30
ANSE
31
aimed for man to be always a^moving and going
somewheres else, wouldn’t He a put him longways
on his belly, like a snake ? It stands to reason He
would.
Putting it where every bad luck prowling can find
it and come straight to my door, charging me taxes
on top of it. Making me pay for Cash having to get
them carpenter notions when if it hadn’t been no
road come there, he wouldn’t a got them ; falling
off of churches and lifting no hand in six months
and me and Addie slaving ^d a-slaving, when
there’s plenty of sawing on this place he could do if
he’s got to saw.
And Dari, too. Talking me out of him, dum
them. It ain’t th it I am afraid of work ; I always
have fed me and mine and kept a roof above us :
it’s that they would short-hand me ‘just because he
tends to his own business, just because he’s got his
eyes full of the land all the time. I says to them,
he was all right at first, with his eyes full of the
land, because the land laid up-and-down ways then ;
it wasn’t till* that ere road come and switched the
land around lon^ays and his eyes still full of the
land, that they begun to threaten me out of him,
trying to short-hand me with the law.
Making me pay for it. She was well and hale as
ere a woman ever were, except for that road. Just
laying down, resting herself in her own bed, askingj^
naught of none. “ Are you sick, Addie ? ” I said.
“I am not sick,” she said. ^
’* You iay you down and rest you,” I saSl. “ I
32 AS I LAY DYING
knowed you are not sick. You’re just tired. You lay you down and rest.”
** I am not sick,” she said. “ I will get up.”
** Lay still and rest,” I said. “ Ydu ate just
'tired. You can get up to-morrow.” And she was
laying there, well and hale as ere a woman ever were,
except for that road.
“ I never sent for you,” I said. “ I take you to witness I never sent for you.’''
“ I know you didn’t,” Peabody said. “ I bound that. Where is sh^ ? ”
** She’s a-laying down,” I said. “ She’s just a little tired, but she’ll ”
“ Get outen here, Anse,” he said. ** Go set on the porch a while.”
And now I got to pay for it, me without a tooth
in my head, hoping to get ahead enough so 1 could
get my mouth fixed where I could eat God’s own
victuals as a man should, and her hale and well as
ere a woman in the land until that day. Got to pay
for being put to the need of that three dollars. Got
to pay for the way for them boys to ha\e to go away
to earn it. And now I can see same as second sight
the rain shutting down betwixt us, a-coming up that
road like a durn man, like it wasn’t ere a other
house to tain on in all the living' land.
I have heard men cuss their luck, and right, for they were sinful men. But I do not say it’s a curse on me, because I have done no wrong to be cussed Iby.* I amjnot religious, I reckon. But peace is my heai ;/; : I know it is. I have done things^ but neither
ANSE 33
better not worse than them that pretend othetUke,
and I know that Old Marster will care for me as for
ere a sparrow that falls. But it seems hard that a
man in hi^ 'need could be so flouted by a road.
Vatdaman comes around the house> bloody as a
h»g to his knees, and that ere fish choppe4 up with
the axe like as not, or maybe throwed away for him
to lie about the dogs et it. Well, I reckon I ain’t
no call to expe«t no* more of him than of his man>
growed brothers. He comes along, watching the
house, quiet, and sits on the steps. “ Whew,” he
says, ** I’m pure tired.”
Go wash them hands,” I sav. But couldn’t no
woman strove harder than Addie to make them
right, man and buy : I’ll say that for her.
“ It was full of blood and guts as a hog,” he says.
But I just can’t seem to get no heatf into anything,
with this here weather sapping me, too. *‘Pa,”
he says, “ is ma sick some more ? ”
“ Go wash them hands,” I say. But I just can’t seem to get no heart into it.
DARL
H e has been to town this week : the back of
^is neck is trimmed close, with a white line
between hair and sunburn like a joint of
white bone. He has not once looked back.
“Jewel,” I say. Back running, tunnelled be-
tween the two sets of bobbing mule ears, the road
vanishes beneath tb^ wagon as though it were a
ribbon and the front axle were a spool. “ Do you
know she is going to die. Jewel ? ”
It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.
I said to Dewey Dell : “ You want her to die so
you can get to town : is that it ? ” She wouldn’t
say what we both knew. “ The reason you will not
say it is/ when you say it, even to yourself, you will
know it is true : is that it ? But you know it is
true now. I can almost tell you the day when you
knew it is true. Why won’t you say it, even to
yourself?” She will not say it. She just keeps
on saying Are you going to tell pa ? Are you going
to kill him? “You cannot believe it is true
because you cannot believe thaV Dewey Dell,
Dewey Dell Bundren, could have such bad luck : is
• ‘that it?”
[The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like
a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads ; ,the
light 1^ turned copper : in the eye portentous, in
34
DAKL 35
the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning. When
Peabody comes, they will have to use the rope.
He has* pussel-gutted himself eating cold greens.
With the *rope they will haul him up the path,
baloon-like up the sulphurous air.
■ “ Jewel,” I say, “ do you know that A(Jdie Bun-
dren is going to ^e ? Addie Bundren is going to
die?”
PEABODY
W HEN Anse finally sent for me of his own
accord, I said ** He has wore her out at
last/’ And I said a damn good thing
and at first I would not go because there might be
something I could do and I would have to haul her
back, by God. 1 thought maybe they have the
same sort of fool etjt)ics in heaven they have in the
Medical College and that it was maybe Vernon
Tull sending for me again, getting me there in the
nick of time, as Vernon always does things, getting
the most for Anse’s money like he does for his own.
But when it got far enough into the day for me to
read weather sign I knew it couldn’t have been any-
body but Anse that sent. I knew that nobody '
but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the
face of a cyclone. And I knew that if it had finally
occurred to Anse himself that he needed one, it
was already too late.
When I reach the spring and get down and hitch
the team, the sun has gone down behind a bank of
black cloud like a top-heavy mountain range, like a
load of cinders dumped over there*, and there is no
wind. I could hear Cash sawing for a mile before I
btgot there. Anse is standing at the top of the bluff
abpve the path.
** ^Opiere’tj the horse ? ” I say.
*VJewel’s taken and gone,” he says. ** Can’t
PEABODY 37
nobody else ketch hit. You’ll have to walk up, I reckon.”
“Me; walk up, weighing two hundred and
twenty-five* pounds ? ” I say. “ Walk up that
wall ? ” He stands there beside a tree. Too
dm the Lord made the mistake of giving trees roots
md giving the Anse Bundrens He makes feet and
^pbgs. If He’d just swapped them, there wouldn’t
ever be a worry*about this country being deforested
someday. Or any other country. “ What do you
aim for me to do ? ” I. say. Stay here and get
blowed dean out of the countv when that cloud
breaks ? ” Even with the horse it would take me
fifteen minutes to tide up across the pasture to the
top of the ridge and reach the house. The path
looks like a crooked limb blown against the bluff.
Anse has not been in town in twelve years. And
how his mother ever got up there to bear him, he
being his mother’s son.
** Vardaman’s gittin’ the rope,” he says.
After a while Vardaman appears with the plough-
line. He gives the end of it to Anse and comes
down the path, uncoiling it.
“You hold it tight,” I say. “I done already
wrote this visit on to my books, so I’m going to
charge you just the same, whether I get there or
not.”
“ I got hit,” Anse says. “ You kin come on up.”
I’ll 1^ damned if I can see why I don’t quit. "A
man seventy years old, weighing two nulidr«id and
odd pounds, being hauled up and down a dlmn
38 AS I LAY DYING
mountain on a tope. I teckon it*s because I must
reach the fifity-thousand dollar mark of dead accounts
on my books before I can quit. “ What the hell
does your wife mean,” I say, “ taking sick on top
of a dum moimtain?”
“ I^mjright sorry,” he says. He let the rope go,
just dropped it, and he has turned toward the house.
There is a little daylight up here still, of the colour
of sulphur matches. The boards look like strips of
sulphur. Cash does not look back. Vernon Tull
says he brings each board up to the window for her
to see it and say it is all right. The boy overtakes
us. Anse looks back at him. “ Where’s the
rope?” he says.
“ It’s where you left it,” I say. But never you
mind that rope. I got to get back down that bluff.
I don’t aim for that storm to catch me up here.
I’d blow too dum far once I got started.”
The 'girl, is standing by the bed, fanning her.
When we enter she turns her head and looks at us.
She has been dead these ten days. I suppose it’s
having been a part of Anse for so long that she
cannot even make that change, if change it be. I
can remember how when I was young I believed
death to be a phenomenon of the body ; now I
know it to be merely a function oi the mind — and
that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereave-
'”ment. The nihilists say it is the end ; the fiinda-
>mentalists, the beginning ; when in reality it is no
' more than* a' single tenant or family moving out of
a tenement or a town.
PEABODY 59
She looks at us. Only her eyes seein to move.
It’s like they touch us, not with sight or sense, but
like the •stream from a hose touches you, the stream
at the instW of impact as dissociated from the
nozzle as though it had never been there. She does*
nbt look at Anse at all. She looks at m^ then at
the boy. Beneath the quilt she is no more than a
bundle of rotten sticks.
Well, Miss*Addie,” I say. The girl does not
stop the fan. “ How are you, sister ? ” I say.
Her head Mes gaunt on .the j^ow, looking at the
boy. “ You picked out a fine time to get me out
here and bring up a storm.” Then I send Anse
and the boy out. She watches the boy as he
leaves the room. She has not moved save her
eyes.
He and Anse are on the porch wfien I come out,
the boy sitting on the steps, Anse standing by a post,
not even leaning against it, his arms dangling, the
hair pushed and matted up on his head like a dipped
rooster. He turns his head, blinking at me.
“ Why didh’t ypu send for me sooner ? ” I say.
“ Hit was jest one thing and then another,” he
says. “ That ere corn me and the boys was aimin’
to git up with, and Dewey Dell a-takin’ good keer
of her, and follA cornin’ in, a-oflFerin’ to help and
sich, till I jest thought . . .”
“ Damn the money,” I say. “ Did you ever*
hear of me worrying a fellow before he was re%dy,
to pay ? ” .
“ Hit ain’t begrudgin’ the money,” he says. • ** I
40 AS I LA Y DYING
jest kept a-thinkin*. . . . Shc*s goin’, is she?”
The dum little tyke is sitting on the top step,
looking smaller than ever in the sulphur-colour^
light. That’s the one trouble with this country :
' everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like
our rivers, our land : opaque, slow, violent ; shap-
ing and creating the life of man in its implacable
and brooding image. “ 1 knowed hit,” Anse
says. ** All the while 1 made shov Her mind is
sot on hit.”
** And a damn gcwd thing, too,” I say. “ With
a trifling ” He sits on the top step, small,
motionless in faded overalls. When 1 came out he
looked up at me, then at Anse. But now he has
stopped looking at us. He just sits there.
** Have you told her yit ? ” Anse says.
“ What for ? ” I say. “ What the devil for ? ”
” She’ll know hit. I knowed that when she see
you she would know hit, same as writing. You
wouldn’t need to tell her. Her mind ”
Behind us the girl says, “ Pilw.” I look at her, at her face.
“You better go quick,” I say.
When we enter the room she is watching the door.
She looks at me. Her eyes look like lamps blaring
up just before the oil is gone. “ She wants you to
go out,” the girl says.
** Now, Ad^e,” Anse says, “ when he come all
way from Jefferson to git you well?” She
watches me : I can feel her eyes. It’s like she was
shoring at me with them. 1 have seen it before m
PEABODY 41
women. Seen them drive from the room them com-
ing with sympathy and pity, with actual help, and
clinging to some trifling animal to whom they never
were mortf than pack-horses. That’s what they
mean by the love that passeth understanding : that*
pi>ide, that furious desire to hide that abject naked-
ness which we bring here with us, carry with us
into operating rooms, carry stubbornly and furi-
ously with us into 'the earth again. I leave the
room. Beyond the porch Cash’s saw snores
steadily into the board.^ A ^jimute later she calls
his name, her voice harsh and strong.
“ Cash,” she says ; “ you, Cash ! ”
DARL
P A stands beside the bed. Ffom behind his
leg Vardaman peers, with his round head and
his eyes round and his mouth beginning to
open. She looks at pa ; all her failing life appears
to drain into her eyes, urgent. Irremediable. “ It’s
Jewel she wants,” Dewey Dell says.
“ Why, Addie,” f«..says,/‘ him and Dari went to
make one more load. They thought there was
time. That you would wait for them, and that
three dollars and all . . .” He stoops, laying his
hand on hers. For a while yet she looks at him,
without reproach, without anything at all, as if
her eyes alone are listening to the irrevocable
cessation of his voice. Then she raises herself, •
who has not moved in ten days. Dewey Dell
leans down, trying to press her back.
“ Ma,” she says ; “ ma.” •
She is looking out the window, at Cash stooping
steadily at the board in the failing light, labouring
on toward darkness and into it as though the
stroking of the saw illumined its own motion, board
and saw engendered.
“ You, Cash,” she shouts, her voice harsh, strong, md unimpaired. ** You, Cash ! ”
Jle looks up at the gaunt face framed by the
windoy ia the twilight. It is a composite picture
of ail time since he was a child. He ^ops the saw
4 »
D A KL 43
and lifts the board for her to see, watching the
window in which the face has not moved. He drags
a second ^lank into position and slants the two of
them into their final juxtaposition, gesturing to-
ward the ones yet on the ground, shaping with his
^mpty hand in pantomime the finished box. For a
while still she looks down at him from the com-
posite picture, neither with censure nor approbation.
Then the face* disappears.
She lies back and turns her head without so much
as glanch'g at pa. She loqkl^ at Vardaman ; her
eyes, the life in them, rushing suddenly upon
them ; the two flames glare up for a steady instant.
Then they go out as though someone had leaned
down and Wown upon them.
** Ma,” Dewey Dell says ; " ma 1 ” Leaning
above the bed, her hands lifted a little, the fan still
moving like it has for ten days, she begins to keen.
Her voice is strong, young, tremulous and clear,
rapt with its own timbre and volume, the fan still
moving steadily up and down, whispering the use-
less air. Then ^she flings herself across Addie
Bundren’s knees, clutching her, shaking her with the
furious strength of the young before sprawling
suddenly across the handful of rotten bones that
Addie Bundreif left, jarring the whole bed into a
chattering sibilance of mattress shucks, her arms
outflung and the fan in one hand still beating wid^
expiring breath into the quilt.
JFrom behind pa’s leg Vardaman pedlrs^ hit mouth* full open and all colour draining from his fac& into
44 AS I LAY DYING
his mouth, as though he has by some means fleshed
his own teeth in himself, sucking. He begins to
move slowly backward from the bed^ Kis eyes
round, his pale face fading into the dusk like a piece
of paper pasted on a failing wall, and so out of the
door.
Pa leans above the bed in the twilight, his humped silhouette partaking of that owl-Jike quality of awry- feathered, disgrunded outrage withifi which lurks a wisdom too profound or too inert for even thought.
“ Dum them boyS^’ he ‘says.
Jewelj I say. Overhead the day drives Hevel and grey^ hiding the sun by a flight of g^ey spears. In the rain the mules smoke a little, splashed yellow with mud, the off one clinging in sliding lunges to the side of the road above the ^itch. The tilted lumber gleams dull yellow, water-soaked and heavy as lead, tilted at a steep angle into the ditch above the broken wheel ; about the shattered spokes and about JeweTs ankles a runnel of yellow neither water nor earth swirls, curving with the yellow road neither of earth nor water, down the hill dissolving into a streaming mass oftdark^'ff-een neither of earth nor sky. Jewel, I say.
Cash comes to the door, carrying the saw. Pa
stands beside the bed, humped, his arms dangling.
He turns his head, his shabby profile, his chin
collapsing slowly as he works the snu£F against his
^ums.
*5 She’s gone,” Cash says.
Sh at him. “ How nieh are vou done ? ” oa
D A K Li 45
says. Cash does not answer. He enters, carrying
the saw. “ I reckon you better get at it,” pa says.
** You’ll have to do the best you can, with them
boys gontf oflF that-a-way.” Cash looks down at
her face. He is not listening to pa at all. He doe#
not approach the bed. He stops in the ^ddle of
the floor, the saw against his leg, his sweating arms
powdered lightly with sawdust, his face composed.
** If you get in, a tight, maybe some of them’ll get
here to-morrow and help you,” pa says. “ Vernon
could.” Cash is not listempg. He is looking
down at; her peaceful, rigioface fading into the
dusk as though darkness were a precursor of the
ultimate earth, until at last the face seems to float
detached upon it, lightly as the reflection of a dead
leaf. “ There is Christians enough to help you,”
pa says. Cash is not listening. After a while he
turns without looking at pa and leaves the room.
Then the saw begins to snore again. “ They will
help us in our sorrow,” pa says.
The sound of the saw is steady, competent, un-
hurried, stirring the dying light so that at each
stroke her face sedms to wake a little into an expres-
sion of listening and of waiting, as though she were
counting the strokes. Pa looks down at the face,
at the black spaawl of Dewey Dell’s hair, the out-
flung arms, the clutched fan now motionless on the
fading quilt. ** I reckon you better get supper on,^
he says.
Dewey ^Dell does not move.
*** Git up, now, and put supper on," pa ,say8.
46 AS I LAY DYING
** We got to keep our strength up. I reckon Doctor
Peabody’s right hungry, coming all this way. And
Cash’ll need to eat quick and get back to work so he
can finish it in time.”
Dew^y Dell rises, heaving to her feet. She looks
do^a at, the face. It is like a casting of fading
yjionze upon the pillow, the hands alone still with
any semblance of life : a curled, gnarled inertness ;
a spent yet alert quality froili which weariness,
exhaustion, travail has not yet departed, as though
they doubted even yefcthe actuality of rest, guarding
with homed and penurious alertness the /ressation
which they know cannot last.
