Requiem for a Nun Read online

  Maybe I will say shut up this time.

  Gowan

  Only let me finish first. I was going to say, ‘with our handiest kinfolks.’

  (to Temple)

  I carried him to Maggie’s.

  Stevens

  (moving)

  I think we can all go now. Come on.

  Gowan

  So do I.

  (he comes on around the desk, and stops again; to Temple)

  Make up your mind. Do you want to ride with me, or Gavin?

  Stevens

  (to Gowan)

  Go on. You can pick up Bucky.

  Gowan

  Right.

  (he turns, starts toward the steps front, where Temple and Stevens entered, then stops)

  That’s right. I’m probably still supposed to use the spy’s entrance.

  (he turns back, starts around the desk again, toward the door at rear, sees Temple’s gloves and bag on the desk, and takes them up and holds them out to her: roughly almost)

  Here. This is what they call evidence; dont forget these.

  (Temple takes the bag and gloves. Gowan goes on toward the door at rear)

  Temple

  (after him)

  Did you have a hat and coat?

  (he doesn’t answer. He goes on, exits)

  Oh God. Again

  Stevens

  (touches her arm)

  Come on.

  Temple

  (not moving yet)

  Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—

  Stevens

  (speaking her thought, finishing the sentence)

  —he will wreck the car again against the wrong tree, in the wrong place, and you will have to forgive him again, for the next eight years until he can wreck the car again in the wrong place, against the wrong tree—

  Temple

  I was driving it too. I was driving some of the time too.

  Stevens

  (gently)

  Then let that comfort you.

  (he takes her arm again, turns her toward the stairs)

  Come on. It’s late.

  Temple

  (holds back)

  Wait. He said, No.

  Stevens

  Yes.

  Temple

  Did he say why?

  Stevens

  Yes. He cant.

  Temple

  Cant? The Governor of a state, with all the legal power to pardon or at least reprieve, cant?

  Stevens

  That’s just law. If it was only law, I could have plead insanity for her at any time, without bringing you here at two oclock in the morning—

  Temple

  And the other parent too; dont forget that. I dont know yet how you did it. . . . Yes, Gowan was here first; he was just pretending to be asleep when I carried Bucky in and put him in his bed; yes, that was what you called that leaking valve, when we stopped at the filling station to change the wheel: to let him get ahead of us—

  Stevens

  All right. He wasn’t even talking about justice. He was talking about a child, a little boy—

  Temple

  That’s right. Make it good: the same little boy to hold whose normal and natural home together, the murderess, the nigger, the dope-fiend whore, didn’t hesitate to cast the last gambit—and maybe that’s the wrong word too, isn’t it?—she knew and had: her own debased and worthless life. Oh yes, I know that answer too; that was brought out here tonight too: that a little child shall not suffer in order to come unto Me. So good can come out of evil.

  Stevens

  It not only can, it must.

  Temple

  So touché, then. Because what kind of natural and normal home can that little boy have where his father may at any time tell him he has no father?

  Stevens

  Haven’t you been answering that question every day for six years? Didn’t Nancy answer it for you when she told you how you had fought back, not for yourself, but for that little boy? Not to show the father that he was wrong, nor even to prove to the little boy that the father was wrong, but to let the little boy learn with his own eyes that nothing, not even that, which could possibly enter that house, could ever harm him?

  Temple

  But I quit. Nancy told you that too.

  Stevens

  She doesn’t think so now. Isn’t that what she’s going to prove Friday morning?

  Temple

  Friday. The black day. The day you never start on a journey. Except that Nancy’s journey didn’t start at daylight or sunup or whenever it is polite and tactful to hang people, day after tomorrow. Her journey started that morning eight years ago when I got on the train at the University—

  (she stops: a moment; then quietly)

  Oh God, that was Friday too; that baseball game was Friday—

  (rapidly)

  You see? Dont you see? It’s nowhere near enough yet. Of course he wouldn’t save her. If he did that, it would be over: Gowan could just throw me out, which he may do yet, or I could throw Gowan out, which I could have done until it got too late now, too late forever now, or the judge could have thrown us both out and given Bucky to an orphanage, and it would be all over. But now it can go on, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, forever and forever and forever—

  Stevens

  (gently tries to start her)

  Come on.

