out of the way of, the motor cars) but like the track-walker in the tunnel,
the thunder of the express mounting behind him, who finds himself opposite
a niche or crack exactly his size in the wall's living and impregnable rock,
and steps into it, inviolable and secure while destruction roars past and on
and away, grooved ineluctably to the spidery rails of its destiny and
destination; not even-the jail-worth selling to the United States for some
matching allocation out of the federal treasury; not even (so fast, so far,
was Progress) any more a real pawn, let alone knight or rook, on the
County's political board, not even plum in true worth of the word: simply a
modest sinecure for the husband of someone's cousin, who had failed not as
a father but merely as a fourth-rate farmer or day-laborer;
It survived, endured; it had its inevictable place in the town and the
country; it was even still adding modestly not just to its but to the town's
and the county's history too: somewhere behind that dingy brick faqade,
between the old durable hand-molded brick and the cracked
creosote-impregnated plaster of the inside walls (though few in the town or
county any longer knew that they were there) were the old notched and
mortised logs which (this, the town and county did remember; it was part of
its legend) had held someone who might have been Wiley Rarpe; during that
summer of 1864, the federal brigadier who had fired the Square and the
courthouse had used the jail as his provost-marshal's guard-house; and even
children in high school remembered how the jail had been host to the
Governor of the State while he discharged a thirty-day sentence for contempt
of court for refusing to testify in a paternity suit brought against one of
his lieutenants: but isolate, even its legend and record and history,
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 317
indisputable in authenticity yet a little oblique, elliptic or perhaps
just ellipsoid, washed thinly over with a faint quiet cast of apocryphy:
because there were new people in the town now, strangers, outlanders,
living in new minute glass-walled houses set as neat and orderly and
antiseptic as cribs in a nursery ward, in new subdivisions named Fairfield
or Longwood or Halcyon Acres which had once been the lawn or back yard or
kitchen garden of the old residences (the old obsolete columned houses
still standing among them like old horses surged suddenly out of slumber
in the middle of a flock of sheep), who had never seen the jail; that is,
they had looked at it in passing, they knew where it was, when their kin
or friends or acquaintances from the East or North or California visited
them or passed through Jefferson on the way to New Orleans or Florida,
they could even repeat some of its legend or history to them: but they had
had no contact with it; it was not a part of their lives; they had the
automatic stoves and furnaces and milk deliveries and lawns the size of
installment-plan rugs; they had never had to go to the jail on the morning
after Juneteenth or July Fourth or Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year's
(or for that matter, on almost any Monday morning) to pay the fine of
houseman or gardener or handyman so that he could hurry on home (still
wearing his hangover or his barely-stanched razor-slashes) and milk the
cow or clean the furnace or mow the lawn;
So only the old citizens knew the jail any more, not old people but old
citizens: men and women old not in years but in the constancy of the town,
or against that constancy, concordant (not coeval of course, the town's
date was a century and a quarter ago now, but in accord against that
continuation) with that thin durable continuity born a hundred and
twenty-five years ago out of a handful of bandits captured by a -drunken
militia squad, and a bitter ironical incorruptible wilderness mail-rider,
and a monster wrought-iron padlockthat steadfast and durable and
unhurryable continuity against or across which the vain and glittering
ephemerae of progress and alteration washed in substanceless repetitive
evanescent scarless waves, like the wash and glare of the neon sign on
what was still known as the Holston House diagonally opposite, which would
fade with each dawn from the old brick walls of the jail and leave no
trace; only the old citizens still knew it: the intractable and
obsolescent of the town who still insisted on wood-burning ranges and cows
and vegetable gardens and handymen who had to be taken out of hock on the
mornings after Saturday nights and holidays; or the ones who actually
spent the Saturday- and holiday-nights inside the
318 WILLIAM FAULKNER
barred doors and windows of the cells or bullpen for drunkenness or fighting
or gambling-the servants, housemen and gardeners and handymen, who would be
extracted the next morning by their white folks, and the others (what the
town knew as the New Negro, independent of that community) who would sleep
there every night beneath the thin ruby checker-barred wash and fade of the
hotel sign, while they worked their fines out on the street; and the County,
since its cattle-thieves and moonshiners went to trial from there, and its
murderers-by electricity now (so fast, that fast, was Progress)-to eternity
from there; in fact it was still, not a factor perhaps, but at least an
integer, a cipher, in the county's political establishment; at least still
used by the Board of Supervisors, if not as a lever, at least as something
like Punch's stuffed club, not intended to break bones, not aimed to leave
any permanent scars;
So only the old knew it, the irreconcilable Jeffersonians and
Yoknapatawphians who had (and without doubt firmly intended to continue to
have) actual personal dearings with it on the blue Monday mornings after
holidays, or during the semi-yearly terms of Circuit or Federal Court:-until
suddenly you, a stranger, an outlander say from the East or the North or the
Far West, passing through the little town by simple accident, or perhaps
relation or acquaintance or friend of one of the outland families which had
moved into one of the pristine and recent subdivisions, yourself turning out
of your way to fumble among road signs and filling stations out of frank
curiosity, to try to learn, comprehend, understand what had brought your
cousin or friend or acquaintance to elect to live here-not specifically
here, of course, not specifically Jefferson, but such as here, such as Jeff
erson-suddenly you would realise that something curious was happening or had
happened here: that instead of dying off as they shotild as time passed, it
was as though these old irreconcilables were actually increasing in number;
as though with each interment of one, two more shared that vacancy: where in
1900, only thirty-five years afterward, there could not have been more than
two or three capable of it, either by knowledge or memory of leisure, or
even simple willingness and inclination, now, in 1951, eighty-six years
afterward, they could be counted in dozens (and in 1965, a hundred years
afterward, in hundreds because-by now you had already begun to understand
why your kin or friend or acquaintance had elected to come to such as this
with his family and call it his life-by then the children of that second
outland invasion following a war, would also have become not just