Requiem for a Nun

180 WILLIAM FAULKNER

padlock transported a thousand miles by horseback from Carolina, the box was

removed to a small new leanto room like a wood- or tool-shed built two days

ago against one outside wall of the morticed-log mud-chinked shake-down

jail; and thus was born the Yoknapatawpha County courthouse: by simple

fortuity, not only less old than even the jail, but come into existence at

all by chance and accident: the box containing the documents not moved from

any place, but simply to one; removed from the trading-post back room not

for any reason inherent in either the back room or the box, but on the con-

trary: which-the box-was not only in nobody's way in the back room, it was

even missed when gone since it had served as another seat or stool among the

powder- and whisky-kegs and firkins of salt and lard about the stove on

winter nights; and was moved at all for the simple reason that suddenly the

settlement (overnight it would become a town without having been a village;

one day in about a hundred years it would wake frantically from its communal

slumber into a rash of Rotary and Lion Clubs and Chambers of Commerce and

City Beautifuls: a furious beating of hollow drums toward nowhere, but

merely to sound louder than the next little human clotting to its north or

south or east or west, dubbing itself city as Napoleon dubbed himself

emperor and defending the expedient by padding its census rolls-a fever, a

delirium in which it would confound forever seething with motion and motion

with progress. But that was a hundred years away yet; now it was frontier,

the men and women pioneers, tough, simple, and durable, seeking money or

adventure or freedom or simple escape, and not too particular how they did

it.) discovered itself faced not so much with a problem which had to be

solved, as a Damocles sword of dilemma from which it had to save itself;

Even the jailbreak was fortuity: a gang-three or four-of Natchez Trace

bandits (twenty-five years later legend would begin to affirm, and a hundred

years later would still be at it, that two of the bandits were the Harpes

themselves, Big Harpe anyway, since the circumstances, the method of the

breakout left behind like a smell, an odor, a kind of gargantuan and bizarre

playfulness at once humorous and terrifying, as if the settlement had

fallen, blundered, into the notice or range of an idle and whimsical giant.

Which-that they were the Harpes-was impossible, since the Harpes and even

the last of Mason's ruffians were dead or scattered by this time, and the

robbers would have had to belong to John Murrel's organization-if they

needed to belong to any at all other than the simple fraternity of rapine.)

captured by chance by an