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

we stopped at Dumfries and he went into the restaurant but I was too worried to eat and I
couldn't find him and then he came up another street and I felt the bottle in his pocket
before he knocked my hand away. He kept on saying I had his lighter and then when he
lost it and I told him he had, he swore he never owned one in his life."
The meat hissed and spluttered in the skillet. "He got drunk three separate time,"
Temple said. "Three separate times in one day. Buddy--that's Hubert, my youngest
brother--said that if he ever caught me with a drunk man, he'd beat hell out of me. And
now I'm with one that gets drunk three times in one day." Leaning her hip against the
table, her hand crushing the cigarette, she began to laugh. "Dont you think that's funny?"
she said. Then she quit laughing by holding her breath, and she could hear the faint
guttering the lamp made, and the meat in the skillet and the hissing of the kettle on the
stove, and the voices, the harsh, abrupt, meaningless masculine sounds from the house.
"And you have to cook for all of them every night. All those men eating here, the house
full of them at night, in the dark . . ." She dropped the crushed cigarette. "May I hold the
baby? I know how; I'll hold him good." She ran to the box, stooping, and lifted the
sleeping child. It opened its eyes, whimpering. "Now, now; Temple's got it." She rocked
it, held high and awkward in her thin arms. "Listen," she said, looking at the woman's
back, "will you ask him? your husband, I mean. He can get a car and take me somewhere.
Will you? Will you ask him?" The child had stopped whimpering. Its lead-colored
eyelids showed a thin line of eyeball. "I'm not afraid," Temple said. "Things like that dont
happen. Do they? They're just like other people. You're just like other people. With a
little baby. And besides, my father's a ju-judge. The gu-governor comes to our house to e-
eat-What a cute little bu-ba-a-by," she wailed, lifting the child to her face; "if bad mans
hurts Temple, us'll tell the governor's soldiers, won't us?"
"Like what people?" the woman said, turning the meat. "Do you think Lee hasn't
anything better to do than chase after every one of you cheap little-" She opened the fire
door and threw her cigarette in and slammed the door. In nuzzling at the child Temple
had pushed her hat onto the back of her head at a precarious dissolute angle above her
clotted curls. "Why did you come here?"
"It was Gowan. I begged him. We had already missed the ball game, but I begged
him if he'd just get me to Starkville before the special started back, they wouldn't know I
wasn't on it, because the ones that saw me get off wouldn't tell. But he wouldn't. He said
we'd stop here just a minute and get some more whisky and he was already drunk then.
He had gotten drunk again since we left Taylor and I'm on probation and Daddy would
just die. But he wouldn't do it. He got drunk again while I was begging him to take me to
a town anywhere and let me out."
"On probation?" the woman said.
"For slipping out at night. Because only town boys can have cars, and when you
had a date with a town boy on Friday or Saturday or Sunday, the boys in school wouldn't
have a date with you, because they cant have cars. So I had to slip out. And a girl that
didn't like me told the Dean, because I had a date with a boy she liked and he never asked
her for another date. So I had to."
"If you didn't slip out, you wouldn't get to go riding," the woman said.
"Is that it? And now when you slipped out once too often, you're squealing."
"Gowan's not a town boy. He's from Jefferson. He went to Virginia. He kept on
saying how they had taught him to drink like a gentleman, and I begged him just to let me