Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 321

years it has changed that many times from blonde to dark and back to

blonde again: which doesn't matter, since in your own remembering that

tender mist and vail will be forever blonde) not even waiting: musing: a

year, and still not even waiting: meditant, not even unimpatient: just

patienceless, in the sense that blindness and zenith are colorless; until

at last the mule, not out of the long northeastern panorama of defeat and

dust and fading smoke, but drawn out of it by that impregnable, that

invincible, that incredible, that terrifying passivity, coming at that one

fatigueless unflagging jog all the way from Virginia-the mule which was

a better mule in 1865 than the blood mare had been a horse in '-2 and '-3

and '-4, for the reason that this was now 1865, and the man, still gaunt

and undefeated: merely harried and urgent and short of time to get on to

Alabama and see the condition of his farm-or (for that matter) if be still

had a farm, and now the girl, the fragile and workless girl not only

incapable of milking a cow but of whom it was never even demanded,

required, suggested, that she substitute for her father in drying the

dishes, mounting pillion on a mule behind a paroled cavalry subaltern out

of a surrendered army who had swapped his charger for a mule and the sabre

of his rank and his defeatless pride for a stocking full of seed corn,

whom she had not known or even spoken to long enough to have learned his

middle name or his preference in food, or told him hers, and no time for

that even now: riding, hurrying toward a country she had never seen, to

begin a life which was not even simple frontier, engaged only with

wilderness and shoeless savages and the tender hand of God, but one which

had been rendered into a desert (assuming that it was still there at all

to be returned to) by the iron and fire of civilization;

Which was all your bost (guide) could tell you, since that was all he

knew, inherited, inheritable from the town: which was enough, more than

enough in fact, since all you needed was the face framed in its blonde and

delicate vail behind the scratched glass; yourself, the stranger, the

outlander from New England or the prairies or the Pacific Coast, no longer

come by the chance or accident of kin or friend or acquaintance or

roadmap, but drawn too from ninety years away by that incredible and

terrifying passivity, watching in your turn through and beyond that old

milk-dim disfigured glass that shape, that delicate frail and useless bone

and flesh departing pillion on a mule without one backward look, to the

reclaiming of an abandoned and doubtless even ravaged (perhaps even

usurped) Alabama hill farm-being lifted onto the mule (the first time he

touched her probably, except to put the ring