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    Requiem for a Nun, Fragment

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    2020-03-09_104455

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    Requiem for a Nun, Fragment

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    8 views10 pages

    2020 03 09 - 104455

    Uploaded by

    salvador_santillan_2
    Requiem for a Nun, Fragment

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 10
    re ACT ONE gur COURTHOUSE (A Name for the City) _ fhe courthous is less old than the town, which began gomewhere under the turn of the century as a Chickasaw Agency ttading-post and so continued for almost thirty fore it discovered, not that it lacked a depository cords and certainly not that it needed one, but by creating or anyway decreeing one, could it h a situation which otherwise was going to cost rears be for its te that only cope with somebody money; The settlement had the records; even the simple dispos- session of Indians begot in time a minuscule of archive, Jet alone the normal litter of man’s ramshackle confedera- tion against environment — that time and that wilderness _ in this case, 2 meagre, fading, dog-eared, uncorrelated, at times illiterate sheaf of land grants and patents and transfers and deeds, and tax- and militia-rolls, and bills of sale for slaves, and counting-house lists of spurious cur- rency and exchange rates, and liens and mortgages, and Jisted rewards for escaped or stolen Negroes and other livestock, and diary-like annotations of births and mar- riages and deaths and public hangings and land-auctions, accumulating slowly for those three decades in a sort of iron pirate’s chest in the back room of the post-office- trading-post-store, until that day thirty years later when, because of a jailbreak compounded by an ancient monster iron padlock transported a thousand miles by horseback from Carolina, the box was removed to a small new lean- to room like a wood- or tool-shed built two days ago tone outside Wall OF Ue MNOTUCEG=109 mid against one O shake-down jail; and thus was born the Vokn County courthouse: by simple fortuity, NOE 03 than even the jail, but come into existence at and accident: the box containing the docum moved from any place, but simply to one; rei e the trading-post back room not for any reason inhere either the back room or the box, but on the contr which — the box - was not only in nobody’s ¥ back room, it was even missed when gone sin seryed as another seat or stool among the powder whiskey-kegs and firkins of salt and lard about ¢] on winter nights; and was moved at all for the reason that suddenly the settlement (over-night it become a town without having been a village; on about a hundred years it would wake frantically communal slumber into a rash of Rotary and Lion and Chambers of Commerce and City Beautifuls: a fy beating of hollow drums toward nowhere, but mer sound louder than the next little human clo g north or south or east or west, dubbing itself Napoleon dubbed himself emperor and defendin expedient by padding its census rolls — a fever, a delirg in which it would confound forever seething with n and motion with Progress. But that was a hundred away yet; now it was frontier, the men and w pioneers, tough, simple, and durable, seeking mon imple escape, and not tol Covered itself faced not so to be sol sword of dilemma from which it had tes ac fe an Even the jailbreak was fortuity: a of Natchez Trace bandits (owen Baie 0 8 REQUIEM FOR A NUN against one outside wall of the mori ticed-Io oe shake-down jail; and thus wag born the Yona tit County courthouse: by simple fortuity, not Only Jeg Pa than even the jail, but come into existence at al] by eto and accident: the box containing the document moved from any place, but simply to One; removed feo the trading-post back room not for any teason inhetene either the back room or the box, but on t he Contrary, ‘ which — the box ~ was not only in nobody’s way in ¢ i back room, it was even missed when go Me since it hay served as another seat or stool among the Powder. and whiskey-kegs and firkins of salt and lard about the stove On winter nights; and was moved at all for the si settlement (over- with a problem which h, : 8 swotd of dilemma from which jt iin (6 yHE COURTIOUSE 9 rin to affirm, and a hundred years later would ould bee that two of the bandits were the Harpes them- gill be a j Jarpe anyway, since the circumstances, the elves ere breakout left behind like a smell, an odour. ppettiod Y and bizarre playfulness at ones f gargantuan and terrifying, as if the settlement had fallen, ron into the notice or range of an idle and whim- A : Which — that they were the Harpes — was im- since the Harpes and even the last of Mason’s rere dead of scattered