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

He was sleeping late the next morning; he had seen daylight. He was wakened by
someone knocking at the door. It was half-past six. He went to the door. The negro porter
of the hotel stood there.
"What?" Horace said. "Is it Mrs. Goodwin?"
"She say for you to come when you up," the negro said.
"Tell her I'll be there in ten minutes."
As he entered the hotel he passed a young man with a small black bag, such as
doctors carry. Horace went on up. The woman was standing in the half-open door,
looking down the hall.
"I finally got the doctor," she said. "But I wanted anyway. . ." The child lay on the
bed, its eyes shut, flushed and sweating, its curled hands above its head in the attitude of
one crucified, breathing in short, whistling gasps. "He was sick all last night. I went and
got some medicine and I tried to keep him quiet until daylight. At last I got the doctor."
She stood beside the bed, looking down at the child.
"There was a woman there," she said. "A young girl."
"A--" Horace said. "Oh," he said. "Yes. You'd better tell me about it."
XVIII
Popeye drove swiftly but without any quality of haste or of flight, down the clay road and
into the sand. Temple was beside him. Her hat was jammed onto the back of her head, her
hair escaping beneath the crumpled brim in matted clots. Her face looked like a
sleepwalker's as she swayed limply to the lurching of the car. She lurched against
Popeye, lifting her hand in limp reflex. Without releasing the wheel he thrust her back
with his elbow. "Brace yourself," he said. "Come on, now."
Before they came to the tree they passed the woman. She stood beside the road,
carrying the child, the hem of her dress folded back over its face, and she looked at them
quietly from beneath the faded sunbonnet, flicking swiftly in and out of Temple's vision
without any motion, any sign. When they reached the tree Popeye swung the car out of
the road and drove it crashing into the undergrowth and through the prone tree-top and
back into the road again in a running popping of cane-stalks like musketry along a trench,
without any diminution of speed. Beside the tree Gowan's car lay on its side. Temple
looked vaguely and stupidly at it as it too shot behind.
Popeye swung back into the sandy ruts. Yet there was no flight in the action: he
performed it with a certain vicious petulance, that was all. It was a powerful car. Even in
the sand it held forty miles an hour, and up the narrow gulch to the highroad, where he
turned north. Sitting beside him, braced against jolts that had already given way to a
smooth increasing hiss of gravel, Temple gazed dully forward as the road she had
traversed yesterday began to flee backward under the wheels as onto a spool, feeling her
blood seeping slowly inside her loins. She sat limp in the corner of the seat, watching the
steady backward rush of the land-pines in opening vistas splashed with fading dogwood;
sedge; fields green with new cotton and empty of any movement, peaceful, as though
Sunday were a quality of atmosphere, of light and shade--sitting with her legs close