Dewey Dell stoops and slides the quilt from be-
neath them and draws it up over them to the chin,
smoothing it down, drawing it smooth. Then
without looking at pa she goes around the bed and
leaves the room.
She will go out where Peabody is, where she can stand in the twilight and look at his hack with such an expression that, feeling her eyes and turning, he will say : I would not let it grieve me, now. She was old, and sick. too. Suffer- ing more than we knew. She couldn’t have got well. Vardaman’s getting big now, and with you to take good care of them all. I would try not to let it grieve me. I expect you’d better go and get some iupper ready. It don’t lutve to be much. But they’ll need to eat, and she hoking at him, saying You could do so much for me if you Just would. If you just kstew. lam I and you are you andfl kptw it and you don’t know it and ymt coM do so, much for me if you just would and if you just would
DAKL
47
then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me and Dari.
Pa stands over the bed, dangle-armed, humped,
motionless!*. He raises his hand to his head, scour-
ing his hair, listening to the saw. He comes nearef
^d rubs his hand, palm and back, on his thigh and
lays it on her face and then on the hump of quilt
where her hands are. He touches the quilt as he
saw Dewey Dell do* trying to smoothe it up to the
chin, but disarranging it instead. He tries to
smoothe it again, clumsily, hand awkward as a
claw, smoothing at the wrinfies which he made and
which continue to emerge beneath his hand with
perverse ubiquity, so that at last he desists, his hand
falling to his side and stroking itself again, palm
and back, on his thigh. The sound of the saw
snores steadily into the room. Pa* breathes with a
quiet, rasping sound, mouthing the snuff against
his gums. “ God’s will be done,” he says.
“ Now I can get them teeth.”
Jewers hat droops limp about his neck, channelling
water on to the soahd tow-sack tied about his shoulders
as, ankle-deep in the running ditch, he pries with a slipping
two-by-four, with a piece of rotting log for fulcrum, at the
axle. Jewel, I say, she is dead. Jewel. Addie Bundren
is dead.
VARDAMAN
T II ^HEN I begin to run. I run toward the II luck and come to the edge of the porch and
JL stop. Then I begin to cry. I can feel where
the fish was in the dust. It is cut up into pieces of
not-fish now, not-blood on my‘hands and overalls.
Then it wasn’t so. It hadn’t happened then. And
now she is getting sA^jfar ahead I cannot catch her.
The trees look like chickens when they ruffle out into the cool dust on the hot days. If I jump off the porch I will be where the fish was, and it all cut up into not-fish now. I can hear the bed and her face and them and I can feel the floor shake when he
I
walks on it that came and did it. That came and did it when she was all right but he came and did it.
“ The fat son of a bitch.”
I jump from the porch, running. The top of the
bam comes swooping up out of the twilight. If I
jump I can go through it like thf pink lady in the
circus, into the warm smelling, without having to
wait. My hands grab at the bushes ; beneath my
feet the rocks and dirt go mbbling down.
Then I can breathe again, in the' warm smelling*.
I enter the stall, trying to touch him, and then I can
tty then I vomit the crying. As soon as he gets
tjirough kicking I can and then I can cry, the crying
can.
**He Jtut ner. He kilt her.”
48
VARDAMAN
49
The life in him runs under the skin, under my
hand, running through the splotches, smelling up
into my nose where the sickness is beginning to cry,
vomiting t\ie crying, and then I can breathe,
vomiting it. It makes a lot of noise. 1 can smell
thi life running up from under my hands* up my
arms, and then I can leave the stall.
I cannot find it. In the dark, along the dust, the
walls I cannot find il. The crying makes a lot of
noise. I wish it wouldn’t make so much noise.
Then I find ’t in the wagon-sjj'Sd, in the dust, and I
run across the lot and into the road, the stick
jouncing on my shoulder.
They watch me as I run up, beginning to jerk
back, their eyes rolling, snorting, jerking back on
the hitch rein. I strike. I can hear the stick strik-
ing ; I can see it hitting their heads, the breast-
yoke, missing altogether sometimes as they rear and
plunge, but 1 am glad.
“ You kilt my maw ! ”
The stick breaks, they rearing and snorting, their feet popping^ lou<^ on the ground ; loud because it is going to rain and the air is empty for the rain. But it is still long enough. I run this way and that as they rear and jerk at the hitch-rein, striking.
“ You kilt het 1 ”
I strike at them, striking, they wheeling in a long
lunge, the buggy wheeling on to two wheels ancJ'
motionless like it is nailed to the groimd and
ho];ses motionless like they are nailed tsy tlf: hind
feet to the centre of a whirling-plate.
50
AS I LAY DYING
I luh in the dust. 1 cannot see, running in the
suckings dust where the buggy vanishes tilted on two
wheels. I strike, the stick hitting into the-ground,
bouncing, striking into the dust and thed into the air
again and the dust sucking on down the road faster
than if i^car was in it. And then I can cry, looking
at the stick. It is broken down to my hand, not
longer than stove wood that was a long stick. I
throw it away and I can cry. *It does not make so
much noise now.
The cow is standing in .the barn door, chewing.
When she sees me come into the lot she»lows, her
mouth full of flopping green, her tongue flopping.
“ I ain’t a-goin’ to milk you. I ain’t a-goin’ to do nothing for them.”
I hear her turn when I pass. When I turn she
is just behind me with her sweet, hot, hard breath.
“ Didn’t I tell you I wouldn’t ? ”
She nudges me, snuffing. She moans deep in-
side, her mouth closed. I jerk my hand, cursing
her like Jewel does.
“ Git, now.”
I stoop my hand to the ground and run at her.
She jumps back and whirls away and stops, watching
me. She moans. She goes on to the path and
stands there, looking up the path.
It is dark in the bam, warm, smelling, silent. 1 *can cry quietly, watching the top of the hill.
^Cash comes to the hill, limping where he fell off
of thqchviuch. He looks down at the spring, then
up /he road and back toward the bam. He comes
VARDAMAN 51
down the path stifHy and looks at the broken hitch-
rein and at the dust in the road and then up the
road, where the dust is gone.
“ I hope they’ve got clean past Tull’s by now. I so hope hit.”
<^ash turns and limps up the path.
*‘Durn him. I showed him. Durn him.”
I am not crying now. I am not anything.
Dewey Dell conjes to the hill and calls me. “ Var-
daman.” I am not anything. I am quiet. “ You,
Vardaman ” I can cry quiet now, feeling and
hearing njy tears
“ Then hit want. Hit hadn’t happened then.
Hit was a-layin’ right there on the ground. And
now she’s gittin ready to cook hit.”
It is dark. 1 can hear wood, silence : I know them. But not living sounds, not eVen him. It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of com- ponents — snuffings and stampings ; smells of cool- ing flesh and ammoniac hair ; an illusion of a co- ordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is. I see him dissolve — legs, a rolling eye, a gaudy splotching like cold flames — and float upon the dark in fading solution ; all one yet neither ; all either yet none. I can see hearing coil toward him, caressing, shaping his hard shap% — ^fetlock, hip, shoulder and head ; smell and souiid.
I am not afraid.
‘*Gx)ked and et. G>oked and et.’'
DEWEY DELL
H e could do so much for me if he just would.
He could do everything for me. It’s like
everything in the world for me is inside a
tub full of guts, so that you wonder how there can
be any room in it for anything else very important.
He is a big tub of guts and I am a little tub of guts
and if there is not aijy room for anything else impor-
tant in a big tub of guts, how can it be jroom in a
little tub of guts. But I know it is there because
God gave women a sign when something has hap-
pened bad.
It’s because I am alone. If I could just feel it, it
would be different, because I would not be alone.
But if I were not alone, everybody would know it.
And he could do so much for me, and then I would
not be alone. Then I could be all right alone.
I would let him come in between me and Lafe, like
Dari came in between me and Lafe, and so Lafe is
alone too. He is Lafe and I am Dewey Dell, and
when mother died I had to go beyond and outside
of me and Lafe and Dari to grieve because he could
do so much for me and he don’t kt ow it. He don’t
even know it.
From the back porch I cannot see the bam.
Then the sound of Cash’s sawing comes in from that
way. .i It isijlike a dog outside the house,, going back
an4 forth around the house to whatever door you
12
DEWEY DELL 53
come to, waiting to come in. He said I worry more
than you do and I said You don’t know what worry
is so I can’t ;worry. I try to but I can’t think long
enough to worry.
light the kitchen lamp. The fish, cut into
jagged pieces, bleeds quietly in the pan. I put it
into the cupboard quick, listening into the hall,
hearing. It took he^; ten days to die ; maybe she
don’t know it i^ yet. Maybe she won’t go until
Cash* Or maybe until Jewel. ^ I take the dish of
greens from ihe cupboard an^ the bread-pan from
the cold sfove, and I stop, watching the door.
“ Where’s Vardaman ? ” Cash says. In the lamp his sawdusted arms look like sand.
“ I don’t know. I ain’t seen him.”
“ Peabody’s team run away. See if you can find Vardaman. The horse will let him catch him.”
“ Well. Tell them to come to supper.”
I cannot see the barn. I said, I don’t know how
to worry. I don’t know how to cry. I tried, but
I can’t. After a while the sound of the saw comes
around, coming dairfc along the ground in the dust-
dark. Then I can see him, going up and down
above the plank.
“ You come ii^to supper,” I say. “ Tell him.”
He could do everything for me. And he don’t
know it. He is his guts and I am my guts. And I
am Lafe’s guts. That’s* it. I don’t see why he
didn’t stay in town. We are country j>eopk n< 5 t <
as good as town people. I don’t see why he mdn’t.
Then I can see the top of the bam. The cow
)4 I LAY DYING
stands at the foqt of the path, lowing. When I turn ba^k. Cash is gone.
I carry the buttermilk in. Pa and Cash and he
are at the table.
** Where’s that big fish Bud caught, sister ? ” he says.
I set the milk on the table. “ I never had no
time to cook it.”
“ Plain turnip greens is mighty* spindling eating
for a man my size,” he says. Cash is eating.
About his head the* ^rint of his hat is sweated into
his hair. His shirt is blotched with sweat. He has
not washed his hands and arms.
“ You ought to took time,” pa says. “ Where’s Vardaman ? ”
I go toward the door. “ I can’t find him.”
“ Here, sister,” he says ; “ never mind about the fish. It|ll save, I reckon. Come on and sit down.”
“ I ain’t minding it,” I say. “ I’m going to milk before it sets in to rain.”
Pa helps himself and pushes the dish on. But he
does not begin to eat. His hands a're half-closed
on either side of his plate, his head bowed a little,
his awry hair standing into the lamplight. He
looks like right after the maul hits the steer and
it no longer alive and don’t yel: know that it is
dead.
But Cash is eating, and he is too. “ You better ..ec.t something,” he says. He is looking at pa.
Lild: Gas*h and me. You’ll need it.’*’
“ Ay,”.pa says. He rouses up, like a steer that’s
DEVTEY DELL 55
been kneeling in a pond and you run at it. “ She would not begrudge me it.”
When. I am out of sight of the house, I go fast.
The cow lows at the foot of the bluff. She nuzzles
at me, snuffing, blowing her breath in a sweet, hot
bhlst, through my dress, against my hot nakedness,
moaning. “ You got to wait a little while. Then
I’ll tend to you.” She follows me into the barn
where I set the .bucket down. She breathes into
the bucket, moaning. “ I told you. You just got
to wait, now. I got more to do than I can tend to.”
The barn is dark When I p'kss, he kicks the wall
a single blow. I go on. The broken plank is like a
pale plank standing on end. Then I can see the
slope, feel the air moving on my face again, slow,
pale, with lesser dark and with empty seeing, the
pine clumps blotched up the tilted slope, secret and
waiting.
The cow in silhouette against the door nuzzles at the silhouette of the bucket, moaning.
Then I pass the stall. I have almost passed it.
I listen to it saying for a long time before it can say
the word and the listening part is afraid that there
may not be time to say it. I feel my body, my bones
and flesh beginning to part and open upon the alone,
and the process ol^oming unalone
Lafe. “ Lafe ” Lafe. Lafe. I lean a little for-
ward, one foot advanced with dead walking.
feel the darkness rushing past my breast, past thp
cow ; I begin to rush upon the darknes;; b^.t the‘
cow stops me and the darkness rushes on upon i^he
56 AS I LAY DYING
sweet blast of her moaning breath, filled with wood and with silence.
“Vaidaman. You, Vardaman.”
He comes out of the stall. “ You durn little sneak ! You dum litde sneak ! ”
He does not resist ; the last of rushing darkness
flees whisding away. “ What ? I ain’t done
nothing.”
“ You durn litde sneak I ” lyly hands shake
him, hard. Maybe I couldn’t stop them. I didn’t
know they could shake so hard. They shake both
of us, shaking.
“ I never done it,” he says. “ I never touched them.”
My hands stop shaking him, but I still hold him.
“ What are you doing here ? Why didn’t you
answer when L called you ? ”
“ I ain’t doing nothing.”
“ You go on to the house and get your supper.”
He draws back. I hold him. “ You quit now. You leave me be.”
“ What were you doing down here ?. You didn’t come down here to sneak after me ? ”
“ I never. I never. You quit, now. I didn’t even know you was down here. You leave me be.”
I hold him, leaning down to see his face, feel it
with my eyes. He is about to cry. “ ^ on,
.now. I done put supper on and I’ll be there soon
as I milk. You better go on before he eats evety-
^ifiing^up. «I hope that team runs clean back to
Jc%rson.”
57
DEWBY DELL
He kilt her, he says. He begins to cry.
Hush.
3he never hurt him and he come and kilt her.
“ Hush.*** He struggles. I hold him. “ Hush.**
“ He Idlt her.** The cow comes up behind us, mdaning. I shake him again.
“ You stop it, now. Right this minute. You*re
fixing to make yourself sick and then you can’t go to
town. You go, on ’to the house and eat your
supper.**
“ I don’t want no supper. T don’t want to go to town.”
“ We’ll leave you here, then. Lessen you be-
have, we will leave you. Go on, now, before that
old green-eating tub of guts eats everything up from
you.” He goes on, disappearing slowly into the
hill. The crest, the trees, the roof of the house
stand against the sky. The cow nuzzles at me,
moaning. “ You’ll just have to wait. What you
got in you ain’t nothing to what I got in me, even
if you are a woman too.” She follows me, moan-
ing. Then the dead, hot, pale air breathes on my
face again. He could fix it all right, if he just would.
And he don’t even know it. He could do every-
thing for me if he just knowed it. The cow breathes
upon my hips and back, her breath warm, sweet,
stertorous, moaning. The sky lies flat down the
slope, upon the secret clumps. Beyond the hil^
sheet-lightning stains upward and fades. The de^d
air, shapes .the dead earth in the dead.da^ness,
further away than seeing shapes the dead earth. It
E
jS AS I LAY DYING
lies dead and warm upon me, touching me naked
through my clothes. I said You don’t know what
worry'is. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know
whether I am worrying or not. Whether I can or
not. I don’t know whether I can cry or not. I
don’t kpow whether I have tried to or not. I feel
like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
YARD AMAN
W HEN they get it finished they are going
to put her in it and then for a Ictfig time
I couldn’t say it. I saw the dark stand
up and go whirling away and I said “ Are you going
to nail her up «i it * Cash ? Cash ? Cash ? ” I
got shut up in the crib the new door it was too heavy
for me i* went shut I couldn’t Toreathe because the
rat was bitathing up all the air. I said “ Are you
going to nail it shut, Cash ? Nail it ? Na// it ? ”
Pa walks around. His shadow walks around,
over Cash going up and down above the saw, at the
bleeding plank.
Dewey Dell said we will get some bananas. The
train is behind the glass, red on the track. When it
runs the track shines on and off. Pa said flour
and sugar and coflee costs so much. Because 1
am a country boy because boys in town. Bicycles.
Why do flout and^sugar and coffee cost so much
when he is a country boy. “ Wouldn’t you ruther
have some bananas instead ? ” Bananas are gone,
eaten. Gone. When it runs on the track shines
again. “Why ain’t I a town boy, "pa?” I said
God made me. I did not said to God to made me
in the country. If He can make the train, why can’t*^
He make them all in the town because flour and,
sugar and cofliee. ** Wouldn’t you Athe^ have
bananas ? ”
J9
6o
AS I LAY DYING
He walks around. His shadow walks around.
It was not her. I was there, looking. I saw.
I thought it was her, but it was not. It was not my
mother. She went away when the otJier one laid
down in her bed and drew the quilt up. She went
away. Did she go as far as town ? ” “ She went
farther than town,” “Did all those rabbits and
possums go farther than towp ? ” God made the
rabbits and possums. He made 'the train. Why
must He make a different place for them to go if she
is just like the rabbi^.
Pa walks around. His shadow does. ‘ The saw sounds like it is asleep.
And so if Cash nails the box up, she is not a rab-
bit. And so if she is not a rabbit I couldn’t breathe
in the crib and Cash is going to nail it up. And so
if she lets him it is not her. I know. I was there.
I saw when it did not be her. I saw. They think
it is and Cash is going to nail it up.
It was not her because it was. laying right yonder
in the dirt. And now it’s all chopped up. I
chopped it up. It’s laying in the kitchen in the
bleeding pan, waiting to be cooked and et. Then it
wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t.
And to-morrow it will be cooked md et and she will
be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and there
won’t be anything in the box and so she can breathe.
It was laying right yonder on the ground. I can
iigct Vernon. He was there and he seen it, and with
both of Us 'it will be and then it will not be.