by this time, and the rob- would have had to belong to John Murtel’s organi- bers _ if they needed to belong to any at all other than gation Je fraternity of rapine.) captured by chance by an ae band of civilian more-or-less militia and brought o. Jefferson jail because it was the nearest one, the ita band being part of a general muster at Jefferson E, days before for a Fourth-of-July barbecue, which by ay d day had been refined by hardy elimination into ken brawling which rendered even the hardiest vulnerable enough to be ejected from the settle- ment by the civilian residents, the band which was to make the capture having been carried, still comatose, in one of the evicting wagons to a swamp four miles from Jefferson known as Hurricane Bottoms, where they made camp to regain their strength or at least their legs, and where that night the four — or three — bandits, on the way across country to their hide-out from their last exploit on the Trace, stumbled onto the campfire. And here report divided; some said that the sergeant in command of the militia recognized one of the bandits as a deserter from his corps, others said that one of the bandits recognized in the Sergeant a former follower of his, the bandit’s, trade. Anyway, on the fourth morning all of them, captors and ptisoners, returned to Jefferson in a group, some said in the seco one drunt survivors REQUIE a M ro RA Noy confederation now seeking meee the captors brought their prizes hack revenge for having been evicted fr ke c oie vere frontier, ploneer times It, we "8, when Persons tae tk freedom were ilmost a physical condi; Mal ibe the, -ommunity wa: 2C1tiOn like gee ) community was going to interfere a Pe oy 9 Be awd 10 morals as long as the amoralist practiseg SO; Other, 7 se ad t be i Meypp he and so Jefferson, being neither on the -y, mete River but lying about midway between, na or K c ; , no part of the underworld of either; tally Gyan But they had some of it now, taken as it were f unawares, without warning to prepare and fendemd : put the bandits into the log-and-mud-chinking jail, whe until now had had no lock at all since its clients Oeull been amateurs — local brawlers and drunkards ang away slaves — for whom a single heavy wooden beam j slots across the outside of the door like on a cornetih ia sufficed. But they had now what might be four — ihe Dillingers or Jesse Jameses of the time, with rewards on their heads. So they locked the jail; they bored an anges hole through the door and another through the jamb and passed a length of heavy chain through the holes and sent a messenger on the run across to the post-office-stote to fetch the ancient Carolina lock from the last Nashville — the iron monster weighing almost fifteen tas long as a bayonet, not just but the oldest mail-pouch pounds, with a key almos' the only lock in that part of the country, lock in that cranny of the United States, brought there by one of the three men who were what was to be Yokna- patawpha County’s coeval pioneers and settlers, leaving in it the three oldest names — Alexander Holston, who came as half groom and half bodyguard to Doctot Samu Habersham, and half nurse and half tutor to the doctot’s 4 7H COURTHOUSE 1 meyear old motherless son, the three of them ridin, it , across Tennessee from the Cumberland Gap ich Louis Grenier, the Huguenot younger son one, ought the first slaves into the country and was who “4 Ne first big land patent and so became the first raniter janter; while Doctor Habersham, with his worn bag of pills and knives and his brawny taciturn plac! rd and his half orphan child, became the settle- itself (for a time, before it was named, the settle- ment was known as Doctor Habersham’s, then Haber- ment * Ben simply Habersham; a hundred years later, shar +a schism between two ladies’ clubs over the nam- ae streets in order to get free mail delivery, a move- | ee was started, first, to change the name back to Habersham; then, failing that, to divide the town in two ad call one half of it Habersham after the old pioneer | Goctor and founder) ~ friend of old Issetibbeha, the Chic- kasaw chief (the motherless Habersham boy, now a man of twenty-five, married | one of Issetibbeha’s grand- daughters and in the thirties emigrated to Oklahoma with his wife’s dispossessed people), first unofficial, then official Chickasaw agent until he resigned in a letter of furious denunciation addressed to the President of the United States himself; and — his charge and pupil a man now — ‘Alexander Holston became the settlement’s first publican, establishing the tavern still known as the Holston House, the original log walls and puncheon floors and hand- — morticed joints of which are still buried somewhere be- neath the modern pressed glass and brick veneer and neon tubes. The lock