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

"The strikers. I dont care a damn who is running the car, see. I'll ride with one as
soon as another. Sooner, if I could make this route every night at this time."
She walked beside him. "You dont mean that," she said.
"Sure I do." He took her arm.
"I guess you'd just as soon be married to one as another, the same way."
"Who told you that?" he said. "Have them bastards been talking about me?"
A month later she told them that they would have to be married.
"How do you mean, have to?" he said.
"I dont dare tell them. I have to go away. I dont dare."
"Well, dont get upset. I'd just as lief. I have to pass here every night anyway."
They were married. He would pass the corner at night. He would ring the footbell.
Sometimes he would come home. He would give her money. Her mother liked him;
he would come roaring into the house at dinner time on Sunday, calling the other clients,
even the old ones, by their first names. Then one day he didn't come back; he didn't ring
the foot-bell when the trolley passed. The strike was over by then. She had a Christmas
card from him; a picture, with a bell and an embossed wreath in gilt, from a Georgia
town. It said: "The boys trying to fix it up here. But these folks awful slow. Will maybe
move on until we strike a good town ha ha." The word, strike, was underscored.
Three weeks after her marriage, she had begun to ail. She was pregnant then. She
did not go to a doctor, because an old negro woman told her what was wrong. Popeye
was born on the Christmas day on which the card was received. At first they thought he
was blind. Then they found that he was not blind, although he did not learn to walk and
talk until he was about four years old. In the meantime, the second husband of her
mother, an undersized, snuffy man with a mild, rich, moustache, who pottered about the
house--he fixed all the broken steps and leaky drains and such--left home one afternoon
with a check signed in blank to pay a twelve dollar butcher's bill. He never came back.
He drew from the bank his wife's fourteen hundred dollar savings account, and
disappeared.
The daughter was still working down town, while her mother tended the child.
One afternoon one of the clients returned and found his room on fire. He put it out; a
week later he found a smudge in his waste-basket. The grandmother was tending the
child. She carried it about with her. One evening she was not in sight. The whole
household turned out. A neighbor turned in a fire alarm and the firemen found the
grandmother in the attic, stamping out a fire in a handful of excelsior in the center of the
floor, the child asleep in a discarded mattress nearby.
"Them bastards are trying to get him," the old woman said. "They set the house
on fire." The next day, all the clients left.
The young woman quit her job. She stayed at home all the time. "You ought to
get out and get some air," the grandmother said.
"I get enough air," the daughter said.
"You could go out and buy the groceries," the mother said. "You could buy them
cheaper."
"We get them cheap enough."
She would watch all the fires; she would not have a match in the house. She kept
a few bidden behind a brick in the outside wall. Popeye was three years old then. He
looked about one, though he could eat pretty well. A doctor had told his mother to feed