Sanctuary

it coming and she got out of the road and stood there and watched it come

dropping down the hill. Temple and Popeye were in it. Popeye did not make

any sign, though Temple looked full at the woman. From beneath her hat

Temple looked the woman full in the face, without any sign of recognition

whatever. The face did not turn, the eyes did not wake; to the woman

beside the road it was like a small, dead-colored mask drawn past her on

a string and then away. The car went on, lurching and jolting in the ruts.

The woman went on to the house.

The blind man was sitting on the front porch, in the sun. When she

entered the hall, she was walking fast. She was not aware of the child's

thin weight. She found Goodwin in their bedroom. He was in the act of

putting on a frayed tie; looking at him, she saw that he had just shaved.

"Yes," she said. "What is it? What is it?"

"I've got to walk up to Tull's and telephone for the sheriff," he said.

"The sheriff," she said. "Yes. All right." She came to the

60 WILLIAM FAULKNER

bed and laid the child carefully down. "To Tull's," she said. "Yes. He's got

a phone."

"You'll have to cook," Goodwin said. "There's Pap."

"You can give him some cold bread. He wont mind. There's some left in the

stove. He wont mind."

"I'll go," Goodwin said. "You stay here."

"To Tull's," she said. "All right." Tull was the man at whose house Gowan

had found a car. It was two miles away. Tull's family was at dinner. They

asked her to stop. "I just want to use the telephone," she said. The

telephone was in the dining-room, where they were eating. She called, with

them sitting about the table. She didn't know the number. "The Sheriff,"

she said patiently into the mouthpiece. Then she got the sheriff, with

Tull's family sitting about the table, about the Sunday dinner. "A dead

man. You pass Mr. Tull's about a mile and turn off to the right. . . . Yes,

the Old Frenchman place. Yes. This is Mrs. Goodwin talking. . . . Goodwin.

Yes."

xv

BENBOW REACHED HIS SISTER'S HOME IN THE MIDDLE OF THE afternoon. It was four

miles from town, Jefferson. He and his sister were born in Jefferson, seven

years apart, in a house which they still owned, though his sister had wanted

to sell the house when Benbow married the divorced wife of a man named

Mitchell and moved to Kinston. Benbow would not agree to sell, though he had

built a new bunaglow in Kinston on borrowed money upon which he was still

paying interest.

When he arrived, there was no one about. He entered the house and he was

sitting in the dim parlor behind the closed blinds, when he heard his

sister come down the stairs, still unaware of his arrival. He made no

sound. She had almost crossed the parlor door and vanished when she paused

and looked full at him, without outward surprise, with that serene and

stupid impregnability of heroic statuary; she was in white. "Oh, Horace,"

she said.

He did not rise. He sat with something of the air of a guilty small boy.

"How did you-" he said. "Did Belle-"

"Of course. She wired me Saturday. That you had left, and if you came here,

to tell you that she had gone back home to Kentucky and had sent for Little

Belle."

"Ah, damnation," Benbow said.

"Why?" his sister said. "You want to leave home yourself, but you dont want

her to leave."

He stayed at his sister's two days. She had never been given to talking,

living a life of serene vegetation like perpetual corn

SANCTUARY 61

or wheat in a sheltered garden instead of a field, and during those two days

she came and went about the house with an air of tranquil and faintly

ludicrous tragic disapproval.

After supper they sat in Miss Jenny's room, where Narcissa would read the

Memphis paper before taking the boy off to bed. When she went out of the

room, Miss Jenny looked at Benbow.

"Go back home, Horace," she said.

"Not to Kinston," Benbow said. "I hadn't intended to stay here, anyway. It

wasn't Narcissa I was running to. I haven't quit one woman to run to the

skirts of another."

"If you keep on telling yourself that you may believe it, someday," Miss

Jenny said. "Then what'll you do?"

"You're right," Benbow said. "Then I'd have to stay at home."

His sister returned. She entered the room with a definite air. "Now for

it," Benbow said. His sister had not spoken directly to him all day.

"What are you going to do, Horace?" she said. "You must have business of

some sort there in Kinston that should be attended to."

"Even Horace must have," Miss Jenny said. "What I want to know is, why he

left. Did you find a man under the bed, Horace?"

"No such luck," Benbow said. "It was Friday, and all of a sudden I knew

that I could not go to the station and get that box of shrimp and-"

"But you have been doing that for ten years," his sister said.

"I know. That's how I know that I will never learn to like smelling

shrimp."

"Was that why you left Belle?" Miss Jenny said. She looked at him. "It took

you a long time to learn that, if a woman dont make a very good wife for

one man, she aint like to for another, didn't it?"