TULL
I T was nigh to midnight and it had set in to tain
when he woke us. It had been a misdoubtfiil
night, with the storm making ; a night*when a
fellow looks for most anything to happen before he
can get the stock fed and himself to the house an
supper et and in bed with the rain starting, and when
Peabody’s team come up, lathered, with the broke
harness dragging and the neck-yoke betwixt the off
critter’s fegs, Cora says “ It’s Addie Bundren.
She’s gone at last.”
“ Peabody mought have been to ere a one of a
dozen houses hereabouts,” I says. “ Besides,
how do you know it’s Peabody’s team ? ”
“ Well, ain’t it ? ” she says. “ You hitch up, now.”
“ What for ? ” I says. “ If she is gone, we can’t
do nothing till morning. And it fixing to storm
too.”
“ It’s my duty,’' she says. “ You put the team in.
But I wouldn’t do it. “ P stands to reason they’d
send for us if tjiey needed us. You don’t even
know she’s gone yet.”
“ Why, don’t you know that’s Peabody’s team ^
Do you claim it ain’t ? Well, then.” But I
wouldn’t go. When folks wants a fel^w, i^’s b
to*wait till they sends for him, I’ve foubd. “ It’s
6i
6z
AS I LAY DYING
my Quistian duty/* Cora says. Will you stand between me and my Christian duty ?
You can stay tWe all day to-morrow, if you want, I says.
So when Cora waked me it had set in to rain.
Even while I was going to the door with the lamp
and it shining on the glass so he could see I am
coming, it kept on knocking. Not loud, but steady,
like he might have gone to sleep, thumping, but I
never noticed how low down on the door the
knocking was till I opened it and never seen noth-
ing. I held the lamp up, with the rain sparkling
across it and Cora back in the hall saying “ Who
is it, Vernon ? ** but I couldn*t see nobody a-tall at
first until I looked down and around the door,
lowering the lamp.
He looked like a drowned puppy, in them over-
alls, without no hat, splashed up to his knees where
he had walked them four miles in the mud. “ Well,
I’ll be durned,” I says.
“ Who is it, Vernon ? ’* Cota says.
He looked at me, his eyes round and black in the
middle like when you throw a light in a owl’s face.
“ You mind that ere fish,” he says.
“ Come in the house,” I says. “ What is it ? Is your maw ”
“ Vernon,” Cora says.
He stood kind of around behind the door, in the
dark. The rain was blowing on to the lamp, hissing
*bn it SID I ^ scared every minute it’ll break. “ Xou
wa^ there,” he says. “You seen it.” •
TULL 65
Then Cora come to the door. “ You come
right in outen the rain,” she says, pulling him in and
him watching me. He looked just like a drowned
puppy. “ t told you,” Cora says. “ I told you it
was a-happening. You go and hitch.”
^ But he ain’t said ** I says.
He looked at me, dripping on to the floor.
“ He’s a-ruining the rug,” Cora says. “ You go
get the team wMe I*take him to the kitchen.”
But he hung back, dripping, watching me with
them eyes. “ You was there. You seen it laying
there. Cash is fixing to na*l her up, and it was
a-laying right there on the ground. You seen it.
You seen the mark in the dirt. The rain never come
up till after I was a-coming here. So we can get
back in time.”
I be durn if it didn’t give me the creeps, even
when I didn’t know yet. But Cora did. “ You get
that team quick as you can,” she says. “ He’s
outen his head with grief and worry.”
I be dum if it didn’t give me the creeps. Now
and then a fellow gets to thinking. About all the
sorrow and afflictions in this world ; how it’s
liable to strike anywhere, like lightning. I reckon
it does take a powerful trust in the Lord to guard
a fellow, though* sometimes I think that Cora’s a
mite over-cautious, like she was trying to crowd the
other folks away and get in closer than anybody
else. But then, when something like this happens^
I ijickon she is right and you got to Keep ^er it
and 1 reckon I am blessed in having a wife diat
64 AS I LAY DYING
ever strives for sanctity and well-doing like she says 1 am.
Now and then a fellow gets to thinking *about it.
Not often, though. Which is a good thing. For
the Lord aimed for him to do and not to spend too
much tjme thinking, because his brain it’s like a
piece of machinery : it won’t stand a whole lot of
racking. It’s best when it all runs along the same,
doing the day’s work and not"no S'ne part used no
more than needful. I have said and I say again,
that’s ever living thfiig the matter with Dari : he
just thinks by hims^f too much. G]fica’s right
when she says all he needs is a wife to straighten
him out. And when I think about that, I think
that if nothing but being married will help a man,
he’s durn nigh hopeless. But I reckon G>ra’s right
when she says the reason the Lord had to create
women is because man don’t know his own good
when he sees it.
When I come back to the house with the team,
they was in the kitchen. She was dressed on top
of her nightgown with a shawl ,over her head and
her umbrella and her Bible wrapped up in the oil-
cloth, and him sitting on a up-turned bucket on
the stove-zinc where she had put him, dripping on
to the floor. “ I can’t get nothing buten him except
about a fish,” she says. ** It’s a judgment on them.
1 see the hand of the Lord upon this boy for Anse
^indren’s judgment and warning.”
“ Tlfe taSSx never come up till after •!, left,” .he saya. I had done left. I was on the way. And
TULL 65
so it was there in the dust. You seen it. Gish is fixing to nail her, but you seen it.”
When we got there it was raining hard, and him
sitting on the seat between us, wrapped up in Gera’s
shawl. He hadn’t said nothing else, just sitting
there with Cotz holding the umbrella o^er him.
Now and then Cora would stop singing long enough
to say “ It’s a judgment on Anse Bundren. May it
show him the path oY sin he is a-trodding.” Then
she would sing again, and him sitting there between
us, leaning forward a li
go fast enough to suit him.
It was laying right yonder,” he says, “ but the
rain come up after I taken and left. So I can go
and open the windows, because Cash ain’t nailed
her yet.”
It was long a-past midnight when we drove the
last nail, and almost dust-dawn when I got back
home and taken the team out and got back in bed,
with Cora’s nightcap laying on the other pillow.
And be durned if even then it wasn’t like I could
still hear Cora siijging and feel that boy leaning
forward between us like he was ahead of the mules,
and still see Cash going up and down with that saw,
and Anse standing there like a scarecrow, like he
was a steer standing knee-deep in a pond and some-
body come by and set the pond up on edge and he
ain’t missed it yet.
It was nigh toward daybreak when we drove t/jig
last nail and toted it into the house, wHere She was
laying on the bed with the window open and the
66
AS I LAY DYING
rain blowing on her again. Twice he did it, and
him so dead for sleep that Cora says his face looked
like one of these here Christmas masts that had done
been buried a while and then dug up, tintil at last
* they put her into it and nailed it down so he couldn’t
open the window on her no more. And the next
morning they found him in his shirt-tail laying
asleep on the floor like a felled steer, and the top
of the box bored clean full of holes* and Cash’s new
auger broke off in the last one. When they taken
the lid off they found that .two of them had bored
on into her face.
If it’s a judgment, it ain’t right. Because the
Lord’s got more to do than that. He’s bound to
have. Because the only burden Anse Bundren’s
ever had is hiijiself. And when folks talks him
low, I think to myself he ain’t that less of a man or
he couldn’t a bore himself this long.
It ain’t right. I be durn if it is. Because He
said Suffer little children to come unto Me don’t
make it right, neither. Cora said, “ I have bore
you what the Lord God sent me. I faced it with-
out fear nor terror because my &th was strong in
the Lord, a-bolstering and sustaining me. If you
have no son, it’s because the Lord has decreed
otherwise in His wisdom. And my life is and has
ever been a open book to ere a man or woman
dmong His creatures because I trust in my God and'
nay reward.”
I reckon She’s right. I reckon if there’s ere;, a
man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all
TULL 67
over to and go away with I^s mind at rest, it would
be Cota. And I reckon aie would make a few
changes^ no matter how He was tunning it. And
I reckon they would be for man’s good. Least-
ways, we would have to like them. Leastways,
wl might as well go on and make like we did.
DARL
T ime lantem sits on a stump. Rusted,
jgrease-fouled, its cracked chimney smeared
on one side with a soaring smudge of soot,
it sheds a feeble and sultry glare upon the trestles
and the boards and the adjacent e;uth. Upon the
dark ground the chips look like random smears of
soft pale paint on a biack cwvas. The boards look
like long smooth tatters torn from the. flat dark-
ness and turned backside out.
Cash labours about the trestles, moving back and
forth, lifting and placing the planks with long clat-
tering reverberations in the dead air as though he
were lifting and dropping them at the bottom of an
invisible well, the sounds ceasing without depart-
ing, as 'if any movement might dislodge diem
from the immediate air in reverberant repetition.
He saws again, his elbow flashing slowly, a thin
thread of fire running along the edge of the saw,
lost and recovered at the top and bottom of each
stroke in unbroken elongation, so that the saw
appears to be six feet long, into and out of pa’s
shabby and aimless silhouette. Give me that
plank,” Cash says. ** No ; the other one.” He
puts the saw down and comes and picks up the
l^ank he wants, sweeping pa away with the long
swinging g^eam of the balanced board.
The air smells like sulphur. Upon the impal-
68
D A RL 69
pable plane of it their shadows form as upon a wall,
as though like sound they had not gone very far
away in* falling but had merely congealed for a
moment, immediate and musing. Cash works on,
h^f turned into the feeble light, 6ne thigh and one
pole-thin arm braced, his face sloped into the light
with a rapt, dynamic immobility above his tireless
elbow. Below the^sky sheet-lightning slumbers
lightly ; against* it the trees, motionless, are ruffled
out to the last twig, swollen, increased as though
quick with 5'ouog.
It begins to rain. The fLrst harsh, sparse, swift
drops rush through the leaves and across the ground
in a long sigh, as though of relief from intolerable
suspense. They are big as buckshot, warm as
though fired from a gun ; they sweep across the
lantern in a vicious hissing. Pa lifts his face, slack-
mouthed, the wet black rim of snuff plastered close
along the base of his gums ; from behind his slack-
faced astonishment he muses as though from
beyond time, upon the ultimate outrage. Cash
looks once af the sky, then at the lantern. The saw
has not faltered, the running gleam of its pistoning
edge unbroken. “ Get something to cover the
lantern,” he says.
Pa goes to the house. The rain rushes suddenly
down, without thunder, without warning of At\j[
sort ; he is swept on to the porch upon the edge
of it and in an instant Cash is wet to the ski^. Yet
the motion of the saw has not faltered, as though it
and the arm ftinctioned in a tranquil conviction 'hat
m AS I LAY DYING
I3uti vifus an illusion of the mind. Then he puts
down the saw and goes and crouches above the
lantern^ shielding it with his body, his back shaped
lean and scrawny by his wet shirt as* though he
bad been abruptly turned wrong-side out, shirt
and all.*
Pa returns. He is wearing Jewel’s raincoat and
catrying Dewey Delias. Squatting over the lan-
tern, Cash reaches back and pi(^s up four sticks and
drives them into the, earth and takes Dewey Dell’s
raincoat from pa and spreads it over the sticks,
forming a roof above tie lantern. Pa watches him.
“ I don’t know what you’ll do,” he says. “ Dari taken his coat with him.”
“ Get wet,” Cash says. He takes up the saw
again ; again it amoves up and down, in and out of
that unhurried imperviousness as a piston moves in
the oil ; soaked, scrawny, tireless, with the lean
light body of a boy or an old man. Pa watches
him, blinking, his face streaming ; again he looks
up at the sky with that expression of dumb and
brooding outrage and yet of vindication, as though
he had expected no less ; now and then he stirs,
moves, gaunt and streaming, picking up a board or
a tool and then laying it down. Vernon Tull is
there now, and Cash is wearing Mrs. Tull’s raincoat
and he and Vernon are hunting the saw. After a
while they find it in pa’s hand.
“ Why don’t you go on to the house, out of the
rain ? Ga^ says. Pa looks at him, his fare
streaming slowly. It is as though upon a face
DARL 71
catved by a savage caricaturist a monstrous bur-
lesque of all bereavement flowed. “You go on
in,” Cash says. “ Me and Vernon can finish it.”
Pa looks* at them. The sleeves of Jewel’s coat
are too short for him. Upon his face the rain ‘
streams, slow as cold glycerine. “ I don’t begrudge
her the wetting,” he says. He moves again and
falls to shifting the planks, picking them up, laying
them down again direfully, as though they are
glass. He goes to the lantern and pulls at the
propped f ^Licoat until he knocks it down and Cash
comes and fixes it back.
“ You get on to the house,” Cash says. He leads
pa to the house and returns with the raincoat and
folds it and places it beneath the shelter where the
lantern sits. Vernon has not stopped. He looks
up, still sawing.
“You ought to done that at first,” he says.
“ You knowed it was fixing to rain.”
“ It’s his fever,” Cash says. He looks at the board.
“ Ay,” Vernon ^ays. “ He’d a come, anyway.”
Cash squints at the board. On the long flank of it the rain crashes steadily, myriad, fluctuant.
“ I’m going to bevel it,” he says.
“ It’ll take mofe time,” Vernon says. Cash sets
the plank on edge ; a moment longer Vernon
watches him, then he hands him the plane.
Vernon holds the board steady while Cash bevel*^ thg edge of-it with the tedious and minifte c&e of a jeweller. Mrs. Tull comes to the edge of the po“ch
71 AS I LAY DYING
and odls Vemon. "'How near aie you done?” sbe says.
Vemon does not look up. “ Not long.. Some, yet.”
She watches Cash stooping at the plank, the tur-
gid sayage gleam of the lantern slicking on the
raincoat as he moves. You go down and get
some planks off the barn and Gnish it and come
in out of the rain,' she says. ** You*ll both catch
your death.” Vernon does not move. “ Vemon,**
she says.
*" We won*t be long^** he says. We*ll be done
after a spell.** Mrs. Tull watches them a while.
Then she re-enters the house.
** If we get in a tight, we could take some of
them planks,*’ , Vemon says. “ 1*11 help you put
them back.”
Cash ceases the plane and squints along the
plank, wiping it with his palm. “ Give me the
next one,” he says.
Some time toward dawn the rain ceases. But it
is not yet day when Cash drives the last nail and
stands stiffly up and looks down at the finished
coffin, the others watching him. In the lantern-
light his face is calm, musing ; slowly he strokes his
hands on his raincoated thighs ixi a gesture delib-
erate, final and composed. Then the four of them
‘ — Cash and pa and Vemon and Peabody — ^raise the
:ofiin to their shoulders and turn toward the house.
[t is li'ghf , vet they move slowly ; empty, yet they capy it carefully; lifeless, yet they move with
DAKL
75
hushed ptecautionaty words to one another, speak-
ing^f it as though, complete, it now slumbered
lightly alive, waiting to come awake. On the dark
floor their feet clump awkwardly, as though for a
lod|5 time they have not walked on floors.
They set it down by the bed. Peabody says
quietly ; “ Let*s eat a snack. It’s almost daylight.
Where’s Cash ”
He has returned to* the trestles, stooped again in
the lantern’s feeble glare as he gathers up his tools
and wipe« them on a cloth carefully and puts them
into the box with its leather sling to go over the
shoulder. Then he takes up box, lantern and rain-
coat and returns to the house, mounting the steps
into faint silhouette against the paling east.
In a strange room you must empty yourself for
sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what
are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you
are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you
never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t
know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because
he does not know that he does not know whether
he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep
because he is not what he is and he is what he is not.
Beyond the unlamped wall I can heat the rain shap-
ing the wagon thsft is ours, the load that is no longer
theirs that felled and sawed it not yet theirs that
bought it and which is not ours either, lie on ou?
wagon though it does, since only the wind and thc^
rain shape it only to Jewel and me, th^t fte not
asfeep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wmd
V
F
74 AS I LAY DYING
ate waSf it is not. Yet the wagon iSy because when
the wagon is wasy Addie Bundten will not be. And
Jewel JSy so Addie Bundren must be. And then I
must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a
strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet,
I am if.
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
CASH
MADE it on the bevel.
1. There is more surface for the nails to grip.
2. There is twice the gripping-surface to each seam.
3. The water will have to seep into it on a
slant. Water moves e<»siest up and down
o^ siriiglit across.
4. In ‘a house people a e upright two-thirds
of the time. So the seams and joints are
made up-ard-down. Because the stress is
up-and-down.
5. In a bed where people lie down all the
time, the joints and seams are made side-
ways, because the stress is sideways.
6. Except.
7. A body is not square like a cross-tie.
8. Animal magnetism.
9. The animal^ magnetism of a dead body
makes the stress come slanting, so the
seams and joints of a cofHn are made on
the bevel.
10. You can s%e by an old grave that the earth sinks down on the bevel.
11. While in a natural hole it sinks by the centre, the stress being up-and-down.
12. So 1 made it on the bevel.
13. It makes a neater job.
7J
V ARDAMAN
Y mothei is a fish.
TULL
I T was ten o’clock when I got back, with Pea-
body’s team hitched on to the back of the
wagon. They had already dragged the buck-
board back from where Quick found it upside
down straddle of tha ditch about a mile from the
spring. It was pulled out of the road at the spring,
and about a dozen wagons was already there. It
was Quick found it. He said the river was up
and still rising. He said ic had already covered
the highest water-mark on the bridge-piling he
had ever seen. That bridge won’t stand a
whole lot of water,” I said. “ Has somebody
told Anse about it ? ”
“ I told him,” Quick said. “ He says he reckons
them boys has heard and unloaded and are on the
way back by now. He says they can load up and
get across.”
He better go on and bury her at New Hope,”
Armstid said. “ That bridge is old. I wouldn’t
monkey with it.”
“His mind is set on taking her to Jefferson,” Quick said.
