Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 181

incidental band of civilian more-or-less militia and brought in to the

Jefferson jail because it was the nearest one, the militia band being part

of a general muster at Jefferson two days before for a Fourth-of-July

barbecue, which by the second day had been refined by hardy elimination into

one drunken brawling which rendered even the hardiest survivors vulnerable

enough to be ejected from the settlement by the civilian residents, the band

which was to make the capture having been carried, still comatose, in one of

the evicting wagons to a swamp four miles from Jefferson known as Hurricane

Bottoms, where they made camp to regain their strength or at least their

legs, and where that night the four-or threebandits, on the way across

country to their hideout from their last exploit on the Trace, stumbled onto

the campfire. And here report divided; some said that the sergeant in

command of the militia recognised one of the bandits as a deserter from his

corps, others said that one of the bandits recognised in the sergeant a

former follower of his, the bandit's, trade. Anyway, on the fourth morning

all of them, captors and prisoners, returned to Jefferson in a group, some

said in confederation now seeking more drink, others said that the captors

brought their prizes back to the settlement in revenge for having been

evicted from it. Because these were frontier, pioneer times, when personal

liberty and freedom were almost a physical condition like fire or flood, and

no community was going to interfere with anyone's morals as long as the

amoralist practised somewhere else, and so Jefferson, being neither on the

Trace nor the River but lying about midway between, naturally wanted no part

of the underworld of either;

But they had some of it now, taken as it were by surprise, unawares, without

warning to prepare and fend off. They put the bandits into the

log-and-mudchinking jail, which until now had had no lock at all since its

clients so far had been amateurs-local brawlers and drunkards and runaway

slaves -for whom a single heavy wooden beam in slots across the outside of

the door like on a corncrib, had sufficed. But they had now what might be

four-three Dillingers or Jesse Jameses of the time, with rewards on their

heads. So they locked the jail; they bored an auger hole through the door

and another through the jamb and passed a length of heavy chain through the

holes and sent a messenger on the run across to the postoffice-store to

fetch the ancient Carolina lock from the last Nashville mail-pouch-the iron

monster weighing almost fifteen pounds, with a key almost as long as a

bayonet, not just the only lock in that part of the country, but the oldest

lock in that cranny of the United States, brought there