Sanctuary Read Free Page A

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 anorange 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