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

shadow wore no hat, so she turned and on tiptoe she went to the door and peered around
it. A man sat in a splint-bottom chair, in the sunlight, the back of his bald, white-fringed
head toward her, his hands crossed on the head of a rough stick. She emerged onto the
back porch.
"Good afternoon," she said. The man did not move. She advanced again, then she
glanced quickly over her shoulder. With the tail of her eye she thought she had seen a
thread of smoke drift out of the door in the detached room where the porch made an L,
but it was gone. From a line between two posts in front of this door, three square cloths
hung damp and limp, as though recently washed, and a woman's undergarment of faded
pink silk. It had been washed until the lace resembled a ragged, fibre-like fraying of the
cloth itself. It bore a patch of pale calico, neatly sewn. Temple looked at the old man
again.
For an instant she thought that his eyes were closed, then she believed that he had
no eyes at all, for between the lids two objects like dirty yellowish clay marbles were
fixed. "Gowan," she whispered, then she wailed "Gowan," and turned running, her head
reverted, just as a voice spoke beyond the door where she had thought to have seen
smoke:
"He cant hear you. What do you want?"
She whirled again and without a break in her stride and still watching the old man,
she ran right off the porch and fetched up on hands and knees in a litter of ashes and tin
cans and bleached bones, and saw Popeye watching her from the corner of the house, his
hands in his pockets and a slanted cigarette curling across his face. Still without stopping
she scrambled onto the porch and sprang into the kitchen, where a woman sat at a table, a
burning cigarette in her hand, watching the door.
VI
Popeye went on around the house. Gowan was leaning over the edge of the porch,
dabbing gingerly at his bloody nose. The barefooted man squatted on his heels against the
wall.
"For Christ's sake," Popeye said, "why cant you take him out back and wash him
off? Do you want him sitting around here all day looking like a damn hog with its throat
cut?" He snapped the cigarette into the weeds and sat on the top step and began to scrape
his muddy shoes with a platinum penknife on the end of his watch chain.
The barefoot man rose.
"You said something about--" Gowan said.
"Pssst!" the other said. He began to wink and frown at Gowan, jerking his head at
Popeye's back.
"And then you get on back down that road," Popeye said. "You hear?"
"I thought you was fixin' to watch down ther," the man said.
"Dont think," Popeye said, scraping at his trouser-cuffs. "You've got along forty
years without it. You do what I told you.
When they reached the back porch the barefoot man said: "He jest caint stand fer
nobody--Aint he a cur'us feller, now? I be dawg ef he aint better'n a circus to--He wont