TH'E JAIL
511
his,
if-no, when-he could get there, and it had not been ruined
by four years
of
war and neglect, and even if the land was still
plantable, even if he could start planting the stocking of corn to–
morrow, he would be weeks and even months late; during that walk
to the door and as he lifted his hand to knock on it, he must have
thought with a kind of weary and indomitable outrage of how, al–
ready months late, he must still waste a day or maybe even two
or three of them before he could load the
girl
onto the mule behind
him and head at last for Alabama- this, at a time when of all things
he would require patience and a clear head, trying for them (( cour–
tesy too, which would be demanded now) ), patient and urgent and
polite, undefeated, trying to explain, in terms which they could un–
derstand or at least accept, his simple need and the urgency of it,
to the mother and father whom he had never seen before and whom
he never intended, or anyway anticipated, to see again, not that he
had anything for or against them either: he simply intended to be
too busy for the rest of
his
life, once they could get on the mule and
start for home; not seeing the
girl
then, during the interview, not
even asking to see her for a moment when the interview was over,
because he had to get the license now and then find the preacher: so
that the first word he ever spoke to her was a promise delivered
through a stranger;
it
was probably not until they were on the mule
-the frail useless hands whose only strength seemed to be that suf–
ficient to fold the wedding license into the bosom of her dress and
then cling to the belt around his waist-that he looked at her again
or ((both of them)) had time to learn one another's middle name);
That was the story, the incident, ephemeral of an afternoon in
late May, unrecorded by the town and the county because they had
little time too: (the county and the town) had anticipated Appo–
mattox and kept that lead, so that in effect Appomattox itself never
overhauled them; it was the long pull of course, but they had-as
they would realise later-that priceless, that unmatchable year; on
New Year's Day, 1865, while the rest of the South sat staring at
the northeastern horizon beyond which Richmond lay, like a family
staring at the closed door to a sick-room, Yoknapatawpha County
was already nine months gone in reconstruction; by New Year's '66,
the gutted walls (the rain of two winters had washed them clean of
