Requiem for a Nun

by William Faulkner

  (Temple makes a convulsive movement, then catches herself)

  Hit me. Light you a cigarette too. I told you and him both I brought my foot. Here it is.

  (she raises her foot slightly)

  I’ve tried everything else; I reckon I can try that too.

  Temple

  (repressed, furious)

  Hush. I tell you for the last time. Hush.

  Nancy

  I’ve hushed.

  She doesn’t move. She is not looking at Temple. There is a slight change in her voice or manner, though we only realise later that she is not addressing Temple.

  I’ve tried. I’ve tried everything I know. You can see that.

  Temple

  Which nobody will dispute. You threatened me with my children, and even with my husband—if you can call my husband a threat. You even stole my elopement money. Oh yes, nobody will dispute that you tried. Though at least you brought the money back. Pick it up.

  Nancy

  You said you dont need it.

  Temple

  I dont. Pick it up.

  Nancy

  No more do I need it.

  Temple

  Pick it up, anyway. You can keep your next week’s payout of it when you give it back to Mr Gowan.

  Nancy stoops and gathers up the money, and gathers the jewelry back into its box, and puts them on the table.

  (quieter)

  Nancy.

  (Nancy looks at her)

  I’m sorry. Why do you force me to this—hitting and screaming at you, when you have always been so good to my children and me—my husband too—all of us—trying to hold us together in a household, a family, that anybody should have known all the time couldn’t possibly hold together? even in decency, let alone happiness?

  Nancy

  I reckon I’m ignorant. I dont know that yet. Besides, I aint talking about any household or happiness neither—

  Temple

  (with sharp command)

  Nancy!

  Nancy

  —I’m talking about two little children—

  Temple

  I said, hush.

  Nancy

  I cant hush. I’m going to ask you one more time. Are you going to do it?

  Temple

  Yes!

  Nancy

  Maybe I am ignorant. You got to say it out in words yourself, so I can hear them. Say, I’m going to do it.

  Temple

  You heard me. I’m going to do it.

  Nancy

  Money or no money.

  Temple

  Money or no money.

  Nancy

  Children or no children.

  (Temple doesn’t answer)

  To leave one with a man that’s willing to believe the child aint got no father, willing to take the other one to a man that dont even want no children—

  (They stare at one another)

  If you can do it, you can say it.

  Temple

  Yes! Children or no children! Now get out of here. Take your part of that money, and get out. Here—

  Temple goes quickly to the table, removes two or three bills from the mass of banknotes, and hands them to Nancy, who takes them. Temple takes up the rest of the money, takes up her bag from the table and opens it. Nancy crosses quietly toward the nursery, picking up the milk bottle from the table as she passes, and goes on. With the open bag in one hand and the money in the other, Temple notices Nancy’s movement.

  What are you doing?

  Nancy

  (still moving)

  This bottle has got cold. I’m going to warm it in the bathroom.

  Then Nancy stops and looks back at Temple, with something so strange in her look that Temple, about to resume putting the money into the bag, pauses too, watching Nancy. When Nancy speaks, it is like the former speech: we dont realise until afterward what it signifies.

  I tried everything I knowed. You can see that.

  Temple

  (peremptory, commanding)

  Nancy.

  Nancy

  (quietly, turning on)

  I’ve hushed.

  She exits through the door into the nursery. Temple finishes putting the money into the bag, and closes it and puts it back on the table. Then she turns to the baby’s bag. She tidies it, checks rapidly over its contents, takes up the jewel box and stows it in the bag and closes the bag. All this takes about two minutes; she has just closed the bag when Nancy emerges quietly from the nursery, without the milk bottle, and crosses, pausing at the table only long enough to put back on it the money Temple gave her, then starts on toward the opposite door through which she first entered the room.

  Temple

  Now what?

  Nancy goes on toward the other door. Temple watches her.

  Nancy.

  (Nancy pauses, still not looking back)

  Dont think too hard of me.

  (Nancy waits, immobile, looking at nothing. When Temple doesn’t continue, she moves again toward the door)

  If I—it ever comes up, I’ll tell everybody you did your best. You tried. But you were right. It wasn’t even the letters. It was me.

  (Nancy moves on)

  Good-bye, Nancy.

  (Nancy reaches the door)

  You’ve got your key. I’ll leave your money here on the table. You can get it—

  (Nancy exits)

  Nancy!

  There is no answer. Temple looks a moment longer at the empty door, shrugs, moves, takes up the money Nancy left, glances about, crosses to the littered desk and takes up a paperweight and returns to the table and puts the money beneath the weight; now moving rapidly and with determination, she takes up the blanket from the table and crosses to the nursery door and exits through it. A second or two, then she screams. The lights flicker and begin to dim, fade swiftly into complete darkness, over the scream.