  Temple

  (holding back)

  Tell me exactly what he did say. Not tonight: it couldn’t have been tonight—or did he say it over the telephone, and we didn’t even need—

  Stevens

  He said it a week ago—

  Temple

  Yes, about the same time when you sent the wire. What did he say?

  Stevens

  (quotes)

  ‘Who am I, to have the brazen temerity and hardihood to set the puny appanage of my office in the balance against that simple undeviable aim? Who am I, to render null and abrogate the purchase she made with that poor crazed lost and worthless life?’

  Temple

  (wildly)

  And good too—good and mellow too. So it was not even in hopes of saving her life, that I came here at two o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t even to be told that he had already decided not to save her. It was not even to confess to my husband, but to do it in the hearing of two strangers, something which I had spent eight years trying to expiate so that my husband wouldn’t have to know about it. Dont you see? That’s just suffering. Not for anything: just suffering.

  Stevens

  You came here to affirm the very thing which Nancy is going to die tomorrow morning to postulate: that little children, as long as they are little children, shall be intact, unanguished, untorn, unterrified.

  Temple

  (quietly)

  All right. I have done that. Can we go home now?

  Stevens

  Yes.

  (she turns, moves toward the steps, Stevens beside her. As she reaches the first step, she falters, seems to stumble slightly, like a sleepwalker. Stevens steadies her, but at once she frees her arm, and begins to descend)

  Temple

  (on the first step: to no one, still with that sleepwalker air)

  To save my soul—if I have a soul. If there is a God to save it—a God who wants it—

  Curtain

  Act Three

  The Jail (Nor Even Yet Quite Relinquish——)

  So, although in a sense the jail was both older and less old than the courthouse, in actuality, in time, in observation and memory, it was older even than the town itself. Because there was no town until there was a courthouse, and no courthouse until (like some unsentient unweaned creature torn violently from the dug of its dam) the floorless lean-to rabbit-hutch housing the iron chest was reft from the log flank of the jail and transmogrified into a by-neo-Greek-out-of-Georgian-England edifice set in
the center of what in time would be the town Square (as a result of which, the town itself had moved one block south—or rather, no town then and yet, the courthouse itself the catalyst: a mere dusty widening of the trace, trail, pathway in a forest of oak and ash and hickory and sycamore and flowering catalpa and dogwood and judas tree and persimmon and wild plum, with on one side old Alec Holston’s tavern and coaching yard, and a little farther along, Ratcliffe’s trading post-store and the blacksmith’s, and diagonal to all of them, en face and solitary beyond the dust, the log jail; moved—the town—complete and intact, one block southward, so that now, a century and a quarter later, the coaching-yard and Ratcliffe’s store were gone and old Alec’s tavern and the blacksmith’s were a hotel and a garage, on a main thorough-fare true enough but still a business side street, and the jail across from them, though transformed also now into two storeys of Georgian brick by the hand ((or anyway pocketbooks)) of Sartoris and Sutpen and Louis Grenier, faced not even on a side street but on an alley);

