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

"And go on back to Kinston until the whole thing is over," Narcissa said. "These
people are not your people. Why must you do such things?"
"I cannot stand idly by and see injustice--"
"You wont ever catch up with injustice, Horace," Miss Jenny said.
"Well, that irony which lurks in events, then."
"Hmmph," Miss Jenny said. "It must be because she is one woman you know that
dont know anything about that shrimp."
"Anyway, I've talked too much, as usual," Horace said. "So I'll have to trust you
all-"
"Fiddlesticks," Miss Jenny said. "Do you think Narcissa'd want anybody to know
that any of her folks could know people that would do anything as natural as make love
or rob or steal?" There was that quality about his sister. During all the four days between
Kinston and Jefferson he had counted on that imperviousness. He hadn't expected her-any
woman -to bother very much over a man she had neither married nor borne when she had
one she did bear to cherish and fret over. But he had expected that imperviousness, since
she had had it thirty-six years.
When he reached the house in town a light burned in one room. He entered,
crossing the floors which he had scrubbed himself, revealing at the time no more skill
with a mop than he had expected, than he had with the lost hammer with which he nailed
the windows down and the shutters to ten years ago, who could not even learn to drive a
motor car. But that was ten years ago, the hammer replaced by the new one with which
he had drawn the clumsy nails, the windows open upon scrubbed floor spaces still as
dead pools within the ghostly embrace of hooded furniture.
The woman was still up, dressed save for the hat. It lay on the bed where the child
slept. Lying together there, they lent to the room a quality of transience more
unmistakable than the makeshift light, the smug paradox of the made bed in a room
otherwise redolent of long unoccupation. It was as though femininity were a current
running through a wire along which a certain number of identical bulbs were hung.
"I've got some things in the kitchen," she said. "I wont be but a minute."
The child lay on the bed, beneath the unshaded light, and he wondered why
women, in quitting a house, will remove all the lamp shades even though they touch
nothing else; looking down at the child, at its bluish eyelids showing a faint crescent of
bluish white against its lead-colored cheeks, the moist shadow of hair capping its skull,
its hands uplifted, curl- palmed, sweating too, thinking Good God. Good God.
He was thinking of the first time he had seen it, lying in a wooden box behind the
stove in that ruined house twelve miles from town; of Popeye's black presence lying upon
the house like the shadow of something no larger than a match failing monstrous and
portentous upon something else otherwise familiar and everyday and twenty times its
size; of the two of them--himself and the woman--in the kitchen lighted by a cracked and
smutty lamp on a table of clean, spartan dishes and Goodwin and Popeye somewhere in
the outer darkness peaceful with insects and frogs yet filled too with Popeye's presence in
black and nameless threat. The woman drew the box out from behind the stove and stood
above it, her hands still hidden in her shapeless garment. "I have to keep him in this so
the rats cant get to him," she said.