Sanctuary Page 9

  The next morning Benbow got the key to the house from his sister, and went into town. The house was on a side street, unoccupied now for ten years. He opened the house, drawing the nails from the windows. The furniture had not been moved. In a pair of new overalls, with mops and pails, he scoured the floors. At noon he went down town and bought bedding and some tinned food. He was still at work at six oclock when his sister drove up in her car.

  “Come on home, Horace,” she said. “Dont you see you cant do this?”

  “I found that out right after I started,” Benbow said. “Until this morning I thought that anybody with one arm and a pail of water could wash a floor.”

  “Horace,” she said.

  “I’m the oldest, remember,” he said. “I’m going to stay here. I have some cover.” He went to the hotel for supper. When he returned, his sister’s car was again in the drive. The negro driver had brought a bundle of bedclothing.

  “Miss Narcissa say for you to use them,” the negro said. Benbow put the bundle into a closet and made a bed with the ones which he had bought.

  Next day at noon, eating his cold food at the kitchen table, he saw through the window a wagon stop in the street. Three women got down and standing on the curb they made unabashed toilets, smoothing skirts and stockings, brushing one another’s back, opening parcels and donning various finery. The wagon had gone on. They followed, on foot, and he remembered that it was Saturday. He removed the overalls and dressed and left the house.

  The street opened into a broader one. To the left it went on to the square, the opening between two buildings black with a slow, continuous throng, like two streams of ants, above which the cupola of the courthouse rose from a clump of oaks and locusts covered with ragged snow. He went on toward the square. Empty wagons still passed him and he passed still more women on foot, black and white, unmistakable by the unease of their garments as well as by their method of walking, believing that town dwellers would take them for town dwellers too, not even fooling one another.

  The adjacent alleys were choked with tethered wagons, the teams reversed and nuzzling gnawed corn-ears over the tail-boards. The square was lined two-deep with ranked cars, while the owners of them and of the wagons thronged in slow overalls and khaki, in mail-order scarves and parasols, in and out of the stores, soiling the pavement with fruit- and peanut-hulls. Slow as sheep they moved, tranquil, impassable, filling the passages, contemplating the fretful hurrying of those in urban shirts and collars with the large, mild inscrutability of cattle or of gods, functioning outside of time, having left time lying upon the slow and imponderable land green with corn and cotton in the yellow afternoon.

  Horace moved among them, swept here and there by the deliberate current, without impatience. Some of them he knew; most of the merchants and professional men remembered him as a boy, a youth, a brother lawyer—beyond a foamy screen of locust branches he could see the dingy second-story windows where he and his father had practised, the glass still innocent of water and soap as then—and he stopped now and then and talked with them in unhurried backwaters.

  The sunny air was filled with competitive radios and phonographs in the doors of drug- and music-stores. Before these doors a throng stood all day, listening. The pieces which moved them were ballads simple in melody and theme, of bereavement and retribution and repentance metallically sung, blurred, emphasised by static or needle—disembodied voices blaring from imitation wood cabinets or pebble-grain horn-mouths above the rapt faces, the gnarled slow hands long shaped to the imperious earth, lugubrious, harsh, and sad.

  That was Saturday, in May: no time to leave the land. Yet on Monday they were back again, most of them, in clumps about the courthouse and the square, and trading a little in the stores since they were here, in their khaki and overalls and collarless shirts. All day long a knot of them stood about the door to the undertaker’s parlor, and boys and youths with and without schoolbooks leaned with flattened noses against the glass, and the bolder ones and the younger men of the town entered in twos and threes to look at the man called Tommy. He lay on a wooden table, barefoot, in overalls, the sun-bleached curls on the back of his head matted with dried blood and singed with powder, while the coroner sat over him, trying to ascertain his last name. But none knew it, not even those who had known him for fifteen years about the countryside, nor the merchants who on infrequent Saturdays had seen him in town, barefoot, hatless, with his rapt, empty gaze and his cheek bulged innocently by a peppermint jawbreaker. For all general knowledge, he had none.

