hundred years later, when Sutpen's own legend in the county would include
the anecdote of the time the architect broke somehow out of his dungeon
and tried to flee and Sutpen and his Negro head man and hunter ran him
down with dogs in the swamp and brought him back) since, as the architect
had told them, they had no money to buy bad taste with nor even anything
from which to copy what bad taste might still have been within their com-
pass; this one too still costing nothing but the labor and-the second year
now-most of that was slave since there were still more slave owners in the
settlement which had been a town and named for going on two years now,
already a town and already named when the first ones walked up on that
yellow morning two years back:-men other than Holston and the blacksmith
(Compson was one now) who owned one or two or three Negroes, besides
Grenier and Sutpen who had set up camps beside the creek in Compson's
pasture for the two gangs of their Negroes to live in until the two
buildingsthe courthouse and the jail-should be completed. But not al-
together slave, the boundmen, the unfree, because there were
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 201
still the white men too, the same ones who on that hot July morning two
and now three years ago had gathered in a kind of outraged unbelief to
Ring, hurl up in raging sweating impotent fury the little three-walled
lean-to--the same men (with affairs of their own they might have been
attending to or work of their own or for which they were being hired,
paid, that they should have been doing) standing or lounging about the
scaffolding and the stacks of bricks and puddles of clay mortar for an
hour or two hours or half a day, then putting aside one of the Negroes and
taking his place with trowel or saw or adze, unbidden or unreproved either
since there was none present with the right to order or deny; a stranger
might have said probably for that reason, simply because now they didn't
have to, except that it was more than that, working peacefully now that
there was no outrage and fury, and twice as fast because there was no
urgency since this was no more to be hurried by man or men than the
burgeoning of a crop, working (this paradox too to anyone except men like
Grenier and Compson and Peabody who had grown from infancy among slaves,
breathed the same air and even suckled the same breast with the sons of
Ham: black and white, free and unfree, shoulder to shoulder in the same
tireless lift and rhythm as if they had the same aim and hope, which they
did have as far as the Negro was capable, as even Ratcliffe, son of a long
pure line of Anglo-Saxon mountain people and-destinedfather of an equally
long and pure line of white trash tenant farmers who never owned a slave
and never would since each had and would imbibe with his mother's milk a
personal violent antipathy not at all to slavery but to black skins, could
have explained: the slave's simple child's mind had fired at once with the
thought that he was helping to build not only the biggest edifice in the
country, but probably the biggest he had ever seen; this was all but this
was enough) as one because it was theirs, bigger than any because it was
the sum of all and, being the sum of all, it must raise all of their hopes
and aspirations level with its own aspirant and soaring cupola, so that,
sweating and tireless and unflagging, they would look about at one another
a little shyly, a little amazed, with something like humility too, as if
they were realizing, or were for a moment at least capable of believing,
that men, all men, including themselves, were a little better, purer maybe
even, than they had thought, expected, or even needed to be. Though they
were still having a little trouble -with Ratcliffe: the money, the Holston
lock-Chickasaw axle grease fifteen dollars; not trouble really because it
had never been an obstruction even three years ago when it was new, and
now after three years even the light impedeless chip was worn by
familiarity and
202 WILLIAM FAULKNER
ustom to less than a toothpick: merely present, merely visible, ,~r that is,
~iudible: and no trouble with Ratcliffe because he made one too contraposed
the toothpick; more: he was its , hief victim, sufferer, since m here with
the others was mostly inattention, a little humor, now and then a little
fading annoyance and impatience, with him was shame, bafflement, a little
anguish and despair like a man struggling with a congenital vice, hopeless,
indomitable, already defeated. It was not even the money any more now, the
fifteen dollars. It was the fact that they had refused it and, refusing it,
had maybe committed a fatal and irremediable error. He would try to explain
it: 'It's like Old Moster and the rest of them up there that run the luck,
would look down at us and say, Well well, looks like them durn peckerwoods
down there dont want them fifteen dollars we was going to give them
free-gratis-for-nothing. So maybe they dont want nothing from us. So maybe
we better do like they seem to want, and let them sweat and swivet and
scrabble through the best they can by themselves.'
'A%ich they-the town-did, though even then the courtliouse was not finished
for another six years. Not but that they thought it was: complete: simple
and square, floored and roofed and windowed, with a central hallway and the
four offices sheriff and tax assessor and circuit- and chanceryclerk
(which-the chancery-clerk's office-would contain the ballot boxes and booths
for voting,-below, and the courtroom and jury-room and the judge's chambers
above ven to the pigeons and English sparrows, migrants too but not
pioneers, inevictably urban in fact, come all the way from the Atlantic
coast as soon as the town became a town with a name, taking possession of
the gutters and eave-boxes almost before the final hammer was withdrawn,
uxorious and interminable the one, garrulous and myriad the other. Then in
the sixth year old Alec Holston died and bequeathed back to the town the
fifteen dollars it had paid him for the lock; two years before, Louis
Grenier had died and his heirs still held in trust on demand the fifteen
hundred dollars his will had devised it, and now there was another newcomer
in the county, a man named John Sartoris, with slaves and gear and money too
like Grenier and Sutpen, but who was an even better stalemate to Sutpen than
Grenier had been because it was apparent at once that he, Sartoris, was the
sort of man who could even cope with Sutpen in the sense that a man with a
sabre or even a small sword and heart enough for it could cope with one with
an axe; and that summer (Sutpen's Paris architect had long since gone back
to whatever place he came from and to which he had made his one abortive
midnight try to return,
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 203
but his trickle, flow of bricks had never even faltered: his molds and
kilns had finished the jail and were now raising the walls of two churches
and by the half-century would have completed what would be known through
all north Mississippi and cast Tennessee as the Academy, the Female
Institute) there was a committee: Compson and Sartoris and Peabody (and
in absentia Sutpen: nor would the town ever know exactly how much of the
additional cost Sutpen and Sartoris made up): and the next year the eight