soldiers began to trickle back into the county, there was anticlimax; they
returned to a land which not only had passed through Appomattox over a
year ago, it had had that year in which to assimilate it, that whole year
in which not only to ingest surrender but (begging the metaphor, the
figure) to convert, metabolise it, and then defecate it as fertilizer for
the four-years' fallow land they were already in train to rehabilitate a
year before the Virginia knell rang the formal change, the men of '65
returning to find themselves alien in the very land they had been bred and
born in and had fought for four years to defend, to find a working and
already solvent economy based on the premise that it could get along
without them; (and now the rest of this story, since it occurs, happens,
here: not yet June in '65; this one had indeed wasted no time getting
back: a stranger, alone; the town did not even know it had ever seen him
before, because the other time was a year ago and had lasted only while
he galloped through it firing a pistol backward at a Yankee army, and he
had been riding a horse-a fine though a little too small and too delicate
blooded mare-where now he rode a big mule, which for that reason -its
size-was a better mule than the horse was a horse, but it was still a
mule, and of course the town could not know that he had swapped the mare
for the mule on the same day that he traded his lieutenant's sabre-he
still had the pistol -for the stocking full of seed corn he had seen
growing in a Pennsylvania field and had not let even the mule have one
mouthful of' it during the long journey across the ruined land between the
Atlantic seaboard and the JeTerson jail, riding up to the jail at last,
still gaunt and tattered and dirty and still undefeated and not fleeing
now but instead making or at least planning a single-handed assault
against what any rational man would have considered insurmountable odds
((but
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 309
then, that bubble had ever been immune to the ephemerae of facts) );
perhaps, probably-without doubt: apparently she had been standing leaning
musing in it for three or four years in 1864; nothing had happened since,
not in a land which had even anticipated Appamattox, capable of shaking
a meditation that rooted, that durable, that veteran-the girl watched him
get down and tie the mule to the fence, and perhaps while he walked from
the fence to the door be even looked for a moment at her, though possibly,
perhaps even probably, not, since she was not his immediate object now,
he was not really concerned with her at the moment, because he had so
little time, he had none, really: still to reach Alabama and the small
hill farm which had been his father's and would now be his, if-no, when-he
could get there, and it had not been ruined by four years of war and
neglect, and even if the land was still plantable, even if he could start
planting the stocking of corn tomorrow, he would be weeks and even months
late; during that walk to the door and as he lifted his hand to knock on
it, he must have thought with a kind of weary and indomitable outrage of
how, already months late, he must still waste a day or maybe even two or
three of them before he could load the girl onto the mule behind him and
head at last for Alabama-this, at a time when of all things he would
require patience and a clear head, trying for them ((courtesy too, which
would be demanded now)), patient and urgent and polite, undefeated, trying
to explain, in terms which they could understand or at least accept, his
simple need and the urgency of it, to the mother and father whom he had
never seen before and whom he never intended, or anyway anticipated, to
see again, not that he had anything for or against them either: he simply
intended to be too busy for the rest of his life, once they could get on
the mule and start for home; not seeing the girl then, during the in-
terview, not even asking to see her for a moment when the interview was
over, because he had to get the license now and then find the preacher:
so that the first word he ever spoke to her was a promise delivered
through a stranger; it was probably not until they were on the mule-the
frail useless hands whose only strength seemed to be that sufficient to
fold the wedding license into the bosom of her dress and then cling to the
belt around his waist-that be looked at her again or ((both of them)) had
time to learn one another's middle name);
That was the story, the incident, ephemeral of an afternoon in late May,
unrecorded by the town and the county because they had little time too:
which (the county and the town)
310 WILLIAM FAULKNER
had anticipated Appomattox and kept that lead, so that in effect Appomattox
itself never overhauled them; it was the long pull of course, but they
had-as they would realise later -that priceless, that unmatchable year; on
New Year's Day, 1865, while the rest of the South sat staring at the
northeast horizon beyond which Richmond lay, like a family staring at the
closed door to a sick-room, Yoknapatawpha County was already nine months
gone in reconstruction; by New Year's of '66, the gutted walls (the rain of
two winters had washed them clean of the smoke and soot) of the Square had
been temporarily roofed and were stores and shops and offices again, and
they had begun to restore the courthouse: not temporary, this, but restored,
exactly as it had been, between the two columned porticoes, one north and
one south, which had been tougher than dynamite and fire, because it was the
symboclass="underline" the County and the City: and they knew how, who had done it before;
Colonel Sartoris was home now, and General Compson, the first Jason's son,
and though a tragedy had happened to Sutpen and his pride-a failure not of
his pride nor even of his own bones and flesh, but of the lesser bones and
flesh which he had believed capable of supporting the edifice of his
dream-they still had the old plans of his architect and even the architect's
molds, and even more: money, (strangely, curiously) Redmond, the town's
domesticated carpetbagger, symbol of a blind rapacity almost like a
biological instinct, destined to cover the South like a migration of
locusts; in the case of this man, arriving a full year before its time and
now devoting no small portion of the fruit of his rapacity to restoring the
very building the destruction of which had rung up the curtain for his
appearance on the stage, had been the formal visa on his passport to
pillage; and by New Year's of '76, this same Redmond with his money and
Colonel Sartoris and General Compson had built a railroad from Jefferson
north into Tennessee to connect with the one from Memphis to the Atlantic
Ocean; nor content there either, north or south: another ten years (Sartoris
and Redmond and Compson quarreled, and Sartoris and Redmond bought-probably
with Redmond's money-Compson's interest in the railroad, and the next year
Sartoris and Redmond had quarreled and the year after that, because of
simple physical fear, Redmond killed Sartoris from ambush on the Jefferson
Square and fled, and at last even Sartoris's supporters-he had no friends:
only enemies and frantic admirers-began to understand the result of that
regimental election in the fall of '62) and the railroad was a part of that