“ Then he better get at it soon as he can,” Armstid said.
Anse meets us at the door. He has shaved, but
not good. . There is a long cut on his ja»r, ana*
h^ is wearing his Sunday pants and a wMte shirt
77
78 AS I LAY DYING
with the neckband buttoned. It is drawn smooth
over his hump, making it look bigger than ever,
like a ij^hite shirt will, and his face is different too.
He looks folks in the eye now, dignified, his face
tragic and composed, shaking us by the hand as
we wa^jc up on to the porch and scrape our shoes,
a litde stiff in our Sunday clothes, our Sunday
clothes rustling, not looking full at him as he
meets us.
** The Lord giveth,” we say.
The Lord givetlti.”
That boy is not theije. Peabody told about how
he come into the kitchen, hollering, swarming
and clawing at Qira when he found her cooking
that fish, and how Dewey Dell taken him down
to the barn. “ My team all right ? ” Peabody
says.
“ All right,” I tell him. “ I give them a bait
this motning. Your buggy seems all right too.
It ain’t hurt.”
“ And no fault of somebody*s,” he says. “ Fd
give a nickel to know where that boy was when
that team broke away.”
** If it’s broke anywhere. I’ll fix it,” I say.
The women folks go on into the house. We
can hear them, talking and fanning. The fans go
whish, whish, whish and them talking, the talking
bounding kind of like bees murmuring in a water-
bucket. The men stop on the porch, talking some,
not lobkipg at one another.
** Howdy, Vernon,” they say. “ Howdy, Tull.”
79
TULL
“ Looks like more fain.”
** It does for a fact.”
** Yes,* sir. It will rain some more.”
“It come up quick.”
“ And going away slow. It don't fail.”
^ go around to the back. Cash is filling, up the
holes he bored in the top of it. He is trimming
out plugs for them, one at a time, the wood wet
and hard to work. ' He could cut up a tin can
and hide the holes and nobodv wouldn't know the
difference. Wouldn't mind, anyway. I have seen
him spend a hour trimming out a wedge like it
was glass he was working, when he could have
reached around and picked up a dozen sticks and
drove them into the joint and made it do.
When we finished I go back to the front. The
men have gone a litde piece from the house,
sitting on the ends of the boards and on the
saw-horses where we made it last night, some
sitting and some squatting. Whitfield ain’t come
yet.
They look up sit me, their eyes asking.
“ It’s about,” I say. “ He's ready to nail.”
While they are getting up Anse comes to the
door and looks at us and we return to the porch.
We scrape our %hoes again, careful, waiting for
one another to go in first, milling a litde at the
door. Anse stands inside the door, dignified,
composed. He waves us in and leads the way
i^o the room.
They had laid her in it reversed. Cash made it
8o
AS I LAY DYING
dock-shape, like this with evety joint
and seam bevelled* and scrubbed with
the plane, tight as a drum and neat as a sewing
basket, and they had laid her in it head to foot so
it wouldn’t crush her dress. It was her wedding
dress and it had a flare-out bottom, and they had
laid her head to foot in it so the dress could
spread out, and they had made her a veil out of
a mosquito bar so the auger holes in her face
wouldn’t show. ,
When we are going out, Whitfield comes. He is
wet and muddy to tl^e waist, coming in. “ The
Lord comfort this house,” he says. “ I was late
because the bridge has gone. I went down to the
old ford and swum my horse over, the Lord
protecting me. His grace be upon this house.”
We go back to the trestles and plank-ends and sit or squat.
“ I knowed it would go,” Armstid says.
“ It’s been there a long time^ that ere bridge,” Quick says.
“ The Lord has kept it there, you mean,” Uncle
Billy says. “ I don’t know ere a man that’s touched
hammer to it in twenty-five years.”
“ How long has it been there. Uncle Billy ? ” Quick says.
“It was built in . . . let me see ... It was
in the year 1888,” Uncle Billy says. “I mind it
j^ecause the first man to cross it was Peabody
coming to *my house when Jody was bom.”
“ If I’d .a crossed it every time your wife littered
TULL Si
since, it*d a been wore out long before this, Billy,” Peabody says.
We laugh, suddenly loud, then suddenly quiet again. We^look a litde aside at one another.
Lots of folks has crossed it that won't cross no more bridges,” Houston says.
** It's a fact,” Litdejohn says. “ It's so.”
“ One more ain't, no ways,” Armstid says.
“It'd taken them t^o-three days to got her to
town in the wagon. They'd be gone a week,
getting hot to Jefferson and back.”
“ What*s Anse so itching to take her to Jefferson for, anyway ? ” Houston sajs.
“ He promised her,” I say. “ She wanted it. She come from there. Her mind was set on it.”
“ And Anse is set on it, too,” Quick says.
“ Ay,” Uncle Billy says. “ It's like a man that's
let everything slide all his life to get set on some-
thing that will make the most trouble for every-
body he knows.”
“ Well, it'll take the Lord to get her over that liver now,” • Peabody says. “ Anse can't do it.”
“ And I reckon He will,” Quick says. “ He's took care of Anse a long time, now.”
“ It's a fact,” Littlejohn says.
** Too long to quit now,” Armstid says.
“ I reckon He's like everybody else around here,”
Uncle Billy says. “ He’s done it so long now He
can't quit.”
Cash comes out. He has put on a*cleaft shirt ; his hair, wet, is combed smooth down on his
82 AS I LAY DYING
brow, smooth and black as if he had painted it on
to his head. He squats stifHy among us, we
watching him.
“ You feeling this weather, ain’t yovf ? ” Armstid says.
Cash says nothing.
“A broke bone always feels it,” Littlejohn
says. “ A fellow with a broke bone can tell it
a-coming.”
“ Lucky Cash got off with just a broke leg,”
Armstid says. “ He might have hurt himself bed-
rid. How far’d you fall. Cash ? ”
“ Twenty-eight fool, four and a half inches, about,” Cash says. I move over beside him.
“A fellow can sho slip quick on wet planks,” Quick says.
“ It’s too bad,” 1 say. “ But you couldn’t a holp it.”
“ It’s them durn women,” he says. “ I made it
to balance with her. I made it to her measure
and weight.”
1/ it takes wet boards for folks to falU if s fitting to be lots of falling before this spell is done.
“ You couldn’t have holp it,” I say.
I don't mind the folks falling. Ifs the cotton and
com I mind.
Neither does Peabody mind the folks falling. How *hout it. Doc?
Ifs a fact. Washed clean outen the ground it will 'be. Seems Pke something is always happening to if.
’Course tt does. That’s wly ifs worth ar^thing. If
TULL 85
nothing didn’t happen and everybody made a big erop, do you rechon it would be worth the raising?
Well^ I be dum if I like to see my work washed outen the grcmdy work I sweat over.
It’s a fact. A fellow wouldn’t mind seeing it washed < up" if he could just turn on the rain himself.
Who is that man can do that ? Where is tie colour of his eyes ?
Ay. The Lor^ made it to g^ow. It’s Ilisn to wash up if He sees it fitten so.
“You couldn’t have holp it,” T say.
“ It’b them duin women,” he says.
In the house the womc^i begin to sing. We
hear the first line commence, beginning to swell
as they take hold, and we rise and move toward
the door, taking off our hats and throwing our
chews away. We do not go in. We stop at the
steps, clumped, holding our hats between our lax
hands in front or behind, standing with one foot
advanced and our heads lowered, looking aside,
down at our hats in our hands and at the earth
or now and. then at the sky and at one another’s
grave, composed face.
The song ends ; the voices quaver away with a
rich and dying fall. Whitfield begins. His voice
is bigger than him. It’s like they are not the
same. It’s like he is one, and his voice is one,
swimming on two horses side by side across the
ford and coming into the house, the mud-splashed
one and the one that never even got wet| triumphanf
and sad. Somebody in the house begins to cry.
84 AS I LAY DYING
It sounds like her eyes and her voice were turned
back inside her, listening; we move, shifting to
the oth^r leg, meeting one another’s eye and making
like they hadn’t touched.
Whitfield stops at last. The women sing again.
In the thick air it’s like their voices come out of
the air, flowing together and on in the sad, com-
forting tunes. When they cease it’s like they
hadn’t gone away. It’s like they had just dis-
appeared into the air and when we moved we
would loose them again out of the air around us,
sad and comforting. Then they finish and we
put on our hats, our m\.>vements stiff, like we hadn’t
never wore hats before.
On the way home Cora is still singing. “ I am
boimding toward my God and my reward,” she
sings, sitting on the wagon, the shawl around her
shoulders and the umbrella open over her, though
it is not raining.
“ She has hem,” I say. “ ^^erever she went,
she has her reward in being free of Anse Bundren.”
Sbe laid there three days in that box, waiting for Dari
and Jewel to come clean hack home and get a new wheel
and go back to where the wagon was in the ditch. Take
my team y, Anse y I said,
We*ll wait for oumy he said, She*ll want it so. She was ever a particular woman.
" On the third day they got bark and they loaded
her into the wagon and started and it already too
'*late, You*l^ have to go all the way round ^ Samson's
bridff, iVll take you a day to get there. Then
TULL 85
be forty miles from Jefferson. Take my teamy
Anse.
We*ll WMt for ourn. She'll want it ^0.
It was ab&ut a mile from the house we saw him,
sitting on the edge of the slough. It hadn’t had
a fish in it never that I knowed. He looked«around
at us, his eyes round and calm, his face dirty, the
pole across his knees. Gjra was still singing.
“ This ain’t no good day to fish,” I said. “ You
come on home with us and me and you’ll go down
to the river first thing ‘in the morning and catch
some rishr’
“ It’s one in here,” he safe. '* Dewey Dell seen it.”
“ You come on with us. The river’s the best place.”
“ It’s in here,” he said. “ Dewey Dell seen it.”
“ I’m boimding toward my God and my reward,” Cora sung.
DARL
“ T*S not your horse that’s dead. Jewel,” I I say. He sits erect on the seat, leaning a litde
JULforward, wooden-backed. The brim of his
hat has soaked free of the crown in two places,
drooping across his wooden face so that, head
lowered, he looks through it like through the visor
of a helmet, looking 4ong across the valley to where
the bam leans against the bluff, shaping the invisible
horse. ** See then ? *1 I say. High above the
house, against the qurck thick sky, they hang in
narrowing circles. From here they are no more
than specks, implacable, patient, portentous. “ But
it’s not your Itorse that’s dead.”
“ Goddamn you,” he says. “ Goddamn you.”
I cannot love my mother because I have no
mother. Jewel’s mother is a horse.
Motionless, the tall buzzards hang in soaring
circles, the clouds giving them an illusion of
retrograde.
Motionless, wooden-backed, wooden-faced, he
shapes the horse in a rigid stoop like a hawk,
hook-winged. They are waiting for us, ready for
the moving of it, waiting for hM. He enters the
stall and waits until it kicks at him so that he can
^p past and mount on to the trough and pause,
peering out across the intervening stall-tops toward
the empty 'path, before he reaches into the loF
** Goddamn him. Goddamn him.”
86
CASH
“ TTT won’t balance. If you want it to tote and
F ride on a balance, we will have ”
Jl “ Pick up. Goddamn you, pick u^.”
I’m telling you it won’t tote and it won’t tide
on a balance unless ”
“ Pick up ! pick up, goddamn your thick-nosed soul to hell, pick up ! ”
It won’t balance If’they want it to tote and ride on a balance, they wi^y have
«7
DARL
H e stoops among us above it, two of the
eight hands. In his face the blood goes
in waves. In between them his flesh
is greenish looking, about that smooth, thick,
pale green of cow’s cud ; his, face suflbcated,
furious, his lip lifted«upon his teeth. “ Pick up ! ”
he says. “ Pick up, goddamn your thick-nosed
soul ! ”
He heaves, lifting ine whole side so suddenly
that we all spring into the lift to catch and balance
it before he hurls it completely over. For an
instant it resists, as though volitional, as though
within it her pole-thin body clings furiously, even
though dead, to a sort of modesty, as she would
have tried to conceal a soiled garment that she could
not prevent her body soiling. .Then it breaks
free, rising suddenly as though the emaciation of
her body had added buoyancy ^to the planks or as
though, seeing that the garment was about to be
tom from her, she rushes suddenly after it in a
passionate reversal that flouts its own desire and
need. Jewel’s face goes completely green and I
can hear teeth in his breath.
We carry it down the hall, our feet harsh and
clumsy on the floor, moving with shuffling steps,
and tlfrop^ the door.
** Steady it a minute, now,” pa says, letting gu.
88
D AKL, 89
He turns back to shut and lock the door, but Jewel will not wait.
“ Come on,” he says in that suffocating voice. “ Come on.’*'
We lower it carefully down the steps. We move,
balancing it as though it were something infinitely
precious, our faces averted, breathing through our
teeth to keep our nostrils closed. We go down
the path, toward, the slope.
“ We better wait,” Cash sfiys. “ I tell you it
ain’t balanced now. Wje’ll need another hand on
that hill.”-
“Then turn loose,” Jevfcl sajs. He will not
stop. Cash begins to fall behind, hobbling to
keep up, breathing harshly ; then he is distanced
and Jewel carries the entire front* end alone, so
that, tilting as the path begins to slant, it begins
to rush away from me and slip down the air like
a sled upon invisible snow, smoothly evacuating
atmosphere in which the sense of it is still shaped.
“ Wait, Jewel,” I say. But he will not wait.
He is almost running now and Cash is left behind.
It seems to me that the end which I now carry
alone has no weight, as though it coasts like a
rushing straw upon the furious tide of Jewel’s
despair. I am not even touching it when, turning,
he lets it overshoot him, swinging, and stops it
and sloughs it into the wagon-bed in the sanfe
motion and looks back at me, his face suffused
with fury and despair.
“ Goddamn you. Goddamn you.”
VARDAMAN
W E are going to town. Dewey Dell
says it won’t be sold because it belongs
to Santa Claus and he has taken it
back with him until next Christmas. Then it will
be behind the glass again^ shining with waiting.
Pa and Cash are^ coming down the hill, but
Jewel is going to the barn. “ Jewel,” pa says.
Jewel does not stop. “ ^here you going ? ” pa
says. But Jewel does^pot stop. “You leave that
horse here,” pa says. Jewel stops and looks at
pa. Jewel’s eyes look like marbles. “ You leave
that horse her^,” pa says. “ We’ll all go in the
wagon with ma, like she wanted.”
But my mother is a fish. Vernon seen it. He was there.'
“ Jewel’s mother is a horse,” Dari said.
“ Then mine can be a fish, can’t it, Dari ? ” I said.
Jewel is my brother.
“ Then mine will have to be a horse, too,” I said.
** Why ? ” Dari said. “ If pa,. is your pa, why
does your ma have to be a horse just because
Jewel’s is ? ”
“ Why does it ? ” I said. “ Why does it, Dari ? ” Dark is ijiy brother.
** Then* what is your ma, Dari ? ” I said.
90
VARDAMAN 91
“ I haven't got ere one,” Dari said. “ Because
if I had one, it is was. And if it .is was, it can't
be is. Gan it?”
“ No,” I ^aid.
“^hen I am not,” Dari said. “ Am I ? ”
“ No,” I said.
I am. Dari is my brother.
“ But you arcy Dari,” I said.
“ I know it,”. Dari said. “ That’s why I am not is. Are is too many for one woman to foal.”
Cash is carrying his tool-box. Pa looks at him.
“ I’ll stop* at Tull’s on the way back,” Cash says.
“ Get on that barn roof.”
“ It ain’t respectful,” pa says. “ It’s a deliberate flouting of her and of me.”
“Do you want him to come all the way back
here and carry them up to Tull’s afoot ? ” Dari
says. Pa looks at Dari, his mouth chewing. Pa
shaves every day now because my mother is a fish.
“ It ain’t right,” pa says.
Dewey Dell has the package in her hand. She has the basket wit|;i our dinner too.
“ What’s that ? ” pa says.
“ Mrs. Tull's cakes,” Dewey Dell says, getting
into the wagon. “ I’m taking them to town for
her.”
“It ain’t right,” pa says. “It’s a flouting of the dead.”
It’ll be there. It’ll be there come Christmas,
^he says, shining on the track. She sa^s^ hfi won’t
sell it to no town boys.
DARL
H e goes on toward the bam, entering the lot, wooden-backed.
Dewey Dell carries the basket on one
arm, in the other hand something wrapped square
in a newspaper. Her face is calm and sullen, her
eyes brooding and lilert ; within them I can see
Peabody’s back like two round peas in two thimbles :
perhaps in Peabody’s back tu^o of those worms
which work surreptitious and steady through you
and out the other side and you waking suddenly
from sleep or from waking, with on your face an
expression sudden, intent, and concerned. She sets
the basket into the wagon and climbs in, her leg
coming long from beneath her tightening dress :
that lever which moves the world ; one of that
caliper which measures the length and breadth of
life. She sits on the seat beside Vardaman and
sets the parcel on her lap.
Then he enters the bam. He has not looked back.
“ It ain’t right,” pa says. “ It’s little enough for him to do for her.”
“ Go on,” Cash says. “ Leave him stay if he
wants. He’ll be all right here. Maybe he’ll go
up to Tull’s and stay.”
HS’U, ditch us,” I say. He’ll cut across and meet us at Tull’s lane.”
9 *
DARL
93
“ He would have rid that horse, too,” pa says,
“ if I hadn’t a stopped him. A dum spotted critter
wilder than a cattymount. A deliberate flouting
of her and of me.”
The wagon moves; the mules’ ears begin to
bob.' Behind us, above the house, motionless in
tall and soaring circles, they diminish and disappear.
