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 III
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 insentient 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 centre 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 thoroughfare 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 pocket-books] 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 — aye, overlapping — continuity the history of a community, look not in the church registers and the courthouse records, but beneath the successive layers of calsomine 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-coloured 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 smouldering 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 travelling 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 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 deer-hide 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
