Requiem for a Nun

Act Three

THE JAIL (Nor Even Yet Quite Relinquish-)

So, although in a sense the jail was both older and less old than the

courthouse, in actuality, in time, in observation and memory, it was older

even than the town itself. Because there was no town until there was a

courthouse, and no courthouse until (like some unsentient unweaned creature

torn violently from the dug of its dam) the floorless lean-to rabbit-hutch

housing the iron chest was reft from the log flank of the jail and

transmogrified into a by-neo-Greek-out-of-Georgian-Eng-land edifice set in

the center of what in time would be the town Square (as a result of which,

the town itself had moved one block south-or rather, no town then and yet,

the courthouse itself the catalyst: a mere dusty widening of the trace,

trail, pathway in a forest of oak and ash and hickory and sycamore and

flowering catalpa and dogwood and judas tree and persimmon and wild plum,

with on one side old Alec Holston's tavern and coaching-yard, and a little

farther along, Ratcliffe's trading-post-store and the blacksmith's, and

diagonal to all of them, en face and solitary beyond the dust, th~ log jail;

moved-the town-complete and intact, one blo( southward, so that now, a

century and a quarter later, V coaching-yard and Ratcliffe's store were gone

and old Alec tavern and the blacksmith's were a hotel and a garage, on a

main thoroughfare true enough but still a business side-street, and the jail

across from them, though transformed also now into two storeys of Georgian

brick by the hand ((or anyway pocketbooks) ) of Sartoris and Sutpen and

Louis Grenier, faced not even on a side-street but on an alley);

And so, being older than all, it had seen all: the mutation and

the change: and, in that sense, had recorded them (indeed, as

Gavin Stevens, the town lawyer and the county amateur Cin

cinnatus, wits wont to say, if you would peruse in unbroken

ay, overlap ping-cont iriu ity the history of a community, look

not in the church registers and the courthouse records, but be

neath the successive layers of calcimine and creosote and

whitewash on the walls of the jail, since only in that forcible

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