Mississip-
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 319
pians but Jeffersonians and Yoknapatawphians: by which time-who knows?-not
merely the pane, but the whole window, perhaps the entire wall, may have
been removed and embalmed intact into a museum by an historical, or anyway
a cultural, club of ladies-why, by that time, they may not even know, or
even need to know: only that the window-pane bearing the girl's name and
the date is that old, which is enough; has lasted that long: one small
rectangle of wavy, crudely-pressed, almost opaque glass, bearing a few
faint scratches apparently no more durable than the thin dried slime left
by the passage of a snail, yet which'has endured a hundred years) who are
capable and willing too to quit whatever they happen to be doing-sitting
on the last of the wooden benches beneath the last of the locust and
chinaberry trees among the potted conifers of the new age dotting the
courthouse yard, or in the chairs along the shady sidewalk before the
Holston House, where a breeze always blows-to lead you across the street
and into the jail and (with courteous neighborly apologies to the jailor's
wife stirring or turning on the stove the peas and grits and
side-meat-purchased in bargain-lot quantities by shrewd and indefatigable
peditation from store to store-which she will serve to the prisoners for
dinner or supper at so much a head-plate-pay able by the County, which is
no mean factor in the sinecure of her husband's incumbency) into the
kitchen and so to the cloudy pane bearing the faint scratches which, after
a moment, you will descry to be a name and a date;
Not at first, of course, but after a moment, a second, because at first
you would be a little puzzled, a little impatient because of your
illness-at-ease from having been dragged without warning or preparation
into the private kitchen of a strange woman cooking a meal; you would
think merely What? So what? annoyed and even a little outraged, until
suddenly, even while you were thinking it, something has already happened:
the faint frail illegible meaningless even inference-less scratching on
the ancient poor-quality glass you stare at, has moved, under your eyes,
even while you stared at it, coalesced, seeming actually to have entered
into another sense than vision: a scent, a whisper, filling that hot
cramped strange room already fierce with the sound and reek of frying
pork-fat: the two of them in conjunction-the old milky obsolete glass, and
the scratches on it: that tender ownerless obsolete girl's name and the
old dead date in April almost a century ago-speaking, murmuring, back
from, out of, across from, a time as old as lavender, older than album or
stereopticon, as old as daguerreotype itself;
320 WILLIAM FAULKNER
And being a stranger and a guest would have been enough, since, a stranger
and a guest, you would have shown the simple courtesy and politeness of
asking the questions naturally expected of you by the host or anyway
volunteer guide, who had dropped whatever he was doing (even if that had
been no more than sitting with others of his like on a bench in a
courthouse yard or on the sidewalk before a hotel) in order to bring you
here; not to mention your own perfectly natural desire for, not revenge
perhaps, but at least compensation, restitution, viqdication, for the
shock and annoyance of having been brought here without warning or
preparation, into the private quarters of a strange woman engaged in
something as intimate as cooking a meal; but by now you had not only begun
to understand why your kin or friend or acquaintance had elected, not
Jefferson but such as Jefferson, for his life, but you had heard that
voice, that whisper, murmur, frailer than the scent of lavender, yet (for
that second anyway) louder than all the seethe and fury of frying fat; so
you ask the questions, not only which are expected of you, but whose
answers you yourself must have if you are to get back into your car and
fumble with any attention and concentration among the road signs and
filling stations, to get on to wherever it is you had started when you
stopped by chance or accident in Jefferson for an hour or a day or a
night, and the hostguide-answers them, to the best of his ability out of
the town's composite heritage of remembering that long back, told,
repeated, inherited to him by his father; or rather, his mother: from her
mother: or better still, to him when he himself was a child, direct from
his great-aunt: the spinsters, maiden and childless out of a time when
there were too many women because too many of the young men were maimed
or dead: the indomitable and undefeated, maiden progenitresses of spinster
and childless descendants still capable of rising up and stalking out in
the middle of Gone With the Wind;
And again one sense assumes the office of two or three: not only hearing,
listening, and seeing too, but you are even standing on the same spot, the
same boards she did that day she wrote her name into the window and on the
other one three years later watching and hearing through and beyond that
faint fragile defacement the sudden rush and thunder: the dust: the
crackle and splatter of pistols: then the face, gaunt, battle-dirty,
stubbled-over; urgent of course, but merely harried, harassed; not
defeated, turned for a fleeing instant across the turmoil and the fury,
then gone: and still the girl in the window (the guide host-has never said
one or the other; without doubt in the town's remembering after a hundred
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 321
years it has changed that many times from blonde to dark and back to
blonde again: which doesn't matter, since in your own remembering that
tender mist and vail will be forever blonde) not even waiting: musing: a
year, and still not even waiting: meditant, not even unimpatient: just
patienceless, in the sense that blindness and zenith are colorless; until
at last the mule, not out of the long northeastern panorama of defeat and
dust and fading smoke, but drawn out of it by that impregnable, that
invincible, that incredible, that terrifying passivity, coming at that one
fatigueless unflagging jog all the way from Virginia-the mule which was
a better mule in 1865 than the blood mare had been a horse in '-2 and '-3
and '-4, for the reason that this was now 1865, and the man, still gaunt
and undefeated: merely harried and urgent and short of time to get on to
Alabama and see the condition of his farm-or (for that matter) if be still
had a farm, and now the girl, the fragile and workless girl not only
incapable of milking a cow but of whom it was never even demanded,
required, suggested, that she substitute for her father in drying the
dishes, mounting pillion on a mule behind a paroled cavalry subaltern out
of a surrendered army who had swapped his charger for a mule and the sabre
of his rank and his defeatless pride for a stocking full of seed corn,
whom she had not known or even spoken to long enough to have learned his
middle name or his preference in food, or told him hers, and no time for
that even now: riding, hurrying toward a country she had never seen, to
begin a life which was not even simple frontier, engaged only with
wilderness and shoeless savages and the tender hand of God, but one which
had been rendered into a desert (assuming that it was still there at all