Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 305

cousin and with enough other cousins and inlaws of his own to have assured

the election of sheriff or chancery- or circuitclerk-a failed farmer who was

not at all the victim of his time but, on the contrary, was its master,

since his inherited and inescapable incapacity to support his family by his

own eff orts had matched him with an era and a land where government was

founded on the working premise of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude

and indigence, for the private business failures among your or your wife's

kin whom otherwise you yourself would have to support-so much his destiny's

master that, in a land and time where a man's survival depended not only on

his ability to drive a straight furrow and to fell a tree without maiming or

destroying himself, that fate had supplied to him one child: a frail anemic

girl with narrow workless bands lacking even the strength to milk a cow, and

then capped its own vanquishment and eternal subjugation by the paradox of

giving him for his patronymic the designation of the vocation at which he

was to fail: Farmer; this was the incumbent, the turnkey, the jailor; the

old tough logs which had known Ikkemotubbe's drunken Chickasaws and brawling

teamsters and trappers and flatboatmen (and-for that one short summer

night-the four highwaymen, one of whom might have been the murderer, Wiley

Harpe), were now the bower framing a window in which mused hour after hour

and day and month and year, the frail blonde girl not only incapable of (or

at least excused from) helping her mother cook, but even of drying the

dishes after her mother (or father perhaps) washed them-musing, not even

waiting for anyone or anything, as far as the town knew, not even pensive,

as far as the town knew: just musing amid her blonde hair in the window

facing the country town street, day after day and month after month and-as

the town remembered it-year after year for what must have been three or four

of them, inscribing at some moment the fragile and indelible signature of

her meditation in one of the panes of it (the window): her frail and

workless name, scratched by a diamond ring in her frail and workless hand,

and the date: Cecilia Farmer April 16th 1861;

At which moment the destiny of the land, the nation, the South, the State,

the County, was already whirling into the plunge of its precipice, not that

the State and the South knew it, because the first seconds of fall always

seem like soar: a weightless deliberation preliminary to a rush not downward

but upward, the failing body reversed during that second by

transubstantiation into the upward rush of earth; a soar, an apex, the

South's own apotheosis of its destiny and its pride, Mississippi and

Yoknapatawpha County not last in this, Mis-