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

the box out and drew it before her. Her hand touched the child's face, then she flung her
arms around the box, clutching it, staring across it at the pale door and trying to pray. But
she could not think of a single designation for the heavenly father, so she began to say
"My father's a judge; my father's a judge" over and over until Goodwin ran lightly into
the room. He struck a match and held it overhead and looked down at her until the flame
reached his fingers.
"Hah," he said. She heard his light, swift feet twice, then his hand touched her
cheek and he lifted her from behind the box by the scruff of the neck, like a kitten. "What
are you doing in my house?" he said.
VII
From somewhere beyond the lamplit hall she could hear the voices--a word; now and
then a laugh: the harsh, derisive laugh of a man easily brought to mirth by youth or by
age, cutting across the spluttering of frying meat on the stove where the woman stood.
Once she heard two of them come down the hall in their heavy shoes, and a moment later
the clatter of the dipper in the galvanized pail and the voice that had laughed, cursing.
Holding her coat close she peered around the door with the wide, abashed curiosity of a
child, and saw Gowan and a second man in khaki breeches. He's getting drunk again, she
thought. He's got drunk four times since we left Taylor.
"Is he your brother?" she said.
"Who?" the woman said. "My what?" she turned the meat on the hissing skillet.
"I thought maybe your young brother was here."
"God," the woman said. She turned the meat with a wire fork. "I hope not."
"Where is your brother?" Temple said, peering around the door. "I've got four
brothers. Two are lawyers and one's a newspaper man. The other's still in school. At
Yale. My father's a judge. Judge Drake of Jackson." She thought of her father sitting on
the veranda, in a linen suit, a palm leaf fan in his hand, watching the negro mow the lawn.
The woman opened the oven and looked in. "Nobody asked you to come out here.
I didn't ask you to stay. I told you to go while it was daylight."
"How could I? I asked him. Gowan wouldn't, so I had to ask him."
The woman closed the oven and turned and looked at Temple, her back to the
light. "How could you? Do you know how I get my water? I walk after it. A mile. Six
times a day. Add that up. Not because I am somewhere I am afraid to stay." She went to
the table and took up a pack of cigarettes and shook one out.
"May I have one?" Temple said. The woman flipped the pack along the table. She
removed the chimney from the lamp and lit hers at the wick. Temple took up the pack
and stood listening to Gowan and the other man go back into the house. "There are so
many of them," she said in a wailing tone, watching the cigarette crush slowly in her
fingers. "But maybe, with so many of them . . ." The woman had gone back to the stove.
She turned the meat. "Gowan kept on getting drunk again. He got drunk three times
today. He was drunk when I got off the train at Taylor and I am on probation and I told
him what would happen and I tried to get him to throw the jar away and when we stopped
at that little country store to buy a shirt he got drunk again. And so we hadn't eaten and