clash it home, so that any other hand with a similar knife could have cut
the whole lock from the pouch as easily as it had been clasped onto it.
So the old lock was not even a symbol of security: it was a gesture of
salutation, of free men to free men, of civilization across not just the
three hundred miles of wilderness to Nashville, but the fifteen hundred
to Washington: of respect without servility, allegiance without abasement
to the government which they had helped to found and had accepted with
pride but still as free men, still free to withdraw from it at any moment
when the two of them found themselves no longer compatible, the old lock
meeting the pouch each time on its arrival, to clasp it in iron and
inviolable symbolism, while old Alec Holston, childless bachelor, grew a
little older and grayer, a little more arthritic in flesh and temper too,
a little stiffer and more rigid in bone and pride too, since the lock was
still his, he had merely lent it, and so in a sense he was the grandfather
in the settlement of the inviolability not just of govern-
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 185
ment mail, but of a free government of free men too, so long as the
government remembered to let men live free, not under it but beside it;
That was the lock; they put it on the jail. They did it quickly, not even
waiting until a messenger could have got back from the Holston House with
old Alec's permission to remove it from the mail-pouch or use it for the
new purpose. Not that he would have objected on principle nor refused his
permission except by simple instinct; that is, he would probably have been
the first to suggest the lock if he had known in time or thought of it
first, but he would have refused at once if he thought the thing was
contemplated without consulting him. Which everybody in the settlement
knew, though this was not at all why they didn't wait for the messenger.
In fact, no messenger had ever been sent to old Alec; they didn't have
time to send one, let alone wait until he got back; they didn't want the
lock to keep the bandits in, since (as was later proved) the old lock
would have been no more obstacle for the bandits to pass than the
customary wooden bar; they didn't need the lock to protect the settlement
from the bandits, but to protect the bandits from the settlement. Because
the prisoners had barely reached the settlement when it developed that
there was a faction bent on lynching them at once, out of hand, without
preliminary-a small but determined gang which tried to wrest the prisoners
from their captors while the militia was still trying to find someone to
surrender them to, and would have succeeded except for a man named
Compson, who had come to the settlement a few years ago with a racehorse,
which he swapped to Ikkemoutubbe, Issetibbeha's successor in the
chiefship, for a square mile of what was to be the most valuable land in
the future town of Jefferson, who, legend said, drew a pistol and held the
ravishers at bay until the bandits could be got into the jail and the
auger holes bored and someone sent to fetch old Alec Holston's lock.
Because there were indeed new names and faces too in the settlement
now-faces so new as to have (to the older residents) no discernible
antecedents other than mammalinity, nor past other than the simple years
which had scored them; and names so new as to have no discernible (nor
discoverable either) antecedents or past at all, as though they had been
invented yesterday, report dividing again: to the effect that there were
more people in the settlement that day than the militia sergeant whom one
or all of the bandits might recognise;
So Compson locked the jail, and a courier with the two best horses in the
settlement-one to ride and one to lead-cut
186 WILLIAM FAULKNER
through the woods to the Trace to ride the hundred-odd miles to Natchez with
news of the capture and authority to dicker for the reward; and that evening
in the Holston House kitchen was held the settlement's first municipal
meeting, prototype not only of the town council after the settlement would
be a town, but of the Chamber of Commerce when it would begin to proclaim
itself a city, with Compson presiding, not old Alec, who was quite old now,
grim, taciturn, sitting even on a hot July night before a smoldering log in
his vast chimney, his back even turned to the table (he was not interested
in the deliberation; the prisoners were his already since his lock held
them; whatever the conference decided would have to be submitted to him for
ratification anyway before anyone could touch his lock to open it) around
which the progenitors of the Jefferson city fathers sat in what was almost
a council of war, not only discussing the collecting of the reward, but the
keeping and defending it. Because there were two factions of opposition now:
not only the lynching party, but the militia band too, who claimed that as
prizes the prisoners still belonged to their original captors; that they-the
militia-had merely surrendered the prisoners' custody but had relinquished
nothing of any reward: on the prospect of which, the militia band had got
more whiskey from the trading-post store and had built a tremendous bonfire
in front of the jail, around which they and the lynching party had now
confederated in a wassail or conference of their own. Or so they thought.
Because the truth was that Compson, in the name of a crisis in the public
peace and welfare, had made a formal demand on the professional bag of
Doctor Peabody, old Doctor Habersham's successor, and the three of
them-Compson, Peabody, and the post trader (his name was Ratcliffe; a
hundred years later it would still exist in the county, but by that time it
had passed through two inheritors who had dispensed with the eye in the
transmission of words, using only the ear, so that by the time the fourth
one had been compelled by simple necessity to learn to write it again, it
had lost the V and the final 'fe' too) added the laudanurn to the keg of
whiskey and sent it as a gift from the settlement to the astonished militia
sergeant, and returned to the Holston House kitchen to wait until the last
of the uproar died; then the law-and-order party made a rapid sortie and
gathered up all the comatose opposition, lynchers and captors too, and
dumped them all into the jail with the prisoners and locked the door again
and went home to bed-until the next morning, when the first arrivals were
met by a scene resembling an outdoor stage setting: which was how the legend
of the mad Harpes started: a thing not just fantastical but
incomprehensible, not just whimsical but a
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 187
little terrifying (though at least it was bloodless, which would have
contented neither Harne) : not just the lock gone from the door nor even
just the door gone from the jail, but the entire wall gone, the
mud-chinked axe-morticed logs unjointed neatly and quietly in the darkness
and stacked as neatly to one side, leaving the jail open to the world like
a stage on which the late insurgents still lay sprawled and various in
deathlike slumber, the whole settlement gathered now to watch Compson
trying to kick at least one of them awake, until one of the Holston
slaves-the cook's husband, the waiter-groom
hostler-ran into the crowd shouting, 'Whar de lock, whar de lock, ole Boss