Requiem for a Nun

310 WILLIAM FAULKNER

had anticipated Appomattox and kept that lead, so that in effect Appomattox

itself never overhauled them; it was the long pull of course, but they

had-as they would realise later -that priceless, that unmatchable year; on

New Year's Day, 1865, while the rest of the South sat staring at the

northeast horizon beyond which Richmond lay, like a family staring at the

closed door to a sick-room, Yoknapatawpha County was already nine months

gone in reconstruction; by New Year's of '66, the gutted walls (the rain of

two winters had washed them clean of the smoke and soot) of the Square had

been temporarily roofed and were stores and shops and offices again, and

they had begun to restore the courthouse: not temporary, this, but restored,

exactly as it had been, between the two columned porticoes, one north and

one south, which had been tougher than dynamite and fire, because it was the

symbol: the County and the City: and they knew how, who had done it before;

Colonel Sartoris was home now, and General Compson, the first Jason's son,

and though a tragedy had happened to Sutpen and his pride-a failure not of

his pride nor even of his own bones and flesh, but of the lesser bones and

flesh which he had believed capable of supporting the edifice of his

dream-they still had the old plans of his architect and even the architect's

molds, and even more: money, (strangely, curiously) Redmond, the town's

domesticated carpetbagger, symbol of a blind rapacity almost like a

biological instinct, destined to cover the South like a migration of

locusts; in the case of this man, arriving a full year before its time and

now devoting no small portion of the fruit of his rapacity to restoring the

very building the destruction of which had rung up the curtain for his

appearance on the stage, had been the formal visa on his passport to

pillage; and by New Year's of '76, this same Redmond with his money and

Colonel Sartoris and General Compson had built a railroad from Jefferson

north into Tennessee to connect with the one from Memphis to the Atlantic

Ocean; nor content there either, north or south: another ten years (Sartoris

and Redmond and Compson quarreled, and Sartoris and Redmond bought-probably

with Redmond's money-Compson's interest in the railroad, and the next year

Sartoris and Redmond had quarreled and the year after that, because of

simple physical fear, Redmond killed Sartoris from ambush on the Jefferson

Square and fled, and at last even Sartoris's supporters-he had no friends:

only enemies and frantic admirers-began to understand the result of that

regimental election in the fall of '62) and the railroad was a part of that

system covering the whole South and East like the veins in an oak leaf and

itself mutually adjunctive to the other intricate