unheard voice crying thinly out of the roar of a mob: 'Wait, look here,
listen-'
Because they were too busy raging and sweating among the dismantled logs and
felling the new ones in the adjacent woods and trimming and notching and
dragging them out and mixing the tenuous clay mud to chink them together
with; it was not until the second day that they learned what was troubling
Ratcliffe, because now they had time, the work going no slower, no lessening
of sweat but on the contrary, if anything the work going even a little
faster because now there was a lightness in the speed and all that was
abated was the rage and the outrage, because somewhere between the dark and
the dawn of the first and the second day, something had happened to them-the
men who had spent that first long hot endless July day sweating and raging
about the wrecked jail, flinging indiscriminately and savagely aside the
dismantled logs and the log-like laudanum-smitten inmates in order to
rebuild the one, cursing old Holston and the lock and the four-three
-bandits. and the eleven militiamen who had arrested them, and Compson and
Pettigrew and Peabody and the United States of America-the same men met at
the project before sunrise on the next day which was already promising to be
hot and endless too, but with the rage and the fury absent now, quiet, not
grave so much as sobered, a little amazed, diffident, blinking a little
perhaps, looking a little aside from one another, a little unfamiliar even
to one another in the new jonquil-colored light, looking about them at the
meagre huddle of crude cabins set without order and every one a little awry
to every other and all dwarfed to doll-houses by the vast loom of the woods
which enclosed them-the tiny clearing clawed punily not even into the flank
of pathless wilderness but into the Join, the groin, the secret parts, which
was the irrevocable cast
196 WILLIAM FAULKNER
die of their lives, fates, pasts and futures-not even speaking for a while
yet since each one probably believed (a little shamefaced too) that the
thought was solitarily his, until at last one spoke for all and then it was
all right since it had taken one conjoined breath to shape that sound, the
speaker speaking not loud, diffidently, tentatively, so you insert the first
light tentative push of wind into the mouthpiece of a strange untried
foxhorn: 'By God. Jefferson.'
'Jefferson, Mississippi,' a second added.
'Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi,' a third coriected; who,
which one, didn't matter this time either since it was still one conjoined
breathing, one compound dream-state, mused and static, well capable of
lasting on past sunrise too, though they probably knew better too since
Compson was still there: the gnat, the thorn, the catalyst.
'It aint until we finish the goddamned thing,' Compson said. 'Come on.
Let's get at it.' So they finished it that day, working rapidly now, with
speed and lightness too, concentrated yet inattentive, to get it done and
that quickly, not to finish it but to get it out of the way, behind them;
not to finish it quickly in order to own, possess it sooner, but to be able
to obliterate, efface it the sooner, as if they had also known in that
first yellow light that it would not be near enough, would not even be the
beginning; that the little lean-to room they were building would not even
be a pattern and could not even be called practice, working on until noon,
the hour to stop and eat, by which time Louis Grenier had arrived from
Frenchman's Bend (his plantation: his manor, his kitchens and stables and
kennels and slave quarters and gardens and promenades and fields which a
hundred years later will have vanished, his name and his blood too, leaving
nothing but the name of his plantation and his own fading corrupted legend
like a thin layer of the native ephemeral yet inevictable dust on a section
of country surrounding a little lost paintless crossroads store) twenty
miles away behind a slave coachman and footman in his imported English
carriage and what was said to be the finest matched team outside of Natchez
or Nashville, and Compson said, 'I reckon that'll do'-all knowing what he
meant: not abandonment: to complete it, of course, but so little remained
now that the two slaves could finish it. The four in fact, since, although
as soon as it was assumed that the two Grenier Negroes would lend the two
local ones a hand, Compson demurred on the grounds that who would dare
violate the rigid protocol of bondage by ordering a stableservant, let
alone a house servant, to do manual labor, not to mention having the
temerity to approach old Louis Grenier with the suggestion, Peabody nipped
that at once.
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 197
'One of them can use my shadow,' he said. 'It never blenched out there with
a white doctor standing in it,' and even offered to be emissary to old
Grenier, except that Grenier himself forestalled them. So they ate
Holston's noon ordinary, while the Chickasaws, squatting unmoving still
where the creep of shade had left them in the full fierce glare of July
noon about the wagon where old Mohataha still sat under her slave-borne
Paris parasol, ate their lunches too which (Mohataha's and her personal
retinue's came out of a woven whiteoak withe fishbasket in the wagonbed),
they appeared to have carried in from what, patterning the white people,
they called their plantation too, under their arms inside the rolled-up
trousers. Then they moved back to the front gallery and-not the settlement
any more now: the town; it had been a town for thirty-one hours now-watched
the four slaves put up the final log and pin down the final shake on the
roof and hang the door, and then, Ratcliffe leading something like the
court chamberlain across a castle courtyard, cross back to the store and
enter and emerge carrying the iron chest, the grave Chickasaws watching too
the white man's slaves sweating the white man's ponderable dense
inscrutable medicine into its new shrine. And now they had time to find out
what was bothering Ratcliffe.
'That lock,' Ratcliffe said.
'WhatT somebody said.
'That Indian axle-grease,' Ratcliffe said.
'WhatT they said again. But they knew, understood, now. It was neither lock
nor axle-grease; it was the fifteen dollars which could have been charged
to the Indian Department on Ratcliffe's books and nobody would have ever
found it, noticed it, missed it. It was not greed on Ratcliffe's part, and
least of all was he advocating corruption. The idea was not even new to
him; it did not need any casual man on a horse riding in to the settlement
once every two or three weeks, to reveal to him that possibility; he had
thought of that the first time he had charged the first sack of peppermint
candy to the first one of old Mohataha's forty-year-old grandchildren and
had refrained from adding two zeroes to the ten or fifteen cents for ten
years now, wondering each time why he did refrain, amazed at his own virtue
or at least his strength of will. It was a matter of principle. It was
he-they: the settlement (town now)-who had thought of charging the lock to
the United States as a provable lock, a communal risk, a concrete
ineradicable object, win lose or draw, let the chips fall where they may,
on that dim day when some Federal inspector might, just barely might, audit