William Faulkner
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 tom 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 cen–
tury 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 busi–
ness side-street, and the jail across from them, though transformed
also
now into two storeys of Georgian brick by the hand (( or any–
way 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
*
This is a section from
Requiem for a Nun,
to be published this
fall
by
Random House.
