Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN

by

WILLIAM FAULKNER

Act One, 179

THE COURTHOUSE (A Name for the City)

Act Two, 233

THE GOLDEN DOME (Beginning Was the Word)

Act Three, 296

THE JAIL (Nor Even Yet Quite Relinquish-)

Act One

THE COURTHOUSE (A Name for the City)

The courthouse is less old than the town, which began somewhere under the

turn of the century as a Chickasaw Agency trading-post and so continued for

almost thirty years before it discovered, not that it lacked a depository

for its records and certainly not that it needed one, but that only by

creating or anyway decreeing one, could it cope with a situation which

otherwise was going to cost somebody money;

The settlement had the records; even the simple dispossession

of Indians begot in time a minuscule of archive, let alone the

normal litter of man's ramshackle confederation against en

vironment-that time and that wilderness-in this case, a

meagre, fading, dogeared, uncorrelated, at times illiterate

sheaf of land grants and patents and transfers and deeds, and

tax- and militia-rolls, and bills of sale for slaves, and counting

house lists of spurious currency and exchange rates, and liens

and mortgages, and listed rewards for escaped or stolen

Negroes and other livestock, and diary-like annotations of

births and marriages and deaths and public hangings and land

auctions, accumulating slowly for those three decades in a

sort of iron pirate's chest in the back room of the postoffice

tradingpost-store, until that day thirty years later when, be

cause of a jailbreak compounded by an ancient monster iron

179