Sanctuary (2 page)

“I want to reach Jefferson before dark,” Benbow said. “You cant keep me here like this.”

Without removing the cigarette Popeye spat past it into the spring.

“You cant stop me like this,” Benbow said. “Suppose I break and run.”

Popeye put his eyes on Benbow, like rubber. “Do you want to run?”

“No,” Benbow said.

Popeye removed his eyes. “Well, dont, then.”

Benbow heard the bird again, trying to recall the local name for it. On the invisible highroad another car passed, died away. Between them and the sound of it the sun was almost gone. From his trousers pocket Popeye took a dollar watch and looked at it and put it back in his pocket, loose like a coin.

Where the path from the spring joined the sandy byroad a tree had been recently felled, blocking the road. They climbed over the tree and went on, the highroad now behind them. In the sand were two shallow parallel depressions, but no mark of hoof. Where the branch from the spring seeped across it Benbow saw the prints of automobile
tires. Ahead of him Popeye walked, his tight suit and stiff hat all angles, like a modernist lampstand.

The sand ceased. The road rose, curving, out of the jungle. It was almost dark. Popeye looked briefly over his shoulder. “Step out, Jack,” he said.

“Why didn’t we cut straight across up the hill?” Benbow said.

“Through all them trees?” Popeye said. His hat jerked in a dull, vicious gleam in the twilight as he looked down the hill where the jungle already lay like a lake of ink. “Jesus Christ.”

It was almost dark. Popeye’s gait had slowed. He walked now beside Benbow, and Benbow could see the continuous jerking of the hat from side to side as Popeye looked about with a sort of vicious cringing. The hat just reached Benbow’s chin.

Then something, a shadow shaped with speed, stooped at them and on, leaving a rush of air upon their very faces, on a soundless feathering of taut wings, and Benbow felt Popeye’s whole body spring against him and his hand clawing at his coat. “It’s just an owl,” Benbow said. “It’s nothing but an owl.” Then he said: “They call that Carolina wren a fishing-bird. That’s what it is. What I couldn’t think of back there,” with Popeye crouching against him, clawing at his pocket and hissing through his teeth like a cat. He smells black, Benbow thought; he smells like that black stuff that
ran out of Bovary’s mouth and down upon her bridal veil when they raised her head.

A moment later, above a black, jagged mass of trees, the house lifted its stark square bulk against the failing sky.

The house was a gutted ruin rising gaunt and stark out of a grove of unpruned cedar trees. It was a landmark, known as the Old Frenchman place, built before the Civil War; a plantation house set in the middle of a tract of land; of cotton fields and gardens and lawns long since gone back to jungle, which the people of the neighborhood had been pulling down piecemeal for firewood for fifty years or digging with secret and sporadic optimism for the gold which the builder was reputed to have buried somewhere about the place when Grant came through the county on his Vicksburg campaign.

Three men were sitting in chairs on one end of the porch. In the depths of the open hall a faint light showed. The hall went straight back through the house. Popeye mounted the steps, the three men looking at him and his companion. “Here’s the professor,” he said, without stopping. He entered the house, the hall. He went on and crossed the back porch and turned and entered the room where the light was. It was the kitchen. A woman stood at the stove. She wore a faded calico dress. About her naked ankles a worn pair of man’s brogans, unlaced, flapped when she moved. She looked back at Popeye, then to the stove again, where a pan of meat hissed.

Popeye stood in the door. His hat was slanted across his face. He took a cigarette from his pocket, without producing the pack, and pinched and fretted it and put it into his
mouth and snapped a match on his thumbnail. “There’s a bird out front,” he said.

The woman did not look around. She turned the meat. “Why tell me?” she said. “I dont serve Lee’s customers.”

“It’s a professor,” Popeye said.

The woman turned, an iron fork suspended in her hand. Behind the stove, in shadow, was a wooden box. “A what?”

“Professor,” Popeye said. “He’s got a book with him.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“I dont know. I never thought to ask. Maybe to read the book.”

“He came here?”

“I found him at the spring.”

“Was he trying to find this house?”

“I dont know,” Popeye said. “I never thought to ask.” The woman was still looking at him. “I’ll send him on to Jefferson on the truck,” Popeye said. “He said he wants to go there.”

“Why tell me about it?” the woman said.

“You cook. He’ll want to eat.”

“Yes,” the woman said. She turned back to the stove. “I cook. I cook for crimps and spungs and feebs. Yes. I cook.”

In the door Popeye watched her, the cigarette curling across his face. His hands were in his pockets. “You can quit. I’ll take you back to Memphis Sunday. You can go to hustling again.” He watched her back. “You’re getting fat here. Laying off in the country. I wont tell them on Manuel street.”

The woman turned, the fork in her hand. “You bastard,” she said.

“Sure,” Popeye said. “I wont tell them that Ruby Lamar is down in the country, wearing a pair of Lee Goodwin’s throwed-away shoes, chopping her own firewood. No. I’ll tell them Lee Goodwin is big rich.”

“You bastard,” the woman said. “You bastard.”

“Sure,” Popeye said. Then he turned his head. There was a shuffling sound across the porch, then a man entered. He was stooped, in overalls. He was barefoot; it was his bare feet which they had heard. He had a sunburned thatch of hair, matted and foul. He had pale furious eyes, a short soft beard like dirty gold in color.

“I be dawg if he aint a case, now,” he said.

“What do you want?” the woman said. The man in overalls didn’t answer. In passing, he looked at Popeye with a glance at once secret and alert, as though he were ready to laugh at a joke, waiting for the time to laugh. He crossed the kitchen with a shambling, bear-like gait, and still with that air of alert and gleeful secrecy, though in plain sight of them, he removed a loose board in the floor and took out a gallon jug. Popeye watched him, his forefingers in his vest, the cigarette (he had smoked it down without once touching it with his hand) curling across his face. His expression was savage, perhaps baleful; contemplative, watching the man in overalls recross the floor with a kind of alert diffidence, the jug clumsily concealed below his flank; he was watching Popeye, with that expression alert and ready for mirth, until he left the room. Again they heard his bare feet on the porch.

“Sure,” Popeye said. “I wont tell them on Manuel street that Ruby Lamar is cooking for a dummy and a feeb too.”

“You bastard,” the woman said. “You bastard.”

W
hen 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.