  The stage is in complete darkness.

  Scene III

  Same as Scene I. Governor’s Office. 3:09 A.M. March twelfth.

  The lights go on upper left. The scene is the same as before, Scene I, except that Gowan Stevens now sits in the chair behind the desk where the Governor had been sitting and the Governor is no longer in the room. Temple now kneels before the desk, facing it, her arms on the desk and her face buried in her arms. Stevens now stands beside and over her. The hands of the clock show nine minutes past three.

  Temple does not know that the Governor has gone and that her husband is now in the room

  Temple

  (her face still hidden)

  And that’s all. The police came, and the murderess still sitting in a chair in the kitchen in the dark, saying ‘Yes, Lord, I done it,’ and then in the cell at the jail still saying it—

  (Stevens leans and touches her arm, as if to help her up. She resists, though still not raising her head)

  Not yet. It’s my cue to stay down here until his honor or excellency grants our plea, isn’t it? Or have I already missed my cue forever even if the sovereign state should offer me a handkerchief right out of its own elected public suffrage dressing-gown pocket? Because see?

  (she raises her face, quite blindly, tearless, still not looking toward the chair where she could see Gowan instead of the Governor, into the full glare of the light)

  Still no tears.

  Stevens

  Get up, Temple.

  (he starts to lift her again, but before he can do so, she rises herself, standing, her face still turned away from the desk, still blind; she puts her arm up almost in the gesture of a little girl about to cry, but instead she merely shields her eyes from the light while her pupils readjust)

  Temple

  Nor cigarette either; this time it certainly won’t take long, since all he has to say is, No.

  (still not turning her face to look, even though she is now speaking directly to the Go
vernor whom she still thinks is sitting behind the desk)

  Because you aren’t going to save her, are you? Because all this was not for the sake of her soul because her soul doesn’t need it, but for mine.

  Stevens

  (gently)

  Why not finish first? Tell the rest of it. You had started to say something about the jail.

  Temple

  The jail. They had the funeral the next day—Gowan had barely reached New Orleans, so he chartered an airplane back that morning—and in Jefferson, everything going to the graveyard passes the jail, or going anywhere else for that matter, passing right under the upstairs barred windows—the bullpen and the cells where the Negro prisoners—the crapshooters and whiskey-peddlers and vagrants and the murderers and murderesses too—can look down and enjoy it, enjoy the funerals too. Like this. Some white person you know is in a jail or a hospital, and right off. you say, How ghastly: not at the shame or the pain, but the walls, the locks, and before you even know it, you have sent them books to read, cards, puzzles to play with. But not Negroes. You dont even think about the cards and puzzles and books. And so all of a sudden you find out with a kind of terror, that they have not only escaped having to read, they have escaped having to escape. So whenever you pass the jail, you can see them—no, not them, you dont see them at all, you just see the hands among the bars of the windows, not tapping or fidgeting or even holding, gripping the bars like white hands would be, but just lying there among the interstices, not just at rest, but even restful, already shaped and easy and unanguished to the handles of the plows and axes and hoes, and the mops and brooms and the rockers of white folks’ cradles, until even the steel bars fitted them too without alarm or anguish. You see? not gnarled and twisted with work at all, but even limbered and suppled by it, smoothed and even softened, as though with only the penny-change of simple sweat they had already got the same thing the white ones have to pay dollars by the ounce jar for. Not immune to work, and in compromise with work is not the right word either, but in confederacy with work and so free from it; in armistice, peace;—the same long supple hands serene and immune to anguish, so that all the owners of them need to look out with, to see with—to look out at the outdoors—the funerals, the passing, the people, the freedom, the sunlight, the free air—are just the hands: not the eyes: just the hands lying there among the bars and looking out, that can see the shape of the plow or hoe or axe before daylight comes; and even in the dark, without even having to turn on the light, can not only find the child, the baby—not her child but yours, the white one—but the trouble and discomfort too—the hunger, the wet didy, the unfastened safety-pin—and see to remedy it. You see. If I could just cry. There was another one, a man this time, before my time in Jefferson but Uncle Gavin will remember this too. His wife had just died—they had been married only two weeks—and he buried her and so at first he tried just walking the country roads at night for exhaustion and sleep, only that failed and then he tried getting drunk so he could sleep, and that failed and then he tried fighting and then he cut a white man’s throat with a razor in a dice game and so at last he could sleep for a little while; which was where the sheriff found him, asleep on the wooden floor of the gallery of the house he had rented for his wife, his marriage, his life, his old age. Only that waked him up, and so in the jail that afternoon, all of a sudden it took the jailer and a deputy and five other Negro prisoners just to throw him down and hold him while they locked the chains on him-lying there on the floor with more than a half dozen men panting to hold him down, and what do you think he said? ‘Look like I just cant quit thinking. Look like I just cant quit.’

