gleam, this spark, this gilded crumb of man's eternal aspira
tion, this golden dome preordained and impregnable, this
minuscule foetus-glint tougher than ice and harder than freeze;
the earth lurched again, sloughing; the ice with infinitesimal
speed, scouring out the valleys, scoring the hills, and vanished;
the earth tilted further to recede the sea rim by necklace-rim
of crustacean husks in recessional contour lines like the con
centric whorls within the sawn stump telling the tree's age,
233
234 WILLIAM FAULKNER
bearing south by recessional south toward that mute and beckoning gleam
the confluent continental swale, baring to light and air the broad blank
mid-continental page for the first scratch of orderly recording-a
laboratory-factory covering what would be twenty states, established and
ordained for the purpose of manufacturing one: the ordered unhurried whirl
of seasons, of rain and snow and freeze and thaw and sun and drouth to
aereate and slack the soil, the conflux of a hundred rivers into one vast
father of rivers carrying the rich dirt, the rich garnering, south and
south, carving the bluffs to bear the long march of the river towns,
flooding the Mississippi lowlands, spawning the rich alluvial dirt layer
by vernal layer, raising inch by foot by year by century the surface of
the earth which in time (not distant now, measured against that long
signatureless chronicle) would tremble to the passing of trains like that
when the cat crosses the suspension bridge;
The rich deep black alluvial soil which would grow cotton taller than the
head of a man on a horse, already one jungle one brake one impassable
density of brier and cane and vine interlocking the soar of gum and
cypress and hickory and pinoak and ash, printed now by the tracks of
unalien shapes-bear and deer and panthers and bison and wolves and
alligators and the myriad smaller beasts, and unalien men to name them too
perhaps-the (themselves) nameless though recorded predecessors who built
the mounds to escape the spring floods and left their meagre artifacts:
the obsolete and the dispossessed, dispossessed by those who were
dispossessed in turn because they too were obsolete: the wild Algonquian,
Chickasaw and Choctaw and Natchez and Pascagoula, peering in virgin aston-
ishment down from the tall bluffs at a Chippeway canoe bearing three
Frenchmen-and had barely time to whirl and look behind him at ten and then
a hundred and then a thousand Spaniards come overland from the Atlantic
Ocean: a tide, a wash, a thrice flux-and-ebb of motion so rapid and quick
across the land's slow alluvial chronicle as to resemble the limber
flicking of the magician's one hand before the other holding the deck of
inconstant cards: the Frenchman for a moment, then the Spaniard for
perhaps two, then the Frenchman for another two and then the Spaniard
again for another and then the Frenchman for that one last second,
half-breath; because then came the Anglo-Saxon, the pioneer, the tall man,
roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whiskey, Bible and jug in one
hand and (like as not) a native tomahawk in the other, brawling, turbulent
not through viciousness but simply because of his over-revved glands;
uxorious and polygamous: a married invincible bachelor, dragging his
gravid wife and most
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 235
of the rest of his mother-in-law's family behind him into the trackless
infested forest, spawning that child as like as not behind the barricade of
a rifle-crotched log mapless leagues from nowhere and then getting her with
another one before reaching his final itch-footed destination, and at the
same time scattering his ebullient seed in a hundred dusky bellies through
a thousand miles of wilderness; innocent and gullible, without bowels for
avarice or compassion or forethought either, changing the face of the earth:
felling a tree which took two hundred years to grow, in order to extract
from it a bear or a capful of wild honey;
Obsolete too: still felling the two-hundred-year-old tree when the bear and
the wild honey were gone and there was nothing in it any more but a raccoon
or a possum whose hide was worth at the most two dollars, turning.the earth
into a howling waste from which he would be the first to vanish, not even on
the heels but synchronous with the slightly darker wild men whom he had
dispossessed, because, like them, only the wilderness could feed and nourish
him; and so disappeared, strutted his roaring eupeptic hour, and was no
more, leaving his ghost, pariah and proscribed, scriptureless now and armed
only with the highwayman's, the murderer's, pistol, haunting the fringes of
the wilderness which he himself had helped to destroy, because the river
towns marched now recessional south by south along the processional bluffs:
St. Louis, Paducah, Memphis, Helena, Vicksburg, Natchez, Baton Rouge, peo-
pled by men with mouths full of law, in broadcloth and flowered waistcoats,
who owned Negro slaves and Empire beds and buhl cabinets and ormolu clocks,
who strolled and smoked their cigars along the bluffs beneath which in the
shanty and flatboat purlieus he rioted out the last of his doomed evening,
losing his worthless life again and again to the fierce knives of his
drunken and worthless kind-this in the intervals of being pursued and
harried in his vanishing avatars of Harpe and Hare and Mason and Murrel,
either shot on sight or hoicked, dragged out of what remained of his secret
wilderness haunts along the overland Natchez trace (one day someone brought
a curious seed into the land and inserted it into the earth, and now vast
fields of white not only covered the waste places which with his wanton and
heedless axe he bad made, but were effacing, thrusting back the wilderness
even faster than he had been able to, so that he barely had a screen for his
back when, crouched in his thicket, he glared at his dispossessor in
impotent and incredulous and uncomprehending rage) into the towns to his
formal apothesis in a courtroom and then a gallows or the limb of a tree;
236 WILLIAM FAULKNER
Because those days were gone, the old brave innocent tumultuous eupeptic
tomorrowless days; the last broadhorn and keelboat (Mike Fink was a legend;
soon even the grandfathers would no longer claim to remember him, and the
river hero was now the steamboat gambler wading ashore in his draggled
finery from the towhead where the captain had marooned him) had been sold
piecemeal for firewood in Chartres and Toulouse and Dauphine street, and
Choctaw and Chickasaw braves, in short hair and overalls and armed with
mule-whips in place of war-clubs and already packed up to move west to
Oklahoma, watched steamboats furrowing even the shallowest and remotest
wilderness streams where tumbled gently to the motion of the paddle-wheels,
the gutted rock-weighted bones of Hare's and Mason's murderees; a new time,
a new age, millennium's beginning; one vast single net of commerce webbed
and veined the mid-continent's fluvial embracement; New Orleans, Pittsburgh,
and Fort Bridger, Wyoming, were suburbs one to the other, inextricable in
destiny; men's mouths were full of law and order, all men's mouths were
round with the sound of money; one unanimous golden affirmation ululated the
nation's boundless immeasurable forenoon: profit plus regimen equals