Sanctuary

sun found it. Temple stood in the sand, listening to the birds among the

sunshot leaves, listening, looking about. She followed the dry runlet to

where a jutting shoulder formed a nook matted with bricrs. Among the new

green last year's dead leaves from the branches overhead clung, not yet

fallen to earth. She stood here for a while, folding and folding the

sheets in her fingers, in a kind of despair. When she rose she saw, upon

the glittering mass of leaves along the crest of the ditch, the squatting

outline of a man.

For an instant she stood and watched herself run out of her body, out of

one slipper. She watched her legs twinkle against the sand, through the

flecks of sunlight, for several yards, then whirl and run back and snatch

up the slipper and whirl and run again.

When she caught a glimpse of the house she was opposite the front porch.

The blind man sat in a chair, his face lifted into the sun. At the edge

of the woods she stopped and put on the slipper. She crossed the ruined

lawn and sprang onto the porch and ran down the hall. When she reached

the back

54 WILLIAM FAULKNER

porch she saw a man in the door of the barn, looking toward the house. She

crossed the porch in two strides and entered the kitchen, where the woman

sat at the table, smoking, the child on her lap.

"He was watching me!" Temple said. "He was watching me all the time!" She

leaned beside the door, peering out, then she came to the woman, her face

small and pale, her eyes like holes burned with a cigar, and laid her

hand on the cold stove.

"Who was?" the woman said.

"Yes," Temple said. "He was there in the bushes, watching me all the

time." She looked toward the door, then back at the woman, and saw her

hand lying on the stove. She snatched it up with a wailing shriek,

clapping it against her mouth, and turned and ran toward the door. The

woman caught her arm, still carrying the child on the other, and Temple

sprang back into the kitchen. Goodwin was coming toward the house. He

looked once at them and went on into the hall.

Temple began to struggle. "Let go," she whispered, "let go! Let go!" She

surged and plunged, grinding the woman's hand against the door jamb until

she was free. She sprang from the porch and ran toward the barn and into

the hallway and climbed the ladder and scrambled through the trap and to

her feet again, running toward the pile of rotting hay.

Then suddenly she ran upside down in a rushing interval; she could see

her legs still running in space, and she struck lightly and solidly on

her back and lay still, staring up at an oblong yawn that closed with a

clattering vibration of loose planks. Faint dust sifted down across the

bars of sunlight.

Her hand moved in the substance in which she lay, then she remembered the

rat a second time. Her whole body surged in an involuted spurning

movement that brought her to her feet in the loose hulls, so that she

flung her hands out and caught herself upright, a hand on either angle

of the corner, her face not twelve inches from the cross beam on which

the rat crouched. For an instant they stared eye to eye, then its eyes

glowed suddenly like two tiny electric bulbs and it leaped at her head

just as she sprang backward, treading again on something that rolled

under her foot.

She fell toward the opposite corner, on her face in the hulls and a few

scattered corn-cobs gnawed bone-clean. Something thudded against the wall

and struck her hand in ricochet. The rat was in that corner now, on the

floor. Again their faces were not twelve inches apart, the rat's eyes

glowing and fading as though worked by lungs. Then it stood erect, its

back to the corner, its forepaws curled against its chest, and began to

.%aueak at her in tiny plaintive gasps. She backed away on

SANCTUARY 55

hands and knees, watching it. Then she got to her feet and sprang at the

door, hammering at it, watching the rat over her shoulder, her body arched

against the door, rasping at the planks with her bare hands.

XH

DIE WOMAN STOOD IN THE KITCHEN DOOR, HOLDING THE

child, until Goodwin emerged from the house. The lobes of his nostrils

were quite white against his brown face, and she said: "God, are you drunk

too?" He came along the porch. "She's not here," the woman said. "You

can't find her." He brushed past her, trailing a reek of whiskv. She

turned, watching him. He looked swiftly about the kitchen, then he turned

and looked at her standing in the door, blocking it. "You wont find her,"

she said. "She's gone." He came toward her, lifting his arm. "Dont put

your hand on me," she said. He gripped her arm, slowly. His eyes were a

little bloodshot. The lobes of his nostrils looked like wax.

"Take your hand off me," she said. "Take it off." Slowly he drew her out

of the door. She began to curse him. "Do you think you can? Do you think

I'll let you? Or any other little slut?" Motionless, facing one another

like the first position of a dance, they stood in a mounting terrific

muscular hiatus.

With scarce any movement at all he flung her aside in a complete