Requiem for a Nun

304 WILLIAM FAULKNER

slave, for his little hour more, his little minute yet while the time, the

land, the nation, the American earth, whirled faster and faster toward the

plunging precipice of its destiny;

That fast, that rapid: a commodity in the land now which until now had dealt

first in Indians: then in acres and sections and boundaries:-an economy:

Cotton: a king: omnipotent and omnipresent: a destiny of which (obvious now)

the plow and the axe had been merely the tools; not plow and axe which had

effaced the wilderness, but Cotton: petty globules of Motion weightless and

myriad even in the hand of a child, incapable even of wadding a rifle, let

alone of charging it, yet potent enough to sever the very taproots of oak

and hickory and gum, leaving the acre-shading tops to wither and vanish in

one single season beneath that fierce minted glare; not the rifle nor the

plow which drove at last the bear and deer and panther into the last jungle

fastnesses of the river bottoms, but Cotton; not the soaring cupola of the

courthouse drawing people into the country, but that same white tide

sweeping them in: that tender skin covering the winter's brown earth,

burgeoning through spring and summer into September's white surf crashing

against the flanks of gin and warehouse and ringing like bells on the marble

counters of the banks: altering not just the face of the land, but the

complexion of the town too, creating its own parasitic aristocracy not only

behind the columned porticoes of the plantation houses, but in the count-

ing-rooms of merchants and bankers and the sanctums of lawyers, and not only

these last, but finally nadir complete: the county offices too: of sheriff

and tax-collector and bailiff and turnkey and clerk; doing overnight to the

old jail what Sutpen's architect with all his brick and iron smithwork, had

not been able to accomplish-the old jail which had been unavoidable, a

necessity, like a public comfort-station, and which, like the public

comfort-station, was not ignored but simply by mutual concord, not seen, not

looked at, not named by its purpose and aim, yet which to the older people

of the town, in spite of Sutpen's architect's face-lifting, was still the

old jail-now translated into an integer, a moveable pawn on the county's

political board like the sheriff's star or the clerk's bond or the bailiff's

wand of office; converted indeed now, elevated (an apotheosis) ten feet

above the level of the town, so that the old buried log walls now contained

the living-quarters for the turnkey's family and the kitchen from which his

wife catered, at so much a meal, to the city's and the county's

prisoners-perquisite not for work or capability for work, but for political

fidelity and the numerality of votable kin by blood or marriage-a jailor or

turnkey, himself someone's