Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 313

on one flank of the base of the Confederate monument, but even before it

faded there was neon in the town and A.A.A. and C.C.C. in the county, and

W.P.A. ("and XYZ and etc.," as "Uncle Pete" Gombault, a lean clean

tobacco-chewing old man, incumbent of a political sinecure under the

designation of United States marshal-an office held back in reconstruction

times, when the State of Mississippi was a United States military

district, by a Negro man who was still living in 1925 -firemaker, sweeper,

janitor and furnace-attendant to five or six lawyers and doctors and one

of the banks-and still known as "Mulberry" from the avocation which he had

followed before and during and after his incumbency as marshal: peddling

illlicit whiskey in pint and half-pint bottles from a cache beneath the

roots of a big mulberry tree behind the drugstore of his pre-1865

owner-put it) in both; W.P.A. and XYZ marking the town and the county as

war itself had not: gone now were the last of the forest trees which had

followed the shape of the Square, shading the unbroken second-storey

balcony onto which the lawyers' and doctors' offices had opened, which

shaded in its turn the fronts of the stores and the walkway beneath; and

now was gone even the balcony itself with its wrought-iron balustrade on

which in the long summer afternoons the lawyers would prop their feet to

talk; and the continuous iron chain looping from wooden post to post along

the circumference of the courthouse yard, for the farmers to hitch their

teams to; and the public watering trough where they could water them,

because gone was the last wagon to stand on the Square during the spring

and summer and fall Saturdays and trading-days, and not only the Square

but the streets leading into it were paved now, with fixed signs of

interdiction and admonition applicable only to something capable of moving

faster than thirty miles an hour; and now the last forest tree was gone

from the courthouse yard too, replaced by formal synthetic shrubs

contrived and schooled in Wisconsin greenhouses, and in the courthouse

(the city hall too) a courthouse and city hall gang, in miniature of

course (but that was not its fault but the fault of the city's and the

county's size and population and wealth) but based on the pattern of

Chicago and Kansas City and Boston and Philadelphia (and which, except for

its minuscularity, neither Philadelphia nor Boston nor Kansas City nor

Chicago need have blushed at) which every three or four years would try

again to raze the old courthouse in order to build a new one, not that

they did not like the old one nor wanted the new, but because the new one

would bring into the town and county that much more increment of unearned

federal money;