THE JA I L
touched, insulated by its windless backwater from fire; and now the
town was as though insulated by fire or perhaps cauterised by fire
from fury and turmoil, the long roar of the rushing omnivorous rock
fading on to the east with the fading upro.ar of the battle: and so in ef–
fect it was a whole year in advance of Appomattox (only the undefeated
undefeatable women, vulnerable only to death, resisted, endured, ir–
reconcilable); already, before there was a name for them (already
their prototype before they even existed as a species), there were car–
petbaggers in Jefferson-a Missourian named Redmond, a cotton–
and quartermaster-supplies speculator, who had followed the North–
ern army to Memphis in '61 and (nobody knew exactly how or why)
had been with (or at least on the fringe of) the military household
of the brigadier commanding the force which occupied Jefferson,
himself-Redmond-going no fartller, stopping, staying, none knew
the why for that either, why he elected Jefferson, chose that alien fire–
gutted site (himself one, or at least the associate, of them who had set
the match) to be his future home; and a German private, a black–
smith, a deserter from a Pennsylvania regiment, who appeared in the
summer of '64, riding a mule, with (so the tale told later, when
his
family of daughters had become matriarchs and grandmothers of the
town's new aristocracy) for saddle-blanket sheaf on sheaf of virgin
and uncut United States banknotes, so Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha
County had mounted Golgotha and passed beyond Appomattox a
full year in advance, with returned soldiers in the town, not only
the wounded from the battle of Jefferson, but whole men: not only
the furloughed from Forrest in Alabama and Johnston in Georgia
and Lee in Virginia, but the stragglers, the unmaimed flotsam and
refuse of that single battle now drawing its final constricting loop
from the Atlantic Ocean at Old Point Comfort, to Richmond: to
Chattanooga: to Atlanta: to the Atlantic Ocean again at Charles–
ton, who were not deserters but who could not rejoin any still–
intact Confederate unit for the reason that there were enemy armies
between (so that in the almost faded twilight of that land, the knell
of Appomattox made no sound; when in the spring and early
summer of '65 the formally and officially paroled and disbanded
soldiers began to trickle back into the county, there was anticlimax;
they returned to a land which not only had passed through Appo–
mattox over a year ago, it had that year in which to assimilate it,
