506
PARTISAN REVIEW
clerk's bond or the bailiff's wand of office; converted indeed now,
elevated (an apotheosis) ten feet above the level of the town, so that
the old buried log walls now contained the living-quarters for the
turnkey's family and the kitchen from which his wife catered, at
so much a meal, to the city's and tRe county's prisoners-perqui–
site not for work or capability for work, but for political fidelity
and the numerality of votable kin by blood or marriage-a jailor
or turnkey, himself someone's cousin and with enough other cousins
and inlaws of his own
to
have assured the election of sheriff or
chancery- or circuit-clerk- a failed farmer who was not at all the
victim of his time but, on the contrary, was its master, since his in–
herited and inescapable incapacity to support his family by his own
efforts had matched him with an era and a land where government
was founded on the working premise of being primarily an asylum
for ineptitude and indigence, for the private business failures among
your or your wife's kin whom otherwise you yourself would have
to support-so much his destiny's master that, in a land and time
where a man's survival depended not only on his ability to drive a
straight furrow and to fell a tree without maiming or destroying
himself, that fate had supplied to him one child: a frail anemic girl
with narrow workless hands lacking even the strength to milk a
cow, and then capped its own vanquishment and eternal subjugation
by the paradox of giving him for his patronymic the designation of
the vocation at which he was to fail: Farmer; this was the incumbent,
the turnkey, the jailor; the old tough logs which had known Ikke–
motubbe's drunken Chickasaws and brawling teamsters and trappers
and flatboatmen (and- for that one short summer night-the four
highwaymen, one of whom might have been the murderer, Wiley
Harpe), were now the bower framing a window in which mused
}:lour after hour and day and month and year, the frail blonde girl
not only incapable of (or at least excused from) helping her mother
cook, but even of drying the dishes after her mother (or father per–
haps) washed them- musing, not even waiting for anyone or any–
thing, as far as the town knew, not even pensive, as far as the town
knew: just musing amid her blonde hair in the window facing the
country town street, day after day and month after month
and~
as the town remembered it-year after year for what must have been
three or four of them, inscribing at some moment the fragile and in-