ANSE
I TOLD him not to bring that horse out of
reject for his dead ma, because it wouldn’t
look right, him prancing along on a durn
circus animal and her wanting us all to be in the
wagon with her that sprung fro/n her flesh and
blood, but we hadnjt no more than passed Tull’s
lane when Dari begun 1,0 laugh. Setting back
there on the plank seat with Cash, with his dead
ma lying in her coffin pt his feet, laughing. How
many times I told him it’s doing such things as
that that makes folks talk about him, I don’t know.
I says I got some regard for what folks says about
my flesh and blood even if you haven’t, even if I
have raised such a durn passel of boys, and when
you fixes it so folks can say such about you, it’s a
reflection on your ma, I says, not me : I am a man
and I can stand it ; it’s on your womenfolks, your
ma and sister that you should care for, and I turned
and looked back at him setting there, laughing.
“ I don’t expect you to have no respect for me,”
I says. “ But with your own ma not cold in her
coffin yet.”
“ Yonder,” Cash says, jerking his head toward
the lane. The horse is still a right smart piece
away, coming up at a good pace, but I don’t have
to be ti»ld who it is. I just looked back at Dari
setting there^ laughing.
94
ANSE 95
I done my best,” I says. “ I tried to do as
she would wish it. The Lord will pardon me
and excuse the conduct of them He sent me.”
And Dari sotting on the plank seat right above her
wh^re she was laying, laughing.
DARL
H e comes up the lane fast, yet we are
three hundred yards beyond the mouth
of it when he turns into the road, the
mud flying beneath the flickering drive of the
hooves. Then he slows a little^ light and erect
in the saddle, the hofse mincing through the mud.
Tull is in his lot. He looks at us, lifts his hand.
We go on, the wagon creaking, the mud w’hispering
on the wheels. Veriy)n still stands there. He
watches Jewel as he passes, the horse moving with
a light, high-kneed driving gait, three hundred
yards back. We go on, with a motion so soporific,
so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress, as
though time and not space were decreasing between
us and it. '
It turns off at right angles, the wheel-marks of
last Sunday healed away now ; a smooth, red
scoriation curving away into the pines ; a white
signboard with faded lettering : Sjew Hope Church.
3 mi. It wheels up like a motionless hand lifted
above the profound desolation of the ocean ;
beyond it the red road lies like a spoke of which
Addie Bundren is the rim. It wheels past, empty,
ufiscarred, the white signboard turns away its
fading and tranquil assertion. Cash looks up the
*road qndetly, his head turning as we pass.it like
an owl’s* head, his face composed. Pa looks
96
0 A K L
stiiaight ahead, humped. Dewey Dell looks at the
road too, then she looks back at me, her eyes
watchful and repudiant, not like that question
which was dn those of Cash, for a smouldering
whUe. The signboard passes ; the unscarred road
wheels on. Then Dewey Dell turns he^ head.
The wagon creaks on.
Cash spits over the wheel. V In a couple of days now it’ll be smqjling,” he says.
“ You might tell Jewel that,” 1 say.
He is niouonless nov> sitting the horse at the
junction, \ipright, watching us, no less still than
the signboard that lifts ’ts fading capitulation
opposite him.
“ It ain’t balanced right for no long ride,” Cash says.
“ Tell him that, too,” I say. The wagon creaks on.
A mile farther along he passes us, the horse,
arch-necked, reined back to a swift single-foot.
He sits lightly, poised, upright, wooden-faced in
the saddle, the broken hat raked at a swaggering
angle. He passes us swiftly, without looking at
us, the horse driving, its hooves hissing in the
mud. A gout of mud, back-flung, plops on to
the box. Cash leans forward and takes a tool
from his box and removes it carefully. When the
road crosses Whiteleaf, the willows leaning nefr
enough, he breaks off a branch and scours at the
stain with the wet leaves.
ANSE
I T*S a hard country on man ; it*s hard. Eight
mi^es of the sweat of his body washed up
outen the Lord’s earth, where the Lord Him-
self told him to ptut it. Nowhere in this sinful
world can a honest, hard-worl^ing man profit.
It takes them that runs the stores in the towns,
doing no sweating, living .off of them that sweats.
It ain’t the hard-working man, the farmer. Some-
times I wonder why ye keep at it. It’s because
there is a reward for us above, where they can’t
take their motors and such. Every man will be
equal there and it will be taken from them that
have and give to them that have not by the Lord.
But it’s a long wait, seems like. It’s bad that a
fellow muk earn the reward of his right-doing by
flouting hisself and his dead. We drove all the
rest of the day and got to Samson’s at dust-dark
and then that bridge was gone, too. . They hadn’t
never seen the river so high, and it’s not done
raining yet. There was old men that hadn’t never
seen nor heard of it being so in the memory of
man. I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He
loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn
if- He don’t take some curious ways to show it,
seems like.
But iiowtl can get them teeth. That will be a comfort. ‘Ijt will.
98
SAMSON
I T was just before sundown. We were sitting
on the porch when the wagon camejup the
road with the five of them in it and the other
one on the horse behind, ^ne of them raised
his hand, but tjjiey was goir/g on past the store
without stopping.
“ Whc’b tiiat ? ” MacCallum says ; I can*t think of his nahie : Rafe’s twin ; that one it was.
“ It’s Bundren, from do'v^n beyond New Hope,”
Quick says. “ There’s one of them Snopes horses
Jewel’s riding.”
“ I didn’t know there was ere a one of them horses
left,” MacCallum says. “I thought you folks
down there finally contrived to give them all away.”
“ Try and get that one,” Quick says. The wagon went on.
“ I bet old man Lon never gave it to him,” I says.
“No,” Quick says. “He bought it from
pappy.” The wagon went on. “ They must not
a heard about the bridge,” he says.
“ What’re they doing up here, anyway ? ” Mac- Callum says.
“ Taking a holiday since he got his wife burielB,
I reckon,” Quick says. “Heading for town, I
reckon, with Tull’s bridge gone too. f winder if'
they ain’t heard about the bridge.”
99
lOO
AS I LAY DYING
** Th^*ll have to fly, then,” I says. “ I don’t
teckon thete’s ere a bndge between here and
Mouth of Ishatawa.”
They had something in the wagon.c But Quick
had been to the funeral three days ago and we
natura^y never thought anything about it except
that they were heading away from home mighty
late and that theyVadn’t heard about the bridge.
“ You better holle\[ at them,” ,MacCallum says.
Dum it, the name ishright on the tip of my tongue.
So Quick hollered and they stopped and he went
to the wagon and told them.
He come back with, them. “ They’re going to
Jefferson,” he says. “ The bridge at Tull’s is
gone, too.” Like we didn’t know it, and his face
looked funny, ^around the nostrils, but they just
sat there, Bundren and the girl and the chap on
the seat, md Cash and the second one, the one
folks talks about, on a plank across the tail>gate,
and the other one on that spotted horse. But I
reckon they was used to it by then because when
I said to ^sh that they’d haye to pass by New
Hope again and what they’d better do, he just
says,
“I reckon we can get there.”
I ain’t miH:h for meddling. Let every man run
his own business to suit himself, I say. But after
I talked to Rachel about them not having a regular
man to fix her and it being July and all, I went
back d&wiPto the barn and tried to talk to Bundren
about it.
lOI
SAMSON
“ I give her my promise,” he says. ** Her mind was set on it.”
I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that
hates moving, to get set on moving once he does
gett,started off, the same as he was set on staying
still, like it ain't the moving he hates so much as
the starting and the stopping. And like he 'would
be kind of proud of whateve/ come up to make
the moving or the setting stiy look hard. He set
there on the wagon, hunched up, blinking, listening
to us tell about how quick the bridge went and
how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn’t
act like he was proud of it> like he had made the
river rise himself.
“You say it’s higher than you ever see it
before ? ” he says. “ God’s will be’done,” he says.
“ I reckon it won’t go down much by morning,
neither,” he says.
“ You better stay here to-night,” I says, “ and
get a early start for New Hope to-morrow morn-
ing.” I was just sorry for them bone-gaunted
mules. I toH Raqhel, I says, “ Well, would you
have had me turn them away at dark, eight miles
from home? What else could I do,” I says.
“ It won’t be but one night, and they’ll keep it in
the barn, and they’ll sholy get started by daylight.”
And so I says, “ You stay here to-night and early
to-morrow you can go back to New Hope. I got
tools enough, and the boys can go on right after
supper and have it dug and ready if di^y^want,”
and then I found that girl watching me. If her
xoz
AS I LAY DYING
eyes had a been pistols, I wouldn’t be talking now. I be dog if they didn’t blaze at me. And so when I went down to the bam I come on them, her talking so she never noticed when *1 come up.
“ You promised her,” she says. “ She wouldn’t
go until you promised. She thought she could
depend on you. If you don’t do it, it will be a
curse on you.”
“ Can’t no man lay i don’t aim to keep my
word,” Bundren says. ** My heart is open to ere
a man.”
**I don’t care what your heart is,”* she says. She was whispering, kind of, talking fast. “ You
promised her. You’ve got to. You ” Then
she seen me and quit, standing there. If they’d
been pistols, I ^Ji^ouldn’t be talking now. So when
I talked to him about it, he says,
“I give her my promise. Her mind is set on it.”
** But seems to me she’d rather have her ma buried close by, so she could ”
“It’s Addie I give the prcynise to,” he says. “ Her mind is set on it.”
So I told them to drive it into the barn because
it was threatening rain again, and that supper was
about readyi^ Only they didn’t ^ant to come in.
“ I thank you,” Bundren says. “ We wouldn’t
discommode you. We got a litde something in
the basket. We can make out.”
“ W&1,”*T says, “ since you are so particular about youf womenfolks, I am too. And when
SAMSON 105
folks stops with us at meal-time and won’t come to the table, my wife takes it as a insult.”
So the girl went on to the kitchen to help Rachel. And then J«wel come to me.
“ Sho,” I says. “ Help yourself outen the loft. Fe^ him when you bait the mules.”
“ I rather pay you for him,” he says.
“What for?” I says. “ I /wouldn’t begrudge no man a bait fgr his horse.#
“ I rather pay you,” he sayJ ; I thought he said extra.
“ Extra'^or whuL ? ” I says. “ Won’t he eat hay and corn ? ”
“ Extra feed,” be says. “ I feed him a little extra and I don’t want him beholden to no man.”
“ You can’t buy no feed from me, boy,” I says.
“ And if he can eat that loft clean. I’ll help you
load the barn on to the wagon in the morning.”
“ He ain’t never been beholden to no man,” he says. “ I rather pay you for it.”
And if I had my rathers, you wouldn’t be here
a-tall, I wanwd to^ say. But I just says, “ Then
it’s high time he commenced. You can’t buy no
feed from me.”
When Rachel put supper on, her and the girl
went and fixed s«me beds. But wotnjdn’t any of
them come in. “ She’s been dead long enough
to get over that sort of foolishness,” I says. Because
1 got just as much respect for the dead as ere a
man, but you’ve got to uespect the dead IheAselves,
and a woman that’s been dead in a box ^our days.
104 AS I LAY DYING
the best way to respect her is to get her into the
ground as quick as you can. But they wouldn’t
do it.
It wouldn’t be right,” Bundren sayg. Q)urse,
if the boys wants to go to bed, I reckon I can set
up wijh her. I don’t begrudge her it.”
So when I went |3ack down there they were squat- ting on the ground around the wagon, all of them.
Let that chap cot^e to the hoyse and get some
sleep, anyway,” I says. “And you better come
too,” I says to the girl. I wasn’t aiming to inter-
fere with them. And I sholy hadn’t done nothing
to her that I knowedj^
“ He’s done already asleep,” Bundren says.
They had done put him to bed in the trough in
a empty stall.
“ Well, you come on, then,” I says to her. But
still she .never said nothing. They just squatted
there. You couldn’t hardly see them. “ How
about you boys ? ” I says. “ You got a full day
to-morrow.” After a while Cash says,
“ I thank you. We can make out.”
“ We wouldn’t be beholden,” Bundren says. “ I thank you kindly.”
So I left them squatting there. I reckon after four days t\}zy was used to it. But Rachel wasn’t.
“ It’s a outrage,” she says. “ A outrage.”
' “ What could he ’a’ done ? ” I says. “ He give her his promised word.”
“ WVio’d talking about h
SAMSON 105
that you and him and all the men in the world that
torture us alive and flout us dead, dragging us up
and down the country **
“Now, now,” I says. “You’re upset.”
“ Don’t you touch me ! ” she says. “ Don’t you touch me ! ”
A man can’t tell notliing ab^ut them. 1 lived
with the same one fifteen yeaws and I be durn if I
can. And I imagined a lot >f)£ things coming up
between us, but I be dumV I ever thought it
would bt a uody four days dead and that a woman.
But they make liie hard on them not taking it as it
comes up, like a man doe%.
So I laid there, hearing it commence to rain,
thinking about them down there, squatting around
the wagon and the rain on the roof, and thinking
about Rachel crying there until after a while it was
like I could still hear her crying even after she was
asleep, and smelling it even when I knowed I
coul^’t. I couldn’t decide even then whether I
could or not, or if it wasn’t just knowing it was what
it was.
, So next morning I never went down there. I
heard them hitching up and then when I knowed
they must be about ready to take out, I went out
the front and went down the road^toward the
bridge until I heard the wagon come out of the
lot and go back toward New Hope. And then
when I come back to the house, Rachel jumped on
me because I wasn’t there to make them*qpme in to
breakfast. You can’t tell about them. Just about
H
io6 AS I LAY DYING
when you decide they mean one thing, I be dum
if you not only haven’t got to change your mind,
like as not you got to take a raw-hiding for thinking
they meant it.
But it was still like I could smell it. And so I
decided then that it wasn’t smelling it, but it was
just kdowing it was there, like you will get*.fooled
now and then. Bunwhen I went to the bam I knew
different. When I walked into the hallway I saw
something. It kind^of hunkered up when I come
in and I thought at first it was one of them got left,
then I saw what it was. It was a bukzard. It
looked around and saw nie and went on down the
hall, spraddle-legged, with its wings kind of hun-
kered out, watching me first over one shoulder and
then over the other, like a old bald-headed man.
When it got outdoors it begun to fly. It had to
fly a long time before it ever got up into the air,
with it thick and heavy and full of rain like it was.
If they was bent on going to Jefferson, I reckon
they could have gone around up by Mount Vernon,
like MacCallum did. He’ll g^t home about day
after to-morrow, horse-back. Then they’d be just
eighteen miles from town. But maybe this bridge
being gone too has learned him the Lord’s sense and
judgment, f-
That MacCallum. He’s been trading with me off
and on for twelve years. I have known him from a
boy up ; know his name as well as I do my own.
But be^'duliti if I can say
DEWEY DELL
pnr^HE signboard comes in sight. It is look- I ing out at the road now, because it can wait.
JL 'New Hope. 3 mi. it will say. New* Hope.
3 mi. New Hope. 3 mi. And then the road will
begin, curving away into thp trees, empty with
waiting, saving New Hope three miles.
I hear^ that mv mother is dead. I wish I had time to let her die. I wish I had time to wish I had. It is because in the wild a^id outraged earth too soon too soon too soon. It’s not that 1 wouldn’t and will not it’s that it is too soon too soon too soon.
Now it begins to say it. New H*ope three miles. New Hope three miles. Thales what they mean by the womb of time : the agony and the despair of spreading bones y the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entreUls of events. Cash’s head turns slowly as we approach, his pale, empty, sad, composed and questioning face following dieted aiyi empty curve ; beside the back -wheel Jewel sits the horse, gazing straight ahead.
The land runs out of Dari’s eyes ; they swim to
pin-points. They begin at my feet and rise along
my body to my flee, and then my dre^is gone : I
sit naked ori the seat above the unhurrying mule^,
above the travail. Suppose I tell him to turn. He
will do what I say. Don*tyou know he will d^ what I
say? Once I waked with a black void rushing
under me. I could not see. I saw Vardaman rise
107
io 8 AS I LAY D'^ING
and go to the window and strike the knife into the fish, thek blood gushing, hissing like steam but I could not see. He*Il do as I say. He always does. I can persstade him to anything. You y know I can. Suppose 1 say Turn here. That was when I died that time. . Suppose I do. We'll go to New Hope. We won't have to go to i()wn. I rose and took the knife from the streaming feh still hissing and 1 killed Dari.
When I used to sleap with Vardaman I had a night- mare once I thought / was em>ake hut I couldn't see and couldn't feel I couldn't feel the bed under me and I couldn't think what I was I couldn't think of my name I couldn't even think I ^ girl I couldn't even think I nor even think I want to wake up nor remember what was opposite to awake so I could do that I knew that something was passing hut I couldn't even think of time then all of a sudden I knew that something was it was wind blowing over me it was like the wind came and blew me back from where it was I was not blowing ihe room and Vardaman asleep and all of them back under me again and going on like a piece of cool silk dragging across my naked legs.
It blows cool out of the pmes, a sad steady
sound. New Hope. Was 3 mi. Was 3 mi. I
believe in God I believe in God.
“ Why dj'ln’t we go to New Hope, pa ? ” Varda-
man says. '** Mr. Samson said we was, but we done
passed the road.”
Dari says, “ Look, Jewel.” But he is not looking
at me.‘ jfe is looking atothe sky. The buzzard
is as still as if he were nailed to it.
DEWnEY DELL 109
We turn into Tull*s lane. We pass the bam and
go on, the wheels whispeting in the mud, passing
the green rows of cotton in the wild earth, and
Vernon little across the field behind the plough.
Hjg lifts his hand as we pass and stands there look-
ing after us for a long while.
“ Look, Jewel,” Dari says. - Jewel sits *on his
horse like they were both made out of wood, looking
straight ahead.
I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.
