THE JAIL
603
or friend of one of the outland families which had moved into one of
the pristine and recent subdivisions, yourself turning out of your way
to fumble among road signs and filling stations out of frank curiosity,
to try to learn, comprehend, understand what had brought your
cousin or friend or acquaintance to elect to live here-not specifically
here, of course, not specifically Jefferson, but such as here, such as
Jefferson-suddenly you would realise that something curious was
happening or had happened here: that instead of dying off as they
should as time passed, it was as though these old irreconcilables were
actually increasing in number; as though with each interment of one,
two more shared that vacancy: where in 1900, only thirty-five years
afterward, there could not have been more than two or three capable
of it, either by knowledge or memory of leisure, or even simple willing–
ness and inclination, now, in 1951, eighty-six years afterward, they
could be counted in dozens (and in 1965, a hundred years afterward,
in hundreds because-by now you had already begun to understand
why your kin or friend or acquaintance had elected to come to such
as this with his family and call it his life-by then the children of
that second outland invasion following a war, would also have become
not just Mississippians but Jeffersonians and Yoknapatawphians: by
which time-who knows ?-not merely the pane, but the whole window,
perhaps the entire wall, may have been removed and embalmed
intact into a museum by an historical, or anyway a cultural, club of
ladies--why, by that time, they may not even know, or even need
to know; only that the window-pane bearing the girl's name and
the date is that old, which is enough; has lasted that long: one small
rectangle of wavy, crudely-pressed, almost opaque glass, bearing a
few faint scratches apparently no more durable than the thin dried
slime left by the passage of a snail, yet which has endured a hundred
years) who are capable and willing too to quit whatever they happen
to be doing-sitting on the last of the wooden benches beneath the
last of the locust and chinaberry trees among the potted conifers of
the new age dotting the courthouse yard, or in the chairs along
the shady sidewalk before the Holston
House,
where a breeze always
blows-to lead you across the street and into the jail and (with
courteous neighborly apologies to the jailor's wife stirring or turning
on the stove the peas and grits and side-meat-purchased in bargain–
lot quantities by shrewd and indefatigable peditation from store to
store--which she will serve to the prisoners for dinner or supper at
so much a head-plate--payable to the County, which is no mean
factor in the sinecure of her husband's incumbency) . into the kitchen
