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

teacher in school and it was a little black thing like a nigger boy, kind of, and I was the
teacher. Because I'd say How old am I? and I'd say I'm forty-five years old. I had irongray
hair and spectacles and I was all big up here like women get. I had on a gray tailored
suit, and I never could wear gray. And I was telling it what I'd do, and it kind of drawing
up like it could already see the switch.
"Then I said That wont do. I ought to be a man. So I was an old man, with a long
white beard, and then the little black man got littler and littler and I was saying Now. You
see now. I'm a man now. Then I thought about being a man, and as soon as I thought it, it
happened. It made a kind of plopping sound, like blowing a little rubber tube wrong-side
outward. It felt cold, like the inside of your mouth when you hold it open. I could feel it,
and I lay right still to keep from laughing about how surprised he was going to be. I could
feel the jerking going on inside my knickers ahead of his hand and me lying there trying
not to laugh about how surprised and mad he was going to be in about a minute. Then all
of a sudden I went to sleep. I couldn't even stay awake until his hand got there. I just went
to sleep. I couldn't even feel myself jerking in front of his hand, but I could hear the
shucks. I didn't wake up until that woman came and took me down to the crib."
As he was leaving the house Miss Reba said: "I wish you'd get her down there and
not let her come back. I'd find her folks myself, if I knowed how to go about it. But you
know how . . . She'll be dead, or in the asylum in a year, way him and her go on up there
in that room. There's something funny about it that I aint found out about yet. Maybe it's
her. She wasn't born for this kind of life. You have to be born a butcher or a barber, I
guess. Wouldn't anybody be either of them just for money or fun."
Better for her if she were dead tonight, Horace thought, walking on. For me, too.
He thought of her, Popeye, the woman, the child, Goodwin, all put into a single chamber,
bare, lethal, immediate and profound: a single blotting instant between the indignation
and the surprise. And I too; thinking how that were the only solution. Removed,
cauterised out of the old and tragic flank of the world. And 1, too, now that we're all
isolated; thinking of a gentle dark wind blowing in the Iona corridors of sleep; of lying
beneath a low cozy root under the long sound of the rain: the evil, the injustice, the tears.
In an alley-mouth two figures stood, face to face, not touching; the man speaking in a low
tone unprintable epithet after epithet in a caressing whisper, the woman motionless before
him as though in a musing swoon of voluptuous ecstasy. Perhaps it is upon the instant
that we realise, admit, that there is a logical pattern to evil, that we die, he thought,
thinking of the expression he had once seen in the eyes of a dead child, and of other dead:
the cooling indignation, the shocked despair fading, leaving two empty globes in which
the motionless world lurked profoundly in miniature.
He did not even return to his hotel. He went to the station. He could get a train at
midnight. He had a cup of coffee and wished immediately that he had not, for it lay in a
hot ball on his stomach. Three hours later, when he got off at Jefferson, it was still there,
unassimilated. He walked to town and crossed the deserted square. He thought of the
other morning when he had crossed it. It was as though there had not been any elapsed
time between: the same gesture of the lighted clock-face, the same vulture-like shadows
in the doorways; it might be the same morning and he had merely crossed the square,
about-faced and was returning; all between a dream filled with all the nightmare shapes it
had taken him forty-three years to invent, concentrated in a hot, hard lump in his