Sanctuary

"Yessum," Fonzo said, prodding Virgil toward the stairs. "We been to

prayer-meeting." .

In bed, in the dark, they could still hear the piano.

"You made me spend three dollars," Virgil said.

"Aw, shut up," Fonzo said. "When I think I been here for two whole weeks

almost . . ."

The next afternoon they came home through the dusk with the lights

winking on, beginning to flare and gleam, and the women on their

twinkling blonde legs meeting men and getting into automobiles and such.

"How about that three dollars now?" Fonzo said.

"I reckon we better not go over night," Virgil said. "It'll cost too

much."

"That's right," Fonzo said. "Somebody might see us and tell her."

112 WILLIAM FAULKNER

They waited two nights. "Now it'll be six dollars," Virgil said.

"Dont come, then," Fonzo said.

When they returned home Fonzo said: "Try to act like something, this time.

She near about caught us before on account of the way you acted."

"What if she does?" Virgil said in a sullen voice. "She caint eat us."

They stood outside the lattice, whispering.

"How you know she caint?" Fonzo said.

"She dont want to, then."

"How you know she dont want to?"

"Maybe she dont," Virgil said. Fonzo opened the lattice door. "I caint eat

that six dollars, noways," Virgil said. "Wisht I could."

Minnie let them in. She said: "Somebody huntin you all." They waited in the

hall.

"We done caught now," Virgil said. "I told you about throwing that money

away."

"Aw, shut up," Fonzo said.

A man emerged from a door, a big man with his hat cocked over one ear, his

arm about a blonde woman in a red dress. "There's Cla'ence," Virgil said.

In their room Clarence said: "How'd you get into this place?"

"Just found it," Virgil said. They told him about it. He sat on the bed, in

his soiled hat, a cigar in his fingers.

"Where you been tonight?" he said. They didn't answer. They looked at him

with blank, watchful faces. "Come on. I know. Where was it?" They told him.

"Cost me three dollars, too," Virgil said.

"I'll be durned if you aint the biggest fool this side of Jackson,"

Clarence said. "Come on here." They followed sheepishly. He led them from

the house and for three or four blocks. They crossed a street of negro

stores and theatres and turned into a narrow, dark street and stopped at a

house with red shades in the lighted windows. Clarence rang the bell. They

could hear music inside, and shrill voices, and feet. They were admitted

into a bare hallway where two shabby negro men argued with a drunk white

man in greasy overalls. Through an open door they saw a room filled with

coffeecolored women in bright dresses, with ornate hair and golden smiles.

"Them's niggers," Virgil said.

" 'Course they're niggers," Clarence said. "But see this?" he waved a

banknote in his cousin's face. "This stuff is colorblind."

XXII

ON THE THIRD DAY OF HIS SEARCH, HORACE FOUND A DOMICILE for the woman and

child. It was in the ramshackle house of an old half-crazed white woman who

was believed to manufacture spells for negroes. It was on the edge of town,

set in a tiny plot of ground choked and massed with waist-high herbage in an

unbroken jungle across the front. At the back a path had been trodden from

the broken gate to the door. All night a dim light burned in the crazy

depths of the house and at almost any hour of the twenty-four a wagon or a

buggy might be seen tethered in the lane behind it and a negro entering or

leaving the back door.

The house had been entered once by officers searching for whiskey. They

found nothing save a few dried bunches of weeds, and a collection of dirty

bottles containing liquid of which they could say nothing surely save that

it was not alcoholic, while the old woman, held by two men, her lank

grayish hair shaken before the glittering collapse of her face, screamed

invective at them in her cracked voice. In a lean-to shed room containing

a bed and a barrel of anonymous refuse and trash in which mice rattled alI

night long, the woman found a home.

"You'll be all right here," Horace said. "You can always get me by

telephone, at-" giving her the name of a neighbor. "No: wait; tomorrow I'll

have the telephone put back in. Then you can-"

"Yes," the woman said. "I reckon you better not be coming out here."

"Why? Do you think that would-that I'd care a damn what-"

"You have to live here."

"I'm damned if I do. I've already let too many women run my affairs for me

as it is, and if these uxorious . . ." But he knew he was just talking. He

knew that she knew it too, out of that feminine reserve of unflagging

suspicion of all peoples' actions which seems at first to be mere affinity

for evil but which is in reality practical wisdom.

"I guess IT find you if there's any need," she said. "There's not anything

else I could do."

"By God," Horace said, "don't you let them . . . Bitches," he said;

"bitches."

The next day he had the telephone installed. He did not see his sister for

a week; she had no way of learning that he had a phone, yet when, a week

before the opening of Court, the telephone shrilled into the quiet where he