Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 319

pians but Jeffersonians and Yoknapatawphians: by which time-who knows?-not

merely the pane, but the whole window, perhaps the entire wall, may have

been removed and embalmed intact into a museum by an historical, or anyway

a cultural, club of ladies-why, by that time, they may not even know, or

even need to know: only that the window-pane bearing the girl's name and

the date is that old, which is enough; has lasted that long: one small

rectangle of wavy, crudely-pressed, almost opaque glass, bearing a few

faint scratches apparently no more durable than the thin dried slime left

by the passage of a snail, yet which'has endured a hundred years) who are

capable and willing too to quit whatever they happen to be doing-sitting

on the last of the wooden benches beneath the last of the locust and

chinaberry trees among the potted conifers of the new age dotting the

courthouse yard, or in the chairs along the shady sidewalk before the

Holston House, where a breeze always blows-to lead you across the street

and into the jail and (with courteous neighborly apologies to the jailor's

wife stirring or turning on the stove the peas and grits and

side-meat-purchased in bargain-lot quantities by shrewd and indefatigable

peditation from store to store-which she will serve to the prisoners for

dinner or supper at so much a head-plate-pay able by the County, which is

no mean factor in the sinecure of her husband's incumbency) into the

kitchen and so to the cloudy pane bearing the faint scratches which, after

a moment, you will descry to be a name and a date;

Not at first, of course, but after a moment, a second, because at first

you would be a little puzzled, a little impatient because of your

illness-at-ease from having been dragged without warning or preparation

into the private kitchen of a strange woman cooking a meal; you would

think merely What? So what? annoyed and even a little outraged, until

suddenly, even while you were thinking it, something has already happened:

the faint frail illegible meaningless even inference-less scratching on

the ancient poor-quality glass you stare at, has moved, under your eyes,

even while you stared at it, coalesced, seeming actually to have entered

into another sense than vision: a scent, a whisper, filling that hot

cramped strange room already fierce with the sound and reek of frying

pork-fat: the two of them in conjunction-the old milky obsolete glass, and

the scratches on it: that tender ownerless obsolete girl's name and the

old dead date in April almost a century ago-speaking, murmuring, back

from, out of, across from, a time as old as lavender, older than album or

stereopticon, as old as daguerreotype itself;