Sanctuary

"Then it got down where my insides begin, and I hadn't eaten since

yesterday at dinner and my insides started bubbling and going on and the

shucks begin to make so much noise it was like laughing. I'd think they

were laughing at me because all the time his hand was going inside the

top of my knickers and I hadn't changed into a boy yet.

"That was the funny thing, because I wasn't breathing then. I hadn't

breathed in a long time. So I thought I was dead. Then I did a funny

thing. I could see myself in the coffin. I looked sweet-you know: all in

white. I had on a veil like a bride, and I was crying because I was dead

or looked sweet or something. No: it was because they had put shucks in

the coffin. I was crying because they had put shucks in the coffin where

I was dead, but all the time I could feel my nose going cold and hot and

cold and hot, and I could see all the people sitting around the coffin,

saying Dont she look sweet. Dont she look sweet.

"But I kept on saying Coward! Coward! Touch me, coward! I got mad,

because he was so long doing it. I'd talk to him. I'd say Do you think

I'm going to lie here all night, just waiting on you? I'd say. Let me

tell you what I'll do, I'd say. And I'd lie there with the shucks

laughing at me and me jerking away in front of his hand and I'd think

what I'd say to him, I'd talk to him like the teacher does in school, and

then I was a teacher in school and it was a little black thing like a

nigger boy, kind of, and I was the teacher. Because I'd say How old am

I? and I'd say I'm forty-five years old. I had iron-gray hair and

spectacles and I was all big up here like women get. I had on a gray

tailored suit, and I never could wear gray. And I was telling it what I'd

do, and it kind of drawing up like it could already see the switch.

"Then I said That wont do. I ought to be a man. So I was an old man, with

a long white beard, and then the little black man got littler and littler

and I was saying Now. You see now. I'm a man now. Then I thought about

being a man, and as soon as I thought it, it happened. It made a kind of

plopping sound, like blowing a little rubber tube wrong-side outward. It

felt cold, like the inside of your mouth when you hold it open. I could

feel it, and I lay right still to keep from laughing about how surprised

he was going to be. I could feel the jerking going on inside my knickers

ahead of his hand and me lying there trying not to laugh about how

surprised and mad he was going to be in about a minute. Then all of a

sudden I went to sleep. I couldn't even stay awake until his hand got

there. I just went to sleep. I couldn't even feel myself jerking

SANCTUARY 125

in front of his hand, but I could hear the shucks. I didn't wake up until

that woman came and took me down to the crib."

As he was leaving the house Miss Reba said: "I wish you'd get her down

there and not let her come back. I'd find her folks myself, if I knowed how

to go about it. But you know how . . . She'll be dead, or in the asylum in

a year, way him and her go on up there in that room. There's something

funny about it that I aint found out about yet. Maybe it's her. She wasn't

born for this kind of life. You have to be born a butcher or a barber, I

guess. Wouldn't anybody be either of them just for money or fun."

Better for her if she were dead tonight, Horace thought, walking on. For

me, too. He thought of her, Popeye, the woman, the child, Goodwin, all put

into a single chamber, bare, lethal, immediate and profound: a single

blotting instant between the indignation and the surprise. And I too;

thinking how that were the only solution. Removed, cauterised out of the

old and tragic flank of the world. And 1, too, now that we're all isolated;

thinking of a gentle dark wind blowing in the Iona corridors of sleep; of

lying beneath a low cozy root under the long sound of the rain: the evil,

the injustice, the tears. In an alley-mouth two figures stood, face to

face, not touching; the man speaking in a low tone unprintable epithet

after epithet in a caressing whisper, the woman motionless before him as

though in a musing swoon of voluptuous ecstasy. Perhaps it is upon t,ic

instant that we realise, admit, that there is a logical pattern to evil,

that we die, he thought, thinking of the expression ~'ie had once seen in

the eyes of a dead child, and of other dead: the cooling indignation, the

shocked despair fading, leaving two empty globes in which the motionless

world lurked profoundly in miniature.

He did not even return to his hotel. He went to the station. He could get

a train at midnight. He had a cup of coffee and wished inimediately that he

had not, for it lay in a hot ball on his stomach. Three hours later, when

he got off at Jefferson, it was still there, unassiniflated. He walked to

town and crossed the deserted square. He thought of the other morning when

he had crossed it. It was as thougli there had not been any elapsed time

between: the same gesture of the lighted clock-face, the same vulture-like