THE JAIL
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of someone's cousin, who had failed not as a father but merely as a
fourth-rate farmer or day-laborer;
It survived, endured; it had
it~
inevictable place in the town and the
county; it was even still adding modestly not just to its but to
the town's and the county's history too: somewhere behind that dingy
brick fac;ade, between the old durable hand-molded brick and the
cracked creosote-impregnated plaster of the inside walls (though
few in the town or county any longer knew that they were there)
were the old notched and mortised logs which (this, the town and
county did remember; it was part of its legend) had held someone
who might have been Wiley Harpe; during that summer of 1864,
the federal brigadier who had fired the Square and the courthouse had
used the jail as his provost-marshal's guard-house; and even children
in high school remembered how the jail had been host to the Governor
of the State while he discharged a thirty-day sentence for contempt
of court for refusing to testify in a paternity suit brought against one
of his lieutenants: but isolate, even its legend and record and history,
indisputable in authenticity yet a little oblique, elliptic or perhaps
just ellipsoid, washed thinly over with a faint quiet cast of apocraphy:
because there were new people in the town now, strangers, outlanders,
living in new minute glass-walled houses set as neat and orderly and
antiseptic as cribs in a nursery ward, in new subdivisions named Fair–
field or Longwood or Halcyon Acres which had once been the lawn
or back yard or kitchen garden of the old residences (the old obsolete
columned houses still standing among them like old horses surged
suddenly out of slumber in the middle of a flock of sheep), who had
never seen the jail; that is, they had looked at it in passing, they
knew where it was, when their kin or friends or acquaintances from
the East or North or California visited them or passed through Jeffer–
son on the way to New Orleans or Florida, they could even repeat
some of its legend or history to them: but they had had no contact
with it; it was not a part of their lives; they had the automatic stoves
and furnaces and milk deliveries and lawns the size of installment–
plan rugs; they had never had to go to the jail on the morning after
June tenth or July Fourth or Thanksgiving or Christmas or New
Year's (or for that matter, on almost any Monday morning) to pay
the fine of houseman or gardener or handyman so that he could
hurry on home (still wearing his hangover or his barely-stanched
razor-slashes) and milk the cow or clean the furnace or mow the
lawn;