TULL
A fter they passed I taken the mule out and
„ looped up the trace chains and followed.
^They were^etting in the wagon at the end
of the levee. Anse was setting there, looking at the
bridge where it wasVswagged do^n into the river
with just the two ends in sight. He was looking at
it like he had believed all the time that folks had
been lying to him about it being gone, but like he
was hoping all the tiipe it really was. Kind of
pleased astonishment he looked, setting on the
wagon in his Sunday pants, mumbling his mouth.
Looking like a uncurried horse dressed up ; I
don’t know.
The boy was watching the bridge where it was
midsunk and logs and such drifted up over it and
it swagging and shivering like the whole thing
would go any minute, big-eyed he was watching
it, like he was to a circus. And the gal, too. When
I come up she looked around at me, her eyes
kind of blaring up and going hard like 1 had made
to touch her Then she looked at Anse again and
then back ^ the water again.
It was nigh up to the levee on both sides, the
edrth hid except for the tongue of it we was on
going out to the bridge and then down into the
water, liid ixcept for knowing how the road and the
bridge used to look, a fellow couldn’t tell where
no
Ill
TUL(L
was th^ river and where the land. It was just a
tangle of yellow and the levee not less wider than a
knife-back kind of, with us setting in the wagon and
on the horse and the mule.
Dari was looking at me, and then Cash turned
and looked at me with that look in his eyes like
when |;ie was figuring on whether the planks* would
fit her that night, like he was measuring them
inside of him ai^d not asking you to say what you
thought and not even letting on he was listening
if you did say it, but, listening all right. Jewel
ha^*t inbved. He sat there on the horse, leaning
a little forward, with that same look on his face
when him and Dari passed the house yesterday,
coming back to get her.
“ If it was just up, we could driv^e across,” Anse says. “ We could drive right on across it.”
Sometimes a log would get shoved over the jam
and float on, rolling and turning, and we could
watch it go on to where the ford used to be. It
would slow up and whirl crossways and hang out
of water for. a minute, and you could tell by that
that the ford used to be there.
“But that don’t show nothing,” I say. “It
could be a bar of quicksand built up there.” We
watch the log. #Then the gal is looking at me
again.
“ Mr. Whitfield crossed it,” she says.
“ He was a horse-back,” I say. “ And three days ago. It’s riz five foot^ since.”
“ If the bridge was just up,” Anse says.
XI2
AS I LAY DYING
The log bobs up and goes on again. 1 liete is a lot of tt^sh and foam, and you can hear the water.
** But it*s down,” Anse says.
Cash says, “ A careful fellow could ^walk across yonder on the planks and logs.”
“ But you couldn’t tote nothing,” I say.
“ Likely time you ^t foot on that mess, it’ll^all go,
too. What you think, Dari ? ”
He is looking at ime. He don’t say nothing ;
just looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that
makes folks talk. I always say it ain’t never been
what he done so much or said or anything' so much
as how he looks at you. It’s like he had got into
the inside of you, someway. Like somehow you
was looking at yourself and your doings outen his
eyes. Then I can feel that gal watching me like 1
had made to touch her. She says something to
Anse. . . Mr, Whitfield . . .” she says.
“ I give her my promised word in the presence
of the Lord,” Anse says. “ I reckon it ain’t no
need to worry.”
But still he does not start the mules. We set
there above the water. Another log bobs up over
the jam and goes on ; we watch it check up and
swing slow for a minute where the ford used to be.
Then it goes on. ,
“ It migbc start falling to-night,” I say. ** You cchild lay over one more day.”
Then Jewel turns sideways on the horse. He
has not*moved until then, jmd he turns and looks
at me. His face is kind of green, then it would go
TC7LX II5
red and Ihen green again. “ Get to hell on back
to your damn ploughing,” he says. “ Who the hell
asked you to follow us here ? ”
“ I never meant no harm,” I say.
‘‘ Shut up. Jewel,” Cash says. Jewel looks back
at £he water, his face gritted, going red and green
and then red. “ Well,” Cash says after a ".while,
what you want to do ? ”
Anse don’t say nothing. He sets humped up,
mumbling his mouth. “ If it was just up, we could
drive across it,” he says.
“ Conlt on,” Jewel says, moving the horse.
“ Wait,” Cash says. He lofks at the bridge.
We look at him, except Aifsc and the gal. They
are looking at the water. “ Dewey Dell and
Vardaman and pa better walk across^on the bridge,”
Cash says.
“ Vernon can help them,” Jewel says. “ And we can hitch his mule ahead of ourn.”
“You ain’t going to take my mule into that water,” I say.
Jewel lookg at me. His eyes look like pieces of a
broken plate. “ i*ll pay for your damn mule.
I’ll buy it from you right now. ’
“ My mule ain’t going into that water,” I say.
“ Jewel’s going to use his horse,” Dari says. “ Why won’t you risk your mule, V^non ? ”
“ Shut up, Dari,” Cash says. “ You and Jewel both.”
“ My mule ain’t going into that wftfeti?’ I say.
DARL
H e sits the hotse, glaring at Vernon, his lean
face suffused up to and beyond the pale
rigidity of his eyes. The summit when
he was fifteen, he took a spell of sleeping. One
morning when I went to feed thf mules the cows
were still in the tie-up and then I heard pa go back
to the house and call him. When we came on back
to the house for breakfast he passed us, carrying the
milk buckets, stumbling along like he was drunk,
and he was milking when we put the mules in and
went on to the field without him. We had been
there an hour ahd still he never showed up. When
Dewey Dell came with our lunch, pa sent her back
to find Jewel. They found him in the tie-up,
sitting on the stool, asleep.
After that, every morning pa would go in and
wake him. He would go to sleep at the supper-
table and soon as supper was fipished* he would go
to bed, and when I came in to bed he would be
lying there like a dead man. Yet still pa would have
to wake him in the morning. He would get up,
but he.wou^’t hardly have half, sense : he would
stand for /a’s jawing and complaining without a
Word and take the milk buckets and go to the bam,
and once I found him asleep at the cow, the bucket
in place* and half-full and hi^ hands up to the wrists
in the milk and his head against the cow’s flank.
114
DAR 115
After lhat De^ey Dell had to do the milking.
He still got up when pa waked him, going about
what we told him to do in that dazed way. It was
like he was tjying hard to do them ; that he was as
pu^ed as anyone else.
“ Are you sick ? ” ma said. “ Don’t you feel all right ? ”
“ Yes,” Jewel said. “ I feel all right.”
“ He’s just lazy, trying me,” pa said, and Jewel
standing there, asleep on his teet like as not.
“ Ain’t ]^i>u } ” he said, .waking Jewel up again to
answer.
“ No,” Jewel said.
“ You take off a-^d slay in the house to-day,” ma said.
“ With that whole bottom piece to be busted
out ? ” pa said. “ If you ain’t sick, what’s the
matter with you ? ”
“ Nothing,” Jewel said. “ I’m all right.”
“ All right ? ” pa said. “ You’re asleep on your feet this minute.”
“ No,” Jewel saM. “ I’m all right.”
“ I want him to stay at home to-day,” ma said.
“ I’ll need him,” pa said. “ It’s tight enough, with all of us to do it.”
“ You’ll just have to do the best you can with
Cash and Dari,” ma said. “ I want h-^i to stay in
to-day.”
But he wouldn’t do it. “ I’m all right,” he said,
going on. But he wasu’ t all right. Anybody could
see it. He was losing flesh, and I havd seen him
ii6 AS I LAY Di^ING
go to sleep chopping ; watched the h6e going
slower slower up and down, with less and less
of an arc, until it stopped and he leaning on it
motionless in the hot shimmer of thf sun.
Ma wanted to get the doctor, but pa didn’t want
to spejid the money without it was needful, and
Jewel* did seem aJl right except for his thinness
and his way of dropping off to sleep at any moment.
He ate hearty enough, except for his way of going
to sleep in his plate, with a piece of bread half-way
to his mouth and his jaws still chewing. But he
swore he was all right.
It was ma that got Dewey Dell to do his milking,
paid her somehow, and the other jobs around the
house that Jewel had been doing before supper she
found some way for Dewey Dell and Vardaman to
do them. And doing them herself when pa wasn’t
there. She would fix him special things to eat and
hide them for him. And that may have been when
I first found it out, that Addie Bundren should be
hiding anything she did, who had tried to teach us
that deceit was such that, in a yorld where it was,
nothing else could be very bad or very important,
not even poverty. And at times when I went in
to go to bed she would be sitting in the dark by
Jewel where he was asleep. And I knew that she
was hating iierself for that deceit and hating Jewel
because she had to love him so that she had to act
the deceit.
One ili^it she was taker sick and when I went to the barn to put the team in and drive to Tull’s, I
DAR< 117
covildn’t'find the lantern. I femembered noticing
it on the nail the night before, but it wasn’t there
now at midnight. So I hitched in the dark and
went on and came back with Mrs. Tull just after
dajrlight. And there the lantern was, hanging on the
nail where I remembered it and couldn’t ^nd it
before. , And then one morning while Dewey Dell
was milking just before sun-up. Jewel came into the
barn from the b^ck, through the hole in the back
wall, with the lantern in his hand.
I told ^j.asn, and Cash and I looked at one another.
“ Rutting,” Cash said.
“ Yes,” I said. “ But why ihc lantern ? And
every night, too. No wonder he’s losing flesh.
Are you going to say anything to him ? ”
“ Won’t do any good,” Cash said.
“ What he’s doing now won’t do any good, either.”
“ I know. But he’ll have to learn that himself.
Give him time to realize that it’ll save, that there’ll
be just as much more to-morrow, and he’ll be all
right. I wouldn’t^tell anybody, I reckon.”
“No,” I said. “I told Dewey Dell not to. Not ma, anyway.”
“ No. Not ma.”
After that I thought it was right romical ; he
acting so bewildered and willing and d^d for sleep
and gaunt as a bean-pole, and thinking he was lo
smart with it. And I wondered who the girl was.
I thought of all I knew that it mighf bl, but I
couldn’t say for sure.
ii8 AS I LAY D^ING
** *Taint any girl,” Cash said. “ It*s a married
woman somewhere. Ain’t any young girl got that
much dating and staying power. That’s what I
don’t like about it.”
“ Why ? ” I said. “ She’ll be safer for him than a girl, would. More judgment.”
He ‘looked at me, his eyes fumbling, th? words
fumbling at what he was trying to say. “ It ain’t
always the safe things in thi? world that a
fellow . . .”
“ You mean, the safe things are not ajways the best things ? ”
“ Ay ; best,” he said, fumbling again. It
ain’t the best things, tihe things that are good for
him. ... A young boy. A fellow kind of hates
to see . . . wallowing in somebody else’s
mire . . .” That’s what he was trying to say.
When something is new and hard and bright, there
ought to be something a little better for it than
just being safe, since the safe things are just the
things that folks have been doing so long they
have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the
doing of them that leaves a man to say. That was
not done before and it cannot be done again.
So we didn’t tell, not even when after a while
he’d appear suddenly in the field ^beside us and go
to work, wiutout having had time to get home and
midce out he had been in bed all night. He would
tell ma that he hadn’t been hungry at break&st or
that he’'hari eaten a piece
hitching up the team. But Cash and I knew that
D AKJ^ 119
he hadn'f been home at all on those nights and he
had come up out of the woods when we got to the
field. But we didn’t teU. Summer was almost
over then ; ijire knew that when the nights began
to giet cool, she would be done if he wasn’t.
But when fall came and the nights began j:o get
longer, ,the only difference wa« that he would
always be in bed for pa to wake him, getting him
up at last in that first state of semi-idiocy like when
it first started, worse than when he had stayed out
all night.^
“ She’s sure a stayer,” I told Cash. “ I used to admire her, but I downright respect her now.”
“ It ain’t a woman,” he said.
“ You know,” I said. But he was watching me. “What is it, then?”
“ That’s what I aim to find out,” he said.
“ You can trail him through the woods all night if you want to,” I said. “ I’m not.”
“ I ain’t trailing him,” he said.
“ What do you call it, then ? ”
“ I ain’t trailing fiim,” he said. “ I don’t mean it that way.”
And so a few nights later I heard Jewel get up
and dimb out the window, and then I heard Cash
get up and follow him. The next morning when I
went to the bam. Cash was already thet'^, the mules
fed, and he was helping Dewey Dell milk. Add
when I saw* him I knew that he knew what it was.
Now and then I woultk catch him watching Jewel
with a queer look, like having found out where
120
AS I LAY DrYING
Jewel went and what he was doing had given him
something to teally think about at last. But it was
not a worried look ; it was the kind of look I
would See on him when I would find him doing
some of Jewel’s work around the house, work that
pa still thought Jewel was doing and that ma
thought Dewey Dell was doing. So I said nothing
to him, believing that when he got done digesting
it in his mind, he would tell me. , But he never did.
One morning — it was November then, five
months since it started — ^Jewel was not ip bed and
he didn’t join us in the field. That was the first
time ma learned anything about what had been
going on. She sent Vardaman down to find
where Jewel was, and after a while she came down
too. It was as though, so long as the deceit ran
along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves
be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through
cowardice, since all people are cowards and natur-
ally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a
bland outside. But now it was like we had all —
and by a kind of telepathic agfeement of admitted
feat — ^fiung the whole thing back like covers on
the bed and we all sitting bolt upright in out
nakedness, staring at one another and saying Now
is the truth. He hasn’t come home. Something
has happened to him. We let something happen to
Ifim.”
Then we saw him. He came up along the ditch
and then Aimed straight aaross the field, riding the
horse. Its* mane and tail were going, as though in
I2I
DARI
motion they were carrying out the splotchy pattern
of its coat : he looked like he was riding on a big
pinwheel, barebacked, with a rope bridle, and no
hat on his ^ead. It was a descendant of those
Te^as ponies Flem Snopes brought here twenty-
five years ago and auctioned off for two dollars a
head and nobody but old Lon Quick ever oaught
his and still owned some of the blood because he
could never give it away.
He galloped up and stopped, his heels in the
horse’s ribs and it dancing and swirling like the
shape of its mane and tail and the splotches of its
coat had nothing whatever to do with the flesh-
and-bone horse in^^ide thcJhi, and he sat there,
looking at us.
“ Where did you get that horse ” pa said.
“ Bought it,” Jewel said. “ From Mr. Quick.”
“ Bought it ? ” pa said. “ With what ? Did you buy that thing on my word ? ”
“ It was my money,” Jewel said. “ I earned it. You won’t need to worry about it.”
“ Jewel,” ma said ; “ Jewel.”
“It’s all right,”* Cash said. “He earned the
money. He cleaned up that forty acres of new
ground Quick laid out last spring. He did it
single-handed, working at night by lantern. I
saw him. So I don’t reckon that hon^ cost any-
body anything except Jewel. I don’t reckon We
need worry.”
“ Jewel,” ma said. “ Jewel ” The»i she said :
“You come right to the house and go*to bed,”
iu AS I LAY DYING
“Not yet,” Jewel said. “I ain’t got time. I
got to get me a saddle and bridle. Mr. Quick
says he ”
“ Jewel,” ma said, looking at him. I’ll give —
FU give — give ” Then she began to cry.
She cried hard, not hiding her face, standing there
in hen faded wrapper, looking at him and him on
the horse, looking down at her, his face growing
cold and a litde sick looking until he looked away
quick and Cash came and touched her.
** You go on to the house,” Cash said.^ “ This
here ground is too wet for you. You go on, now.”
She put her hands to her face then and after a while
she went on, stumblifig a little on the plough-
marks. But pretty soon she straightened up and
went on. She ^dn’t look back. When she
reached the ditch she stopped and called Vardaman.
He was Iqoking at the horse, kind of dancing up
and down by it.
“ Let me ride. Jewel,” he said. “ Let me ride. Jewel.”
Jewel looked at him, then he looked away again,
holding the horse reined back. Pa watched him,
mumbling his lip.
** So you bought a horse,” he said. “ You went
behind my back and bought a horse. You never
consulted tfte ; you know how tight it is for us to
mkke by, yet you bought a horse for me to feed.
Taken the work from your flesh and blood and
bought *a horse with it.”
Jewel looked at pa, his eyes paler than ever.
DAK IZ5
** He ^on’t never eat a mouthful of yours,” he said.
“ Not a mouthful. I’ll kill him first. Don’t you
never think it. Don’t you never.”
“Let me •ride, Jewel,” Vatdaman said. “Let
m^ride. Jewel.” He sounded like a cricket in the
grass, a little one. “ Let me ride, Jewel.” •
Thau night I found ma sittihg beside tKe bed
where he was sleeping, in the dark. She cried
hard, maybe because she had to cry so quiet;
maybe because she felt the same way about tears
she did 'about deceit, hating herself for doing it,
hating him because she had to. And then I knew
that I knew. I knew that plain on that day as I
knew about Dewc) Dell on that day.
TULL
S O they finally got Anse to say what he wanted
to do, and him and the gal and the boy got
6ut of the v^gon. But even when ye were
on the bridge Anse kept on looking back, like he
thought maybe, once he was outon the wagon, the
whole thing would kind of blow up and he would
find himself back yonder in the field again and her
laying up there in the house, waiting to die and it to
do all over again.
“ You ought to let them taken your mule,” he
says, and the brj’dge shaking and swaying under us,
going down into the moiling water like it went
clean through to the other side of the earth, and the
other end -coming up outen the water like it wasnT
the same bridge a-tall and that them that would walk
up outen the water on that side' must come from
the bottom of the earth. But it was still whole ; you
could tell that by the way whep this end swagged,
it didn’t look like the other end swagged at all ;
just like the other trees and the bank yonder were
swinging back and forth slow like on a big clock.
