Requiem for a Nun

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

Ratcliffe's shelves by her descendants and subjects and Negro slaves. That

was all the settlement had to do: add the lock to the list, the account. It

wouldn't even matter at what price they entered it. They could have priced