Sanctuary

10

While the woman was cooking breakfast, the child still—or already—asleep in the box behind the stove, she heard a blundering sound approaching across the porch and stop at the door. When she looked around she saw the wild and battered and bloody apparition which she recognised as Gowan. His face, beneath a two-days’ stubble, was marked, his lip was cut. One eye was closed and the front of his shirt and coat were blood-stained to the waist. Through his swollen and stiffened lips he was trying to say something. At first the woman could not understand a word. “Go and bathe your face,” she said. “Wait. Come in here and sit down. I’ll get the basin.”

He looked at her, trying to talk. “Oh,” the woman said. “She’s all right. She’s down there in the crib, asleep.” She had to repeat it three or four times, patiently. “In the crib. Asleep. I stayed with her until daylight. Go wash your face, now.”

Gowan got a little calmer then. He began to talk about getting a car.

“The nearest one is at Tull’s, two miles away,” the woman said. “Wash your face and eat some breakfast.”

Gowan entered the kitchen, talking about getting the car. “I’ll get it and take her on back to school. One of the other girls will slip her in. It’ll be all right then. Dont you think it’ll be all right then?” He came to the table and took a cigarette from the pack and tried to light it with his shaking hands. He had trouble putting it into his mouth, and he could not light it at all until the woman came and held the match. But he took but one draw, then he stood, holding the cigarette in his hand, looking at it with his one good eye in a kind of dull amazement. He threw the cigarette away and turned toward the door, staggering and catching himself. “Go get car,” he said.

“Get something to eat first,” the woman said. “Maybe a cup of coffee will help you.”

“Go get car,” Gowan said. When he crossed the porch he paused long enough to splash some water upon his face, without helping his appearance much.

When he left the house he was still groggy and he thought that he was still drunk. He could remember only vaguely what had happened. He had got Van and the wreck confused and he did not know that he had been knocked out twice. He only remembered that he had passed out some time early in the night, and he thought that he was still drunk. But when he reached the wrecked car and saw the path and followed it to the spring and drank of the cold water, he found that it was a drink he wanted, and he knelt there, bathing his face in the cold water and trying to examine his reflection in the broken surface, whispering Jesus Christ to himself in a kind of despair. He thought about returning to the house for a drink, then he thought of having to face Temple, the men; of Temple there among them.

When he reached the highroad the sun was well up, warm. I’ll get cleaned up some, he said. And coming back with a car. I’ll decide what to say to her on the way to town; thinking of Temple returning among people who knew him, who might know him. I passed out twice, he said. I passed out twice. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ he whispered, his body writhing inside his disreputable and bloody clothes in an agony of rage and shame.

His head began to clear with air and motion, but as he began to feel better physically the blackness of the future increased. Town, the world, began to appear as a black cul-de-sac; a place in which he must walk forever more, his whole body cringing and flinching from whispering eyes when he had passed, and when in midmorning he reached the house he sought, the prospect of facing Temple again was more than he could bear. So he engaged the car and directed the man and paid him and went on. A little later a car going in the opposite direction stopped and picked him up.