Requiem for a Nun

236 WILLIAM FAULKNER

Because those days were gone, the old brave innocent tumultuous eupeptic

tomorrowless days; the last broadhorn and keelboat (Mike Fink was a legend;

soon even the grandfathers would no longer claim to remember him, and the

river hero was now the steamboat gambler wading ashore in his draggled

finery from the towhead where the captain had marooned him) had been sold

piecemeal for firewood in Chartres and Toulouse and Dauphine street, and

Choctaw and Chickasaw braves, in short hair and overalls and armed with

mule-whips in place of war-clubs and already packed up to move west to

Oklahoma, watched steamboats furrowing even the shallowest and remotest

wilderness streams where tumbled gently to the motion of the paddle-wheels,

the gutted rock-weighted bones of Hare's and Mason's murderees; a new time,

a new age, millennium's beginning; one vast single net of commerce webbed

and veined the mid-continent's fluvial embracement; New Orleans, Pittsburgh,

and Fort Bridger, Wyoming, were suburbs one to the other, inextricable in

destiny; men's mouths were full of law and order, all men's mouths were

round with the sound of money; one unanimous golden affirmation ululated the

nation's boundless immeasurable forenoon: profit plus regimen equals

security: a nation of commonwealths; that crumb, that dome, that gilded

pustule, that Idea risen now, suspended like a balloon or a portent or a

thundercloud above what used to be wilderness, drawing, holding the eyes of

all: Mississippi: a state, a commonwealth; triumvirate in legislative,

judiciary, executive, but without a capital, functioning as though from a

field headquarters, operating as though still en route toward that high

inevitable place in the galaxy of commonwealths, so in 1820 from its field

p.c. at Columbia the legislature selected appointed and dispatched the three

Commissioners Hinds, Lattimore and Patton, not three politicians and less

than any three political time-servers but soldiers engineers and

patriots-soldier to cope with the reality, engineer to cope with the

aspiration, patriot to hold fast to the dream-three white men in a Choctaw

pirogue moving slowly up the empty reaches of a wilderness river as two

centuries ago the three Frenchmen had drifted in their Northern birchbark

down that vaster and emptier one;

But not drifting, these: paddling: because this was upstream, bearing not

volitionless into the unknown mystery and authority, but establishing in the

wilderness a point for men to rally to in conscience and free will,

scanning, watching the dense inscrutable banks in their turn too, conscious

of the alien incorrigible eyes too perhaps but already rejectant of them,

not that the wilderness's dark denizens, already dispossessed at