, the State,
the County, was already whirling into the plunge of its precipice, not that
the State and the South knew it, because the first seconds of fall always
seem like soar: a weightless deliberation preliminary to a rush not downward
but upward, the failing body reversed during that second by
transubstantiation into the upward rush of earth; a soar, an apex, the
South's own apotheosis of its destiny and its pride, Mississippi and
Yoknapatawpha County not last in this, Mis-
306 WILLIAM FAULKNER
sissippi among the first of the eleven to ratify secession, the regiment
of infantry which John Sartoris raised and organised with Jefferson for
its headquarters, going to Virginia numbered Two in the roster of
Mississippi regiments, the jail watching that too but just by cognizance
from a block away: that noon, the regiment not even a regiment yet but
merely a voluntary association of untried men who knew they were ignorant
and hoped they were brave, the four sides of the Square lined with their
fathers or grandfathers and their mothers and wives and sisters and
sweethearts, the only uniform present yet that one in which Sartoris stood
with his virgin sabre and his pristine colonel's-braid on the courthouse
balcony, bareheaded too while the Baptist minister prayed and the Richmond
mustering officer swore the regiment in; and then (the regiment) gone; and
now not only the jail but the town too hung without motion in a tideless
backwash: the plunging body advanced far enough now into space as to have
lost all sense of motion, weightless and immobile upon the light pressure
of invisible air, gone now all diminishment of the precipice's lip, all
increment of the vast increaseless ear-th: a town of old men and women and
children and an occasional wounded soldier (John Sartoris himself, deposed
from his colonelcy by a regimental election after Second Manassas, came
home and oversaw the making and harvesting of a crop on his plantation
before he got bored and gathered up a small gang of irregular cavalry and
carried it up into Tennessee to join Forrest), static in quo, rumored,
murmured of war only as from a great and incredible dreamy distance, like
far summer thunder: until the spring of '64, the oncevast fixed impalpable
increaseless and threatless earth now one omnivorous roar of rock (a roar
so vast and so spewing, flinging ahead of itself, like the spray above the
maelstrom, the preliminary anesthetic of shock so that the agony of bone
and flesh will not even be felt, as to contain and sweep along with it the
beginning, the first ephemeral phase, of this story, permitting it to boil
for an instant to the surface like a chip or a twig-a match-stick or a
bubble, say, too weightless to give resistance for destruction to function
against: in this case, a bubble, a minute globule which was its own
impunity, since what it-the bubble-contained, having no part in
rationality and being contemptuous of fact, was immune even to the ra-
tionality of rock)-a sudden battle centering around Colonel Sartoris's
plantation house four miles to the north, the line of a creek held long
enough for the main Confederate body to pass through Jefferson to a
stronger line on the river heights south of the town, a rear-guard action
of cavalry in the streets of the town itself (and this was the story, the
be-
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 307
ginning of it; all of it too, the town might have been justified in
thinking, presuming they had had time to see, notice, remark 'and then
remember, even that little)-the rattle and burst of pistols, the hooves, the
dust, the rush and scurry of a handful of horsemen led by a lieutenant, up
the street past the jail, and the two of them-the frail and useless girl
musing in the blonde mist of her hair beside the window-pane where three or
four (or whatever it was) years ago she had inscribed with her grandmother's
diamond ring her paradoxical and significantless name (and where, so it
seemed to the town, she had been standing ever since), and the soldier,
gaunt and tattered, battle-grimed and fleeing and undefeated, looking at one
another for that moment across the fury and pell mell of battle;
Then gone; that night the town was occupied by Federal troops; two nights
later, it was on fire (the Square, the stores and shops and the professional
offices), gutted (the courthouse too), the blackened jagged topless jumbles
of brick wall enclosing like a ruined jaw the blackened shell of the
courthouse between its two rows of topless columns, which (the columns) were
only blackened and stained, being tougher than fire: but not the jail, it
escaped, untouched, insulated by its windless backwater from fire; and now
the town was as though insulated by fire or perhaps cauterised by fire from
fury and turmoil, the long roar of the rushing omnivorous rock fading on to
the east with the fading uproar of the battle: and so in effect it was a
whole year in advance of Appomattox (only the undefeated undefeatable women,
vulnerable only to death, resisted, endured, irreconcilable); already,
before there was a name for them (already their prototype before they even
existed as a species), there were carpetbaggers in Jefferson-a Missourian
named Redmond, a cotton-and qua rterma ster-supplies speculator, who had
followed the Northern army to Memphis in '61 and (nobody knew exactly how or
why) had been with (or at least on the fringe of) the military household of
the brigadier commanding the force which occupied Jefferson,
himself-Redmond-going no farther, stopping, staying, none knew the why for
that either, why he elected Jefferson, chose that alien fire-gutted site
(himself one, or at least the associate, of them who had set the match) to
be his future home; and a German private, a blacksmith, a deserter from a
Pennsylvania regiment, who appeared in the summer of '64, riding a mule,
with (so the tale told later, when his family of daughters had become matri-
archs and grandmothers of the town's new aristocracy) for saddle-blanket
sheaf on sheaf of virgin and uncut United States
308 WILLIAM FAULKNER
banknotes, so Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County had mounted Golgotha and
passed beyond Appomattox a full year in advance, with returned soldiers
in the town, not only the wounded from the battle of Jefferson, but whole
men: not only the furloughed from Forrest in Alabama and Johnston in
Georgia and Lee in Virginia, but the stragglers, the unmaimed flotsam and
refuse of that single battle now drawing its final constricting loop from
the Atlantic Ocean to Old Point Comfort, to Richmond: to Chattanooga: to
Atlanta: to the Atlantic Ocean again at Charleston, who were not deserters
but who could not rejoin any still-intact Confederate unit for the reason
that there were enemy armies between, so that in the almost faded twilight
of that land, the knell of Appomattox made no sound; when in the spring
and early summer of '65 the formally and officially paroled and disbanded