Requiem for a Nun

300 WILLIAM FAULKNER

coming in faster than old Alec Holston, arthritic and irascible, hunkered

like an old surly bear over his smoldering hearth even in the heat of

summer (he alone now of that original three, since old Grenier no longer

came in to the settlement, and old Doctor Habersham was dead, and the old

doctor's son, in the opinion of the settlement, had already turned Indian

and renegade even at the age of twelve or fourteen) any longer made any

effort, wanted, to associate names with; and now indeed the last moccasin

print vanished from that dusty widening, the last toed-in heelless light

soft quick longstriding print pointing west for an instant, then trodden

from the sight and memory of man by a heavy leather heel engaged not in

the traffic of endurance and hardihood and survival, but in money-taking

with it (the print )not only the moccasins but the deer-hide leggins and

jerkin too, because Ikkemotubbe's Chickasaws now wore Eastern factory-made

jeans and shoes sold them on credit out of Ratcliffe's and Compson's

general store, walking in to the settlement on the white man's Saturday,

carrying the alien shoes rolled neatly in the alien pants under their

arms, to stop at the bridge over Compson's creek long enough to bathe

their legs and feet before donning the pants and shoes, then coming on to

squat all day on the store gallery eating cheese and crackers and

peppermint candy (bought on credit too out of Compson's and Ratcliffe's

showcase) and now not only they but Habersham and Holston and Grenier too

were there on sufferance, anachronistic and alien, not really an annoyance

yet but simply a discomfort;

Then they were gone; the jail watched that: the halted ungreased unpainted

wagon, the span of underfed mules attached to it by fragments of Eastern

harness supplemented by raw deer-bide thongs, the nine young men-the wild

men, tameless and proud, who even in their own generation's memory had

been free and, in that of their fathers, the heirs of kings-squatting

about it, waiting, quiet and composed, not even dressed in the ancient

forest-softened deerskins of their freedom but in the formal regalia of

the white man's inexplicable ritualistic sabbaticals: broadcloth trousers

and white shirts with boiled-starch bosoms (because they were traveling

now; they would be visible to outworld, to strangers:-and carrying the New

England-made shoes under their arms too since the distance would be long

and walking was better barefoot), the shirts collarless and cravatless

true enough and with the tails worn outside, but still board-rigid,

gleaming, pristine, and in the rocking chair in the wagon, beneath the

slave-borne parasol, the fat shapeless old matriarch in the