Page:Requiem for a Nun (1919) Faulkner.djvu/14

THE COURTHOUSE 13

lock in that cranny of the United States, brought there by one of the three men who were what was to be Yoknapatawpha County’s coeval pioneers and settlers, leaving in it thft three oldest names — ^Alexander Holston, who came as half groom and half bodyguard to Doctor Samuel Habersham, and half mine and half tutor to the doctor’s dght-y^ar-cld motherless son, the three of them riding h«neback across Tennessee from the Cumberland Gap ^ong with Louis Grenier, the Huguenot younger son who brought die first slaves into the country and was granted the fint big land patent and so became the first cotton planter; while Doctor Habersham, with his worn black hsLg of pills and knives and his brawny taciturn bodyguard and his half orphan child, became the setdement itself (for a time, before if was named, the setdement was known as Doctor Habersham’s, then Haber- sham’s, then simply Habersham ; a hundred years later, during a schism between two ladies’ clubs over the naming of the streets in order to get free mail delivery, a movement was started, first, to change the name back to Habersham; theh, failing that, to divide the town in two and call one half of it Habersham after the old pioneer doctor and founder) — fiiend of old Issedbbcha, the Chickasaw chief (the motherless Habersham boy, now a man of twenty-five, married one of Issetibbeha’s granddaughters 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 dotiunciation addressed *0 the President of the United States himself; an 4 -vhft charge and pupil a man now — Al&canda Holston became the settlement’s first publican, establishing the tavern still known as the Holston