Page:Requiem for a Nun (1919) Faulkner.djvu/26

THE COURTHOUSE 25

dedicated to the single purpose of picking the manna up and putting it into his lax hand or even between his jaws — illimitable, vast, without beginning or end, not even a trade eft a craft but a beneficence as are sunlight and rain and air, inalienable and immutable.

‘Put it on the Book,’ Ratcliffe said — the Book: not a ledger, but the ledger, since it was probably the only thing of its kind between Nashville and Natchez, unless there might happen to be a similar one a few miles south at the first Choctaw agency at Yalo Busha — a ruled, paper-backed copybook such as might have come out of a schoolroom, in which accrued, with the United States as debtor, in Mohataha’s name (the Chickasaw matriarch, Ikkemotubbe’s mother and old Issetibbeha’s sister, who she could write her name, or anyway make something with a pen or pencil which was agreed to be, or at least accepted to be, a valid signature — signed all the conveyances as her son’s kingdom passed to the white people, regularising it in law anyway) the crawling tedious list of calico and gunpowder, whiskey and salt and snuff and denim pants and* osseous candy drawn from RatcUffe’s shelves by her descendants and subjects and Negro slaves. That was aU the setdement had to do: add the lock to the hst, the accoxmt. It wouldn’t even matter at what price they entered it. They could have priced it on Pettigrew’s scale of fifteen pounds times the distance not just to Carolina but to Wasliington itself, and nobody would ever notice it probably; they could have charged the United States with seventeen thousand five hundred dollars’ worth of the fossihsed and indestructible candy, and noilb would ever read the entry. So it was solved, done, finished, ^dcd. They didn’t even have to discuss it.