Requiem for a Nun

186 WILLIAM FAULKNER

through the woods to the Trace to ride the hundred-odd miles to Natchez with

news of the capture and authority to dicker for the reward; and that evening

in the Holston House kitchen was held the settlement's first municipal

meeting, prototype not only of the town council after the settlement would

be a town, but of the Chamber of Commerce when it would begin to proclaim

itself a city, with Compson presiding, not old Alec, who was quite old now,

grim, taciturn, sitting even on a hot July night before a smoldering log in

his vast chimney, his back even turned to the table (he was not interested

in the deliberation; the prisoners were his already since his lock held

them; whatever the conference decided would have to be submitted to him for

ratification anyway before anyone could touch his lock to open it) around

which the progenitors of the Jefferson city fathers sat in what was almost

a council of war, not only discussing the collecting of the reward, but the

keeping and defending it. Because there were two factions of opposition now:

not only the lynching party, but the militia band too, who claimed that as

prizes the prisoners still belonged to their original captors; that they-the

militia-had merely surrendered the prisoners' custody but had relinquished

nothing of any reward: on the prospect of which, the militia band had got

more whiskey from the trading-post store and had built a tremendous bonfire

in front of the jail, around which they and the lynching party had now

confederated in a wassail or conference of their own. Or so they thought.

Because the truth was that Compson, in the name of a crisis in the public

peace and welfare, had made a formal demand on the professional bag of

Doctor Peabody, old Doctor Habersham's successor, and the three of

them-Compson, Peabody, and the post trader (his name was Ratcliffe; a

hundred years later it would still exist in the county, but by that time it

had passed through two inheritors who had dispensed with the eye in the

transmission of words, using only the ear, so that by the time the fourth

one had been compelled by simple necessity to learn to write it again, it

had lost the V and the final 'fe' too) added the laudanurn to the keg of

whiskey and sent it as a gift from the settlement to the astonished militia

sergeant, and returned to the Holston House kitchen to wait until the last

of the uproar died; then the law-and-order party made a rapid sortie and

gathered up all the comatose opposition, lynchers and captors too, and

dumped them all into the jail with the prisoners and locked the door again

and went home to bed-until the next morning, when the first arrivals were

met by a scene resembling an outdoor stage setting: which was how the legend

of the mad Harpes started: a thing not just fantastical but

incomprehensible, not just whimsical but a