And them logs scraping and bumping at the sunk
p^ and tifting end-up and shooting clean outen
the water and tumbling on toward the ford and
the waiting, slick, whirling, and foamy.
“ What^^ood would thtt V done?” I says. If your team can’t find the ford and haul it across,
124
TULL 125
what got)d would three mules or even ten mules do?”
** I ain’t asking it of you,” he says. “ I can
always do for me and mine. I ain’t asking you to
risl^ your mule. It ain’t your dead ; I am not
blaming you.”
** They ought to went back -ind laid over until
to-morfow,” I says. The water was cold. It was
thick, like slush ice. Only it kind of lived. One
part of you knowed it was just water, the same thing
that had beCii running upder this same bridge for a
long time, yet when them logs would come spewing
up outen it, you were not surprised, like they was
a part of water, of ♦^he waitii4g and the threat.
It was like when we was acros' 5 , up out of the
water again and the hard earth under us, that I was
surprised. It was like we hadn’t expected the
bridge to end on the other bank, on something
tame like the hard earth again that we had tromped
on before this time and knowed well. Like it
couldn’t be me here, because I'd have had bettei
sense than tq done what I just done. And when
I looked back and saw the other bank and saw my
mule standing there where I used to be and knew
that I’d have to get back there some way, I knew it
couldn’t be, because I just couldn’t think of any-
thing that could make me cross that J^ridge ever
even once. Yet here I was, and the fellow that
could make himself cross it twice, couldn’t be me,
not even if Cora told,him to.
It was that boy. I said “Here; j^ou better
126 AS I LAY DYING
take a holt of my hand,** and he waited and held to
me. I be dum if it wasn*t like he come back and
got me ; like he was saying They won*t nothing
hurt you. Like he was saying a^ut a fine place
he ^owed where Christmas come twice with
Thanksgiving and lasts on through the winter and
the sp^g and the summer, and if I just stayed with
him I’d be all right too.
When I looked back at my mule it was like he
was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look
at him standing there and sjpe all the broad land and
my house sweated outen it like it was the more the
sweat, the broader the land ; the more the sweat,
the tighter the house because it would take a tight
house for Cora,/to hold Cora like a jar of milk in
the spring : yoixye got to have a tight jar or you’ll
need a powerful spring, so if you have a big spring,
why then you have the incentive to have tight,
well-made jars, because it is your milk, sour or not,
because you would rather have milk that will sour
than to have milk that won’t, because you are a
man.
And him holding to my hand, his hand that hot
and confident, so that I was like to say : Look-a-
here. Can’t you see that mule yonder ? He never
had no business over here, so he never come, not
being nothj^g but a mule. Because a fellow can
see ever now and then that children have more
sense than him. But he don’t like to admit it
to them vm^il they have bea|;ds. After they have a
beard, they .are too busy because they don’t know
TULL 127
if they*ll%ver quite make it back to where they were
in sense before they was haired, so you don’t mind
admitting then to folks that are worrying about the
same thing tjiat ain’t* worth the worry that you are
yourself.
Then we was over and we stood there, loojdng at
Cash turning the wagon arou'nd. We witched
them drive back down the road to where the trail
turned off into .the bottom. After a while the
wagon was out of sight.
“ We better get on down to the ford and git ready to help,” 1 said.
“ I give her my word,” Anse says. “ It is sacred
on me. I know y- u begrudge it, but she will bless
you in heaven.” '■
“ Well, they got to finish circumventing the land before they can dare the water,” I said. “ Come on.”
“ It’s the turning back,” he said. “ It ain’t no luck in turning back.”
He was standing there, humped, mournful, look-
ing at the empty road beyond the swagging and
swaying bridge, ^nd that gal, too, with the
lunch-basket on one arm and that package under the
other. Just going to town. Bent on it. They,
would risk the fire and the earth and the water and
all just to eat a sack of bananas. “ You ought to
laid over a day,” I said. “ It would ’#1’ fell some
by morning. It mought not ’a’ rained to-ni^t.
And it can’t ^t no higher.”
** I give my promise^” he says. “ Slle is count- ing on it.”
DARL
B efore us the thick dark current runs. It
talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless
and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled
monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the
surface for an instant, silent, i^mpermanent and
profoundly significant, as though just beneath the
surface something huge And alive waked for a
moment of lazy alertness out of and into light
slumber again.
It clucks and murnSurs among the spokes and
about the mules’ knees, yellow, skummed with
flotsman and with thick soiled gouts of foam as
though it had sweat, lathering, like a driven horse.
Through the undergrowth it goes with a plaintive
sound, a musing sound ; in it the unwindcd cane
and saplings lean as before a little gale, swaying
without reflections as though suspended on in-
visible wires from the branches overhead. Above
the ceaseless surface they stancf — trees, cane, vines
— rootless, severed from the earth, spectral above
a scene of immense yet circumscribed desolation
filled with the voice of the waste and mournful
water.
••Cash and 1 sit in the wagon ; Jewel sits the horse
at the off rear-wheel. The horse trembling, its
eye rolhng wild and bab)^blue in its long pink
face, its breathing stertorous like groaning. He
128
DARL 129
sits erect, poised, looking quietly and steadily and
quickly this way and that, his face calm, a little pale,
alert. Cash’s face is also gravely composed ; he
and I look, at one another with long probing
lo(d^s, looks that plunge unimpeded through one
another’s eyes and into the ultimate secret place
where for an instant Cash and Bari crouch flagrant
and unabashed in all the old terror and the old
foreboding, alerl; and secret and without shame.
When we speak our voices are quiet, detached.
“ I reckon we’re still, in the road, all right.”
“ Tull taken and cut them two big whiteoaks.
1 heard tell how at high water in the old days they
used to line up thi' ford by them, trees.”
“ T reckon he did that two yea'^s ago when he
was logging down here. I reckon he never thought
that anybody would ever use this ford again.”
“ I reckon not. Yes, it must have been then.
He cut a sight of timber outen here then. Payed
off that mortgage with it, I hear tell.”
“ Yes. Yes, I reckon so. I reckon Vernon could have done that.”
“ That’s a fact. Most folks that logs in this here
country, they need a durn good farm to support the
sawmill. Or maybe a store. But I reckon Vernon
could.”
“ I reckon so. He’s a sight.”
“Ay. Vernon is. Yes, it must still be hete.
He never wouJfl have got that timber out of here
if he hadn’t cleaned o^t that old road.’* i reckon
we are still on it.” He looks about <|uietly, at
150 AS I LAY DYING
the position of the trees, leaning this way < and that,
loo^g back along the floorless road shaped vaguely
high in air by the position of the lopped and felled
trees, as if the road too had been S9aked free of
earth and floated upward, to leave in its spectral
tracing a monument to a still more profound deso-
lation than this aJbove which we now sit, talking
quietly of old security and old trivial things^^ Jewel
looks at him, then at me, then hjs face turns in in
that quiet, constant, questing about the scene, the
horse trembling quietly and steadily between his
knees.
“ He could go on ahead slow and sort of feel it out,” I say.
“ Yes,” Cash'says, not looking at me. His face
is in profile as he looks forward where Jewel has
moved on ahead.
He can’t miss the river,” T say. “ He couldn’t miss seeing it fifty yards ahead.”
Cash does not look at me, his face in profile.
“ If I’d just suspicioned it, I could ’a’ come down
last week and taken a sight on it.”.
“ The bridge was up then,” i say. He does not look at me. “ Whitfield crossed it a-horse-back.”
Jewel looks at us again, his expression sober and
alert and subdued. His voice is quiet. “ What
you want |ne to do ? ”
I ought to come down last week and taken a
sight on it,” Cash says.
“ We* couldn’t have knf>wn,” I say. “ There wasn’t ady' way for us to know.”
D yi K L 131
“ FU ^de on ahead,” Jewel says. “ You can
follow where I am.” He lifts the horse. It
shrinks, bowed ; he leans to it, speaking to it,
lifting it forward almost bodily, it setting its feet
do'^n with gmgerly splashings, trembling, breathing
harshly. He speaks to it, murmurs to it. “ Go
on,” he says. “ I ain’t going tt let nothing hurt
you. Go on, now.”
“ Jewel,” Cash says. Jewel does not look back. He lifts the horse on.
“ He c^tii swim,” I say. “ If he’ll just give the
horse time, anyhow . . .” When he was born, he
had a bad time of it. Ma would sit in the lamp-
light, holding him on a pillow on her lap. We
would wake and find her so. I'here would be
no sound from them.
That pillow was longer than him,” Cash says.
He is leaning a little forward. “ I ought to come
down last week and sighted. I ought to done it.”
“ That’s right,” I say. “ Neither his feet nor
his head would reach the end of it. You couldn’t
have known,’’ I say.
“ I ought to done^t,” he says. He lifts the reins.
The mules move, into the traces ; the wheels
murmur alive in the water. He looks back and
down at Addie. “ It ain’t on a balance,” he says.
At last the trees open ; against the open river
Jewel sits the horse, half turned, it belly deep now.
Across the rivjt we can see Vernon and pa and
Vardaman and Dewey^Dell. Vernon waving
at us, waving us further downstream.
AS I LAY DYING
132
“ We are too high up/* Cash says. Yemon is
shouting too, but we cannot make out what he
says for the noise of the water. It runs steady and
deep now, unbroken, without sense of motion until
a log comes along, turning slowly. Watch it,**
Cash says. We watch it and see it falter and hang
for a' moment, the current building up behind it
in a thick wave, submerging it for an instadt before
it shoots up and tumbles on.
“ There it is,** I say.
“ Ay,** Cash says. “ It*s there.** We look at
Vernon again. He is now flapping his arms up
and down. We move on downstream, slowly and
carefully, watching Vernon. He drops his hands.
This is the place,** Cash says.
Well, goddamn it, lets get across, then, Jewel sfiys. He moves the horse on.
You. wait,** Cash says. Jewel stops again.
“ Well, by God ** he says. Cash looks at
the water, then he looks back at Addie. “ It ain*t on a balance,** he says.
“ Then go on back to the goddamn bridge and
walk across,** Jewel says. “ 1 ou and Dari both.
Let me on that wagon.**
Cash does not pay him any attention. It ain*t
on a balance,** he says. “ Yes, sir. We got to
watch it.**^
*** Watch it, hell,** Jewel says. “ You get out of that wagon and let me have it. B)> God, if you*re afraid to dcive it over . . .**, His eyes are pale as two bleached chips in his face. Cash is looking at him.
D ARL 133
We*l get it over,” he says. “ I tell you what
you do. You ride on back and walk across
the bridge and come down the other bank and
meet us with the rope. Vernon’ll take your
hoise home with him and keep it till we get
back.”
“ Yoi^ go to hell,” Jewel says.
“ You take the rope and come down the bank
and be ready with it,” Cash says. “ Three can’t do
no more than two can — one to drive and one to
steady it.”
“ Goddamn you,” Jewel says.
Let Jewel take the end of the rope and cross
upstream of us and brace il,” I wy. “ Will you
do that, Jewel ? ”
Jewel watches me, hard. He looks quick at
Cash, then back at me, his eyes alert and hard.
“ I don’t give a damn. Just so we do something.
Setting here, not lifting a goddamn hand . . .”
“ Let’s do that. Cash,” I say.
“ 1 reckon we’ll have to,” Cash says.
The river itself isyiot a hundred yards across, and
pa and Vernon and Vardaman and Dewey Dell
are the only things in sight not of that single mono-
tony of desolation leaning with that terrific quality
a little from right to left, as though we had reached
the place where the motion of the wiipted world
accelerates just before the final precipice. Yet
they appear df^arfed. It is as though the space
between us were time: an irrevocable quality.
It is as though time, no longer running straight
134 AS I LAY DYING
befote us in a diminishing line, now luds parallel
betweeit us like a looping string, the (hstance
being the doubling accretion of the thread and not
the interval between. The mules i stand, their
forequarters already sloped a little, their rumps
high.* They too ate breathing now with a deep
groaning sound ; looking back once, t^eir gaze
sweeps across us with in their eyes a wild, sad,
profound and despairing quality as though they
had already seen in the thick water the shape of
the disaster which they could not speak and we
could not see.
Gish turns back into the wagon He lays his
hands flat on Addie, rbcking her a little. His face
is calm, down-sloped, calculant, concerned. He
lifts his box of tools and wedges it forward under
the seat ; together we shove Addie forward,
wedging” her between the tools and the wagon-bed.
Then he looks at me.
“ No,” I say. “ I reckon I’ll stay. Might take both of us.”
From the tool-box he takes, his coiled rope and
carries the end twice around the seat stanchion and
passes the end to me without tying it. The other
end he pays out to Jewel, who takes a turn about
his saddle-hom.
He must force the horse down into the current,
if moves, high-kneed, arch-necked, boring and
chafing. Jewel sits lightly forward, 'his knees lifted
a litde ;
upon us "and on. He lowers the horse into the
DARL 155
stream, peaking to it in a soothing murmur.
The horse slips, goes under to the saddle, surges
to its feet again, the current building up against
Jewel’s thighs.
“.Watch yourself,” Cash says.
“ I’m on it now,” Jewel says. “ You can come ahead now.”
Cash t!ikes the reins and lowers the team carefully and skilfully into ^ the stream.
I felt the current take us and 1 knew we were on the ford bj that r^asony since it was only by means of that slipping contact that we could tell that we were in motion at all. What had once been a flat surface was now a succession of troughs an 4 hillocks lifting and falling about us, shoving at us, teasing at us with light las(j touches in the vain instants of solidity under- foot. Cash looked back at mCy and then I knew that we were gone. But I did not realise the reason for the rope until I saw the log. It surged up out of the water and stood for an instant upright upon that surging and heaving desolation like Christ. Get out and let the current take yo/t down to the bendy Cash said. You can make it all right.* No, I saidy Vd get fust as wet that way as this.
The log appears suddenly between two hills, as
if it had rocketed suddenly from the bottom of
the river. Upon the end of it a long gcjit of foam
hangs like the beard of an old man or a goat. When
Cash speaks to jile I know that he has been watching
it all the. time, watchyjig it and watching Jewel
ten feet ahead of us. “ Let the rope go,’* he says.
136 AS I LA Y DYING
With his other hand he reaches down a^d reeves
the twa turns from the stanchion. “ Ride on.
Jewel,” he says ; “ see if you can pull us ahead of the
log.”
Jewel shouts at the horse ; again he appears to
lift it bodily between his knees. He is just above
the top of the ford and the horse has a purchase of
some sort for it surges forward, shining vf'edy half
out of water, crashing on in a succession of lunges.
It moves unbelievably fast ; by that token Jewel
realizes at last that the rope is free, for I can see him
sawing back on the reins, his head turned, as the
log rears in a long sluggish lunge between us,
bearing down upon the team. They see it too ;
for a moment they also shine black out of water.
Then the downstream one vanishes, dragging the
other with him ; the wagon sheers crosswise,
poised on the crest of the ford as the log strikes it,
tilting it up and on. Cash is half turned, the reins
running taut from his hand and disappearing into
the water, the other hand reached back upon Addie,
holding her jammed over against the high side of
the wagon. “ Jump clear,” he says quietly. “ Stay
away from the team and don’t try to fight it. It’ll
swing you into the bend all right.”
“ You come too,” I say. Vernon and Vardaman
are running along the bank, pa and Dewey Dell
stand watching us, Dewey Dell with the basket and
the package in her arms. Jewel i^rying to fight
the horse^back. The hea(} of one mul$ appears,
its eyes vide ; it looks back at us for an instant.
D ARL
making % sound almost human. The head vanishes again.
"Back, Jewel,” Cash shouts. "Back, Jewel.”
For another instant I see him leaning to the tilting
wagon, his arm braced back against Addie and his
tools ; I see the bearded head of the rearigg log^
strike up again, and beyond it ^ewel holding the
horse uj^reared, its head wrenched around, ham-
mering its head^with his fist. I jump from the
wagon on the downstream side. Between two
hills I set the mules once more. They roll up out
of the water in succession, turning completely
over, their legs stiffly extended as when they had
lost contact with the earth.<
VARDAMAN
C l ASH tried but she fell off and t)arl jumped
going under he went under and Cash
^hollering tfi catch her and I hollering run-
ning and hollering and Dewey Dell hollering at
me Vardaman you vardaman you vardaman and
Vernon passed me because he was seeing her come
up and she jumped into the water again and Dari
hadn’t caught her yet
He came up to see and I hollering catch her Dari
catch her and he4idn’t»come back because she was
too heavy he had to go on catching at her and I
hollering catch her darl catch her darl because in
the water she could go faster than a man and Darl
had to grabble for her so I knew he could catch
her because he is the best grabbler even with the
mules in the way again they dived up rolling their
feet stiff rolling down again and their backs up now
and Darl had to again because in the water she
could go faster than a man 6r a woman and I
passed Vernon and he wouldn’t get in the water
and help Darl he would grabble for her with Darl
he knew but he wouldn’t help
The mules dived up again diving their legs stiff thdr stiff legs rolling slow and then Darl again and I hollering catch her darl catch her Ite^jd her into the bank darl ;ind Vernon wouljln’t help and then Darl dodged pist the mules where he could he had her
158
VARDAMAN 159
under tile water coming in to the bank coming in
slow because in the water she fought to stay under
the water but Dari is strong and he was coming in
slow and sq I knew he had her because he came
sl^w and I ran down into the water to help and I
couldn’t stop hollering because Dari was strong an^
steady holding her under the water even if ^e did
fight heSvould not let her go he was seeing me and
he would hold her and it was all right now it was
all right now it was all right
he comes up ouh of the water. He comes a
long way up slow before his hands do but he*s got to have
her got to so I can bear it. Then his hands come up
and all of him aboc: the wat&. I 'can’t stop. I have
not got time to try. I will try to when I can but his
bands came empty out of the water emptying the water
emptying away
“ Where is ma, Dari ? ” I said. “ You never
got her. You knew she is a fish but you let her
get away. You never got her. Dari. Dari.