  And so, being older than all, it had seen all: the mutation and the change: and, in that sense, had recorded them (indeed, as Gavin Stevens, the town lawyer and the county amateur Cincinnatus, was wont to say, if you would peruse in unbroken—ay, overlapping—continuity the history of a community, look not in the church registers and the courthouse records, but beneath the successive layers of calcimine and creosote and whitewash on the walls of the jail, since only in that forcible carceration does man find the idleness in which to compose, in the gross and simple terms of his gross and simple lusts and yearnings, the gross and simple recapitulations of his gross and simple heart); invisible and impacted, not only beneath the annual inside creosote-and-whitewash of bullpen and cell, but on the blind outside walls too, first the simple mud-chinked log ones and then the symmetric brick, not only the scrawled illiterate repetitive unimaginative doggerel and the perspectiveless almost prehistoric sexual picture-writing, but the images, the panorama not only of the town but of its days and years until a century and better had been accomplished, filled not only with its mutation and change from a halting-place: to a community: to a settlement: to a village: to a town, but with the shapes and motions, the gestures of passion and hope and travail and endurance, of the men and women and children in their successive overlapping generations long after the subjects which had reflected the images were vanished and replaced and again replaced, as when you stand say alone in a dim and empty room and believe, hypnotised beneath the vast weight of man’s incredible and enduring Was, that perhaps by turning your head aside you will see from the corner of your eye the turn of a moving limb—a gleam of crinoline, a laced wrist, perhaps even a Cavalier plume—who knows? provided there is will enough, perhaps even the face itself three hundred years after it was dust—the eyes, two jellied tears filled with arrogance and pride and satiety and knowledge of anguish and foreknowledge of death, saying no to death across twelve generations, asking still the old same unanswerable question three centuries after that which reflected them had learned that the answer didn’t matter, or—better still—had forgotten the asking of it—in the shadowy fathomless dreamlike depths of an old mirror which has looked at too much too long;

  But not in shadow, not this one, this mirror, these logs: squatting in the full glare of the stump-pocked clearing during those first summers, solitary on its side of the dusty widening marked with an occasional wheel but mostly by the prints of horses and men: Pettigrew’s private pony express until he and it were replaced by a monthly stagecoach from Memphis, the race horse which Jason Compson traded to Ikkemotubbe, old Mohataha’s son and the last ruling Chickasaw chief in that section, for a square of land so large that, as the first formal survey revealed, the new courthouse would have been only another of Compson’s outbuildings had not the town Corporation bought enough of it (at Compson’s price) to forefend themselves being trespassers, and the saddle-mare which bore Doctor Habersham’s worn black bag (and which drew the buggy after Doctor Habersham got too old and stiff to mount the saddle), and the mules which drew the wagon in which, seated in a rocking chair beneath a French parasol held by a Negro slave girl, old Mohataha would come to town on Saturdays (and came that last time to set her capital X on the paper which ratified the dispossession of her people forever, coming in the wagon that time too, barefoot as always but in the purple silk dress which her son, Ikkemotubbe, had brought her back from France, and a hat crowned with the royal-colored plume of a queen, beneath the slave-held parasol still and with another female slave child squatting on her other side holding the crusted slippers which she had never been able to get her feet into, and in the back of the wagon the petty rest of the unmarked Empire flotsam her son had brought to her which was small enough to be moved; driving for the last time out of the woods into the dusty widening before Ratcliffe’s store where the Federal land agent and his marshal waited for her with the paper, and stopped the mules and sat for a little time, the young men of her bodyguard squatting quietly about the halted wagon after the eight-mile walk, while from the gallery of the store and of Holston’s tavern the settlement—the Ratcliffes and Compsons and Peabodys and Pettigrews ((not Grenier and Holston and Habersham, because Louis Grenier declined to come in to see it, and for the same reason old Alec Holston sat alone on that hot afternoon before the smoldering log in the fireplace of his taproom, and Doctor Habersham was dead and his son had already departed for the West with his bride, who was Mohataha’s granddaughter, and his father-in-law, Mohataha’s son, Ikkemotubbe))—looked on, watched: the inscrutable ageless wrinkled face, the fat shapeless body dressed in the cast-off garments of a French queen, which on her looked like the Sunday costume of the madam of a rich Natchez or New Orleans brothel, sitting in a battered wagon inside a squatting ring of her household troops, her young men dressed in their Sunday clothes for traveling too: then she said, ‘Where is this Indian territory?’ And they told her: West. ‘Turn the mules west,’ she said, and someone did so, and she took the pen from the agent and made her X on the paper and handed the pen back and the wagon moved, the young men rising too, and she vanished so across that summer afternoon to that terrific and infinitesimal creak and creep of ungreased wheels, herself immobile beneath the rigid parasol, grotesque and regal, bizarre and moribund, like obsolescence’s self riding off the stage enthroned on its own obsolete catafalque, looking not once back, not once back toward home);

