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

"How did you--" he said. "Did Belle--"
"Of course. She wired me Saturday. That you had left, and if you came here, to
tell you that she had gone back home to Kentucky and had sent for Little Belle."
"Ah, damnation," Benbow said.
"Why?" his sister said. "You want to leave home yourself, but you dont want her
to leave."
He stayed at his sister's two days. She had never been given to talking, living a
life of serene vegetation like perpetual corn or wheat in a sheltered garden instead of a
field, and during those two days she came and went about the house with an air of
tranquil and faintly ludicrous tragic disapproval.
After supper they sat in Miss Jenny's room, where Narcissa would read the
Memphis paper before taking the boy off to bed. When she went out of the room, Miss
Jenny looked at Benbow.
"Go back home, Horace," she said.
"Not to Kinston," Benbow said. "I hadn't intended to stay here, anyway. It wasn't
Narcissa I was running to. I haven't quit one woman to run to the skirts of another."
"If you keep on telling yourself that you may believe it, someday," Miss Jenny
said. "Then what'll you do?"
"You're right," Benbow said. "Then I'd have to stay at home."
His sister returned. She entered the room with a definite air. "Now for it,"
Benbow said. His sister had not spoken directly to him all day.
"What are you going to do, Horace?" she said. "You must have business of some
sort there in Kinston that should be attended to."
"Even Horace must have," Miss Jenny said. "What I want to know is, why he left.
Did you find a man under the bed, Horace?"
"No such luck," Benbow said. "It was Friday, and all of a sudden I knew that I
could not go to the station and get that box of shrimp and--"
"But you have been doing that for ten years," his sister said.
"I know. That's how I know that I will never learn to like smelling shrimp."
"Was that why you left Belle?" Miss Jenny said. She looked at him. "It took you a
long time to learn that, if a woman dont make a very good wife for one man, she aint like
to for another, didn't it?"
"But to walk out just like a nigger," Narcissa said. "And to mix yourself up with
moonshiners and street-walkers."
"Well, he's gone and left the street-walker too," Miss Jenny said. "Unless you're
going to walk the streets with that orange-stick in your pocket until she comes to town."
"Yes," Benbow said. He told again about the three of them, himself and Goodwin
and Tommy sitting on the porch, drinking from the jug and talking, and Popeye lurking
about the house, coming out from time to time to ask Tommy to light a lantern and go
down to the barn with him and Tommy wouldn't do it and Popeye would curse him, and
Tommy sitting on the floor, scouring his bare feet on the boards with a faint, hissing
noise, chortling: "Aint he a sight, now?"
"You could feel the pistol on him just like you knew he had a navel," Benbow
said. "He wouldn't drink, because he said it made him sick to his stomach like a dog; he
wouldn't stay and talk with us; he wouldn't do anything: just lurking about, smoking his
cigarettes, like a sullen and sick child.