Requiem for a Nun

308 WILLIAM FAULKNER

banknotes, so Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County had mounted Golgotha and

passed beyond Appomattox a full year in advance, with returned soldiers

in the town, not only the wounded from the battle of Jefferson, but whole

men: not only the furloughed from Forrest in Alabama and Johnston in

Georgia and Lee in Virginia, but the stragglers, the unmaimed flotsam and

refuse of that single battle now drawing its final constricting loop from

the Atlantic Ocean to Old Point Comfort, to Richmond: to Chattanooga: to

Atlanta: to the Atlantic Ocean again at Charleston, who were not deserters

but who could not rejoin any still-intact Confederate unit for the reason

that there were enemy armies between, so that in the almost faded twilight

of that land, the knell of Appomattox made no sound; when in the spring

and early summer of '65 the formally and officially paroled and disbanded

soldiers began to trickle back into the county, there was anticlimax; they

returned to a land which not only had passed through Appomattox over a

year ago, it had had that year in which to assimilate it, that whole year

in which not only to ingest surrender but (begging the metaphor, the

figure) to convert, metabolise it, and then defecate it as fertilizer for

the four-years' fallow land they were already in train to rehabilitate a

year before the Virginia knell rang the formal change, the men of '65

returning to find themselves alien in the very land they had been bred and

born in and had fought for four years to defend, to find a working and

already solvent economy based on the premise that it could get along

without them; (and now the rest of this story, since it occurs, happens,

here: not yet June in '65; this one had indeed wasted no time getting

back: a stranger, alone; the town did not even know it had ever seen him

before, because the other time was a year ago and had lasted only while

he galloped through it firing a pistol backward at a Yankee army, and he

had been riding a horse-a fine though a little too small and too delicate

blooded mare-where now he rode a big mule, which for that reason -its

size-was a better mule than the horse was a horse, but it was still a

mule, and of course the town could not know that he had swapped the mare

for the mule on the same day that he traded his lieutenant's sabre-he

still had the pistol -for the stocking full of seed corn he had seen

growing in a Pennsylvania field and had not let even the mule have one

mouthful of' it during the long journey across the ruined land between the

Atlantic seaboard and the JeTerson jail, riding up to the jail at last,

still gaunt and tattered and dirty and still undefeated and not fleeing

now but instead making or at least planning a single-handed assault

against what any rational man would have considered insurmountable odds

((but