Requiem for a Nun

298 WILLIAM FAULKNER

which bore Doctor Habersham's worn black bag (and which drew the buggy

after Doctor Habersham got too old and stiff to mount the saddle), and the

mules which drew the wagon in which, seated in a rocking chair beneath a

French parasol held by a Negro slave girl, old Mohataha would come to town

on Saturdays (and came that last time to set her capital X on the paper

which ratified the dispossession of her people forever, coming in the

wagon that time too, barefoot as always but in the purple silk dress which

her son, Ikkemotubbe, had brought her back from France, and a hat crowned

with the royal-colored plume of a queen, beneath the slave-held parasol

still and with another female slave child squatting on her other side

holding the crusted slippers which she had never been able to get her feet

into, and in the back of the wagon the petty rest of the unmarked Empire

flotsam her son had brought to her which was small enough to be moved;

driving for the last time out of the woods into the dusty widening before

Ratcliffe's store where the Federal land agent and his marshal waited for

her with the paper, and stopped the mules and sat for a little time, the

young men of her bodyguard squatting quietly about the halted wagon after

the eight-mile walk, while from the gallery of the store and of Holston's

tavern the settlement-the Ratcliffes and Compsons and Peabodys and

Pettigrews ((not Grenier and Holston and Habersham, because Louis Grenier

declined to come in to see it, and for the same reason old Alec Holston

sat alone on that hot afternoon before the smoldering log in the fireplace

of his taproom, and Doctor Habersham was dead and his son had already

departed for the West with his bride, who was Mohataha's granddaughter,

and his father-in-law, Mohataha's son, Ikkemotubbe) )-looked on, watched:

the inscrutable ageless wrinkled face, the fat shapeless body dressed in

the cast-off garments of a French queen, which on her looked like the Sun-

day costume of the madam of a rich Natchez or New Orleans brothel, sitting

in a battered wagon inside a squatting ring of her household troops, her

young men dressed in their Sunday clothes for traveling too: then she

said, 'Where is this Indian territoryT And they told her: West. 'Turn the

mules west,' she said, and someone did so, and she took the pen from the

agent and made her X on the paper and handed the pen back and the wagon

moved, the young men rising too, and she vanished so across that summer

afternoon to that terrific and infinitesimal creak and creep of ungreased

wheels, herself immobile beneath the rigid parasol, grotesque and regal,

bizarre and moribund, like obsolescence's self riding off the stage

enthroned on its own obsolete catafalque, looking not once back, not once

back toward home);