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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