  But most of all, the prints of men—the fitted shoes which Doctor Habersham and Louis Grenier had brought from the Atlantic seaboard, the cavalry boots in which Alec Holston had ridden behind Francis Marion, and—more myriad almost than leaves, outnumbering all the others lumped together—the moccasins, the deerhide sandals of the forest, worn not by the Indians but by white men, the pioneers, the long hunters, as though they had not only vanquished the wilderness but had even stepped into the very footgear of them they dispossessed (and mete and fitting so, since it was by means of his feet and legs that the white man conquered America; the closed and split U’s of his horses and cattle overlay his own prints always, merely consolidating his victory);—(the jail) watched them all, red men and white and black—the pioneers, the hunters, the forest men with rifles, who made the same light rapid soundless toed-in almost heelless prints as the red men they dispossessed, and who in fact dispossessed the red men for that reason: not because of the grooved barrel but because they could enter the red man’s milieu and make the same footprints that he made; the husbandman printing deep the hard heels of his brogans because of the weight he bore on his shoulders: axe and saw and plow-stock, who dispossessed the forest man for the obverse reason: because with his saw and axe he simply removed, obliterated, the milieu in which alone the forest man could exist; then the land speculators and the traders in slaves and whiskey who followed the husbandmen, and the politicians who followed the land speculators, printing deeper and deeper the dust of that dusty widening, until at last there was no mark of Chickasaw left in it anymore; watching (the
jail) them all, from the first innocent days when Doctor Habersham and his son and Alex Holston and Louis Grenier were first guests and then friends of Ikkemotubbe’s Chickasaw clan; then an Indian agent and a land office and a trading post, and suddenly Ikkemotubbe and his Chickasaws were themselves the guests without being friends of the Federal Government; then Ratcliffe, and the trading post was no longer simply an Indian trading post, though Indians were still welcome, of course (since, after all, they owned the land or anyway were on it first and claimed it), then Compson with his race horse and presently Compson began to own the Indian accounts for tobacco and calico and jeans pants and cooking pots on Ratcliffe’s books (in time he would own Ratcliffe’s books too) and one day Ikkemotubbe owned the race horse and Compson owned the land itself, some of which the city fathers would have to buy from him at his price in order to establish a town; and Pettigrew with his tri-weekly mail, and then a monthly stage and the new faces coming in faster than old Alex Holston, arthritic and irascible, hunkered like an old surly bear over his smoldering hearth even in the heat of summer (he alone now of that original three, since old Grenier no longer came in to the settlement, and old Doctor Habersham was dead, and the old doctor’s son, in the opinion of the settlement, had already turned Indian and renegade even at the age of twelve or fourteen) any longer made any effort, wanted, to associate names with; and now indeed the last moccasin print vanished from that dusty widening, the last toed-in heelless light soft quick long-striding print pointing west for an instant, then trodden from the sight and memory of man by a heavy leather heel engaged not in the traffic of endurance and hardihood and survival, but in money—taking with it (the print) not only the moccasins but the deerhide leggins and jerkin too, because Ikkemotubbe’s Chickasaws now wore Eastern factory-made jeans and shoes sold them on credit out of Ratcliffe’s and Compson’s general store, walking in to the settlement on the white man’s Saturday, carrying the alien shoes rolled neatly in the alien pants under their arms, to stop at the bridge over Compson’s creek long enough to bathe their legs and feet before donning the pants and shoes, then coming on to squat all day on the store gallery eating cheese and crackers and peppermint candy (bought on credit too out of Compson’s and Ratcliffe’s showcase) and now not only they but Habersham and Holston and Grenier too were there on sufferance, anachronistic and alien, not really an annoyance yet but simply a discomfort;