Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 317

indisputable in authenticity yet a little oblique, elliptic or perhaps

just ellipsoid, washed thinly over with a faint quiet cast of apocryphy:

because there were new people in the town now, strangers, outlanders,

living in new minute glass-walled houses set as neat and orderly and

antiseptic as cribs in a nursery ward, in new subdivisions named Fairfield

or Longwood or Halcyon Acres which had once been the lawn or back yard or

kitchen garden of the old residences (the old obsolete columned houses

still standing among them like old horses surged suddenly out of slumber

in the middle of a flock of sheep), who had never seen the jail; that is,

they had looked at it in passing, they knew where it was, when their kin

or friends or acquaintances from the East or North or California visited

them or passed through Jefferson on the way to New Orleans or Florida,

they could even repeat some of its legend or history to them: but they had

had no contact with it; it was not a part of their lives; they had the

automatic stoves and furnaces and milk deliveries and lawns the size of

installment-plan rugs; they had never had to go to the jail on the morning

after Juneteenth or July Fourth or Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year's

(or for that matter, on almost any Monday morning) to pay the fine of

houseman or gardener or handyman so that he could hurry on home (still

wearing his hangover or his barely-stanched razor-slashes) and milk the

cow or clean the furnace or mow the lawn;

So only the old citizens knew the jail any more, not old people but old

citizens: men and women old not in years but in the constancy of the town,

or against that constancy, concordant (not coeval of course, the town's

date was a century and a quarter ago now, but in accord against that

continuation) with that thin durable continuity born a hundred and

twenty-five years ago out of a handful of bandits captured by a -drunken

militia squad, and a bitter ironical incorruptible wilderness mail-rider,

and a monster wrought-iron padlockthat steadfast and durable and

unhurryable continuity against or across which the vain and glittering

ephemerae of progress and alteration washed in substanceless repetitive

evanescent scarless waves, like the wash and glare of the neon sign on

what was still known as the Holston House diagonally opposite, which would

fade with each dawn from the old brick walls of the jail and leave no

trace; only the old citizens still knew it: the intractable and

obsolescent of the town who still insisted on wood-burning ranges and cows

and vegetable gardens and handymen who had to be taken out of hock on the

mornings after Saturday nights and holidays; or the ones who actually

spent the Saturday- and holiday-nights inside the