Requiem for a Nun

306 WILLIAM FAULKNER

sissippi among the first of the eleven to ratify secession, the regiment

of infantry which John Sartoris raised and organised with Jefferson for

its headquarters, going to Virginia numbered Two in the roster of

Mississippi regiments, the jail watching that too but just by cognizance

from a block away: that noon, the regiment not even a regiment yet but

merely a voluntary association of untried men who knew they were ignorant

and hoped they were brave, the four sides of the Square lined with their

fathers or grandfathers and their mothers and wives and sisters and

sweethearts, the only uniform present yet that one in which Sartoris stood

with his virgin sabre and his pristine colonel's-braid on the courthouse

balcony, bareheaded too while the Baptist minister prayed and the Richmond

mustering officer swore the regiment in; and then (the regiment) gone; and

now not only the jail but the town too hung without motion in a tideless

backwash: the plunging body advanced far enough now into space as to have

lost all sense of motion, weightless and immobile upon the light pressure

of invisible air, gone now all diminishment of the precipice's lip, all

increment of the vast increaseless ear-th: a town of old men and women and

children and an occasional wounded soldier (John Sartoris himself, deposed

from his colonelcy by a regimental election after Second Manassas, came

home and oversaw the making and harvesting of a crop on his plantation

before he got bored and gathered up a small gang of irregular cavalry and

carried it up into Tennessee to join Forrest), static in quo, rumored,

murmured of war only as from a great and incredible dreamy distance, like

far summer thunder: until the spring of '64, the oncevast fixed impalpable

increaseless and threatless earth now one omnivorous roar of rock (a roar

so vast and so spewing, flinging ahead of itself, like the spray above the

maelstrom, the preliminary anesthetic of shock so that the agony of bone

and flesh will not even be felt, as to contain and sweep along with it the

beginning, the first ephemeral phase, of this story, permitting it to boil

for an instant to the surface like a chip or a twig-a match-stick or a

bubble, say, too weightless to give resistance for destruction to function

against: in this case, a bubble, a minute globule which was its own

impunity, since what it-the bubble-contained, having no part in

rationality and being contemptuous of fact, was immune even to the ra-

tionality of rock)-a sudden battle centering around Colonel Sartoris's

plantation house four miles to the north, the line of a creek held long

enough for the main Confederate body to pass through Jefferson to a

stronger line on the river heights south of the town, a rear-guard action

of cavalry in the streets of the town itself (and this was the story, the

be-