REQUIEM FOR A NUN
by
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Act One, 179
THE COURTHOUSE (A Name for the City)
Act Two, 233
THE GOLDEN DOME (Beginning Was the Word)
Act Three, 296
THE JAIL (Nor Even Yet Quite Relinquish-)
Act One
THE COURTHOUSE (A Name for the City)
The courthouse is less old than the town, which began somewhere under the
turn of the century as a Chickasaw Agency trading-post and so continued for
almost thirty years before it discovered, not that it lacked a depository
for its records and certainly not that it needed one, but that only by
creating or anyway decreeing one, could it cope with a situation which
otherwise was going to cost somebody money;
The settlement had the records; even the simple dispossession
of Indians begot in time a minuscule of archive, let alone the
normal litter of man's ramshackle confederation against en
vironment-that time and that wilderness-in this case, a
meagre, fading, dogeared, uncorrelated, at times illiterate
sheaf of land grants and patents and transfers and deeds, and
tax- and militia-rolls, and bills of sale for slaves, and counting
house lists of spurious currency and exchange rates, and liens
and mortgages, and listed rewards for escaped or stolen
Negroes and other livestock, and diary-like annotations of
births and marriages and deaths and public hangings and land
auctions, accumulating slowly for those three decades in a
sort of iron pirate's chest in the back room of the postoffice
tradingpost-store, until that day thirty years later when, be
cause of a jailbreak compounded by an ancient monster iron
179
180 WILLIAM FAULKNER
padlock transported a thousand miles by horseback from Carolina, the box was
removed to a small new leanto room like a wood- or tool-shed built two days
ago against one outside wall of the morticed-log mud-chinked shake-down
jail; and thus was born the Yoknapatawpha County courthouse: by simple
fortuity, not only less old than even the jail, but come into existence at
all by chance and accident: the box containing the documents not moved from
any place, but simply to one; removed from the trading-post back room not
for any reason inherent in either the back room or the box, but on the con-
trary: which-the box-was not only in nobody's way in the back room, it was
even missed when gone since it had served as another seat or stool among the
powder- and whisky-kegs and firkins of salt and lard about the stove on
winter nights; and was moved at all for the simple reason that suddenly the
settlement (overnight it would become a town without having been a village;
one day in about a hundred years it would wake frantically from its communal
slumber into a rash of Rotary and Lion Clubs and Chambers of Commerce and
City Beautifuls: a furious beating of hollow drums toward nowhere, but
merely to sound louder than the next little human clotting to its north or
south or east or west, dubbing itself city as Napoleon dubbed himself
emperor and defending the expedient by padding its census rolls-a fever, a
delirium in which it would confound forever seething with motion and motion
with progress. But that was a hundred years away yet; now it was frontier,
the men and women pioneers, tough, simple, and durable, seeking money or
adventure or freedom or simple escape, and not too particular how they did
it.) discovered itself faced not so much with a problem which had to be
solved, as a Damocles sword of dilemma from which it had to save itself;
Even the jailbreak was fortuity: a gang-three or four-of Natchez Trace
bandits (twenty-five years later legend would begin to affirm, and a hundred
years later would still be at it, that two of the bandits were the Harpes
themselves, Big Harpe anyway, since the circumstances, the method of the
breakout left behind like a smell, an odor, a kind of gargantuan and bizarre
playfulness at once humorous and terrifying, as if the settlement had
fallen, blundered, into the notice or range of an idle and whimsical giant.
Which-that they were the Harpes-was impossible, since the Harpes and even
the last of Mason's ruffians were dead or scattered by this time, and the
robbers would have had to belong to John Murrel's organization-if they
needed to belong to any at all other than the simple fraternity of rapine.)
captured by chance by an
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 181
incidental band of civilian more-or-less militia and brought in to the
Jefferson jail because it was the nearest one, the militia band being part
of a general muster at Jefferson two days before for a Fourth-of-July
barbecue, which by the second day had been refined by hardy elimination into
one drunken brawling which rendered even the hardiest survivors vulnerable
enough to be ejected from the settlement by the civilian residents, the band
which was to make the capture having been carried, still comatose, in one of
the evicting wagons to a swamp four miles from Jefferson known as Hurricane
Bottoms, where they made camp to regain their strength or at least their
legs, and where that night the four-or threebandits, on the way across
country to their hideout from their last exploit on the Trace, stumbled onto
the campfire. And here report divided; some said that the sergeant in
command of the militia recognised one of the bandits as a deserter from his
corps, others said that one of the bandits recognised in the sergeant a
former follower of his, the bandit's, trade. Anyway, on the fourth morning
all of them, captors and prisoners, returned to Jefferson in a group, some
said in confederation now seeking more drink, others said that the captors
brought their prizes back to the settlement in revenge for having been
evicted from it. Because these were frontier, pioneer times, when personal
liberty and freedom were almost a physical condition like fire or flood, and
no community was going to interfere with anyone's morals as long as the
amoralist practised somewhere else, and so Jefferson, being neither on the
Trace nor the River but lying about midway between, naturally wanted no part
of the underworld of either;
But they had some of it now, taken as it were by surprise, unawares, without
warning to prepare and fend off. They put the bandits into the
log-and-mudchinking jail, which until now had had no lock at all since its
clients so far had been amateurs-local brawlers and drunkards and runaway
slaves -for whom a single heavy wooden beam in slots across the outside of
the door like on a corncrib, had sufficed. But they had now what might be
four-three Dillingers or Jesse Jameses of the time, with rewards on their
heads. So they locked the jail; they bored an auger hole through the door
and another through the jamb and passed a length of heavy chain through the
holes and sent a messenger on the run across to the postoffice-store to
fetch the ancient Carolina lock from the last Nashville mail-pouch-the iron
monster weighing almost fifteen pounds, with a key almost as long as a
bayonet, not just the only lock in that part of the country, but the oldest
lock in that cranny of the United States, brought there