Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 203

but his trickle, flow of bricks had never even faltered: his molds and

kilns had finished the jail and were now raising the walls of two churches

and by the half-century would have completed what would be known through

all north Mississippi and cast Tennessee as the Academy, the Female

Institute) there was a committee: Compson and Sartoris and Peabody (and

in absentia Sutpen: nor would the town ever know exactly how much of the

additional cost Sutpen and Sartoris made up): and the next year the eight

disjointed marble columns were landed from an Italian ship at New Orleans,

into a steamboat up the Mississippi to Vicksburg, and into a smaller

steamboat up the Yazoo and Sunflower and Tallahatchie, to Ikkemotubbe's

old landing which Sutpen now owned, and thence the twelve miles by oxen

into Jefferson: the two identical four-column porticoes, one on the north

and one on the south, each with its balcony of wroughtiron New Orleans

grillwork, on one of which-the south one-in 1861 Sartoris would stand in

the first Confederate uniform the town had ever seen, while in the Square

below the Richmond mustering officer enrolled and swore in the regiment

which Sartoris as its colonel would take to Virginia as a part of Bee, to

be Jackson's extreme left in front of the Henry house at First Manassas,

and from both of which each May and November for a hundred years, bailiffs

in their orderly appointive almost hereditary succession would cry without

inflection or punctuation either 'oyes oyes honorable circuit court of

Yoknapatawpha County come all and ye shall be heard' and beneath which for

that same length of time too except for the seven years between '63 and

'70 which didn't really count a century afterward except to a few

irreconcilable old ladies, the white male citizens of the county would

pass to vote for county and state offices, because when in '63 a United

States military force burned the Square and the business district, the

courthouse survived. It didn't escape: it simply survived: harder than

axes, tougher than fire, more fixed than dynamite; encircled by the

tumbled and blackened ruins of lesser walls, it stifl stood, even the

topless smoke-stained columns, gutted of course and roofless, but immune,

not one hair even out of the Paris architect's almost forgotten plumb, so

that all they had to do (it took nine years to build; they needed

twenty-five to restore it) was put in new floors for the two storeys and

a new roof, and this time with a cupola with a four-faced clock and a bell

to strike the hours and ring alarms; by this time the Square, the banks

and the stores and the lawyers' and doctors' and dentists' offices, had

been restored, and the English sparrows were back too which had never

really deserted-the garrulous noisy independent swarms which, as though

con-