Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 307

ginning of it; all of it too, the town might have been justified in

thinking, presuming they had had time to see, notice, remark 'and then

remember, even that little)-the rattle and burst of pistols, the hooves, the

dust, the rush and scurry of a handful of horsemen led by a lieutenant, up

the street past the jail, and the two of them-the frail and useless girl

musing in the blonde mist of her hair beside the window-pane where three or

four (or whatever it was) years ago she had inscribed with her grandmother's

diamond ring her paradoxical and significantless name (and where, so it

seemed to the town, she had been standing ever since), and the soldier,

gaunt and tattered, battle-grimed and fleeing and undefeated, looking at one

another for that moment across the fury and pell mell of battle;

Then gone; that night the town was occupied by Federal troops; two nights

later, it was on fire (the Square, the stores and shops and the professional

offices), gutted (the courthouse too), the blackened jagged topless jumbles

of brick wall enclosing like a ruined jaw the blackened shell of the

courthouse between its two rows of topless columns, which (the columns) were

only blackened and stained, being tougher than fire: but not the jail, it

escaped, untouched, insulated by its windless backwater from fire; and now

the town was as though insulated by fire or perhaps cauterised by fire from

fury and turmoil, the long roar of the rushing omnivorous rock fading on to

the east with the fading uproar of the battle: and so in effect it was a

whole year in advance of Appomattox (only the undefeated undefeatable women,

vulnerable only to death, resisted, endured, irreconcilable); already,

before there was a name for them (already their prototype before they even

existed as a species), there were carpetbaggers in Jefferson-a Missourian

named Redmond, a cotton-and qua rterma ster-supplies speculator, who had

followed the Northern army to Memphis in '61 and (nobody knew exactly how or

why) had been with (or at least on the fringe of) the military household of

the brigadier commanding the force which occupied Jefferson,

himself-Redmond-going no farther, stopping, staying, none knew the why for

that either, why he elected Jefferson, chose that alien fire-gutted site

(himself one, or at least the associate, of them who had set the match) to

be his future home; and a German private, a blacksmith, a deserter from a

Pennsylvania regiment, who appeared in the summer of '64, riding a mule,

with (so the tale told later, when his family of daughters had become matri-

archs and grandmothers of the town's new aristocracy) for saddle-blanket

sheaf on sheaf of virgin and uncut United States