TH 'E
JAI L
515
(such was progress, that fast, that rapid) lost from control on an
icy road by his (the banker's) grandson, who had just returned
from (such was progress) two years of service. as a combat airman
on the Western Front and now the camouflage paint
is
weathering
slowly from a French point-seventy-five field piece squatting on
one flank of the base of the Confederate monument, but even before
it faded there was neon in the town and A.A.A. and C.C.C. in the
county, and W.P.A. ("and XYZ and etc.," as "Uncle Pete" Gom–
bault, a lean clean tobacco-chewing old man, incumbent of a politi–
cal sinecure under the designation of United States marshal-an
office held back in reconstruction times, when the State of Mississippi
was a United States military district, by a Negro man who was still
living in 1925-fire-maker, sweeper, janitor and furnace-attendant
to five or six lawyers and doctors and one of the banks--and still
known as "Mulberry" from the avocation which he had followed
before and during and after his incumbency as marshal: peddling
illicit whiskey in pint and half-pint bottles from a cache beneath
the roots of a big mulberry tree behind the drugstore of his pre-
1865 owner-put it) in both; W.P.A. and XYZ marking the town
and the county as war itself had not: gone now were the last of
the forest trees which had followed the shape of the Square, shading
the unbroken second-storey balcony onto which the lawyers' and
doctors' offices had opened, which shaded in its turn the fronts of
the stores and the walkway beneath; and now was gone even the
balcony itself with its wrought-iron balustrade on which in the long
summer afternoons the lawyers would prop their feet to talk; and
the continuous iron chain looping from wooden post to post along
the circumference of the courthouse yard, for the farmers to hitch
their teams to; and the public watering trough where they could
water them, because gone was the last wagon to stand on the Square
during the spring and summer and fall Saturdays and trading-days,
and not only the Square but the streets leading into it were paved
now, with fixed signs of interdiction and admonition applicable only
to something capable of moving faster than thirty miles an hour;
and now the last forest tree was gone from the courthouse yard
too, replaced by formal synthetic shrubs contrived and schooled in
(Continued on
p.
598)