  (she ceases, blinking, rubs her eyes and then extends one hand blindly toward Stevens, who has already shaken out his handkerchief and hands it to her. There are still no tears on her face; she merely takes the handkerchief and dabs, pats at her eyes with it as if it were a powderpuff, talking again)

  But we have passed the jail, haven’t we? We’re in the courtroom now. It was the same there; Uncle Gavin had rehearsed her, of course, which was easy, since all you can say when they ask you to answer to a murder charge is, Not Guilty. Otherwise, they cant even have a trial; they would have to hurry out and find another murderer before they could take the next official step. So they asked her, all correct and formal among the judges and lawyers and bailiffs and jury and the Scales and the Sword and the flag and the ghosts of Coke upon Littleton upon Bonaparte and Julius Caesar and all the rest of it, not to mention the eyes and the faces which were getting a moving-picture show for free since they had already paid for it in the taxes, and nobody really listening since there was only one thing she could say. Except that she didn’t say it: just raising her head enough to be heard plain—not loud: just plain—and said, ‘Guilty, Lord’— like that, disrupting and confounding and dispersing and flinging back two thousand years, the whole edifice of corpus juris and rules of evidence we have been working to make stand up by itself ever since Caesar, like when without even watching yourself or even knowing you were doing it, you would reach out your hand and turn over a chip and expose to air and light and vision the frantic and aghast turmoil of an antbed. And moved the chip again, when even the ants must have thought there couldn’t be another one within her reach: when they finally explained to her that to say she was not guilty, had nothing to do with truth but only with law, and this time she said it right, Not Guilty, and so then the jury could tell her she lied and everything was all correct again and, as everybody thought, even safe, since now she wouldn’t be asked to say anything at all anymore. Only, they were wrong; the jury said Guilty and the judge said Hang and now everybody was already picking up his hat to go home, when she picked up that chip too: the judge said, ‘And may God have mercy on your soul’ and Nancy answered: ‘Yes, Lord.’

  (she turns suddenly, almost briskly, speaking so briskly that her momentum carries her on past the instant when she sees and recognizes Gowan sitting where she had thought all the time that the Governor was sitting and listening to her)

  And that is all, this time. And so now you can tell us. I know you’re not going to save her, but now you can say so. It won’t be difficult. Just one word—

  (she stops, arrested, utterly motionless, but even then she is first to recover)

  Oh God.

  (Gowan rises quickly. Temple whirls to Stevens)

  Why is it you must always believe in plants? Do you have to? Is it because you have to? Because you are a lawyer? No, I’m wrong. I’m sorry; I was the one that started us hiding gimmicks on each other, wasn’t it?

  (quickly: turning to Gowan)

  Of course; you didn’t take the sleeping pill at all. Which means you didn’t even need to come here for the Governor to hide you behind the door or under the desk or wherever it was he was trying to tell me you were hiding and listening, because after all the Governor of a Southern state has got to try to act like he regrets having to aberrate from being a gentleman—

  Stevens

  (to Temple)

  Stop it.

  Gowan

  Maybe we both didn’t start hiding soon enough—by about eight years—not in desk drawers either, but in two abandoned mine shafts, one in Siberia and the other at the South Pole, maybe.

  Temple

  All right. I didn’t mean hiding. I’m sorry.

  Gowan

  Dont be. Just draw on your eight years’ interest for that.

  (to Stevens)

  All right, all right; tell me to shut up too.

  (to no one directly)

  In fact, this may be the time for me to start saying sorry for the next eight-year term. Just give me a little time. Eight years of gratitude might be a habit a little hard to break. So here goes.

  (to Temple)

  I’m sorry. Forget it.

  Temple

  I would have told you.

  Gowan

  You did. Forget it. You see how easy it is ? You could have been doing
that yourself for eight years: every time I would say ‘Say sorry, please,’ all you would need would be to answer: ‘I did. Forget it.’

  (to Stevens)

  I guess that’s all, isn’t it? We can go home now. (he starts to come around the desk)

  Temple

  Wait.

  (Gowan stops; they look at each other)

  Where are you going?

  Gowan

  I said home, didn’t I? To pick up Bucky and carry him back to his own bed again.

  (they look at one another)

  You’re not even going to ask me where he is now?

  (answers himself)

  Where we always leave our children when the clutch—

  Stevens

  (to Gowan)