Sanctuary

2

When the woman entered the dining-room, carrying a platter of meat, Popeye and the man who had fetched the jug from the kitchen and the stranger were already at a table made by nailing three rough planks to two trestles. Coming into the light of the lamp which sat on the table, her face was sullen, not old; her eyes were cold. Watching her, Benbow did not see her look once at him as she set the platter on the table and stood for a moment with that veiled look with which women make a final survey of a table, and went and stooped above an open packing case in a corner of the room and took from it another plate and knife and fork, which she brought to the table and set before Benbow with a kind of abrupt yet unhurried finality, her sleeve brushing his shoulder.

As she was doing that, Goodwin entered. He wore muddy overalls. He had a lean, weathered face, the jaws covered by a black stubble; his hair was gray at the temples. He was leading by the arm an old man with a long white beard stained about the mouth. Benbow watched Goodwin seat the old man in a chair, where he sat obediently with that tentative and abject eagerness of a man who has but one pleasure left and whom the world can reach only through one sense, for he was both blind and deaf: a short man with a bald skull and a round, full-fleshed, rosy face in which his cataracted eyes looked like two clots of phlegm. Benbow watched him take a filthy rag from his pocket and regurgitate into the rag an almost colorless wad of what had once been chewing tobacco, and fold the rag up and put it into his pocket. The woman served his plate from the dish. The others were already eating, silently and steadily, but the old man sat there, his head bent over his plate, his beard working faintly. He fumbled at the plate with a diffident, shaking hand and found a small piece of meat and began to suck at it until the woman returned and rapped his knuckles. He put the meat back on the plate then and Benbow watched her cut up the food on the plate, meat, bread and all, and then pour sorghum over it. Then Benbow quit looking. When the meal was over, Goodwin led the old man out again. Benbow watched the two of them pass out the door and heard them go up the hall.

The men returned to the porch. The woman cleared the table and carried the dishes to the kitchen. She set them on the table and she went to the box behind the stove and she stood over it for a time. Then she returned and put her own supper on a plate and sat down to the table and ate and lit a cigarette from the lamp and washed the dishes and put them away. Then she went back up the hall. She did not go out onto the porch. She stood just inside the door, listening to them talking, listening to the stranger talking and to the thick, soft sound of the jug as they passed it among themselves. “That fool,” the woman said. “What does he want.……” She listened to the stranger’s voice; a quick, faintly outlandish voice, the voice of a man given to much talk and not much else. “Not to drinking, anyway,” the woman said, quiet inside the door. “He better get on to where he’s going, where his women folks can take care of him.”

She listened to him. “From my window I could see the grape arbor, and in the winter I could see the hammock too. But in the winter it was just the hammock. That’s why we know nature is a she; because of that conspiracy between female flesh and female season. So each spring I could watch the reaffirmation of the old ferment hiding the hammock; the green-snared promise of unease. What blossoms grapes have, that is. It’s not much: a wild and waxlike bleeding less of bloom than leaf, hiding and hiding the hammock, until along in late May, in the twilight, her—Little Belle’s—voice would be like the murmur of the wild grape itself. She never would say, ‘Horace, this is Louis or Paul or Whoever’ but ‘It’s just Horace’. Just, you see; in a little white dress in the twilight, the two of them all demure and quite alert and a little impatient. And I couldn’t have felt any more foreign to her flesh if I had begot it myself.

“So this morning—no; that was four days ago; it was Thursday she got home from school and this is Tuesday—I said, ‘Honey, if you found him on the train, he probably belongs to the railroad company. You cant take him from the railroad company; that’s against the law, like the insulators on the poles.’

“ ‘He’s as good as you are. He goes to Tulane.’

“ ‘But on a train, honey,’ I said.

“ ‘I’ve found them in worse places than on the train.’

“ ‘I know,’ I said. ‘So have I. But you dont bring them home, you know. You just step over them and go on. You dont soil your slippers, you know.’

“We were in the living room then; it was just before dinner; just the two of us in the house then. Belle had gone down town.

“ ‘What business is it of yours who comes to see me? You’re not my father. You’re just—just——’

“ ‘What?’ I said. ‘Just what?’

“ ‘Tell Mother, then! Tell her. That’s what you’re going to do. Tell her!’

“ ‘But on the train, honey,’ I said. ‘If he’d walked into your room in a hotel, I’d just kill him. But on the train, I’m disgusted. Let’s send him along and start all over again.’

“ ‘You’re a fine one to talk about finding things on the train! You’re a fine one! Shrimp! Shrimp!’ ”

“He’s crazy,” the woman said, motionless inside the door. The stranger’s voice went on, tumbling over itself, rapid and diffuse.

