Sanctuary by William Faulkner Page B

man, she aint likely to for another, didn’t it?”
    “But to walk out just like a nigger,” Narcissa said. “And to mix yourself up with moonshiners and street-walkers.”
    “Well, he’s gone and left the street-walker too,” Miss Jenny said. “Unless you’re going to walk the streets with that orange-stick in your pocket until she comes to town.”
    “Yes,” Benbow said. He told again about the three ofthem, himself and Goodwin and Tommy sitting on the porch, drinking from the jug and talking, and Popeye lurking about the house, coming out from time to time to ask Tommy to light a lantern and go down to the barn with him and Tommy wouldn’t do it and Popeye would curse him, and Tommy sitting on the floor, scouring his bare feet on the boards with a faint, hissing noise, chortling: “Aint he a sight, now?”
    “You could feel the pistol on him just like you knew he had a navel,” Benbow said. “He wouldn’t drink, because he said it made him sick to his stomach like a dog; he wouldn’t stay and talk with us; he wouldn’t do anything: just lurking about, smoking his cigarettes, like a sullen and sick child.
    “Goodwin and I were both talking. He had been a cavalry sergeant in the Philippines and on the Border, and in an infantry regiment in France; he never told me why he changed, transferred to infantry and lost his rank. He might have killed someone, might have deserted. He was talking about Manila and Mexican girls, and that halfwit chortling and glugging at the jug and shoving it at me: ‘Take some mo’; and then I knew that the woman was just behind the door, listening to us. They are not married. I know that just like I know that that little black man had that flat little pistol in his coat pocket. But she’s out there, doing a nigger’s work, that’s owned diamonds and automobiles too in her day, and bought them with a harder currency than cash. And that blind man, that old man sitting there at the table, waiting for somebody to feed him, with that immobility of blind people, like it was the backs of their eyeballs you looked at while they were hearing music you couldn’t hear; thatGoodwin led out of the room and completely off the earth, as far as I know. I never saw him again. I never knew who he was, who he was kin to. Maybe not to anybody. Maybe that old Frenchman that built the house a hundred years ago didn’t want him either and just left him there when he died or moved away.”

    The next morning Benbow got the key to the house from his sister, and went into town. The house was on a side street, unoccupied now for ten years. He opened the house, drawing the nails from the windows. The furniture had not been moved. In a pair of new overalls, with mops and pails, he scoured the floors. At noon he went down town and bought bedding and some tinned food. He was still at work at six oclock when his sister drove up in her car.
    “Come on home, Horace,” she said. “Dont you see you cant do this?”
    “I found that out right after I started,” Benbow said. “Until this morning I thought that anybody with one arm and a pail of water could wash a floor.”
    “Horace,” she said.
    “I’m the oldest, remember,” he said. “I’m going to stay here. I have some cover.” He went to the hotel for supper. When he returned, his sister’s car was again in the drive. The negro driver had brought a bundle of bedclothing.
    “Miss Narcissa say for you to use them,” the negro said. Benbow put the bundle into a closet and made a bed with the ones which he had bought.
    Next day at noon, eating his cold food at the kitchen table, he saw through the window a wagon stop in the street. Three women got down and standing on the curb they made unabashed toilets, smoothing skirts and stockings, brushing one another’s back, opening parcels and donning various finery. The wagon had gone on. They followed, on foot, and he remembered that it was Saturday. He removed the overalls and dressed and left the