Requiem for a Nun

202 WILLIAM FAULKNER

ustom to less than a toothpick: merely present, merely visible, ,~r that is,

~iudible: and no trouble with Ratcliffe because he made one too contraposed

the toothpick; more: he was its , hief victim, sufferer, since m here with

the others was mostly inattention, a little humor, now and then a little

fading annoyance and impatience, with him was shame, bafflement, a little

anguish and despair like a man struggling with a congenital vice, hopeless,

indomitable, already defeated. It was not even the money any more now, the

fifteen dollars. It was the fact that they had refused it and, refusing it,

had maybe committed a fatal and irremediable error. He would try to explain

it: 'It's like Old Moster and the rest of them up there that run the luck,

would look down at us and say, Well well, looks like them durn peckerwoods

down there dont want them fifteen dollars we was going to give them

free-gratis-for-nothing. So maybe they dont want nothing from us. So maybe

we better do like they seem to want, and let them sweat and swivet and

scrabble through the best they can by themselves.'

'A%ich they-the town-did, though even then the courtliouse was not finished

for another six years. Not but that they thought it was: complete: simple

and square, floored and roofed and windowed, with a central hallway and the

four offices sheriff and tax assessor and circuit- and chanceryclerk

(which-the chancery-clerk's office-would contain the ballot boxes and booths

for voting,-below, and the courtroom and jury-room and the judge's chambers

above ven to the pigeons and English sparrows, migrants too but not

pioneers, inevictably urban in fact, come all the way from the Atlantic

coast as soon as the town became a town with a name, taking possession of

the gutters and eave-boxes almost before the final hammer was withdrawn,

uxorious and interminable the one, garrulous and myriad the other. Then in

the sixth year old Alec Holston died and bequeathed back to the town the

fifteen dollars it had paid him for the lock; two years before, Louis

Grenier had died and his heirs still held in trust on demand the fifteen

hundred dollars his will had devised it, and now there was another newcomer

in the county, a man named John Sartoris, with slaves and gear and money too

like Grenier and Sutpen, but who was an even better stalemate to Sutpen than

Grenier had been because it was apparent at once that he, Sartoris, was the

sort of man who could even cope with Sutpen in the sense that a man with a

sabre or even a small sword and heart enough for it could cope with one with

an axe; and that summer (Sutpen's Paris architect had long since gone back

to whatever place he came from and to which he had made his one abortive

midnight try to return,