Requiem for a Nun

184 WILLIAM FAULKNER

the settlement too. The rider refused, succinctly, in three words, one of

which was printable. His reason was the lock's weight. They pointed out

to him that this would not hold water, since not only-the rider was a

frail irascible little man weighing less than a hundred pounds-would the

fifteen pounds of lock even then fail to bring his weight up to that of

a normal adult male, the added weight of the lock would merely match that

of the pistols which his employer, the United States Government, believed

he carried and even paid him for having done so, the rider's reply to this

being succinct too though not so glib: that the lock weighed fifteen

pounds either at the back door of the store in the settlement, or at that

of the postoffice in Nashville. But since Nashville and the settlement

were three hundred yards apart, by the time the horse had carried it from

one to the other, the lock weighed fifteen pounds to the mile times three

hundred miles, or forty-five hundred pounds. Which was manifest nonsense,

a physical impossibility either in lock or horse. Yet indubitably fifteen

pounds times three hundred miles was forty-five hundred something, either

pounds or mil es-especi ally as while they were still trying to unravel

it, the rider repeated his first three succinct-two unprintable-words.)

So less than ever would the pouch need a lock in the back room of the

trading-post, surrounded and enclosed once more by civilization, where its

very intactness, its presence to receive a lock, proved its lack of that

need during the three hundred miles of rapine-haunted Trace; needing a

lock as little as it was equipped to receive one, since it had been

necessary to slit the leather with a knife just under each jaw of the

opening and insert the lock's iron mandible through the two slits and

clash it home, so that any other hand with a similar knife could have cut

the whole lock from the pouch as easily as it had been clasped onto it.

So the old lock was not even a symbol of security: it was a gesture of

salutation, of free men to free men, of civilization across not just the

three hundred miles of wilderness to Nashville, but the fifteen hundred

to Washington: of respect without servility, allegiance without abasement

to the government which they had helped to found and had accepted with

pride but still as free men, still free to withdraw from it at any moment

when the two of them found themselves no longer compatible, the old lock

meeting the pouch each time on its arrival, to clasp it in iron and

inviolable symbolism, while old Alec Holston, childless bachelor, grew a

little older and grayer, a little more arthritic in flesh and temper too,

a little stiffer and more rigid in bone and pride too, since the lock was

still his, he had merely lent it, and so in a sense he was the grandfather

in the settlement of the inviolability not just of govern-