Requiem for a Nun

320 WILLIAM FAULKNER

And being a stranger and a guest would have been enough, since, a stranger

and a guest, you would have shown the simple courtesy and politeness of

asking the questions naturally expected of you by the host or anyway

volunteer guide, who had dropped whatever he was doing (even if that had

been no more than sitting with others of his like on a bench in a

courthouse yard or on the sidewalk before a hotel) in order to bring you

here; not to mention your own perfectly natural desire for, not revenge

perhaps, but at least compensation, restitution, viqdication, for the

shock and annoyance of having been brought here without warning or

preparation, into the private quarters of a strange woman engaged in

something as intimate as cooking a meal; but by now you had not only begun

to understand why your kin or friend or acquaintance had elected, not

Jefferson but such as Jefferson, for his life, but you had heard that

voice, that whisper, murmur, frailer than the scent of lavender, yet (for

that second anyway) louder than all the seethe and fury of frying fat; so

you ask the questions, not only which are expected of you, but whose

answers you yourself must have if you are to get back into your car and

fumble with any attention and concentration among the road signs and

filling stations, to get on to wherever it is you had started when you

stopped by chance or accident in Jefferson for an hour or a day or a

night, and the hostguide-answers them, to the best of his ability out of

the town's composite heritage of remembering that long back, told,

repeated, inherited to him by his father; or rather, his mother: from her

mother: or better still, to him when he himself was a child, direct from

his great-aunt: the spinsters, maiden and childless out of a time when

there were too many women because too many of the young men were maimed

or dead: the indomitable and undefeated, maiden progenitresses of spinster

and childless descendants still capable of rising up and stalking out in

the middle of Gone With the Wind;

And again one sense assumes the office of two or three: not only hearing,

listening, and seeing too, but you are even standing on the same spot, the

same boards she did that day she wrote her name into the window and on the

other one three years later watching and hearing through and beyond that

faint fragile defacement the sudden rush and thunder: the dust: the

crackle and splatter of pistols: then the face, gaunt, battle-dirty,

stubbled-over; urgent of course, but merely harried, harassed; not

defeated, turned for a fleeing instant across the turmoil and the fury,

then gone: and still the girl in the window (the guide host-has never said

one or the other; without doubt in the town's remembering after a hundred