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

The last trumpet-shaped bloom had fallen from the heaven tree at the corner of the jail
yard. They lay thick, viscid underfoot, sweet and oversweet in the nostrils with a
sweetness surfeitive and moribund, and at night now the ragged shadow of full-fledged
leaves pulsed upon the barred window in shabby rise and fall. The window was in the
general room, the white-washed walls of which were stained with dirty hands, scribbled
and scratched over with names and dates and blasphemous and obscene doggerel in
pencil or nail or knife-blade. Nightly the negro murderer leaned there, his face checkered
by the shadow of the grating in the restless interstices of leaves, singing in chorus with
those along the fence below.
Sometimes during the day he sang also, alone then save for the slowing passerby
and ragamuffin boys and the garage men across the way. "One day mo! Aint not place fer
you in heavum! Aint no place fer you in hell! Aint not place fer you in whitefolks' jail!
Nigger, whar you gwine to? Whar you gwine to, nigger?"
Each morning Isom fetched in a bottle of milk, which Horace delivered to the
woman at the hotel, for the child. On Sunday afternoon he went out to his sister's. He left
the woman sitting on the cot in Goodwin's cell, the child on her lap. Heretofore it had lain
in that drugged apathy, its eyelids closed to thin crescents, but today it moved now and
then in frail, galvanic jerks, whimpering.
Horace went up to Miss Jenny's room. His sister had not appeared. "He won't
talk," Horace said. "He just says they will have to prove he did it. He said they had
nothing on him, no more than on the child. He wouldn't even consider bond, if he could
have got it. He says he is better off in the jail. And I suppose he is. His business out there
is finished now, even if the sheriff hadn't found his kettles and destroyed--"
"Kettles?"
"His still. After he surrendered, they hunted around until they found the still. They
knew what he was doing, but they waited until he was down. Then they all jumped on
him. The good customers, that had been buying whiskey from him and drinking all that
he would give them free and maybe trying to make love to his wife behind his back. You
should hear them down town. This morning the Baptist minister took him for a text. Not
only as a murderer, but as an adulterer; a polluter of the free Democratic-Protestant
atmosphere of Yoknapatawpha county. I gathered that his idea was that Goodwin and the
woman should both be burned as a sole example to that child; the child to be reared and
taught the English language for the sole end of being taught that it was begot in sin by
two people who suffered by fire for having begot it. Good God, can a man, a civilised
man, seriously . . ."
"They're just Baptists," Miss Jenny said. "What about the money?"
"He had a little, almost a hundred and sixty dollars. It was buried in a can in the
barn. They let him dig that up. 'That'll keep her' he says 'until it's over. Then we'll clear
out. We've been intending to for a good while. If I'd listened to her, we'd have gone
already. You've been a good girl' he says. She was sitting on the cot beside him, holding
the baby, and he took her chin in his hands and shook her head a little."
"It's a good thing Narcissa aint going to be on that jury," Miss Jenny said.
"Yes. But the fool wont even let me mention that that gorilla was ever on the
place. He said 'They cant prove anything on me. I've been in a jam before. Everybody
that knows anything about me knows that I wouldn't hurt a feeb.' But that wasn't the
reason he doesn't want it told about that thug. And he knew I knew it wasn't, because he