182 WILLIAM FAULKNER
by one of the three men who were what was to be Yoknapatawpha County's
coeval pioneers and settlers, leaving in it the three oldest names-Alexander
Holston, who came as half groom and half bodyguard to Doctor Samuel
Habersham, and half nurse and half tutor to the doctor's eight-year-old
motherless son, the three of them riding horseback across Tennessee from the
Cumberland Gap along with Louis Grenier, the Huguenot younger son who
brought the first slaves into the country and was granted the first big land
patent and became the first cotton planter; while Doctor Habersham, with his
worn black bag of pills and knives and his brawny taciturn bodyguard and his
half orphan child, became the settlement itself (for a time, before it was
named, the settlement was known as Doctor Habersham's, then Habersham's,
then simply Habersham; a hundred years later, during a schism between two
ladies' clubs over the naming of the streets in order to get free mail
delivery, a movement was started, first, to change the name back to
Habersham; then, failing that, to divide the town in two and call one half
of it Habersham after the old pioneer doctor and founder)-friend of old
Issetibbeha, the Chickasaw chief (the motherless Habersham boy, now a man of
twenty-five, married one of Issetibbeha's grand-daughters and in the
thirties emigrated to Oklahoma with his wife's dispossessed people), first
unofficial, then official Chickasaw agent until he resigned in a letter of
furious denunciation addressed to the President of the United States
himself; and-his charge and pupil a man now-Alexander Holston became the
settlement's first publican, establishing the tavern still known as the
Holston House, the original log walls and puncheon floors and hand-morticed
joints of which are still buried somewhere beneath the modern pressed glass
and brick veneer and neon tubes. The lock was his;
Fifteen pounds of useless iron lugged a thousand miles through a desert of
precipice and swamp, of flood and drouth and wild beasts and wild Indians
and wilder white men, displacing that fifteen pounds better given to food or
seed to plant food or even powder to defend with, to become a fixture, a
kind of landmark, in the bar of a wilderness ordinary, locking and securing
nothing, because there was nothing behind the heavy bars and shutters
needing further locking and securing; not even a paper weight because the
only papers in the Holston House were the twisted spills in an old powder
horn above the mantel for lighting tobacco; always a little in the way,
since it had constantly to be moved: from bar to shelf to mantel back to bar
again until they finally thought about putting it on the bi-monthly
mail-pouch; familiar, known, pres-
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 183
ently the oldest unchanged thing in the settlement, older than the people
since Issetibbeha and Doctor Habersham were dead, and Alexander Holston was
an old man crippled with arthritis, and Louis Grenier had a settlement of
his own on his vast plantation, half of which was not even in Yoknapatawpha
County, and the settlement rarely saw him; older than the town, since there
were new names in it now even when the old blood ran in them-Sartoris and
Stevens, Compson and McCaslin and Sutpen and Coldfield-and you no longer
shot a bear or deer or wild turkey simply by standing for a while in your
kitchen door, not to mention the pouch of mail -letters and even
newspapers-which came from Nashville every two weeks by a special rider who
did nothing else and was paid a salary for it by the Federal Government; and
that was the second phase of the monster Carolina lock's transubstantiation
into the Yoknapatawpha County courthouse;
The pouch didn't always reach the settlement every two weeks, nor even
always every month. But sooner or later it did, and everybody knew it would,
because it-the cowhide saddlebag not even large enough to hold a full change
of clothing, containing three or four letters and half that many
badly-printed one- and two-sheet newspapers already three or four months out
of date and usually half and sometimes wholly misinformed or incorrect to
begin with-was the United States, the power and the will to liberty, owning
liegence to no man, bringing even into that still almost pathless wilderness
the thin peremptory voice of the nation which had wrenched its freedom from
one of the most powerful peoples on earth and then again within the same
lifespan successfully defended it; so peremptory and audible that the man
who carried the pouch on the galloping horse didn't even carry any arms ex-
cept a tin horn, traversing month after month, blatantly, flagrantly, almost
contemptuously, a region where for no more than the boots on his feet, men
would murder a traveller and gut him like a bear or deer or fish and fill
the cavity with rocks and sink the evidence in the nearest water; not even
deigning to pass quietly where other men, even though armed and in parties,
tried to move secretly or at least without uproar, but instead announcing
his solitary advent as far ahead of himself as the ring of the horn would
carry. So it was not long before Alexander Holston's lock had moved to the
mailpouch. Not that the pouch needed one, having come already the three
hundred miles from Nashville without a lock. (It had been projected at first
that the lock remain on the pouch constantly. That is, not just while the
pouch was in the settlement, but while it was on the horse between Nashville
and
184 WILLIAM FAULKNER
the settlement too. The rider refused, succinctly, in three words, one of
which was printable. His reason was the lock's weight. They pointed out
to him that this would not hold water, since not only-the rider was a
frail irascible little man weighing less than a hundred pounds-would the
fifteen pounds of lock even then fail to bring his weight up to that of
a normal adult male, the added weight of the lock would merely match that
of the pistols which his employer, the United States Government, believed
he carried and even paid him for having done so, the rider's reply to this
being succinct too though not so glib: that the lock weighed fifteen
pounds either at the back door of the store in the settlement, or at that
of the postoffice in Nashville. But since Nashville and the settlement
were three hundred yards apart, by the time the horse had carried it from
one to the other, the lock weighed fifteen pounds to the mile times three
hundred miles, or forty-five hundred pounds. Which was manifest nonsense,
a physical impossibility either in lock or horse. Yet indubitably fifteen
pounds times three hundred miles was forty-five hundred something, either
pounds or mil es-especi ally as while they were still trying to unravel
it, the rider repeated his first three succinct-two unprintable-words.)
So less than ever would the pouch need a lock in the back room of the
trading-post, surrounded and enclosed once more by civilization, where its
very intactness, its presence to receive a lock, proved its lack of that
need during the three hundred miles of rapine-haunted Trace; needing a
lock as little as it was equipped to receive one, since it had been
necessary to slit the leather with a knife just under each jaw of the
opening and insert the lock's iron mandible through the two slits and