say whar de lock.'
It was gone (as were three horses belonging to three of the lynching
faction). They couldn't even find the heavy door and the chain, and at
first they were almost betrayed into believing that the bandits had had
to take the door in order to steal the chain and lock, catching themselves
back from the very brink of this wanton accusation of rationality. But the
lock was gone; nor did it take the settlement long to realize that it was
not the escaped bandits and the aborted reward, but the lock, and not a
simple situation which faced them, but a problem which threatened, the
slave departing back to the Holston House at a dead run and then
reappearing at the dead run almost before the door, the walls, had had
time to hide him, engulf and then eject him again, darting through the
crowd and up to Compson himself now, saying, "Ole Boss say fetch de
lock"-not send the lock, but bring the lock, So Compson and his
lieutenants (and this was where the mail rider began to appear, or rather,
to emerge-the fragile wisp of a man ageless, hairless and toothless, who
looked too frail even to approach a horse, let alone ride one six hundred
miles every two weeks, yet who did so, and not only that but had wind
enough left not only to an -nounce and precede but even follow his passing
with the jeering musical triumph of the horn:-a contempt for
possible-probable-despoilers matched only by that for the official dross
of which he might be despoiled, and which agreed to remain in civilized
bounds only so long as the despoilers had the taste to refrain) -repaired
to the kitchen where old Alec still sat before his smoldering log, his
back still to the room, and still not turning it this time either. And
that was all. He ordered the immediate return of his lock. It was not even
an ultimatum, it was a simple instruction, a decree, impersonal, the mail
rider now well into the fringe of the group, saying nothing and missing
nothing, like a weightless desiccated or fossil bird, not a vulture of
course nor even quite a hawk, but say a pterodactyl chick arrested just
out of the egg ten glaciers ago and so old in
188 WILLIAM FAULKNER
simple infancy as to be the worn and weary ancestor of all subsequent life.
They pointed out to old Alec that the only reason the lock could be missing
was that the bandits had not had time or been able to cut it out of the
door, and that even three fleeing madmen on stolen horses would not carry a
six-foot oak door very far, and that a party of Ikkernotubbe's young men
were even now trailing the horses westward toward the River and that without
doubt the lock would be found at any moment, probably under the first bush
at the edge of the settlement: knowing better, knowing that there was no
limit to the fantastic and the terrifying and the bizarre, of which the men
were capable who already, just to escape from a log jail, had quietly
removed one entire wall and stacked it in neat piecemeal at the roadside,
and that they nor old Alec neither would ever see his lock again;
Nor did they; the rest of that afternoon and all the next day too, while old
Alec still smoked his pipe in front of his smoldering log, the settlement's
sheepish and raging elders hunted for it, with (by now: the next afternoon)
Ikkemotubbe's Chickasaws helping too, or anyway present, watching: the wild
men, the wilderness's tameless evictant children loooking only the more wild
and homeless for the white man's denim and butternut and felt and straw
which they wore, standing or squatting or following, grave, attentive and
interested, while the white men sweated and cursed among the bordering
thickets of their punily-clawed foothold; and always the rider, Pettigrew,
ubiquitous, everywhere, not helping search himself and never in anyone's
way, but always present, inscrutable, saturnine, missing nothing: until at
last toward sundown Compson crashed savagely out of the last bramble-brake
and flung the sweat from his face with a full-armed sweep sufficient to
repudiate a throne, and said.
'All right, god damn it, we'll pay him for it.' Because they had already
considered that last gambit; they had already realized its seriousness from
the very fact that Peabody had tried to make a joke about it which everyone
knew that even Peabody did not think humorous:
'Yes-and quick too, before he has time to advise with Pettigrew and price
it by the pound.'
'By the pound?' Compson said.
'Pettigrew just weighed it by the three hundred miles from Nashville. Old
Alec might start from Carolina. That's fifteen thousand pounds.'
'Oh,' Compson said. So he blew in his men by means of a foxhom which one of
the Indians wore on a thong around his
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 189
neck, though even then they paused for one last quick conference; again it
was Peabody who stopped them.
'Who'll pay for it?' he said. 'It would be just like him to want a dollar
a pound for it, even if by Pettigrew's scale he had found it in the ashes
of his fireplace.' They-Compson anyway -had probably already thought of
that; that, as much as Pettigrew's presence, was probably why be was trying
to rush them into old Alec's presence with the offer so quickly that none
would have the face to renege on a pro-rata share. But Peabody had torn it
now. Compson looked about at them, sweating, grimly enraged.
'That means Peabody will probably pay one dollar,' be said. 'Who pays the
other fourteen? Me?' Then Ratcliffe, the trader, the store's proprietor,
solved it-a solution so simple, so limitless in retroact, that they didn't
even wonder why nobody had thought of it before; which not only solved the
problem but abolished it; and not just that one, but all problems, from now
on into perpetuity, opening to their vision like the rending of a veil,
like a glorious prophecy, the vast splendid limitless panorama of America:
that land of boundless opportunity, that bourne, created not by nor of the
people, but for the people, as was the heavenly manna of old, with no
return demand on man save the chewing and swallowing since out of its own
matchless Allgood it would create produce train support and perpetuate a
race of laborers dedicated to the single purpose of picking the manna up
and putting it into his lax hand or even between his jaws-illimitable,
vast, without beginning or end, not even a trade or a craft but a
beneficence as are sunlight and rain and air, inalienable and immutable.
'Put it on the Book,' Ratcliffe said-the Book: not a ledger, but the
ledger, since it was probably the only thing of its kind between Nashville
and Natchez, unless there might happen to be a similar one a few miles
south at the first Choctaw agency at Yalo Busha-a ruled, paper-backed
copybook such as might have come out of a schoolroom, in which accrued,
with the United States as debtor, in Mohataha's name (the Chickasaw
matriarch, Ikkemotubbe's mother and old Issetibbeha's sister, who-she could
write her name, or anyway make something with a pen or pencil which was
agreed to be, or at least accepted to be, a valid signature-signed all the
conveyances as her son's kingdom passed to the white people, regularising
it in law anyway) the crawling tedious list of calico and gunpowder,
whiskey and salt and snuff and denim pants and osseous candy drawn from