Requiem for a Nun

204 WILLIAM FAULKNER

comitant with, inextricable from regularised and roted human quarreling, had

appeared in possession of cornices and gutterboxes almost before the last

nail was driven-and now the pigeons also, interminably murmurous, nesting

in, already usurping, the belfry even though they couldn't seem to get used

to the bell, bursting out of the cupola at each stroke of the hour in

frantic clouds, to sink and burst and whirl again at each succeeding stroke,

until the last one: then vanishing back through the slatted louvers until

nothing remained but the frantic and murmurous cooing like the fading echoes

of the bell itself, the source of the alarm never recognised and even the

alarm itself unremembered, as the actual stroke of the bell is no longer

remembered by the vibration-fading air. Because they-the sparrows and the

pigeons ndured, durable, a hundred years, the oldest things there except the

courthouse centennial and serene above the town most of whose people now no

longer even knew who Doctor Habersharn and old Alec Holston and Louis

Grenier were, had been; centennial and serene above the change: the

electricity and gasoline, the neon and the crowded cacophonous air; even

Negroes passing beneath the balconies and into the chancery clerk's office

to cast ballots too, voting for the same white-skinned rascals and

demagogues and white supremacy champions that the white ones did-durable:

every few years the county fathers, dreaming of bakshish, would instigate a

movement to tear it down and erect a new modern one, but someone would at

the last moment defeat them; they will try it again of course and be

defeated perhaps once again or even maybe twice again, but no more than

that. Because its fate is to stand in the hinterland of America: its doom is

its longevity; like a man, its simple age is its own reproach, and after the

hundred years, will become unbearable. But not for a little while yet; for

a little while yet the sparrows and pigeons: garrulous myriad and

independent the one, the other uxorious and interminable, at once frantic

and tranquil-until the clock strikes again which even after a hundred years,

they still seem unable to get used to, bursting in one swirling explosion

out of the belfry as though, the boiir, instead of merely adding one puny

infinitesimal more to the long weary increment since Genesis, had shattered

the virgin pristine air with the first loud dingdong of time and doom.