“Then she was saying ‘No! No!’ and me holding her and she clinging to me. ‘I didn’t mean that! Horace! Horace!’ And I was smelling the slain flowers, the delicate dead flowers and tears, and then I saw her face in the mirror. There was a mirror behind her and another behind me, and she was watching herself in the one behind me, forgetting about the other one in which I could see her face, see her watching the back of my head with pure dissimulation. That’s why nature is ‘she’ and Progress is ‘he’; nature made the grape arbor, but Progress invented the mirror.”

“He’s crazy,” the woman said inside the door, listening.

“But that wasn’t quite it. I thought that maybe the spring, or maybe being forty-three years old, had upset me. I thought that maybe I would be all right if I just had a hill to lie on for a while—It was that country. Flat and rich and foul, so that the very winds seem to engender money out of it. Like you wouldn’t be surprised to find that you could turn in the leaves off the trees, into the banks for cash. That Delta. Five thousand square miles, without any hill save the bumps of dirt the Indians made to stand on when the River overflowed.

“So I thought it was just a hill I wanted; it wasn’t Little Belle that set me off. Do you know what it was?”

“He is,” the woman said inside the door. “Lee ought not to let——”

Benbow had not waited for any answer. “It was a rag with rouge on it. I knew I would find it before I went into Belle’s room. And there it was, stuffed behind the mirror: a handkerchief where she had wiped off the surplus paint when she dressed and stuck it behind the mantel. I put it into the clothes-bag and took my hat and walked out. I had got a lift on a truck before I found that I had no money with me. That was part of it too, you see; I couldn’t cash a check. I couldn’t get off the truck and go back to town and get some money. I couldn’t do that. So I have been walking and bumming rides ever since. I slept one night in a sawdust pile at a mill, one night at a negro cabin, one night in a freight car on a siding. I just wanted a hill to lie on, you see. Then I would be all right. When you marry your own wife, you start off from scratch.……maybe scratching. When you marry somebody else’s wife, you start off maybe ten years behind, from somebody else’s scratch and scratching. I just wanted a hill to lie on for a while.”

“The fool,” the woman said. “The poor fool.” She stood inside the door. Popeye came through the hall from the back. He passed her without a word and went onto the porch.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get it loaded.” She heard the three of them go away. She stood there. Then she heard the stranger get unsteadily out of his chair and cross the porch. Then she saw him, in faint silhouette against the sky, the lesser darkness: a thin man in shapeless clothes; a head of thinning and ill-kempt hair; and quite drunk. “They dont make him eat right,” the woman said.

She was motionless, leaning lightly against the wall, he facing her. “Do you like living like this?” he said. “Why do you do it? You are young yet; you could go back to the cities and better yourself without lifting more than an eyelid.” She didn’t move, leaning lightly against the wall, her arms folded. “The poor, scared fool,” she said.

“You see,” he said, “I lack courage: that was left out of me. The machinery is all here, but it wont run.” His hand fumbled across her cheek. “You are young yet.” She didn’t move, feeling his hand upon her face, touching her flesh as though he were trying to learn the shape and position of her bones and the texture of the flesh. “You have your whole life before you, practically. How old are you? You’re not past thirty yet.” His voice was not loud, almost a whisper.

When she spoke she did not lower her voice at all. She had not moved, her arms still folded across her breast. “Why did you leave your wife?” she said.

“Because she ate shrimp,” he said. “I couldn’t—You see, it was Friday, and I thought how at noon I’d go to the station and get the box of shrimp off the train and walk home with it, counting a hundred steps and changing hands with it, and it——”

“Did you do that every day?” the woman said.

“No. Just Friday. But I have done it for ten years, since we were married. And I still dont like to smell shrimp. But I wouldn’t mind the carrying it home so much. I could stand that. It’s because the package drips. All the way home it drips and drips, until after a while I follow myself to the station and stand aside and watch Horace Benbow take that box off the train and start home with it, changing hands every hundred steps, and I following him, thinking Here lies Horace Benbow in a fading series of small stinking spots on a Mississippi sidewalk.”

“Oh,” the woman said. She breathed quietly, her arms folded. She moved; he gave back and followed her down the hall. They entered the kitchen where a lamp burned. “You’ll have to excuse the way I look,” the woman said. She went to the box behind the stove and drew it out and stood above it, her hands hidden in the front of her garment. Benbow stood in the middle of the room. “I have to keep him in the box so the rats cant get to him,” she said.

“What?” Benbow said. “What is it?” He approached, where he could see into the box. It contained a sleeping child, not a year old. He looked down at the pinched face quietly.

“Oh,” he said. “You have a son.” They looked down at the pinched, sleeping face of the child. There came a noise outside; feet came onto the back porch. The woman shoved the box back into the corner with her knee as Goodwin entered.

“All right,” Goodwin said. “Tommy’ll show you the way to the truck.” He went away, on into the house.

Benbow looked at the woman. Her hands were still wrapped into her dress. “Thank you for the supper,” he said. “Some day, maybe.…” He looked at her; she was watching him, her face not sullen so much, as cold, still. “Maybe I can do something for you in Jefferson. Send you something you need.……”

She removed her hands from the fold of the dress in a turning, flicking motion; jerked them hidden again. “With all this dishwater and washing.……You might send me an orange stick,” she said.

