Page:Requiem for a Nun (1919) Faulkner.djvu/15

14 REQUIEM FOR A NUN

House, the original log walls and pimcheon floors and hand-morticed joints of which are still buried somewhere beneath the modem pressed glass and brick Veneer and neon tubes. The lock was his;

Fifteen pounds of useless iron lugged a thousand mila throt^h a desert of precipice and swamp, of flpod and drouth and wild beasts and wild Indians and wilder whke men, displacing that fifteen pounds better given to food or seed to plant food or even powder to defend with, to become a fixture, a kind of landmark, in die bar of a wilderness ordinary, locking and securing nothing, because there was nothing behind the heavy bars and shutters needing further locking and securing; not even a paper weight because the only papers in the Holston House were the twisted spills in an old powder horn above the mantel for lighting tobacco; always a litde in the way, since it had constandy to be moved: from bar to shelf to mintel then back to bar again until they finally thought about putting it on the bi-monthly mailpouch; familiar, known, presently the oldest unchanged thing in the setdement,joldcr than the people since Issetibbeha and Doctor Habersham were dead, and Alexander Holston was an old man crippled with arthrids, and Louis Grenier had a setdement of his own on his vast plantation, half of which was not even in Yoknapatawpha County, and the setde- ment rarely saw him; older than the town, since there were new names in it now even when the old blood ran in them — Sartoris and Stevens,»Compson and McCaslin and Sutpen and Coldfield — and you pq longer shot a bear or deer or wild turkey simply by s tanding for a^ while in your kitchen door, not to mention die pouch of mail —