  16

  On the day when the sheriff brought Goodwin to town, there was a negro murderer in the jail, who had killed his wife; slashed her throat with a razor so that, her whole head tossing further and further backward from the bloody regurgitation of her bubbling throat, she ran out the cabin door and for six or seven steps up the quiet moonlit lane. He would lean in the window in the evening and sing. After supper a few negroes gathered along the fence below—natty, shoddy suits and sweat-stained overalls shoulder to shoulder—and in chorus with the murderer, they sang spirituals while white people slowed and stopped in the leafed darkness that was almost summer, to listen to those who were sure to die and him who was already dead singing about heaven and being tired; or perhaps in the interval between songs a rich, sourceless voice coming out of the high darkness where the ragged shadow of the heaven-tree which snooded the street lamp at the corner fretted and mourned: “Fo days mo! Den dey ghy stroy de bes ba’ytone singer in nawth Mississippi!”

  Sometimes during the day he would lean there, singing alone then, though after a while one or two ragamuffin boys or negroes with delivery baskets like as not, would halt at the fence, and the white men sitting in tilted chairs along the oil-foul wall of the garage across the street would listen above their steady jaws. “One day mo! Den Ise a gawn po sonnen bitch. Say, Aint no place fer you in heavum! Say, Aint no place fer you in hell! Say, Aint no place fer you in jail!”

  “Damn that fellow,” Goodwin said, jerking up his black head, his gaunt, brown, faintly harried face. “I aint in any position to wish any man that sort of luck, but I’ll be damned.……” He wouldn’t talk. “I didn’t do it. You know that, yourself. You know I wouldn’t have. I aint going to say what I think. I didn’t do it. They’ve got to hang it on me first. Let them do that. I’m clear. But if I talk, if I say what I think or believe, I wont be clear.” He was sitting on the cot in his cell. He looked up at the windows: two orifices not much larger than sabre slashes.

  “Is he that good a shot?” Benbow said. “To hit a man through one of those windows?”

  Goodwin looked at him. “Who?”

  “Popeye,” Benbow said.

  “Did Popeye do it?” Goodwin said.

  “Didn’t he?” Benbow said.

  “I’ve told all I’m going to tell. I dont have to clear myself; it’s up to them to hang it on me.”

  “Then what do you want with a lawyer?” Benbow said. “What do you want me to do?”

  Goodwin was not looking at him. “If you’ll just promise to get the kid a good newspaper grift when he’s big enough to make change,” he said. “Ruby’ll be all right. Wont you, old gal?” He put his hand on the woman’s head, scouring her hair with his hand. She sat on the cot beside him, holding the child on her lap. It lay in a sort of drugged immobility, like the children which beggars on Paris streets carry, its pinched face slick with faint moisture, its hair a damp whisper of shadow across its gaunt, veined skull, a thin crescent of white showing beneath its lead-colored eyelids.

  The woman wore a dress of gray crepe, neatly brushed and skilfully darned by hand. Parallel with each seam was that faint, narrow, glazed imprint which another woman would recognise at a hundred yards with one glance. On the shoulder was a purple ornament of the sort that may be bought in ten cent stores or by mail order; on the cot beside her lay a gray hat with a neatly darned veil; looking at it, Benbow could not remember when he had seen one before, when women ceased to w
ear veils.

  He took the woman to his house. They walked, she carrying the child while Benbow carried a bottle of milk and a few groceries, food in tin cans. The child still slept. “Maybe you hold it too much,” he said. “Suppose we get a nurse for it.”

  He left her at the house and returned to town, to a telephone, and he telephoned out to his sister’s, for the car. The car came for him. He told his sister and Miss Jenny about the case over the supper table.