Walking in single file, Tommy and Benbow descended the hill from the house, following the abandoned road. Benbow looked back. The gaunt ruin of the house rose against the sky, above the massed and matted cedars, lightless, desolate, and profound. The road was an eroded scar too deep to be a road and too straight to be a ditch, gutted by winter freshets and choken with fern and rotted leaves and branches. Following Tommy, Benbow walked in a faint path where feet had worn the rotting vegetation down to the clay. Overhead an arching hedgerow of trees thinned against the sky.

The descent increased, curving. “It was about here that we saw the owl,” Benbow said.

Ahead of him Tommy guffawed. “It skeered him too, I’ll be bound,” he said.

“Yes,” Benbow said. He followed Tommy’s vague shape, trying to walk carefully, to talk carefully, with that tedious concern of drunkenness.

“I be dog if he aint the skeeriest durn white man I ever see,” Tommy said. “Here he was comin up the path to the porch and that ere dog come out from under the house and went up and sniffed his heels, like ere a dog will, and I be dog if he didn’t flinch off like it was a moccasin and him barefoot, and whupped out that little artermatic pistol and shot it dead as a door-nail. I be durn if he didn’t.”

“Whose dog was it?” Horace said.

“Hit was mine,” Tommy said. He chortled. “A old dog that wouldn’t hurt a flea if hit could.”

The road descended and flattened; Benbow’s feet whispered into sand, walking carefully. Against the pale sand he could now see Tommy, moving at a shuffling shamble like a mule walks in sand, without seeming effort, his bare feet hissing, flicking the sand back in faint spouting gusts from each inward flick of his toes.

The bulky shadow of the felled tree blobbed across the road. Tommy climbed over it and Benbow followed, still carefully, gingerly, hauling himself through a mass of foliage not yet withered, smelling still green. “Some more of——” Tommy said. He turned. “Can you make it?”

“I’m all right,” Horace said. He got his balance again. Tommy went on.

“Some more of Popeye’s doins,” Tommy said. “ ’Twarn’t no use, blockin this road like that. Just fixed it so we’d have to walk a mile to the trucks. I told him folks been comin out here to buy from Lee for four years now, and aint nobody bothered Lee yet. Besides gettin that car of hisn outen here again, big as it is. But ’twarn’t no stoppin him. I be dog if he aint skeered of his own shadow.”

“I’d be scared of it too,” Benbow said. “If his shadow was mine.”

Tommy guffawed, in undertone. The road was now a black tunnel floored with the impalpable defunctive glare of the sand. “It was about here that the path turned off to the spring,” Benbow thought, trying to discern where the path notched into the jungle wall. They went on.

“Who drives the truck?” Benbow said. “Some more Memphis fellows?”

“Sho,” Tommy said. “Hit’s Popeye’s truck.”

“Why cant those Memphis folks stay in Memphis and let you all make your liquor in peace?”

“That’s where the money is,” Tommy said. “Aint no money in these here piddlin little quarts and half-a-gallons. Lee just does that for a-commodation, to pick up a extry dollar or two. It’s in makin a run and gettin shut of it quick, where the money is.”

“Oh,” Benbow said. “Well, I think I’d rather starve than have that man around me.”

Tommy guffawed. “Popeye’s all right. He’s just a little curious.” He walked on, shapeless against the hushed glare of the road, the sandy road. “I be dog if he aint a case, now. Aint he?”

“Yes,” Benbow said. “He’s all of that.”

The truck was waiting where the road, clay again, began to mount toward the gravel highway. Two men sat on the fender, smoking cigarettes; overhead the trees thinned against the stars of more than midnight.

“You took your time,” one of the men said. “Didn’t you? I aimed to be halfway to town by now. I got a woman waiting for me.”

“Sure,” the other man said. “Waiting on her back.” The first man cursed him.

“We come as fast as we could,” Tommy said. “Whyn’t you fellows hang out a lantern? If me and him had a been the Law, we’d a had you, sho.”

“Ah, go climb a tree, you mat-faced bastard,” the first man said. They snapped their cigarettes away and got into the truck. Tommy guffawed, in undertone. Benbow turned and extended his hand.

“Goodbye,” he said. “And much obliged, Mister——”

“My name’s Tawmmy,” the other said. His limp, calloused hand fumbled into Benbow’s and pumped it solemnly once and fumbled away. He stood there, a squat, shapeless figure against the faint glare of the road, while Benbow lifted his foot for the step. He stumbled, catching himself.

“Watch yourself, Doc,” a voice from the cab of the truck said. Benbow got in. The second man was laying a shotgun along the back of the seat. The truck got into motion and ground terrifically up the gutted slope and into the gravelled highroad and turned toward Jefferson and Memphis.