to be returned to) by the iron and fire of civilization;
Which was all your bost (guide) could tell you, since that was all he
knew, inherited, inheritable from the town: which was enough, more than
enough in fact, since all you needed was the face framed in its blonde and
delicate vail behind the scratched glass; yourself, the stranger, the
outlander from New England or the prairies or the Pacific Coast, no longer
come by the chance or accident of kin or friend or acquaintance or
roadmap, but drawn too from ninety years away by that incredible and
terrifying passivity, watching in your turn through and beyond that old
milk-dim disfigured glass that shape, that delicate frail and useless bone
and flesh departing pillion on a mule without one backward look, to the
reclaiming of an abandoned and doubtless even ravaged (perhaps even
usurped) Alabama hill farm-being lifted onto the mule (the first time he
touched her probably, except to put the ring
322 WILLIAM FAULKNER
on: not to prove nor even to feet, touch, if there actually was a girl
under the calico and the shawls; there was no time for that yet; but
simply to get her up so they could start), to ride a hundred miles to
become the farmless mother of farmers (she would bear a dozen, all boys,
herself no older, still fragile, still workless among the churns and
stoves and brooms and stacks of wood which even a woman could split into
kindlings; unchanged), bequeathing to them in their matronymic the
heritage of that invincible inviolable ineptitude;
Then suddenly, you realise that that was nowhere near enough, not for that
face-bridehood, motherhood, grandmotherhood, then widowhood and at last
the grave-the long peaceful connubial progress toward matriarchy in a
rocking chair nobody else was allowed to sit in, then a headstone in a
country churchyard-not for that passivity, that stasis, that invincible
captaincy of soul which didn't even need to wait but simply to be, breathe
tranquilly, and take food-infinite not only in capacity but in scope too:
that face, one maiden muse which had drawn a man out of the running pell
mell of a cavalry battle, a whole year around the long iron perimeter of
duty and oath, from Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, across Tennessee
into Virginia and up to the fringe of Pennsylvania before it curved back
into its closing fade along the headwaters of the Appomattox river and at
last removed from him its iron hand: where, a safe distance at last into
the rainy woods from the picket lines and the furled flags and the stacked
muskets, a handful of men leading spent horses, the still-warm pistols
still loose and quick for the hand in the unstrapped scabbards, gathered
in the failing twilight-privates and captains, sergeants and corporals and
subalterns-talking a little of one last desperate cast southward where (by
last report) Johnston was still intact, knowing that they would not, that
they were done not only with vain resistance but with indomitability too;
already departed this morning in fact for Texas, the West, New Mexico: a
new land even if not yet (spent too-like the horses-from the long
harassment and anguish of remaining indomitable and undefeated) a new
hope, putting behind them for good and all the loss of both: the young
dead bride-drawing him (that face) even back from this too, from no longer
having to remain undefeated too: who swapped the charger for the mule and
the sabre for the stocking of seed corn: back across the whole ruined land
and the whole disastrous year by that virgin inevictable passivity more
inescapable than lodestar;
Not that face; that was nowhere near enough: no symbol
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 323
there of connubial matriarchy, but fatal instead with all insatiate and
deathless sterility; spouseless, barren, and undescended; not even
demanding more than that: simply requiring it, requiring all-Lilith's lost
and insatiable face drawing the substance-the will and hope and dream and
imagination-of all men (you too: yourself and the host too) into that one
bright fragile net and snare; not even to be caught, over-flung, by one
single unerring cast of it, but drawn to watch in patient and thronging
turn the very weaving of the strangling golden strands-drawing the two of
you from almost a hundred years away in your turn-yourself the stranger,
the outlander with a B.A. or (perhaps even) M.A. from Harvard or
Northwestern or Stanford, passing through Jefferson by chance or accident
on the way to somewhere else, and the host who in three generations has
never been out of Yoknapatawpha further than a few prolonged Saturday
nights in Memphis or New Orleans, who has heard of Jenny Lind, not because
he has heard of Mark Twain and Mark Twain spoke well of her, but for the
same reason that Mark Twain spoke well of her: not that she sang songs,
but that she sang them in the old West in the old days, and the man
sanctioned by public affirmation to wear a pistol openly in his belt is
an inevictable part of the Missouri and the Yoknapatawpha dream too, but
never of Duse or Bernhardt or Maximilian of Mexico, let alone whether the
Emperor of Mexico even ever had a wife or not (saying-the host-: 'You
mean, she was one of them? maybe even that emperor's wifeT and you: 'Why
not? Wasn't she a Jefferson girl?)'-to stand, in this hot strange little
room furious with frying fat, among the roster and chronicle, the
deathless murmur of the sublime and deathless names and the deathless
faces, the faces omnivorous and insatiable and forever incontent:
demon-nun and angel-witch; empress, siren, Erinys: Mistinguette, too,
invincible possessed of a half-century more of years than the mere three
score or so she bragged and boasted, for you to choose among, which one
she was-not might have been, nor even could have been, but was: so vast,
so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away
the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and
dream-then gone, you are outside again, in the hot noon sun: late; you
have already wasted too much time: to unfumble among the road signs and
filling stations to get back onto a highway you know, back into the United
States; not that it matters, since you know again now that there is no
time: no space: no distance: a fragile and workless scratching almost
depthless in a sheet of old barely transparent glass, and (all you had to
do was look
324 WILLIAM FAULKNER
at it a while; all you have to do now is remember it) there is the clear
undistanced voice as though out of the delicate anterma-skeins of radio,
further than empress's throne, than splendid insatiation, even than
matriarch's peaceful rocking chair, across the vast instantaneous
intervention, from the long long time ago: 'Listen, stranger; this was
myself: this was V
Scene One
Interior, the Jail. 10:30 A.M. March twelfth.
The common room, or 'bull-pen'. It is on the second floor. A heavy barred
door at left is the entrance to it, to the entire cell-block, which-the
cells-are indicated by a row of steel doors, each with its own individual
small barred window, lining the right wall. A narrow passage at the far end
of the right wall leads to more cells. A single big heavily barred window in