Requiem for a Nun

302 WILLIAM FAULKNER

sulated by that city block of space from the turmoil of the town's birthing,

the mud-chinked log walls even carcerant of the flotsam of an older time

already on its rapid way out too: an occasional runaway slave or drunken

Indian or shoddy would-be heir of the old tradition of Mason or Hare or

Harpe (biding its time until, the courthouse finished, the jail too would be

translated into brick, but, unlike the courthouse, merely a veneer of brick,

the old mud-chinked logs of the ground floor still intact behind the

patterned and symmetric sheath); no longer even watching now, merely

cognizant, remembering: only yesterday was a wilderness ordinary, a store,

a smithy, and already today was not a town, a city, but the town and city:

named; not a courthouse but the courthouse, rising surging like the fixed

blast of a rocket, not even finished yet but already looming, beacon focus

and lodestar, already taller than anything else, out of the rapid and fading

wilderness-not the wilderness receding from the rich and arable fields as

tide recedes, but rather the fields themselves, rich and inexhaustible to

the plow, rising sunward and airward out of swamp and morass, themselves

thrusting back and down brake and thicket, bayou and bottom and forest,

along with the copeless denizens-the wild men and animals-which once haunted

them, wanting, dreaming, imagining, no other-lodestar and pole, drawing the

people-the men and women and children, the maidens, the marriageable girls

and the young men, flowing, pouring in with their tools and goods and cattle

and slaves and gold money, behind ox- or mule-teams, by steamboat up

Ikkemotubbe's old river from the Mississippi; only yesterday Pettigrew's

pony express had been displaced by a stage-coach, yet already there was talk

of a railroad less than a hundred miles to the north, to run all the way

from Memphis to the Atlantic Ocean;

Going fast now: only seven years, and not only was the courthouse finished,

but the jail too: not a new jail of course but the old one veneered over

with brick, into two storeys, with white trim and iron-barred windows: only

its face lifted, because behind the veneer were still the old ineradicable

bones, the old ineradicable remembering: the old logs immured intact and

lightness between the tiered symmetric bricks and the whitewashed plaster,

immune now even to having to look, see, watch that new time which in a few

years more would not even remember that the old logs were there behind the

brick or had ever been, an age from which the drunken Indian had vanished,

leaving only the highwayman, who bad wagered his liberty on his luck, and

the runaway nigger, who having no freedom to stake, had wagered merely his

milieu; that rapid,