Requiem for a Nun

318 WILLIAM FAULKNER

barred doors and windows of the cells or bullpen for drunkenness or fighting

or gambling-the servants, housemen and gardeners and handymen, who would be

extracted the next morning by their white folks, and the others (what the

town knew as the New Negro, independent of that community) who would sleep

there every night beneath the thin ruby checker-barred wash and fade of the

hotel sign, while they worked their fines out on the street; and the County,

since its cattle-thieves and moonshiners went to trial from there, and its

murderers-by electricity now (so fast, that fast, was Progress)-to eternity

from there; in fact it was still, not a factor perhaps, but at least an

integer, a cipher, in the county's political establishment; at least still

used by the Board of Supervisors, if not as a lever, at least as something

like Punch's stuffed club, not intended to break bones, not aimed to leave

any permanent scars;

So only the old knew it, the irreconcilable Jeffersonians and

Yoknapatawphians who had (and without doubt firmly intended to continue to

have) actual personal dearings with it on the blue Monday mornings after

holidays, or during the semi-yearly terms of Circuit or Federal Court:-until

suddenly you, a stranger, an outlander say from the East or the North or the

Far West, passing through the little town by simple accident, or perhaps

relation or acquaintance or friend of one of the outland families which had

moved into one of the pristine and recent subdivisions, yourself turning out

of your way to fumble among road signs and filling stations out of frank

curiosity, to try to learn, comprehend, understand what had brought your

cousin or friend or acquaintance to elect to live here-not specifically

here, of course, not specifically Jefferson, but such as here, such as Jeff

erson-suddenly you would realise that something curious was happening or had

happened here: that instead of dying off as they shotild as time passed, it

was as though these old irreconcilables were actually increasing in number;

as though with each interment of one, two more shared that vacancy: where in

1900, only thirty-five years afterward, there could not have been more than

two or three capable of it, either by knowledge or memory of leisure, or

even simple willingness and inclination, now, in 1951, eighty-six years

afterward, they could be counted in dozens (and in 1965, a hundred years

afterward, in hundreds because-by now you had already begun to understand

why your kin or friend or acquaintance had elected to come to such as this

with his family and call it his life-by then the children of that second

outland invasion following a war, would also have become not just

Mississip-