THE JAIL
607
battle, a whole year around the long iron perimeter of duty and
oath, from Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, across Tennessee
into Virginia and up to the fringe of Pennsylvania before it curved
back into its closing fade along the headwaters of the Appomattox
river and at last removed from him its iron hand: where, a safe
distance at last into the rainy woods from the picket lines and the
furled flags and the stacked muskets, a handful of men leading spent
horses, the still-warm pistols still loose and quick for the hand in the
unstrapped scabbards, gathered in the failing twilight-privates and
captains, sergeants and corporals and subalterns- talking a little of
one last desperate cast southward where (by last report) Johnston
was still intact, knowing that they would not, that they were done
not only with vain resistance but with indomitability too; already
departed this morning in fact for Texas, the West, New Mexico; a
new land even if not yet (spent too -like the horses-from the long
harassment and
angui~h
of remaining indomitable and undefeated)
a new hope, putting behind them for good and all the lost of both:
the young dead bride-drawing him (that face) even back from this
too, from no longer having to remain undefeated too: who swapped
the charger for the mule and the sabre for the stocking of seed corn:
back across the whole ruined land and the whole disastrous year by
that virgin inevictable passivity more inescapable than lodestar;
Not that face; that was nowhere near enough; no symbol there of
connubial matriarchy, but fatal instead with all insatiate and deathless
sterility; spouseless, barren, and undescended; not even demanding
more than that: simply requiring it, requiring all-Lilith's lost and
insatiable face drawing the substance-the will and hope and dream
and imagination-of all men (you too: yourself and the host too)
into that one bright fragile net and snare; not even to be caught,
over-flung, by one single unerring cast of it, but drawn to watch in
patient and thronging turn the velY weaving of the strangling golden
strands-drawing the two of you from almost a hundred years away
in your turn-yourself the stranger, the outlander with a B.A. or (per–
haps even) M.A. from Harvard or Northwestern or Stanford, passing
through Jefferson by chance or accident on the way to somewhere
else, and the host who in three generations has never been out of
Yoknapatawpha further than a few prolonged Saturday nights in
Memphis or New Orleans, who has heard of Jenny Lind, not because
he has heard of Mark Twain and Mark Twain spoke well of her,
but for the same reason that Mark Twain spoke well of her; not that
