Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 183

ently the oldest unchanged thing in the settlement, older than the people

since Issetibbeha and Doctor Habersham were dead, and Alexander Holston was

an old man crippled with arthritis, and Louis Grenier had a settlement of

his own on his vast plantation, half of which was not even in Yoknapatawpha

County, and the settlement rarely saw him; older than the town, since there

were new names in it now even when the old blood ran in them-Sartoris and

Stevens, Compson and McCaslin and Sutpen and Coldfield-and you no longer

shot a bear or deer or wild turkey simply by standing for a while in your

kitchen door, not to mention the pouch of mail -letters and even

newspapers-which came from Nashville every two weeks by a special rider who

did nothing else and was paid a salary for it by the Federal Government; and

that was the second phase of the monster Carolina lock's transubstantiation

into the Yoknapatawpha County courthouse;

The pouch didn't always reach the settlement every two weeks, nor even

always every month. But sooner or later it did, and everybody knew it would,

because it-the cowhide saddlebag not even large enough to hold a full change

of clothing, containing three or four letters and half that many

badly-printed one- and two-sheet newspapers already three or four months out

of date and usually half and sometimes wholly misinformed or incorrect to

begin with-was the United States, the power and the will to liberty, owning

liegence to no man, bringing even into that still almost pathless wilderness

the thin peremptory voice of the nation which had wrenched its freedom from

one of the most powerful peoples on earth and then again within the same

lifespan successfully defended it; so peremptory and audible that the man

who carried the pouch on the galloping horse didn't even carry any arms ex-

cept a tin horn, traversing month after month, blatantly, flagrantly, almost

contemptuously, a region where for no more than the boots on his feet, men

would murder a traveller and gut him like a bear or deer or fish and fill

the cavity with rocks and sink the evidence in the nearest water; not even

deigning to pass quietly where other men, even though armed and in parties,

tried to move secretly or at least without uproar, but instead announcing

his solitary advent as far ahead of himself as the ring of the horn would

carry. So it was not long before Alexander Holston's lock had moved to the

mailpouch. Not that the pouch needed one, having come already the three

hundred miles from Nashville without a lock. (It had been projected at first

that the lock remain on the pouch constantly. That is, not just while the

pouch was in the settlement, but while it was on the horse between Nashville

and