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

turned into a narrow, dark street and stopped at a house with red shades in the lighted
windows. Clarence rang the bell. They could hear music inside, and shrill voices, and
feet. They were admitted into a bare hallway where two shabby negro men argued with a
drunk white man in greasy overalls. Through an open door they saw a room filled with
coffee-colored women in bright dresses, with ornate hair and golden smiles.
"Them's niggers," Virgil said.
"'Course they're niggers," Clarence said. "But see this?" he waved a banknote in
his cousin's face. "This stuff is color-blind."
XXII
On the third day of his search, Horace found a domicile for the woman and child. It was
in the ramshackle house of an old half-crazed white woman who was believed to
manufacture spells for negroes. It was on the edge of town, set in a tiny plot of ground
choked and massed with waist-high herbage in an unbroken jungle across the front. At
the back a path had been trodden from the broken gate to the door. All night a dim light
burned in the crazy depths of the house and at almost any hour of the twenty-four a
wagon or a buggy might be seen tethered in the lane behind it and a negro entering or
leaving the back door.
The house had been entered once by officers searching for whiskey. They found
nothing save a few dried bunches of weeds, and a collection of dirty bottles containing
liquid of which they could say nothing surely save that it was not alcoholic, while the old
woman, held by two men, her lank grayish hair shaken before the glittering collapse of
her face, screamed invective at them in her cracked voice. In a lean-to shed room
containing a bed and a barrel of anonymous refuse and trash in which mice rattled all
night long, the woman found a home.
"You'll be all right here," Horace said. "You can always get me by telephone, at-"
giving her the name of a neighbor. "No: wait; tomorrow I'll have the telephone put back
in. Then you can--"
"Yes," the woman said. "I reckon you better not be coming out here."
"Why? Do you think that would-that I'd care a damn what--"
"You have to live here."
"I'm damned if I do. I've already let too many women run my affairs for me as it
is, and if these uxorious . . ." But he knew he was just talking. He knew that she knew it
too, out of that feminine reserve of unflagging suspicion of all peoples' actions which
seems at first to be mere affinity for evil but which is in reality practical wisdom.
"I guess I'll find you if there's any need," she said. "There's not anything else I
could do."
"By God," Horace said, "dont you let them . . . Bitches," he said; "bitches."
The next day he had the telephone installed. He did not see his sister for a week;
she had no way of learning that he had a phone, yet when, a week before the opening of
Court, the telephone shrilled into the quiet where he sat reading one evening, he thought
it was Narcissa until, across a remote blaring of victrola or radio music, a man's voice
spoke in a guarded, tomb-like tone.