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

eturning to the house for a drink, then he thought of having to face Temple, the men; of
Temple there among them.
When he reached the highroad the sun was well up, warm. I'll get cleaned up
some, he said. And coming back with a car. I'll decide what to say to her on the way to
town; thinking of Temple returning among people who knew him, who might know him.
I passed out twice, he said. I passed out twice. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ he whispered,
his body writhing inside his disreputable and bloody clothes in an agony of rage and
shame.
His head began to clear with air and motion, but as he began to feel better
physically the blackness of the future increased. Town, the world, began to appear as a
black cul-de-sac; a place in which he must walk forever more, his whole body cringing
and flinching from whispering eyes when he had passed, and when in midmorning he
reached the house he sought, the prospect of facing Temple again was more than he could
bear. So he engaged the car and directed the man and paid him and went on. A little later
a car going in the opposite direction stopped and picked him up.
XI
Temple waked lying in a tight ball, with narrow bars of sunlight falling across her face
like the tines of a golden fork, and while the stiffened blood trickled and tingled through
her cramped muscles she lay gazing quietly up at the ceiling. Like the walls, it was of
rough planks crudely laid, each plank separated from the next by a thin line of blackness;
in the corner a square opening above a ladder gave into a gloomy loft shot with thin
pencils of sun also. From nails in the walls broken bits 'of desiccated harness hung, and
she lay plucking tentatively at the substance in which she lay. She gathered a handful of it
and lifted her head, and saw within her fallen coat naked flesh between brassiere and
knickers and knickers and stockings. Then she remembered the rat and scrambled up and
sprang to the door, clawing at it, still clutching the fist full of cottonseed-hulls, her face
puffed with the hard slumber of seventeen.
She had expected the door to be locked and for a time she could not pull it open,
her numb hands scoring at the undressed planks until she could hear her finger nails. It
swung back and she sprang out. At once she sprang back into the crib and banged the
door to. The blind man was coming down the slope at a scuffling trot, tapping ahead with
the stick, the other hand at his waist, clutching a wad of his trousers. He passed the crib
with his braces dangling about his hips, his gymnasium shoes scuffing in the dry chaff of
the hallway, and passed from view, the stick rattling lightly along the rank of empty
stalls.
Temple crouched against the door, clutching her coat about her. She could hear
him back there in one of the stalls. She opened the door and peered out, at the house in
the bright May sunshine, the sabbath peace, and she thought about the girls and men
leaving the dormitories in their new Spring clothes, strolling along the shaded streets
toward the cool, unhurried sound of bells. She lifted her foot and examined the soiled
sole of her stocking, brushing at it with her palm, then at the other one.