was his; potseb® Fifteen pounds of useless iron lugged a thousand miles — through a desert of precipice and swamp, of flood and drouth and wild beasts and wild Indians and wilder white | | REQUIEM FOR A Nun 12 men, displacing that fifteen Pounds better or seed to plant so or even Powder to aeen 7 | become a fixture, a kind of landmark, in if €nd igh | derness ordinary, locking and securing notte att there was nothing behind the heavy bars 4.” becit needing further locking and securing; nop oe shag 5 weight because the only Papers in the Het a Dap ‘ were the twisted spills in an old powder horn a i mantel for lighting tobacco; always a little iq «’* te since it had constantly to be moved: from bar ia a Way, mantel then back to bar again until they finally thaite about putting it on the bi-monthly mail-pouch: f Ughe known, presently the oldest unchanged thing in the scl ment, older that the people since Issetibbeha and Doeiy ; Habersham were dead, and Alexander Holston wa It , old man crippled with arthritis, and Louis Grenier ia settlement of his own on his vast plantation, half of which 4 was not even in Yoknapatawpha County, and the settle,» ment rarely saw him; older than the town, since ¢ were new names in it now even when the old blood ran a in them — Sartoris and Stevens, Compson and McCaslin and Sutpen and Coldfield - and you no longer shot a bear or deer or wild turkey simply by standing for a while in your kitchen door, not to mention the pouch of mail — letters and even newspapers — which came from Nashville every two weeks by a special rider who did nothing else and was paid a salary for it by the Federal Government; and that was the second phase of the monster Carolina lock’s transubstantiation into the Yoknapatawpha County courthouse; ; The pouch didn’t always reach the settlement every two 4 weeks, nor even always every month. But sooner or later it did, and everybody knew it would, because it — the — — THE COURTHOUSH Wy whide saddlebag not even large enough to hold a full Fiaoge of clothing, containing three ot four letters and c half that many badly-printed one- and two-sheet neys- apers alrcady three or four months out of date and {sually half and sometimes wholly misinformed or incor- rect to begin with — was the United States, the power and the will to liberty, owning liegence to no tan, bringing even into that still almost pathless wilderness the thin eremptory voice of the nation which had wrenched its freedom from one of the most powerful peoples on earth and then again within the same lifespan successfully defended it; so peremptory and audible that the man who carried the pouch on the galloping horse didn’t even carry any arms except a tin horn, traversing month after month, blatantly, flagrantly, almost contemptuously, a region where for no more than the boots on his feet, men would murder a traveller and gut him like a bear or deer or fish and fill the cavity with rocks and sink the evidence in the nearest water; not even deigning to pass quictly where other men, even though armed and in parties, tried to move secretly or at least without uproar, but instead announcing his solitary advent as far ahead of himself ag the ring of the horn would carry. So it was not long before Alexander Holston’s lock had moved to the mail-pouch. Not that the pouch needed one, having come already the three hundred miles from Nashville without a lock. (It had been projected at first that the lock remain on the pouch constantly. That is, not just while the pouch was in the settlement, but while it was on the horse between Nashville and the settlement too. The rider refused, suc- cinctly, in three words, one of which was printable. His teason 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 “a RFQUIEM FOR A NEN pounds - would the fifteen pounds fo bring hie weight up ro th added weight of the lock the pistols which his err ment, believes done so, the rider’s re of the post-office in Nashvil settlement were three h the horse had carried weighed fifteen po undred miles apa it from one to the ounds to the mile times mules, or forty-five hundred pounds, WW] nonsense, a physical impossibility eithe < Yer indubitably fifteen pounds times three hundred Miles | was forty-five hundred something, either Pounds op miles ~ especially as while they were stil] trying to up Q ravel it, the rider repeated his first three su Ccinct ~ tye unprintable ~words.) So less than ever would the Pouch | tt, by the ting other, the Ig kee three hunde hich was manifi t in lock of ho) equipped to receive One, since it had slit the leather with a knife just under each jaw of th Opening and insert the lock’s iron mandibl two slits and clash j > So that any oth similar knife could have cut the pouch as

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