Requiem for a Nun

196 WILLIAM FAULKNER

die of their lives, fates, pasts and futures-not even speaking for a while

yet since each one probably believed (a little shamefaced too) that the

thought was solitarily his, until at last one spoke for all and then it was

all right since it had taken one conjoined breath to shape that sound, the

speaker speaking not loud, diffidently, tentatively, so you insert the first

light tentative push of wind into the mouthpiece of a strange untried

foxhorn: 'By God. Jefferson.'

'Jefferson, Mississippi,' a second added.

'Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi,' a third coriected; who,

which one, didn't matter this time either since it was still one conjoined

breathing, one compound dream-state, mused and static, well capable of

lasting on past sunrise too, though they probably knew better too since

Compson was still there: the gnat, the thorn, the catalyst.

'It aint until we finish the goddamned thing,' Compson said. 'Come on.

Let's get at it.' So they finished it that day, working rapidly now, with

speed and lightness too, concentrated yet inattentive, to get it done and

that quickly, not to finish it but to get it out of the way, behind them;

not to finish it quickly in order to own, possess it sooner, but to be able

to obliterate, efface it the sooner, as if they had also known in that

first yellow light that it would not be near enough, would not even be the

beginning; that the little lean-to room they were building would not even

be a pattern and could not even be called practice, working on until noon,

the hour to stop and eat, by which time Louis Grenier had arrived from

Frenchman's Bend (his plantation: his manor, his kitchens and stables and

kennels and slave quarters and gardens and promenades and fields which a

hundred years later will have vanished, his name and his blood too, leaving

nothing but the name of his plantation and his own fading corrupted legend

like a thin layer of the native ephemeral yet inevictable dust on a section

of country surrounding a little lost paintless crossroads store) twenty

miles away behind a slave coachman and footman in his imported English

carriage and what was said to be the finest matched team outside of Natchez

or Nashville, and Compson said, 'I reckon that'll do'-all knowing what he

meant: not abandonment: to complete it, of course, but so little remained

now that the two slaves could finish it. The four in fact, since, although

as soon as it was assumed that the two Grenier Negroes would lend the two

local ones a hand, Compson demurred on the grounds that who would dare

violate the rigid protocol of bondage by ordering a stableservant, let

alone a house servant, to do manual labor, not to mention having the

temerity to approach old Louis Grenier with the suggestion, Peabody nipped

that at once.