Requiem for a Nun Read Online Free PDF Page A

four-wall house. That will be the courthouse.’ Pettigrew had been hissing gently between his teeth at each strake of the brush, like a professional Irish groom. Now he stopped, the brush and his hand arrested in midstroke, and turned his head a little.
    â€˜Courthouse? ‘
    â€˜We’re going to have a town,’ Peabody said. ‘We already gat a church—that’s Whitfield’s cabin. And we’re going to build a school too soon as we get around to it. But we’re going to build the courthouse today; we’ve already got something to put in it to make it a courthouse: that iron box that’s been in Ratcliffe’s way in the store for the last ten years. Then we’ll have a town. We’ve already even named her.’
    Now Pettigrew stood up, very slowly. They looked at one another. After a moment Pettigrew said, ‘So?’
    â€˜Ratcliffe says your name’s Jefferson,’ Peabody said.
    â€˜That’s right,’ Pettigrew said. ‘Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew. I’m from old Ferginny.’
    â€˜Any kin?’ Peabody said.
    â€˜No,’ Pettigrew said. ‘My ma named me for him, so I would have same of his luck.’
    â€˜Luck?’ Peabody said.
    Pettigrew didn’t smile. ‘That’s right. She didn’t mean luck. She never had any schooling. She didn’t know the word she wanted to say.’
    â€˜Have you had it?’ Peabody said. Nor did Pettigrew smile now. ‘I’m sorry,’ Peabody said. ‘Try to forget it.’ He said: ‘We decided to name her Jefferson.’ Now Pettigrew didn’t seem to breathe even. He just stood there, small, frail, less than boysize, childless and bachelor, incorrigibly kinless and tieless, looking at Peabody. Then he breathed, and raising the brush, he turned back to the horse and for an instant Peabody thought he was going back to the grooming. But instead of making the stroke, he laid the hand and the brush against the horse’s flank and stood for a moment, his face turned away and his head bent a little. Then he raised his head and turned his face back toward Peabody.
    â€˜You could call that lock ‘axle grease’ on that Indian account,’ he said.
    â€˜Fifty dollars’ worth of axle grease?’ Peabody said.
    â€˜To grease the wagons for Oklahoma,’ Pettigrew said.
    â€˜So we could,’ Peabody said. ‘Only her name’s Jefferson now. We cant ever forget that any more now.’ And that was the courthouse—the courthouse which it had taken them almost thirty years not only to realise they didn’t have, but to discover that they hadn’t even needed, missed, lacked; and which, before they had owned it six months, they discovered was nowhere near enough. Because somewhere between the dark of that first day and the dawn of the next, something happened to them. They began that same day; they restored the jail wall and cut new logs and split out shakes and raised the little floorless lean-to against it and moved the iron chest from Ratcliffe’s back room; it took only the two days and cost nothing but the labor and not much of that per capita since the whole settlement was involved to a man, not to mention the settlement’s two slaves—Holston’s man and the one belonging to the German blacksmith—; Ratcliffe too, all he had to do was put up the bar across the inside of his back door, since his entire patronage was countable in one glance sweating and cursing among the logs and shakes of the half dismantled jail across the way opposite—including Ikkemotubbe’s Chickasaw, though these were neither sweating nor cursing: the grave dark men dressed in their Sunday clothes except for the trousers, pants, which they carried rolled neatly under their arms or perhaps tied by the two legs around their necks like capes or rather hussars’ dolmans where they had forded the creek, squatting or lounging