  “You’re just meddling!” his sister said, her serene face, her voice, furious. “When you took another man’s wife and child away from him I thought it was dreadful, but I said At least he will not have the face to ever come back here again. And when you just walked out of the house like a nigger and left her I thought that was dreadful too, but I would not let myself believe you meant to leave her for good. And then when you insisted without any reason at all on leaving here and opening the house, scrubbing it yourself and all the town looking on and living there like a tramp, refusing to stay here where everybody would expect you to stay and think it funny when you wouldn’t; and now to deliberately mix yourself up with a woman you said yourself was a street-walker, a murderer’s woman.”

  “I cant help it. She has nothing, no one. In a madeover dress all neatly about five years out of mode, and that child that never has been more than half alive, wrapped in a piece of blanket scrubbed almost cotton-white. Asking nothing of anyone except to be let alone, trying to make something out of her life when all you sheltered chaste women—”

  “Do you mean to say a moonshiner hasn’t got the money to hire the best lawyer in the country?” Miss Jenny said.

  “It’s not that,” Horace said. “I’m sure he could get a better lawyer. It’s that—”

  “Horace,” his sister said. She had been watching him. “Where is that woman?” Miss Jenny was watching him too, sitting a little forward in the wheel chair. “Did you take that woman into my house?”

  “It’s my house too, honey.” She did not know that for ten years he had been lying to his wife in order to pay interest on a mortgage on the stucco house he had built for her in Kinston, so that his sister might not rent to strangers that other house in Jefferson which his wife did not know he still owned any share in. “As long as it’s vacant, and with that child—”

  “The house where my father and mother and your father and mother, the house where I—I wont have it. I wont have it.”

  “Just for one night, then. I’ll take her to the hotel in the morning. Think of her, alone, with that baby.……Suppose it were you and Bory, and your husband accused of a murder you knew he didn’t—”

  “I dont want to think about her. I wish I had never heard of the whole thing. To think that my brother—Dont you see that you are always having to clean up after yourself? It’s not that there’s litter left; it’s that you—that—But to bring a street-walker, a murderess, into the house where I was born.”

  “Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said. “But, Horace, aint that what the lawyers call collusion? connivance?” Horace looked at her. “It seems to me you’ve already had a little more to do with these folks than the lawyer in the case should have. You were out there where it happened yourself not long ago. Folks might begin to think you know more than you’ve told.”

  “That’s so,” Horace said, “Mrs Blackstone. And sometimes I have wondered why I haven’t got rich at the law. Maybe I will, when I get old enough to attend the same law school you did.”

  “If I were you,” Miss Jenny said, “I’d drive back to town now and take her to the hotel and get her settled. It’s not late.”

  “And go on back to Kinston until the whole thing is over,” Narcissa said. “These people are not your people. Why must you do such things?”

  “I cannot stand idly by and see injustice—”

  “You wont ever catch up with injustice, Horace,” Miss Jenny said.

  “Well, that irony which lurks in events, then.”

  “Hmmph,” Miss Jenny said. “It must be because she is one woman you know that dont know anything about that shrimp.”

  “Anyway, I’ve talked too much, as usual,” Horace said. “So I’ll have to trust you all—”

  “Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said. “Do you think Narcissa’d want anybody to know that any of her folks could know people that would do anything as natural as make love or rob or steal?” There was that quality about his sister. During all the four days between Kinston and Jefferson he had counted on that imperviousness. He hadn’t expected her—any woman—to bother very much over a man she had neither married nor borne when she had one she did bear to cherish and fret over. But he had expected that imperviousness, since she had had it thirty-six years.

  When he reached the house in town a light burned in one room. He entered, crossing floors which he had scrubbed himself, revealing at the time no more skill with a mop than he had expected, than he had with the lost hammer with which he nailed the windows down and the shutters to ten years ago, who could not even learn to drive a motor car. But that was ten years ago, the hammer replaced by the new one with which he had drawn the clumsy nails, the windows open upon scrubbed floor spaces still as dead pools within the ghostly embrace of hooded furniture.

