Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 299

But most of all, the prints of men-the fitted shoes which Doctor Habersham

and Louis Grenier had brought from the Atlantic seaboard, the cavalry

boots in which Alec Holston had ridden behind Francis Marion, and-more

myriad almost than leaves, outnumbering all the others lumped togetherthe

moccasins, the deerhide sandals of the forest, worn not by the Indians but

by white men, the pioneers, the long hunters, as though they had not only

vanquished the wilderness but had even stepped into the very footgear of

them they dispossessed (and mete and fitting so, since it was by means of

his feet and legs that the white man conquered America; the closed and

split U's of his horses and cattle overlay his own prints always, merely

consolidating his victory);-(the jail) watched them all, red men and white

and black-the pioneers, the hunters, the forest men with rifles, who made

the same light rapid soundless toed-in almost heelless prints as the red

men they dispossessed and who in fact dispossessed the red men for that

reason: not because of the grooved barrel but because they could enter the

red man's milieu and make the same footprints that he made; the husbandman

printing deep the hard heels of his brogans because of the weight he bore

on his shoulders: axe and saw and plow-stock, who dispossessed the forest

man for the obverse reason: because with his saw and axe he simply

removed, obliterated, the milieu in which alone the forest man could

exist; then the land speculators and the traders in slaves and whiskey who

followed the husbandmen, and the politicians who followed the land specu-

lators, printing deeper and deeper the dust of that dusty widening, until

at last there was no mark of Chickasaw left in it any more; watching (the

jail) them all, from the first innocent days when Doctor Habersham and his

son and Alec Holston and Louis Grenier were first guests and then friends

of Ikkemotubbe's Chickasaw clan; then an Indian agent and a land-office

and a trading-post, and suddenly Ikkemotubbe and his Chickasaws were

themselves the guests without being friends of the Federal Government;

then Ratcliffe, and the trading-post was no longer simply an Indian

trading-post, though Indians were still welcome, of course (since, after

all, they owned the land or anyway were on it first and claimed it), then

Compson with his race horse and presently Compson began to own the Indian

accounts for tobacco and calico and jeans pants and cooking-pots on

Ratcliffe's books (in time he would own Ratcliffe's books too) and one day

Ikkemotubbe owned the race horse and Compson owned the land itself, some

of which the city fathers would have to buy from him at his price in order

to establish a town; and Pettigrew with his tri-weekly mail, and then a

monthly stage and the new faces