Sanctuary

functioning outside of time, having left time lying upon the slow and

imponderable land green with corn and cotton in the yellow afternoon.

Horace moved among them, swept here and there by the deliberate current,

without impatience. Some of them he knew; most of the merchants and

professional men remembered him as a boy, a youth, a brother

lawyer-beyond a foamy screen of locust branches he could see the dingy

secondstory windows where he and his father had practised, the glass

still innocent of water and soap as then-and he stopped now and then and

talked with them in unhurried backwaters.

The sunny air was filled with competitive radios and phonographs in the

doors of drug- and music-stores. Before these doors a throng stood all

day, listening. The pieces which moved them were ballads simple in melody

and theme, of bereavement and retribution and repentance metallically

sung, blurred, emphasized by static or needle-disembodied voices blaring

from imitation wood cabinets or pebble-grain horn-

64 WILLIAM FAULKNER

mouths above the rapt faces, the gnarled slow hands long shaped to the

imperious earth, lugubrious, harsh, sad.

That was Saturday, in May: no time to leave the land. Yet on Monday they

were back again, most of them, in clumps about the courthouse and the

square, and trading a little in the stores since they were here, in their

khaki and overalls and collarless shirts. All day long a knot of them stood

about the door to the undertaker's parlor, and boys and youths with and

without schoolbooks leaned with flattened noses against the glass, and the

bolder ones and the younger men of the town entered in twos and threes to

look at the man called Tommy. He lay on a wooden table, barefoot, in

overalls, the sunbleached curls on the back of his head matted with dried

blood and singed with powder, while the coroner sat over him, trying to

ascertain his last name. But none knew it, not even those who had known him

for fifteen years about the countryside, nor the merchants who on

infrequent Saturdays had seen him in town, barefoot, hatless, with his

rapt, empty gaze and his cheek bulged innocently by a peppermint

jawbreaker. For all general knowledge, he had none.

XVI

ON THE DAY WHEN THE SHERIFF BROUGHT GOODWIN TO TOWN, there was a negro

murderer in the jail, who had killed his wife; slashed her throat with a

razor so that, her whole head tossing further and further backward from the

bloody regurgitation of her bubbling throat, she ra-n out the cabin door and

for six or seven steps up the quiet moonlit lane. He would lean in the

window in the evening and sing. After supper a few negroes gathered along

the fence below-natty, shoddy suits and sweat-stained overalls shoulder to

shoulder-and in chorus with the murderer, they sang spirituals while white

people slowed and stopped in the leafed darkness that was almost summer, to

listen to those who were sure to die and him who was already dead singing

about heaven and being tired; or perhaps in the interval between songs a

rich, sourceless voice coming out of the high darkness where the ragged

shadow of the heaven-tree which snooded the street lamp at the corner

fretted and mourned: "Fo days mo! Den dey ghy stroy de bes ba'ytone singer

in nawth Mississippi!"

Sometimes during the day he would lean there, singing alone then, though

after a while one or two ragamuffin boys or negroes with delivery baskets

like as not, would halt at the fence, and the white men sitting in tilted

chairs along the oil-foul wall of the garage across the street would listen

above their steady jaws. "One day mo! Den Ise a gawn po sonnen

SANCTUARY 65

bitch. Say, Aint no place fer you in heavum! Say, Aint no place fer you

in hell! Say, Aint no place fer you in jail!"

"Damn that fellow," Goodwin said, jerking up his black head, his gaunt,

brown, faintly harried face. "I aint in any position to wish any man that

sort of luck, but I'll be damned . . . ... He wouldn't talk. "I didn't

do it. You know that, yourself. You know I wouldn't have. I aint going

say what I think. I didn't do it. They've got to hang it on me first. Let

them do that. I'm clear. But if I talk, if I say what I think or believe,

I won't be clear." He was sitting on the cot in his cell. He looked up

at the windows: two orifices not much larger than sabre slashes.

"Is he that good a shot?" Benbow said. "To hit a man through one of those

windows?" Goodwin looked at him. "Who?"

"Popeye," Benbow said.

"Did Popeye do it?" Goodwin said.

"Didn't he?" Benbow said.

"I've told all I'm going to tell. I don't have to clear myself; it's up

to them to hang it on me."

"Then what do you want with a lawyer?" Benbow said. "What do you want me

to do?"

Goodwin was not looking at him. "If you'll just promise to get the kid

a good newspaper grift when he's big enough to make change," he said.

"Ruby'll be all right. Wont you, old gal?" He put his hand on the woman's

head, scouring her hair with his hand. She sat on the cot beside him,

holding the child on her lap. It lay in a sort of drugged immobility,