Sanctuary

"You ougbt to be in vaudeville," the policeman said. "You'd bring down

the house."

"I am," the woman said. "I bring down the house."

"What house?" He looked at her. "The poor house?"

"I'll bring it down," the woman said. "You watch the papers tomorrow. I

hope they get my name right."

"What's your name? Calvin Coolidge?"

"No, sir. That's my boy,"

"Oh. That's why you had so much trouble shopping, is it? You ought to be

in vaudeville. . . . Will two matches be enough?"

They had had three alarms from that address, so they didn't hurry. The

first to arrive was the daughter. The door was locked, and when the

firemen came and chopped it down, the house was already gutted. The

grandmother was leaning out an upstairs window through which the smoke

already curled. "Them bastards," she said. "They thought they would get

him. But I told them I would show them. I told them so."

The mother thought that Popeye had perished also. They held her,

shrieking, while the shouting face of the grandmother vanished into the

smoke, and the shell of the house caved in; that was where the woman and

the policeman carrying the child, found her: a young woman with a wild

face, her mouth open, looking at the child with a vague air, scouring her

loose hair slowly upward from her temples with both hands. She never

wholly recovered. What with the hard work and the lack of fresh air,

diversion, and the disease, the legacy which her brief husband had left

her, she was not in any condition to stand shock, and there were times

when she still believed that the child had perished, even though she held

it in her arms crooning above it.

Popeye might well have been dead. He had no hair at all until he was five

years old, by which time he was already a kind of day pupil at an

institution: an undersized, weak child with a stomach so delicate that

the slightest deviation from a strict regime fixed for him by the doctor

would throw him into convulsions. "Alcohol would kill him like

strychnine," the doctor said. "And he will never be a man, properly

speaking. With care, he will live some time longer. But he will never be

any older than he is now." He was talking to the woman who had found

Popeye in her car that day when his grandmother burned the house down and

at whose instigation Pop-

174 WILLIAM FAULKNER

eye was under the doctor's care. She would fetch him to her home in

afternoons and for holidays, where he would play by himself. She decided

to have a children's party for him. She told him about it, bought him a

new suit. When the afternoon of the party came and the guests began to

arrive, Popeye could not be found. Finally a servant found a bathroom door

locked. They called the child, but got no answer. They sent for a lock-

smith, but in the meantime the woman, frightened, had the door broken in

with an axe. The bathroom was empty. The window was open. It gave onto a

lower roof from which a drainpipe descended to the ground. But Popeye was

gone. On the floor lay a wicker cage in which two lovebirds lived; beside

it lay the birds themselves, and the bloody scissors with which he had cut

them up alive. Three months later, at the instigation of a neighbor of his

mother, Popeye was arrested and sent to a home for incorrigible children.

He had cut up a half-grown kitten the same way.

His mother was an invalid. The woman who had tried to befriend the child

supported her, letting her do needlework and such. After Popeye was

out-he was let out after five years, his behavior having been impeccable,

as being curedhe would write to her two or three times a year, from

Mobile and then New Orleans and then Memphis. Each summer he would return

home to see her, prosperous, quiet, thin, black, and uncommunicative in

his narrow black suits. He told her that his business was being night

clerk in hotels; that following his profession, he would move from town

to town, as a doctor or a lawyer might.

While he was on his way home that summer they arrested him for killing

a man in one town and at an hour when he was in another town killing

somebody else-that man who made money and had nothing he could do with

it, spend it for, since he knew that alcohol would kill him like poison,

who had no friends and had never known a woman and knew he could

never-and he said. "For Christ's sake," looking about the cell in the

jail of the town where the policeman had been killed, his free hand (the

other was handcuffed to the officer who had brought him from Birmingham)

finicking a cigarette from his coat.

"Let him send for his lawyer," they said, "and get that off his chest.

You want to wire?"

"Nah," he said, his cold, soft eyes touching briefly the cot, the high

small window, the grated door through which the light fell. They removed

the handcuff; Popeye's hand appeared to flick a small flame out of thin

air. He lit the cigarette and snapped the match toward the door. "What

do I want with a lawyer? I never was in- What's the name of this dump?"

SANCTUARY 175

They told him. "You forgot, have you?"

"He won't forget it no more," another said.