Requiem for a Nun

312 WILLIAM FAULKNER

blank shotgun shells and the weightless collapsing of bunting had unveiled

the final ones to the old;

Not only a new century and a new way of thinking, but of acting and

behaving too: now you could go to bed in a train in Jefferson and wake up

tomorrow morning in New Orleans or Chicago; there were electric lights and

running water in almost every house in town except the cabins of Negroes;

and now the town had bought and brought from a great distance a kind of

gray crushed ballast-stone called macadam, and paved the entire street

between the depot and the hotel, so that no more would the train-meeting

hacks filled with drummers and lawyers and court-witnesses need to lurch

and heave and strain through the winter mud-holes; every morning a wagon

came to your very door with artificial ice and put it in your icebox on

the back gallery for you, the children in rotationai neighborhood gangs

following it (the wagon), eating the fragments of ice which the Negro

driver chipped off for them; and that summer a specially-built

sprinkling-cart began to make the round of the streets each day; a new

time, a new age: there were screens in windows now; people (white people)

who could actually sleep in summer night air, finding it harmless,

uninimical: as though there had waked suddenly in man (or anyway in his

womenfolks) a belief in his inalienable civil right to be free of dust and

bugs;

Moving faster and faster: from the speed of two horses on either side of

a polished tongue, to that of thirty then fifty then a hundred under a tin

bonnet no bigger than a wash-tub: which from almost the first explosion,

would have to be controlled by police; already in a back yard on the edge

of town, an ex-blacksmith's-apprentice, a grease-covered man with the eyes

of a visionary monk, was building a gasoline buggy, casting and boring his

own cylinders and rods and cams, inventing his own coils and plugs and

valves as he found he needed them, which would run, and did: crept popping

and stinking out of the alley at the exact moment when the banker Bayard

Sartoris, the Colonel's son, passed in his carriage: as a result of which,

there is on the books of Jefferson today a law prohibiting the operation

of any mechanicallypropelled vehicle on the streets of the corporate town:

who (the same banker Sartoris) died in one (such was progress, that fast,

that rapid) lost from control on an icy road by his (the banker's)

grandson, who had just returned from (such was progress) two years of

service as a combat airman on the Western Front and now the camouflage

paint is weathering slowly from a French point-seventy-five field piece

squatting