Sanctuary by William Faulkner Read Free Book Online Page A

heavenly father, so she began to say “My father’s a judge; my father’s a judge” over and over until Goodwin ran lightlyinto the room. He struck a match and held it overhead and looked down at her until the flame reached his fingers.
    “Hah,” he said. She heard his light, swift feet twice, then his hand touched her cheek and he lifted her from behind the box by the scruff of the neck, like a kitten. “What are you doing in my house?” he said.

7

    F rom somewhere beyond the lamplit hall she could hear the voices—a word; now and then a laugh: the harsh, derisive laugh of a man easily brought to mirth by youth or by age, cutting across the spluttering of frying meat on the stove where the woman stood. Once she heard two of them come down the hall in their heavy shoes, and a moment later the clatter of the dipper in the galvanised pail and the voice that had laughed, cursing. Holding her coat close she peered around the door with the wide, abashed curiosity of a child, and saw Gowan and a second man in khaki breeches. He’sgetting drunk again, she thought. He’s got drunk four times since we left Taylor.
    “Is he your brother?” she said.
    “Who?” the woman said. “My what?” she turned the meat on the hissing skillet.
    “I thought maybe your young brother was here.”
    “God,” the woman said. She turned the meat with a wire fork. “I hope not.”
    “Where is your brother?” Temple said, peering around the door. “I’ve got four brothers. Two are lawyers and one’s a newspaper man. The other’s still in school. At Yale. My father’s a judge. Judge Drake of Jackson.” She thought of her father sitting on the veranda, in a linen suit, a palm leaf fan in his hand, watching the negro mow the lawn.
    The woman opened the oven and looked in. “Nobody asked you to come out here. I didn’t ask you to stay. I told you to go while it was daylight.”
    “How could I? I asked him. Gowan wouldn’t, so I had to ask him.”
    The woman closed the oven and turned and looked at Temple, her back to the light. “How could you? Do you know how I get my water? I walk after it. A mile. Six times a day. Add that up. Not because I am somewhere I am afraid to stay.” She went to the table and took up a pack of cigarettes and shook one out.
    “May I have one?” Temple said. The woman flipped the pack along the table. She removed the chimney from the lamp and lit hers at the wick. Temple took up the pack and stood listening to Gowan and the other man go back into the house. “There are so many of them,” she said in awailing tone, watching the cigarette crush slowly in her fingers. “But maybe, with so many of them.……” The woman had gone back to the stove. She turned the meat. “Gowan kept on getting drunk again. He got drunk three times today. He was drunk when I got off the train at Taylor and I am on probation and I told him what would happen and I tried to get him to throw the jar away and when we stopped at that little country store to buy a shirt he got drunk again. And so we hadn’t eaten and we stopped at Dumfries and he went into the restaurant but I was too worried to eat and I couldn’t find him and then he came up another street and I felt the bottle in his pocket before he knocked my hand away. He kept on saying I had his lighter and then when he lost it and I told him he had, he swore he never owned one in his life.”
    The meat hissed and spluttered in the skillet. “He got drunk three separate times,” Temple said. “Three separate times in one day. Buddy—that’s Hubert, my youngest brother—said that if he ever caught me with a drunk man, he’d beat hell out of me. And now I’m with one that gets drunk three times in one day.” Leaning her hip against the table, her hand crushing the cigarette, she began to laugh. “Dont you think that’s funny?” she said. Then she quit laughing by holding her breath, and she could hear the faint guttering the lamp made, and the meat in