Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 235

of the rest of his mother-in-law's family behind him into the trackless

infested forest, spawning that child as like as not behind the barricade of

a rifle-crotched log mapless leagues from nowhere and then getting her with

another one before reaching his final itch-footed destination, and at the

same time scattering his ebullient seed in a hundred dusky bellies through

a thousand miles of wilderness; innocent and gullible, without bowels for

avarice or compassion or forethought either, changing the face of the earth:

felling a tree which took two hundred years to grow, in order to extract

from it a bear or a capful of wild honey;

Obsolete too: still felling the two-hundred-year-old tree when the bear and

the wild honey were gone and there was nothing in it any more but a raccoon

or a possum whose hide was worth at the most two dollars, turning.the earth

into a howling waste from which he would be the first to vanish, not even on

the heels but synchronous with the slightly darker wild men whom he had

dispossessed, because, like them, only the wilderness could feed and nourish

him; and so disappeared, strutted his roaring eupeptic hour, and was no

more, leaving his ghost, pariah and proscribed, scriptureless now and armed

only with the highwayman's, the murderer's, pistol, haunting the fringes of

the wilderness which he himself had helped to destroy, because the river

towns marched now recessional south by south along the processional bluffs:

St. Louis, Paducah, Memphis, Helena, Vicksburg, Natchez, Baton Rouge, peo-

pled by men with mouths full of law, in broadcloth and flowered waistcoats,

who owned Negro slaves and Empire beds and buhl cabinets and ormolu clocks,

who strolled and smoked their cigars along the bluffs beneath which in the

shanty and flatboat purlieus he rioted out the last of his doomed evening,

losing his worthless life again and again to the fierce knives of his

drunken and worthless kind-this in the intervals of being pursued and

harried in his vanishing avatars of Harpe and Hare and Mason and Murrel,

either shot on sight or hoicked, dragged out of what remained of his secret

wilderness haunts along the overland Natchez trace (one day someone brought

a curious seed into the land and inserted it into the earth, and now vast

fields of white not only covered the waste places which with his wanton and

heedless axe he bad made, but were effacing, thrusting back the wilderness

even faster than he had been able to, so that he barely had a screen for his

back when, crouched in his thicket, he glared at his dispossessor in

impotent and incredulous and uncomprehending rage) into the towns to his

formal apothesis in a courtroom and then a gallows or the limb of a tree;