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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