Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 311

systems covering the rest of the United States, so that you could get on

a train in Jefferson now and, by changing and waiting a few times, go

anywhere in North America;

No more into the United States, but into the rest of the United States,

because the long pull was over now; only the aging unvanquished women were

unreconciled, irreconcilable, reversed and irrevocably reverted against

the whole moving unanimity of panorama until, old unordered vacant pilings

above a tide's flood, they themselves had an illusion of motion, facing

irreconcilably backward toward the old lost battles, the old aborted

cause, the old four ruined years whose very physical scars ten and twenty

and twenty-five changes of season had annealed back into the earth;

twenty-five and then thirty-five years; not only a century and an age, but

a way of thinking died; the town itself wrote the epilogue and epitaph:

1900, on Confederate Decoration Day, Mrs Virginia Depre, Colonel

Sartoris's sister, twitched a lanyard and the spring-restive bunting

collapsed and flowed, leaving the marble effigy-the stone infantryman on

his stone pedestal on the exact spot where forty years ago the Richmond

officer and the local Baptist minister had mustered in the Colonel's regi-

ment, and the old men in the gray and braided coats (all officers now,

none less in rank than captain) tottered into the sunlight and fired

shotguns at the bland sky and raised their cracked quavering voices in the

shrill hackle-lifting yelling which Lee and Jackson and Longstreet and the

two Johnstons (and Grant and Sherman and Hooker and Pope and McClellan and

Burnside too for the matter of that) had listened to amid the smoke and

the din; epilogue and epitaph, because apparently neither the U.D.C.

ladies who instigated and bought the monument, nor the architect who

designed it nor the masons who erected it, had noticed that the marble

eyes under the shading marble palm stared not toward the north and the

enemy, but toward the south, toward (if anything) his own rear-looking

perhaps, the wits said (could say now, with the old war thirty-five years

past and you could even joke about it-except the women, the ladies, the

unsurrendered, the irreconcilable, who even after another thirty-flve

years would still get up and stalk out of picture houses showing Gone With

the Wind), for reinforcements; or per. haps not a combat soldier at all,

but a provost marshal's man looking for deserters, or perhaps himself for

a safe place to run to: because that old war was dead; the sons of those

tottering old men in gray had already died in blue coats in Cuba, the

macabre mementos and testimonials and shrines of the new war already

usurping the earth before the blasts of