Sanctuary

as natural as make love or rob or steal?" There was that quality about

his sister. During all the four days between Kinston and Jefferson he had

counted on that imperviousness. He hadn't expected her-any woman -to

bother very much over a man she had neither married nor borne when she

had one she did bear to cherish and fret over. But he had expected that

imperviousness, since she had had it thirty-six years.

When he reached the house in town a light burned in one room. He entered,

crossing the floors which he had scrubbed himself, revealing at the time

no more skill with a mop than he had expected, than he had with the lost

hammer with which he nailed the windows down and the shutters to ten

years ago, who could not even learn to drive a motor car. But that was

ten years ago, the hammer replaced by the new one with which he had drawn

the clumsy nails, the windows open upon scrubbed floor spaces still as

dead pools within the ghostly embrace of hooded furniture.

The woman was still up, dressed save for the hat. It lay on the bed where

the child slept. Lying together there, they lent to the room a quality

of transience more unmistakable than

68 WILLIAM FAULKNER

the makeshift light, the smug paradox of the made bed in a room otherwise

redolent of long unoccupation. It was as though femininity were a current

running through a wire along which a certain number of identical bulbs

were hung.

"I've got some things in the kitchen," she said. "I wont be but a

minute."

The child lay on the bed, beneath the unshaded light, and he wondered why

women, in quitting a house, will remove all the lamp shades even though

they touch nothing else; looking down at the child, at its bluish eyelids

showing a faint crescent of bluish white against its lead-colored cheeks,

the moist shadow of hair capping its skull, its hands uplifted, curl-

palmed, sweating too, thinking Good God. Good God.

He was thinking of the first time he had seen it, lying in a wooden box

behind the stove in that ruined house twelve miles from town; of Popeye's

black presence lying upon the house like the shadow of something no

larger than a match failing monstrous and portentous upon something else

otherwise familiar and everyday and twenty times its size; of the two of

them-himself and the woman-in the kitchen lighted by a cracked and smutty

lamp on a table of clean, spartan dishes and Goodwin and Popeye somewhere

in the outer darkness peaceful with insects and frogs yet filled too with

Popeye's presence in black and nameless threat. The woman drew the box

out from behind the stove and stood above it, her hands still hidden in

her shapeless garment. "I have to keep him in this so the rats cant get

to him," she said.

"Oh," Horace said, "you have a son." Then she showed him her hands, flung

them out in a gesture at once spontaneous and diffident and

self-conscious and proud, and told him he might bring her an

orange-stick.

She returned, with something wrapped discreetly in a piece of newspaper.

He knew that it was a diaper, freshly washed, even before she said: "I

made a fire in the stove. I guess I overstepped."

"Of course not," he said. "It's merely a matter of legal precaution, you

see," he said. "Better to put everybody to a little temporary discomfort

than to jeopardize our case." She did not appear to be listening. She

spread the blanket on the bed and lifted the child onto it. "You

understand how it is," Horace said. "If the judge suspected that I knew

more about it than the facts would warrant-I mean, we must try to give

everybody the idea that holding Lee for that killing is just-"

"Do you live in Jefferson?" she said, wrapping the blanket about the

child.

"No. I live in Kinston. I used to-1 have practised here, though."

SANCTUARY 69

"You have kinfolks here, though. Women. That used to live n this house."

She lifted the child, tucking the blanket about t. Then she looked at

him. "It's all right. I know how it is. Y'ou've been kind."

"Damn it," he said, "do you think- Come on. Let's go on ,o the hotel. You

get a good night's rest, and I'll be in early in :he morning. Let me take

it."

"I've got him," she said. She started to say something else, .ooking at

him quietly for a moment, but she went on. He :urned out the light and

followed and locked the door. She was already in the car. He got in.

"Hotel, Isom," he said. "I never did learn to drive one," he ;aid.

"Sometimes, when I think of all the time I have spent aot learning to do

things . . ."

The street was narrow, quiet. It was paved now, though he -ould remember

when, after a rain, it had been a canal of blackish substance half earth,

half water, with murmuring gutters in which he and Narcissa paddled and

splashed with tucked-up garments and muddy bottoms, after the crudest of

whittled boats, or made lob-lollies by treading and treading in one spot

with the intense oblivion of alchemists. He could remember when, innocent

of concrete, the street was bordered on either side by paths of red brick