Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 195

or rather hussars' dolmans where they had forded the creek, squatting or

lounging along the shade, courteous, interested, and reposed (even old

Mohataha herself, the matriarch, barefoot in a purple silk gown and a plumed

hat, sitting in a gilt brocade empire chair in a wagon behind two mules,

under a silver-handled Paris parasol held by a female slave child)- because

they (the other white men, his confreres, or-during this first day-his

co-victims) had not yet remarked the thing -quality-something-esoteric,

eccentric, in Ratcliffe's manner, attitude,-not an obstruction nor even an

impediment, not even when on the second day they discovered what it was, be-

cause he was among them, busy too, sweating and cursing too, but rather like

a single chip, infinitesimal, on an otherwise unbroken flood or tide, a

single body or substance, alien and unreconciled, a single thin almost

unheard voice crying thinly out of the roar of a mob: 'Wait, look here,

listen-'

Because they were too busy raging and sweating among the dismantled logs and

felling the new ones in the adjacent woods and trimming and notching and

dragging them out and mixing the tenuous clay mud to chink them together

with; it was not until the second day that they learned what was troubling

Ratcliffe, because now they had time, the work going no slower, no lessening

of sweat but on the contrary, if anything the work going even a little

faster because now there was a lightness in the speed and all that was

abated was the rage and the outrage, because somewhere between the dark and

the dawn of the first and the second day, something had happened to them-the

men who had spent that first long hot endless July day sweating and raging

about the wrecked jail, flinging indiscriminately and savagely aside the

dismantled logs and the log-like laudanum-smitten inmates in order to

rebuild the one, cursing old Holston and the lock and the four-three

-bandits. and the eleven militiamen who had arrested them, and Compson and

Pettigrew and Peabody and the United States of America-the same men met at

the project before sunrise on the next day which was already promising to be

hot and endless too, but with the rage and the fury absent now, quiet, not

grave so much as sobered, a little amazed, diffident, blinking a little

perhaps, looking a little aside from one another, a little unfamiliar even

to one another in the new jonquil-colored light, looking about them at the

meagre huddle of crude cabins set without order and every one a little awry

to every other and all dwarfed to doll-houses by the vast loom of the woods

which enclosed them-the tiny clearing clawed punily not even into the flank

of pathless wilderness but into the Join, the groin, the secret parts, which

was the irrevocable cast