Requiem for a Nun

270 WILLIAM FAULKNER

not with three insentient replaceable Indian clubs or balls, but three

glass bulbs filled with nitroglycerin and not enough hands for one even:

one hand to offer the atonement with and another to receive the

forgiveness with and a third needed to offer the gratitude, and still a

fourth hand more and more imperative as time passed to sprinkle in

steadily and constantly increasing doses a little more and a little more

of the sugar and seasoning on the gratitude to keep it palatable to its

swallower-that perhaps: she just didn't have time to be careful enough,

perhaps it was desperation, or perhaps this was when her husband first

refuted or implied or anyway impugned whichever it was-his son's

paternity. Anyway, she was pregnant again; she had broken her word, de-

stroyed her talisman, and she probably knew fifteen months before the

letters that this was the end, and when the man appeared with the old

letters she probably was not even surprised: she had merely been

wondering for fifteen months what form the doom would take. And accept

this too-

lights flicker and dim further, then steady at that point.

And relief too. Because at last it was over; the roof had fallen,

avalanche had roared; even the helplessness and the impotence were

finished now, because now even the old fragility of bone and meat was no

longer a factor-and, who knows? because of that fragility, a kind of

pride, triumph: you have waited for destruction: you endured; it was

inevitable, inescapable, you had no hope. Nevertheless, you did not

merely cringe, crouching, your head, vision, buried in your arms; you

were not watching that poised arrestment all the time, true enough, but

that was not because you feared it but because you were too busy putting

one foot before the other, never for one instant really flagging,

faltering, even though you knew it was in vain-triumph in the very

fragility which no longer need concern you now, for the reason that the

all, the very worst, which catastraphe can do to you, is crush and

obliterate the fragility; you were the better man, you outfaced even

catastrophe, outlasted it, compelled it to move first; you did riot even

defy it, not even contemptuous: with no other tool or implement but that

worthless fragility, you held disaster off as with one hand you