Requiem for a Nun

194 WILLIAM FAULKNER

'Any kinT Peabody said.

No,' Pettigrew said. 'My ma named me for him, so I would have some of his

luck.'

'Luck?' Peabody said.

Pettigrew didn't smile. 'That's right. She didn't mean luck. She never had

any schooling. She didn't know the word she wanted to say.'

'Have you had it?' Peabody said. Nor did Pettigrew smile now. 'I'm sorry,'

Peabody said. 'Try to forget it.' He said: 'We decided to name her

Jefferson.' Now Pettigrew didn't seem to breathe even. He just stood there,

small, frail, less than boysize, childless and bachelor, incorrigibly

kinless and tieless, looking at Peabody. Then he breathed, and raising the

brush, he turned back to the horse and for an instant Peabody thought he

was going back to the grooming. But instead of making the stroke, he laid

the hand and the brush against the horse's flank and stood for a moment,

his face turned away and his head bent a little. Then he raised his head

and turned his face back toward Peabody.

'You could call that lock 'axle grease' on that Indian account,' he said.

'Fifty dollars' worth of axle grease?' Peabody said.

'To grease the wagons for Oklahoma,' Pettigrew said.

'So we could,' Peabody said. 'Only her name's Jefferson now. We cant ever

forget that any more now.' And that was the courthOUse-the courthouse which

it had taken them almost thirty years not only to realize they didn't have,

but to discover that they hadn't even needed, missed, lacked; and which,

before they had owned it six months, they discovered was nowhere near

enough. Because somewhere between the dark of that first day and the dawn

of the next, something happened to them. They began that same day; they

restored the jail wall and cut new logs and split out shakes and raised the

little floorless lean-to against it and moved the iron cbest from

Ratcliffe's back room; it took only the two days and cost nothing but the

labor and not much of that per capita since the whole settlement was

involved to a man, not to mention the settlement's two slaves-Holston's man

and the one belonging to the German blacksmith-; Ratcliffe too, all he had

to do was put up the bar across the inside of his back door, since his

entire patronage was countable in one glance sweating and cursing among the

logs and shakes of the half dismantled jail across the way

opposite-including Ikkemotubbe's Chickasaw, though these were neither

sweating nor cursing: the grave dark men dressed in their Sunday clothes

except for the trousers, pants, which they carried rolled neatly under

their arms or perhaps tied by the two legs around their necks like capes