Sanctuary

"The fool," the woman said. "The poor fool." She stood inside the door.

Popeye came through the hall from the back. He passed her without a word

and went onto the porch.

"Come on," he said. "Let's get it loaded." She heard the three of them

go away. She stood there. Then she heard the stranger get unsteadily out

of his chair and cross the porch. Then she saw him, in faint silhouette

against the sky, the

SANCTUARY 13

lesser darkness: a thin man in shapeless clothes; a head of thinning and

ill-kempt hair; and quite drunk. "They don't make him eat right," the

woman said.

She was motionless, leaning lightly against the wall, he facing her. "Do

you like living like this?" he said. "Why do you do it? You are young

yet; you could go back to the cities and better yourself without lifting

more than an eyelid." She didn't move, leaning lightly against the wall,

her arms folded. "The poor, scared fool," she said.

"You see," he said, "I lack courage: that was left out of me. The

machinery is all here, but it wont run." His hand fumbled across her

cheek. "You are young yet." She didn't move, feeling his hand upon her

face, touching her flesh as though he were trying to learn the shape and

position of her bones and the texture of the flesh. "You have your whole

life before you, practically. How old are you? You're not past thirty

yet." His voice was not loud, almost a whisper.

When she spoke she did not lower her voice at all. She had not moved, her

arms still folded across her breast. "Why did you leave your wife?" she

said.

"Because she ate shrimp," he said. "I couldn't-You see, it was Friday,

and I thought how at noon I'd go to the station and get the box of shrimp

off the train and walk home with it, counting a hundred steps and

changing hands with it, and it-"

"Did you do that every day?" the woman said.

"No. Just Friday. But I have done it for ten years, since we were

married. And I still don't like to smell shrimp. But I wouldn't mind the

carrying it home so much. I could stand that. It's because the package

drips. All the way home it drips and drips, until after a while I follow

myself to the station and stand aside and watch Horace Benbow take that

box off the train and start home with it, changing hands every hundred

steps, and I following him, thinking Here lies Horace Benbow in a fading

series of small stinking spots on a Mississippi sidewalk."

"Oh," the woman said. She breathed quietly, her arms folded. She moved;

he gave back and followed her down the hall. They entered the kitchen

where a lamp burned. "You'll have to excuse the way I look," the woman

said. She went to the box behind the stove and drew it out and stood

above it, her hands hidden in the front of her garment. Benbow stood in

the middle of the room. "I have to keep him in the box so the rats cant

get to him," she said.

"What?" Benbow said. "What is it?" He approached, where he could see into

the box. It contained a sleeping child, not a year old. He looked down

at the pinched face quietly.

14 WILLIAM FAULKNER

"Oh," he said. "You have a son." They looked down at the pinched, sleeping

face of the child. There came a noise outside; feet came onto the back

porch. The woman shoved the box back into the corner with her knee as

Goodwin entered.

"All right," Goodwin said. "Tommy'll show you the way to the truck." He

went away, on into the house.

Benbow looked at the woman. Her hands were still wrapped into her dress.

"Thank you for the supper," he said. "Some day, maybe . . ." He looked at

her; she was watching him, her face not sullen so much, as cold, still.

"Maybe I can do something for you in Jefferson. Send you something you need

. . ."

She removed her hands from the fold of the dress in a turning, flicking

motion; jerked them hidden again. "With all this dishwater and washing . .

. You might send me an orange stick," she said.

Walking in single file, Tommy and Benbow descended the hill from the house,

following the abandoned road. Benbow looked back. The gaunt ruin of the

house rose against the sky, above the massed and matted cedars, lightless,

desolate, and profound. The road was an eroded scar too deep to be a road

and too straight to be a ditch, gutted by winter freshets and choked with

fern and rotted leaves and branches. Following Tommy, Benbow walked in a

faint path where feet had wom the rotting vegetation down to the clay.

Overhead an arching hedgerow of trees thinned against the sky.

The descent increased, curving. "It was about here that we saw the owl,"

Benbow said.

Ahead of him Tommy guffawed. "It skeered him too, I'll be bound," he said.

"Yes," Benbow said. He followed Tommy's vague shape, trying to walk

carefully, to talk carefully, with that tedious concern of drunkenness.

"I be a dog if he aint the skeeriest durn white man I ever seen," Tommy

said. "Here he was comin' up the path to the porch and that ere dog come

out from under the house and went up and sniffed his heels, like ere a dog

will, and I be dog if he didn't flinch off like it was a moccasin and him