Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 197

'One of them can use my shadow,' he said. 'It never blenched out there with

a white doctor standing in it,' and even offered to be emissary to old

Grenier, except that Grenier himself forestalled them. So they ate

Holston's noon ordinary, while the Chickasaws, squatting unmoving still

where the creep of shade had left them in the full fierce glare of July

noon about the wagon where old Mohataha still sat under her slave-borne

Paris parasol, ate their lunches too which (Mohataha's and her personal

retinue's came out of a woven whiteoak withe fishbasket in the wagonbed),

they appeared to have carried in from what, patterning the white people,

they called their plantation too, under their arms inside the rolled-up

trousers. Then they moved back to the front gallery and-not the settlement

any more now: the town; it had been a town for thirty-one hours now-watched

the four slaves put up the final log and pin down the final shake on the

roof and hang the door, and then, Ratcliffe leading something like the

court chamberlain across a castle courtyard, cross back to the store and

enter and emerge carrying the iron chest, the grave Chickasaws watching too

the white man's slaves sweating the white man's ponderable dense

inscrutable medicine into its new shrine. And now they had time to find out

what was bothering Ratcliffe.

'That lock,' Ratcliffe said.

'WhatT somebody said.

'That Indian axle-grease,' Ratcliffe said.

'WhatT they said again. But they knew, understood, now. It was neither lock

nor axle-grease; it was the fifteen dollars which could have been charged

to the Indian Department on Ratcliffe's books and nobody would have ever

found it, noticed it, missed it. It was not greed on Ratcliffe's part, and

least of all was he advocating corruption. The idea was not even new to

him; it did not need any casual man on a horse riding in to the settlement

once every two or three weeks, to reveal to him that possibility; he had

thought of that the first time he had charged the first sack of peppermint

candy to the first one of old Mohataha's forty-year-old grandchildren and

had refrained from adding two zeroes to the ten or fifteen cents for ten

years now, wondering each time why he did refrain, amazed at his own virtue

or at least his strength of will. It was a matter of principle. It was

he-they: the settlement (town now)-who had thought of charging the lock to

the United States as a provable lock, a communal risk, a concrete

ineradicable object, win lose or draw, let the chips fall where they may,

on that dim day when some Federal inspector might, just barely might, audit

the Chickasaw affairs; it was the United States itself which had

voluntarily offered to show