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

"Goodwin and I were both talking. He had been a cavalry sergeant in the
Philippines and on the Border, and in an infantry regiment in France; he never told me
why he changed, transferred to infantry and lost his rank. He might have killed someone,
might have deserted. He was talking about Manila and Mexican girls, and that halfwit
chortling and glugging at the jug and shoving it at me: 'Take some mo'; and then I knew
that the woman was just behind the door, listening to us. They are not married. I know
that just like I know that that little black man had that flat little pistol in his coat pocket.
But she's out there, doing a nigger's work, that's owned diamonds and automobiles too in
her day, and bought them with a harder currency than cash. And that blind man, that old
man sitting there at the table, waiting for somebody to feed him, with that immobility of
blind people, like it was the backs of their eyeballs you looked at while they were hearing
music you couldn't hear; that Goodwin led out of the room and completely off the earth,
as far as I know. I never saw him again. I never knew who he was, who he was kin to.
Maybe not to anybody. Maybe that old Frenchman that built the house a hundred years
ago didn't want him either and just left him there when he died or moved away."
The next morning Benbow got the key to the house from his sister, and went into
town. The house was on a side street, unoccupied now for ten years. He opened the
house, drawing the nails from the windows. The furniture had not been moved. In a pair
of new overalls, with mops and pails, he scoured the floors. At noon he went down town
and bought bedding and some tinned food. He was still at work at six o'clock when his
sister drove up in her car.
"Come on home, Horace," she said. "Dont you see you cant do this?"
"I found that out right after I started," Benbow said. "Until this morning I thought
that anybody with one arm and a pail of water could wash a floor."
"Horace," she said.
"I'm the older, remember," he said. "I'm going to stay here. I have some covers."
He went to the hotel for supper. When he returned, his sister's car was again in the drive.
The negro driver had brought a bundle of bedclothing.
"Miss Narcissa say for you to use them," the negro said. Benbow put the bundle
into a closet and made a bed with the ones which he had bought.
Next day at noon, eating his cold food at the kitchen table, he saw through the
window a wagon stop in the street, three women got down and standing on the curb they
made unabashed toilets, smoothing skirts and stockings, brushing one another's back,
opening parcels and donning various finery. The wagon had gone on. They followed, on
foot, and he remembered that it was Saturday. He removed the overalls and dressed and
left the house.
The street opened into a broader one. To the left it went on to the square, the
opening between two buildings black with a slow, continuous throng, like two streams of
ants, above which the cupola of the courthouse rose from a clump of oaks and locusts
covered with ragged snow. He went on toward the square. Empty wagons still passed him
and he passed still more women on foot, black and white, unmistakable by the unease of
their garments as well as by their method of walking, believing that town dwellers would
take them for town dwellers too, not even fooling one another.
The adjacent alleys were choked with tethered wagons, the teams reversed and
nuzzling gnawed corn-ears over the tail-boards. The square was lined two-deep with