  The woman was still up, dressed save for the hat. It lay on the bed where the child slept. Lying together there, they lent to the room a quality of transience more unmistakable than the makeshift light, the smug paradox of the made bed in a room otherwise redolent of long unoccupation. It was as though femininity were a current running through a wire along which a certain number of identical bulbs were hung.

  “I’ve got some things in the kitchen,” she said. “I wont be but a minute.”

  The child lay on the bed, beneath the unshaded light, and he wondered why women, in quitting a house, will remove all the lamp shades even though they touch nothing else; looking down at the child, at its bluish eyelids showing a faint crescent of bluish white against its lead-colored cheeks, the moist shadow of hair capping its skull, its hands uplifted, curl-palmed, sweating too, thinking Good God. Good God.

  He was thinking of the first time he had seen it, lying in a wooden box behind the stove in that ruined house twelve miles from town; of Popeye’s black presence lying upon the house like the shadow of something no larger than a match falling monstrous and portentous upon something else otherwise familiar and everyday and twenty times its size; of the two of them—himself and the woman—in the kitchen lighted by a cracked and smutty lamp on a table of clean, spartan dishes and Goodwin and Popeye somewhere in the outer darkness peaceful with insects and frogs yet filled too with Popeye’s presence in black and nameless threat. The woman drew the box out from behind the stove and stood above it, her hands still hidden in her shapeless garment. “I have to keep him in this so the rats cant get to him,” she said.

  “Oh,” Horace said, “you have a son.” Then she showed him her hands, flung them out in a gesture at once spontaneous and diffident and self-conscious and proud, and told him he might bring her an orange-stick.

  She returned, with something wrapped discreetly in a piece of newspaper. He knew that it was a diaper, freshly washed, even before she said: “I made a fire in the stove. I guess I overstepped.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “It’s merely a matter of legal precaution, you see,” he said. “Better to put everybody to a little temporary discomfort than to jeopardise our case.” She did not appear to be listening. She spread the blanket on the bed and lifted the child onto it. “You understand how it is,” Horace said. “If the judge suspected that I knew more about it than the facts would warrant—I mean, we must try to give everybody the idea that holding Lee for that killing is just—”

  “Do you live in Jefferson?” she said, wrapping the blanket about the child.

  “No. I live in Kinston. I used to—I have practised here, though.”

  “You have kinfolks here, though. Women. That used to live in this house.” She lifted the child,
tucking the blanket about it. Then she looked at him. “It’s all right. I know how it is. You’ve been kind.”

  “Damn it,” he said, “do you think—Come on. Let’s go on to the hotel. You get a good night’s rest, and I’ll be in early in the morning. Let me take it.”

  “I’ve got him,” she said. She started to say something else, looking at him quietly for a moment, but she went on. He turned out the light and followed and locked the door. She was already in the car. He got in.

  “Hotel, Isom,” he said. “I never did learn to drive one,” he said. “Sometimes, when I think of all the time I have spent not learning to do things.……”

  The street was narrow, quiet. It was paved now, though he could remember when, after a rain, it had been a canal of blackish substance half earth, half water, with murmuring gutters in which he and Narcissa paddled and splashed with tucked-up garments and muddy bottoms, after the crudest of whittled boats, or made loblollies by treading and treading in one spot with the intense oblivion of alchemists. He could remember when, innocent of concrete, the street was bordered on either side by paths of red brick tediously and unevenly laid and worn in rich, random maroon mosaic into the black earth which the noon sun never reached; at that moment, pressed into the concrete near the entrance of the drive, were the prints of his and his sister’s naked feet in the artificial stone.

  The infrequent lamps mounted to crescendo beneath the arcade of a fillingstation at the corner. The woman leaned suddenly forward. “Stop here, please, boy,” she said. Isom put on the brakes. “I’ll get out here and walk,” she said.