William Faulkner, SANCTUARY – WordPress.com - literature save 2

man is going to let me walk out of that door and up the street and into that courthouse,
after yesterday? What sort of men have you lived with all your life? In a nursery? I
wouldn't do that, myself."
"If he does, he has sprung his own trap," Horace said.
"What good will that do me? Let me tell--"
"Lee," the woman said.
--"you something: the next time you want to play dice with a man's neck--"
"Lee," she said. She was stroking her hand slowly on his head, back and forth.
She began to smooth his hair into a part, patting his collarless shirt smooth. Horace
watched them.
"Would you like to stay here today?" he said quietly. "I can fix it."
"No," Goodwin said. "I'm sick of it. I'm going to get it over with. Just tell that
goddamned deputy not to walk too close to me. You and her better go and eat breakfast."
"I'm not hungry," the woman said.
"You go on like I told you," Goodwin said.
"Lee."
"Come," Horace said. "You can come back afterward."
Outside, in the fresh morning, he began to breathe deeply. "Fill your lungs," he
said. "A night in that place would give anyone the jim-jams. The idea of three grown
people . . . My Lord, sometimes I believe that we are all children, except children
themselves. But today will be the last. By noon he'll walk out of there a free man: do you
realise that?"
They walked on in the fresh sunlight, beneath the high, soft sky. High against the
blue fat little clouds blew up from the south-west, and the cool steady breeze shivered
and twinkled in the locusts where the blooms had long since fallen.
"I dont know how you'll get paid," she said.
"Forget it. I've been paid. You wont understand it, but my soul has served an
apprenticeship that has lasted for forty-three years. Forty-three years. Half again as long
as you have lived. So you see that folly, as well as poverty, cares for its own."
"And you know that he--that--"
"Stop it, now. We dreamed that away, too. God is foolish at times, but at least
He's a gentleman. Dont you know that?"
"I always thought of Him as a man," the woman said.
The bell was already ringing when Horace crossed the square toward the
courthouse. Already the square was filled with wagons and cars and the overalls and
khaki thronged slowly beneath the gothic entrance of the building. Overhead the clock
was striking nine as he mounted the stairs.
The broad double doors at the head of the cramped stair were open. From beyond
them came a steady preliminary stir of people settling themselves. Above the seat-backs
Horace could see their heads--bald heads, gray heads, shaggy heads and heads trimmed to
recent feather-edge above sun-baked necks, oiled heads above urban collars and here and
there a sunbonnet or a flowered hat.
The hum of their voices and movements came back upon the steady draft which
blew through the door. The air entered the open windows and blew over the heads and
back to Horace in the door, laden with smells of tobacco and stale sweat and the earth and