THE JAIL
507
delible signature of her meditation
in
one of the panes of it (the
window): her frail and workless name, scratched by a diamond ring
in
her frail and workless hand, and the date:
Cecilia Farmer April
16th 1861;
At which moment the destiny of the land, the nation, the South,
the State, the County, was already whirling into the plunge of its
precipice, not that the State and the South knew it, because the
first seconds of fall always seem like soar : a weightless deliberation
preliminary to a rush not downward but upward, the falling body
reversed during the second by transubstantiation into the upward rush
of earth; a soar, an apex, the South's own apotheosis of its destiny
and its pride, Mississippi and Yoknapatawpha County not last in
this, Mississippi among the first of the eleven to ratify secession,
the regiment of infantry which John Sartoris raised and organised
with Jefferson for its headquarters, going to Virginia numbered
Two
in
the roster of Mississippi regiments, the jail watching that
too but just by cognizance from a block away: that noon, the
regiment not even a regiment yet but merely a voluntary association
of untried men who knew they were ignorant and hoped they were
brave, the four sides of the Square lined with their fathers or grand–
fathers and their mothers and wives and sisters and sweethearts, the
only uniform present yet that one in which Sartoris stood with his
virgin sabre and his pristine colonel's braid on the courthouse bal–
cony, bareheaded too while the Baptist minister prayed and the
Richmond mustering officer swore the regiment
in;
and then (the
regiment) gone; and now not only the jail but the town too hung
without motion in a tideless backwash: the plunging body advanced
far enough now into space as to have lost all sense of motion, weight–
less and immobile upon the light pressure of invisible air, gone now
all
diminishment of the precipice'S lip, all increment of the vast
increaseless earth: a town of old men and women and children and
an occasional wounded soldier (John Sartoris himself, deposed from
his colonelcy by a regimental election after Second Manassas, came
home and oversaw the making and harvesting of a crop on his plan–
tation before he got bored and gathered up a small gang of irregu–
lar cavalry and carried it up into Tennessee to join Forrest), static
in
quo,
rumored, murmured of war only as from a great and in-
