Requiem for a Nun

190 WILLIAM FAULKNER

it on Pettigrew's scale of fifteen pounds times the distance not just to

Carolina but to Washington itself, and nobody would ever notice it probably;

they could have charged the United States with seventeen thousand five

hundred dollars' worth of the fossilised and indestructible candy, and none

would ever read the entry. So it was solved, done, finished, ended. They

didn't even have to discuss it. They didn't even think about it any more,

unless perhaps here and there to marvel (a little speculatively probably) at

their own moderation, since they wanted nothing-least of all, to escape any

just blame-but a fair and decent adjustment of the lock. They went back to

where old Alec still sat with his pipe in front of his dim hearth. Only they

had overestimated him; he didn't want any money at all, he wanted his lock.

Whereupon what little remained of Compson's patience went too.

'Your lock's gone,' he told old Alec harshly. 'You'll take fifteen dollars

for it,' he said, his voice already fading, because even that rage could

recognize impasse when it saw it. Nevertheless, the rage, the impotence,

the sweating, the too muchwhatever it was-forced the voice on for one word

more: 'Or -'before it stopped for good and allowed Peabody to fill the gap:

'Or elseT Peabody said, and not to old Alec, but to Compson. 'Or else whatT

Then Ratcliffe saved that too.

'Wait,' he said. 'Uncle Alec's going to take fifty dollars for his lock. A

guarantee of fifty dollars. He'll give us the name of the blacksmith back

in Cal'lina that made it for him, and we'll send back there and have a new

one made. Going and coming and all'll cost about fifty dollars. We'll give

Uncle Alec the fifty dollars to hold as a guarantee. Then when the new lock

comes, he'll give us back the money. All right, Uncle AlecT And that could

have been all of it. It probably would have been, except for Pettigrew. It

was not that they had forgotten him, nor even assimilated him. They had

simply sealed -healed him off (so they thought)-him into their civic crisis

as the desperate and defenseless oyster immobilizes its atom of inevictable

grit. Nobody had seen him move yet he now stood in the center of them where

Compson and Ratcliffe and Peabody faced old Alec in the chair. You might

have said that he had oozed there, except for that adamantine quality which

might (in emergency) become invisible but never insubstantial and never in

this world fluid; he spoke in a voice bland, reasonable and impersonal,

then stood there being looked at, frail and child-sized, impermeable as

diamond and manifest with portent, bringing into that backwoods room a

thousand miles deep in pathless wilderness, the whole vast incalculable

weight of federality, not just representing the government nor