Requiem for a Nun Read Free Page B

They pointed out to old Alec that the only reason the lock could be missing was that the bandits had not had time or been able to cut it out of the door, and that even three fleeing madmen on stolen horses would not carry a six-foot oak door very far, and that a party of Ikkemotubbe’s young men were even now trailing the horses westward toward the River and that without doubt the lock would be found at any moment, probably under the first bush at the edge of the settlement: knowing better, knowing that there was no limit to the fantastic and the terrifying and the bizarre, of which the men were capable who already, just to escape from a log jail, had quietly removed one entire wall and stacked it in neat piecemeal at the roadside, and that they nor old Alec neither would ever see his lock again;
    Nor did they; the rest of that afternoon and all the next day too, while old Alec still smoked his pipe in front of his smoldering log, the settlement’s sheepish and raging elders hunted for it, with (by now: the next afternoon) Ikkemotubbe’s Chickasaws helping too, or anyway present, watching: the wild men, the wilderness’s tameless evictant children looking only the more wild and homeless for the white man’s denim and butternut and felt and straw which they wore, standing or squatting or following, grave, attentive and interested, while the white men sweated and cursed among the bordering thickets of their punily-clawed foothold; and always the rider, Pettigrew, ubiquitous, everywhere, not helping search himself and never in anyone’s way, but always present, inscrutable, saturnine, missing nothing: until at last toward sundown Compson crashed savagely out of the last bramble-brake and flung the sweat from his face with a full-armed sweep sufficient to repudiate a throne, and said,
    â€˜All right, god damn it, we’ll pay him for it.’ Because they had already considered that last gambit; they had already realised its seriousness from the very fact that Peabody had tried to make a joke about it which everyone knew that even Peabody did not think humorous:
    â€˜Yes—and quick too, before he has time to advise with Pettigrew and price it by the pound.’
    â€˜By the pound?’ Compson said.
    â€˜Pettigrew just weighed it by the three hundred miles from Nashville. Old Alec might start from Carolina. That’s fifteen thousand pounds.’
    â€˜Oh,’ Compson said. So he blew in his men by means of a foxhorn which one of the Indians wore on a thong around his neck, though even then they paused for one last quick conference; again it was Peabody who stopped them.
    â€˜Who’ll pay for it?’ he said. ‘It would be just like him to want a dollar a pound for it, even if by Pettigrew’s scale he had found it in the ashes of his fireplace. They—Compson anyway—had probably already thought of that; that, as much as Pettigrew’s presence, was probably why he was trying to rush them into old Alec’s presence with the offer so quickly that none would have the face to renege on a pro-rata share. But Peabody had torn it now. Compson looked about at them, sweating, grimly enraged.
    â€˜That means Peabody will probably pay one dollar,’ he said. ‘Who pays the other fourteen? Me?’ Then Ratcliffe, the trader, the store’s proprietor, solved it—a solution so simple, so limitless in retroact, that they didn’t even wonder why nobody had thought of it before; which not only solved the problem but abolished it; and not just that one, but all problems, from now on into perpetuity, opening to their vision like the rending of a veil, like a glorious prophecy, the vast splendid limitless panorama of America: that land of boundless opportunity, that bourne, created not by nor of the people, but for the people, as was the heavenly manna of old, with no return demand on man save the chewing and swallowing since out of its own matchless