Sanctuary (12 page)

“Didn’t I tell you about following me?”

“I wasn’t following you,” Tommy said. “I was watching him,” jerking his head toward the house.

“Watch him, then,” Popeye said. Tommy turned his head and looked toward the house and Popeye drew his hand from his coat pocket.

To Temple, sitting in the cottonseed-hulls and the corn-cobs, the sound was no louder than the striking of a match: a short, minor sound shutting down upon the scene, the instant, with a profound finality, completely isolating it, and she sat there, her legs straight before her, her hands limp and palm-up on her lap, looking at Popeye’s tight back and the ridges of his coat across the shoulders as he leaned out the door, the pistol behind him, against his flank, wisping thinly along his leg.

He turned and looked at her. He waggled the pistol slightly and put it back in his coat, then he walked toward her. Moving, he made no sound at all; the released door yawned and clapped against the jamb, but it made no sound either; it was as though sound and silence had become inverted. She could hear silence in a thick rustling as he moved toward her through it, thrusting it aside, and she began to say Something is going to happen to me. She was saying it to the old man with the yellow clots for eyes. “Something is happening to me!” she screamed at him, sitting in his chair in the sunlight, his hands crossed on the top of the stick. “I told you it was!” she screamed, voiding the words like hot silent bubbles into the bright silence about them until he turned his head and the two phlegm-clots above her where she lay tossing and thrashing on the rough, sunny boards. “I told you! I told you all the time!”

W
hile she was sitting beside the spring, with the sleeping child upon her knees, the woman discovered that she had forgot its bottle. She sat there for about an hour after Popeye left her. Then she returned to the road and turned back toward the house. When she was about halfway back to the house, carrying the child in her arms, Popeye’s car passed her. She heard it coming and she got out of the road and stood there and watched it come dropping down the hill. Temple and Popeye were in it. Popeye did not
make any sign, though Temple looked full at the woman. From beneath her hat Temple looked the woman full in the face, without any sign of recognition whatever. The face did not turn, the eyes did not wake; to the woman beside the road it was like a small, dead-colored mask drawn past her on a string and then away. The car went on, lurching and jolting in the ruts. The woman went on to the house.

The blind man was sitting on the front porch, in the sun. When she entered the hall, she was walking fast. She was not aware of the child’s thin weight. She found Goodwin in their bedroom. He was in the act of putting on a frayed tie; looking at him, she saw that he had just shaved.

“Yes,” she said. “What is it? What is it?”

“I’ve got to walk up to Tull’s and telephone for the sheriff,” he said.

“The sheriff,” she said. “Yes. All right.” She came to the bed and laid the child carefully down. “To Tull’s,” she said. “Yes. He’s got a phone.”

“You’ll have to cook,” Goodwin said. “There’s Pap.”

“You can give him some cold bread. He wont mind. There’s some left in the stove. He wont mind.”

“I’ll go,” Goodwin said. “You stay here.”

“To Tull’s,” she said. “All right.” Tull was the man at whose house Gowan had found a car. It was two miles away. Tull’s family was at dinner. They asked her to stop. “I just want to use the telephone,” she said. The telephone was in the dining-room, where they were eating. She called, with them sitting about the table. She didn’t know the number. “The Sheriff,” she said patiently into the mouthpiece. Then
she got the sheriff, with Tull’s family sitting about the table, about the Sunday dinner. “A dead man. You pass Mr Tull’s about a mile and turn off to the right.……Yes, the Old Frenchman place. Yes. This is Mrs Goodwin talking.…Goodwin. Yes.”

B
enbow reached his sister’s home in the middle of the afternoon. It was four miles from town, Jefferson. He and his sister were born in Jefferson, seven years apart, in a house which they still owned, though his sister had wanted to sell the house when Benbow married the divorced wife of a man named Mitchell and moved to Kinston. Benbow would not agree to sell, though he had built a new bungalow in Kinston on borrowed money upon which he was still paying interest.

When he arrived, there was no one about. He entered
the house and he was sitting in the dim parlor behind the closed blinds, when he heard his sister come down the stairs, still unaware of his arrival. He made no sound. She had almost crossed the parlor door and vanished when she paused and looked full at him, without outward surprise, with that serene and stupid impregnability of heroic statuary; she was in white. “Oh, Horace,” she said.

He did not rise. He sat with something of the air of a guilty small boy. “How did you—” he said. “Did Belle—”

“Of course. She wired me Saturday. That you had left, and if you came here, to tell you that she had gone back home to Kentucky and had sent for Little Belle.”

“Ah, damnation,” Benbow said.

“Why?” his sister said. “You want to leave home yourself, but you dont want her to leave.”

He stayed at his sister’s two days. She had never been given to talking, living a life of serene vegetation like perpetual corn or wheat in a sheltered garden instead of a field, and during those two days she came and went about the house with an air of tranquil and faintly ludicrous tragic disapproval.

After supper they sat in Miss Jenny’s room, where Narcissa would read the Memphis paper before taking the boy off to bed. When she went out of the room, Miss Jenny looked at Benbow.

“Go back home, Horace,” she said.

“Not to Kinston,” Benbow said. “I hadn’t intended to stay here, anyway. It wasn’t Narcissa I was running to. I haven’t quit one woman to run to the skirts of another.”

“If you keep on telling yourself that you may believe it, someday,” Miss Jenny said. “Then what’ll you do?”

“You’re right,” Benbow said. “Then I’d have to stay at home.”

His sister returned. She entered the room with a definite air. “Now for it,” Benbow said. His sister had not spoken directly to him all day.

“What are you going to do, Horace?” she said. “You must have business of some sort there in Kinston that should be attended to.”

“Even Horace must have,” Miss Jenny said. “What I want to know is, why he left. Did you find a man under the bed, Horace?”

“No such luck,” Benbow said. “It was Friday, and all of a sudden I knew that I could not go to the station and get that box of shrimp and—”

“But you have been doing that for ten years,” his sister said.

“I know. That’s how I know that I will never learn to like smelling shrimp.”

“Was that why you left Belle?” Miss Jenny said. She looked at him. “It took you a long time to learn that, if a woman dont make a very good wife for one 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 of
them, 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; that
Goodwin 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 house.

The street opened into a broader one. To the left it went on to the square, the opening between two buildings black with a slow, continuous throng, like two streams of ants, above which the cupola of the courthouse rose from a clump of oaks and locusts covered with ragged snow. He went on toward the square. Empty wagons still passed him and he passed still more women on foot, black and white, unmistakable by the unease of their garments as well as by their method of walking, believing that town dwellers would take them for town dwellers too, not even fooling one another.