Requiem for a Nun

316 WILLIAM FAULKNER

and his baseless hopes, bouncing back at him in radar waves from the

constellatons;

And still-the old jail-endured, sitting in its rumorless culde-sac, its

almost seasonless backwater in the middle of that rush and roar of civic

progress and social alteration and change like a collarless (and reasonably

clean: merely dingy: with a day's stubble and no garters to his socks) old

man sitting in his suspenders and stocking feet, on the back kitchen steps

inside a walled courtyard; actually not isolated by location so much as

insulated by obsolescence: on the way out of course (to disappear from the

surface of the earth along with the rest of the town on the day when all

America, after cutting down all the trees and leveling the hills and moun-

tains with bulldozers, would have to move underground to make room for, get

out of the way of, the motor cars) but like the track-walker in the tunnel,

the thunder of the express mounting behind him, who finds himself opposite

a niche or crack exactly his size in the wall's living and impregnable rock,

and steps into it, inviolable and secure while destruction roars past and on

and away, grooved ineluctably to the spidery rails of its destiny and

destination; not even-the jail-worth selling to the United States for some

matching allocation out of the federal treasury; not even (so fast, so far,

was Progress) any more a real pawn, let alone knight or rook, on the

County's political board, not even plum in true worth of the word: simply a

modest sinecure for the husband of someone's cousin, who had failed not as

a father but merely as a fourth-rate farmer or day-laborer;

It survived, endured; it had its inevictable place in the town and the

country; it was even still adding modestly not just to its but to the town's

and the county's history too: somewhere behind that dingy brick faqade,

between the old durable hand-molded brick and the cracked

creosote-impregnated plaster of the inside walls (though few in the town or

county any longer knew that they were there) were the old notched and

mortised logs which (this, the town and county did remember; it was part of

its legend) had held someone who might have been Wiley Rarpe; during that

summer of 1864, the federal brigadier who had fired the Square and the

courthouse had used the jail as his provost-marshal's guard-house; and even

children in high school remembered how the jail had been host to the

Governor of the State while he discharged a thirty-day sentence for contempt

of court for refusing to testify in a paternity suit brought against one of

his lieutenants: but isolate, even its legend and record and history,