Dari.” I began to run along the bank, watching
the mules dive up slow again and then down
again.
TULL
W HEN I told Cora how Dari jumped
out o;^ the wagon and left Cash sitting
there trying to save it and th^ wagon
turning over, and Jewel that was almost to the bank
fighting that horse back where it had more sense
than to go, she says And you’re one of the folks
that says Dari is the queer one, the one that ain’t
bright, and him the only one of them that had
sense enough to get off that wagon. I notice Anse
was too smart to been on it a-tall.”
“ He couldn’t ’a’ done no good, if he’d been
there,” I said. “ They was going about it right
and they would have made it if it hadn’t a-been for
that log.”
“ Log, fiddlesticks,” Cora said. “ It was the hand of God.”
“ Then how can you say it was foolish ? ” I
said. “ Nobody can’t guard against the hand of
God. It would be sacrilege to try to.”
“ Then why dare it ? ” Cora says. “ Tell me that.”
“ Anse didn’t,” I said. “ That’s just what you faulted him for.”
“ His place was there,” Cora sai^. “ If he had
been a man, he would ’a’ been there instead of
making h(s sons do what He dursn’t.”
** I don’t know what you want, then,” I said.
140
TULL
141
“ One bjeath you say they was daring the hand of
God to try it, and the next breath you jump on Anse
because he wasn*t with them.” Then she begun
to sing again, working at the wash-tub, with that
skuging look in her face like she had done give up
folks and all their foolishness and had done wenf
on ahead of them, marching up the sky, singing.
The v«agon hung for a long time while the current
built up under it^ shoving it off the ford, and Cash
leaning more and more, trying to keep the coffin
braced &o it wouldn’t ^ip down and hnish tilting
the wagon over. Soon as the wagon got tilted
good, to where the current could finish it, the log
went on. It hea led arour/i the .wagon and went
on good as a swimming man could have done. It
was like it had been sent there to do a job and done
it and went on.
When the mules finally kicked loose, it looked
for a minute like maybe Cash would get the wagon
back. It looked like him and the wagon wasn’t
moving at all, and just Jewel fighting that horse
back to the wagon. Then that boy passed me,
running and hollefing at Dari and the gal trying
to catch him, and tfien I see the mules come rolling
slow up out of the water, their legs spraddled stiff
like they had balked upside down, and roll on into
the water again.
Then the wagon tilted over and then It and Jewel
and the hoi^^ was all mixed up together. Cash ’
went outen sight, stiy holding the co§in braced,
and then I couldn’t tell anything for* the horse
AS I LAY DYING
142
lunging and splashing. I thought that <^ash had
give up then and was swimming for it and I was
yelling at Jewel to come on back and then«all of a
sudden him and the horse went und^r too and I
thought they was all going. I knew that the horse
liad got dragged off the ford too, and with that
wild drowning hbrse and that wagon and that
loose box, it was going to be pretty had, and
there I was, standing knee deep in ^e water, yelling
at Anse behind me : “ See what you done now ?
See what you done now?.”
The horse come up again. It was headed for the
bank now, throwing its head up, and then I saw
one of them holding to tfie saddle on the downstream
side, so I started running along the bank, trying to
catch sight of Cash because he couldn’t swim,
yelling at Jewel where Cash was like a dum fool,
bad as that boy that was on down the bank still
hollering at Dari.
So I went down into the water so I could still
keep some kind of a grip in the mud, when I saw
Jewel. He was middle deep, so I knew he was on
the ford, anyway, leaning hard upstream, and then
I see the rope, and then I see the water building up
where he was holding the wagon snubbed just
below the ford.
So it was^Cash holding to the horse when it come
spldshing and scrambling up the bank, moaning and
groaning like a natural man. Whea^I come to it
it was justckicking Cash loo^ from his holt on the
saddle. His face turned up a second when he was
TULL 143
sliding ()ack into the water. It was grey, with
his eyes closed and a long swipe of mud across
his face. Then he let go and turned over in the
water. He looked just like an old bundle of
clothes kind of washing up and down against the
bank. He looked like he was laying there in thS
water on his face, rocking up "and down sf little,
looking»at something on the bottom.
We could walyh the rope cutting down into the
water, and we could feel the weight of the wagon
kind of blump and lunge lazy like, like it just as
soon as not, and that rope cutting down into the
water hard as a iron bar. We could hear the
water hissing on )• like it was ted hot. Like it
was a straight iron bar stuck into the bottom and
us holding the end of it, and the wagon lazing up
and down, kind of pushing and prodding at us
like it had come around and got behind us, lazy
like, like it just as soon as not when it made up its
mind. There was a shoat come by, blowed up
like a balloon ; one of them spotted shoats of Lon
Quick’s. It bumped against the rope like it was
a iron bar and bumped off and went on, and us
watching that rope, slanting down into the water.
We watched it.
DARL
C ASH lies on his back bn the eakh, his head
raised on a rolled garment. His eyes arc
closed, his Vace is grey, his hair plastered k
a smooth smear across his forehead as thoijgh done
with a paint-brush. His face appears sunken a
little, sagging from the bony ridges of eye-sockets,
nose, gums, as though the, wetting had slacked the
firmness which had held the skin full ; his teeth,
set in pale gums, are parted a little as if he had been
laughing quietly, Hc^ lies pole-thin in his wet
clothes, a little pool of vomit at his head and a
thread of it running from the corner of his mouth
and down his cheek where he couldn’t turn his head
quick or £ax enough, until Dewey Dell stoops and
wipes it away with the hem of her dress.
Jewel approaches. He has the plane. Vernon
just found the square,” he says. He looks down
at Cash, dripping too. “Ain’t he talked none
yet ? ”
“ He had his saw and hammer and chalk-line and rule,” I say. “ I know that.”
Jewel lays the square down. Pa watches him.
“ TTiey can’t be far away,” pa says. “ It all
went togedier. Was there ere a such misfortunate
man.”
Jewel ^oes not look at pa. “ You better call Vardam^ ' back here,” he says. He looks al
*44
D AR L 145
Cash, l^en he turns and goes away. “ Get
him to talk soon as he can,” he says, “ so he can
tell us what else there was.”
We return^ to the river. The wagon is hauled
cleitf, the wheels chocked (carefully : we all helped ;
it is as though upon the shabby, familiar, inerif
shape of the wagon there lingered somdiow,
latent yel still immediate, that violence which had
slain the mules that drew it not an hour since)
above the edge of the flood. In the wagon bed it
lies profoun^y, the long pale planks hushed a
little with wetting yet still yellov/, like gold seen
through water, save for two long muddy smears.
We pass it and go on to thr bank.
One end of the rope is made fast to a tree. At
the edge of the stream, knee-deep, Vardaman stands,
bent forward a little, watching Vernon with rapt
absorption. He has stopped yelling and he is
wet to the armpits. Vernon is at the other end
of the rope, shoulder-deep in the river, looking
back at Vardaman. “ Further back than that,”
he says. “ You git back by the tree and hold the
rope for me, so it*can’t slip.”
Vardaman backs talong the rope, to the tree,
moving blindly, watching Vernon. When we
come up he looks at us once, his eyes round and a
litde dazed. Then he looks at Vernon again in that
posture of rapt alertness.
“ I got the Irammer too,” Vernon says. “ Looks
like we ought to done^ already got that ghalk-line.
It ought to floated.”
146 AS I LAY DYING
“ Floated clean away,” Jewel says. “^Wc won^t get it. kWe ought to find the saw, though.”
*‘I teckon so,” Vernon says. He looks at the
water. ** That chalk-line, too. What else did he
have ? ”
“ He ain’t talked yet,” Jewel says, entering the
water. He loolcs back at me. “ You go back
and get him roused up to talk,” he says#
“ Pa’s there,” I say. I follow Jewel into the
water, along the rope. It feels alive in my hand,
bellied faintly in a prolonged and resonant arc.
Vernon is watching me.
You better go,” he says. “ You better be there.”
Let’s see what else we can get before it washes on down,” I say.
We hold to the rope, the current curling and
dimpling* about our shoulders. But beneath that
false blandness the true force of it leans against us
la2ily. I had not thought that water in July could
be so cold. It is like hands moulding and prodding
at the very bones. Vernon is still looking back
toward the bank.
“ Reckon it’ll hold us all ?, ” he says. We too
look back, following the rigid bar of the rope as
it rises from the water to the tree and Vardaman
crouched a little beside it, watching us. “ Wish
my mule ‘wouldn’t strike out for home,” Vernon
says.
** Q)njp on,” Jewel says. ^ Let’s get outen here.”
We sid)tnerge in turn, holding to the rope, being
D A KL 147
clutched by one another while the cold wall of the
water sucks the slanting mud backward and up-
stream ffiom beneath our feet and we are suspended
so, groping along the cold bottom. Even the
mud there is not still. It has a chill, scouring
quality, as though the earth under us were in motion
too. We touch and fumble at one another’s
extended « arms, letting ourselves go cautiously
against the rope ; or, erect in turn, watch the water
suck and boil where one of the other two gropes
beneath the surface. Pa has come down to the
shore, watching us.
Vernon comes up, streaming, his face sloped
down into his pursed blowing mouth. His mouth
is bluish, like a circle of weathered rubber. He has
the rule.
“ He’ll be glad of that,” I say. “ It’s right new. He bought it just last month out of the catalogue.”
“ If we just knowed for sho what else,” Vernon
says, looking over his shoulder and then turning to
face where Jewel had disappeared. “ Didn’t he
go down ’fore me ? ” Vernon says.
“ I don’t know,’^ I say. “ I think so. Yes. Yes, he did.”
We watch the thick curling surface, streaming away from us in slow whorls.
“ Give him a pull on the rope,” Vernon says.
“ He’s on your end of it,” I say.
“ Ain’t nol^y on my end of it,” he says.
“ Pull it in,” I say. Qut be has already (jpne that, holding the end above the water ; and th^ we sec
148 y4S I LAY DYING
Jewel. He is ten yards away ; he
blowings and looks at us, tossing his long hair back
wid\ a jerk of his head, then he looks toward the
bank; we can see him filling his lungs.
“ Jewel,” Vernon says, not loud, Wt his voice
•going full and clear along the water, peremptory
yet
back.”
Jewel dives again. We stand there, leaning
back against the current, watcliing the water where
he disappeared, holding the dead rope between us
like two men holding the nozzle of a fire-hose,
waiting for the water. Suddenly Dewey Dell is
behind us in the wafer. “ You make him come
back, she says. “ Jewel ! she says. He comes
up again, tossing his hair back from his eyes. He
is swimming now, toward the bank, the current
sweeping- him downstream quartering. You,
Jewel ! ” Dewey Dell says. We stand holdmg the
rope and see him gain the bank and climb out. As
he rises from the water, he stoops and picks up
something. He comes back along the bank. He
has found the chalk-line. He comes opposite us
and stands there, looking abour as if he were seeking
something. Pa goes on down the bank. He is
going back to look at the mules again where their
round bodies float and rub quietly together in the
slack watfer within the bend.
“ What did you do with the hamnp'jr, Vernon ? ** Jewel says.
“ I gjve'it to him,’* Vernon says, jerking his head
D A R L 149
at Varda*nan. Vardaman is looking after pa.
Then he looks at Jewel. “ With the square.”
Vernon ^is watching Jewel. He moves toward
the bank, posing Dewey Dell and me.
*‘^ou get on out of here,” I say. She says nothing, looking at Jewel and Vernon.
Where’s the hammer ? ” Jewel says. VJrda- man scuttles up the bank and fetches it.
“ It’s heavier than the saw,” Vernon says. Jewel
is tying the '’nd of the chalk-line about the hammer
shaft.
“ Hammer’s got the most wood in it,” Jewel
says. He and Vernon face one another, watching
Jewel’s hands.
“ And flatter, too,” Vernon says “ It’d float three to one, almost. Try the plane.”
Jewel looks at Vernon. Vernon is tall, too ;
long and lean, eye to eye they stand in their close
wet clothes. Lon Quick could look even at a
cloudy sky and tell the time to ten minutes. Big
Lon I mean, not little Lon.
“ Why don’t you^et out of the water ? ” I say.
“It won’t float hike a saw,” Jewel says.
“ It’ll float nigherto a saw than a hammer will,” Vernon says.
“Bet you,” Jewel says.
“ I won’t bet,” Vernon says.
They stand there, watching Jewel’s still hands.
“ Hell,” Jewel says. “ Get the plane, then.”
So they get the plana and tie it to the ihalk-line and enter Ae water again. Pa comes bick along
150 AS i LAY DYING
the bank. He stops fot a while and looks at us,
hunched, mournful, like a failing steer or an old
^ 'bird.
Vernon and Jewel return, leanii\g against the
current. “ Get out of the way,” Jewel says to
Dewey Dell. “^Get out of the water.”
Slie crowds against me a little so they can pass.
Jewel holding the plane high as though it were
perishable, the blue string traihng back over his
shoulder. They pass us and stop ; they fall to
arguing quietly about just where the wagon went
over.
Dari ought to know,” Vernon says. They look at me.
“ I don’t know,” 1 says. “ I wasn’t there that long.”
“ Hell,” Jewel says. They move on, gingerly,
leaning against the current, reading the ford with
their feet.
“ Have you got a holt of the rope ? ” Vernon
says. Jewel does not answer. He glances back
at the shore, calculant, then at the water. He
flings the plane outward, letting the string run
through his fingers, his fingers turning blue where
it runs over them. When the line stops, he hands
it back to Vernon.
** Better let me go this time,” Vernon says.
Again Jewel does not answer ; we watch him duck
beneath the surface.
Jewel,” Dewey Dell whimpers.
** It eili*t so deep there,” Vemon'says. He does
D AR L 151
not look back. He is watching the water where Jewel wciit under.
When Jewel comes up he has the saw.
When we ^ass the wagon pa is standing beside
it, sorubbing at the two mud smears with a handful
of leaves. Against the jungle Jewel’s horse looks ■
like a patchwork quilt hung on a line.
Cash h|s not moved. We stand above him,
holding the plane, the saw, the hammer, the square,
the rule, the chalk-line, while Dewey Dell squats
and lifts Cash's head. “ Cash,” she says ; “ Cash.”
He opens his eyes, staring profoundly up at our inverted faces. '
“ If ever was such a misfor,tunatd man,” pa says.
“ Look, Cash,” we say, holding the tools up so he can see ; “ what else did you have ? ”
He tries to speak, rolling his head, shutting his eyes.
“ Cash,” we say ; “ Cash.”
It is to vomit he is turning his head. Dewey Dell
wipes his mouth on the wet hem of her dress ;
then he can speak.
“ It’s his saw-set,’ Jewel says. “ The new one
he bought when he bought the rule.” He moves,
turning away. Vernon looks up after him, still
squatting. Then he rises and follows Jewel down
to the water.
“ If ever was such a misfortunate man,"' pa says.
He looms tall gbove us as wc squat ; he looks like a
figure carved clumsily, from tough wogd by a
drunken caricaturist. “ It’s a trial,” says.
IJ2 AS I LAY DYING
But I don’t begrudge her it. No man^can say I
begrudge her it.” Dewey Dell has laid Gish’s
headr^back on the folded coat, twisting hjs head a
litde to avoid the vomit. Beside him his tools
lie. “ A fellow might call it lucky it “was the same
vleg he broke when he fell offen that church,” pa
says* “ But I don’t begrudge her it.”
Jewel and Vernon are in the river agai^. From
here they do not appear to violate the surface at
all ; it is as though it had severed them both at
a single blow, the two torsips moving with infinitesi-
mal and ludicrous care upon the surface. It looks
peaceful, like machinery does after you have
watched it and listened to it for a long time. As
though the clotting which is you had dissolved
into the myriad original motion, and seeing and
hearing in themselves blind and deaf; fury in
itself quiet with stagnation. Squatting, Dewey
Dell’s wet dress shapes for the dead eyes of three
blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which
are the horizons and the valleys of the earth.
CASH
I ,T wasn’7 on a balance. I told them that if
they wanted it to tote and ride on a balances
they would have to
153
CORA
I
O NE day we were talking. She had never
been pure religious, not even after that
summer at the camp meeting when Brother
Whitfield wrestled with her spirit, singled her out
and strove with the vanity in her mortal heart,
and I said to her many a time, “God gave you
children to comfort your hard human lot and for
a token of His own suffering and love, for in love
you conceived and bore them.” 1 said that because
she took God’s love and her duty to Him too much
as a matter of course, and such conduct is not
pleasing to Him. I said, “ He gave us the gift
to raise our voices in His undying praise ” because
1 said there is more rejoicing in heaven over one
sinner than over a hundred that never sinned.
And she said “ My daily life is an acknowledg-
ment and expiation of my sin ” and I said “ Who
are you, to say what is sin and what is not sin ?
It is the Lord’s part to judge ; ours to praise His
mercy and His holy name in the hearing of our
fellow mortals ” because He alone can see into the
heart, and just because a woman’s life is right in
the sight of man, she can’t know if there is no sin
in her heart without she opens her heart to the
Lord and receives His grace. I said,.“ Just because
you have been a faith^l wife is no sign that there
is no sin in your heart, and just because your life
>54
CORA 155
is hard is^o sign that the Lord’s grace is absolving
you.” And she said, “ I know my own sin. I
kno^ that I deserve my punishment. I da not
begrudge it.” And I said, “It is out of your
vartity that you would judge sin and salvation in
the Lord’s place. It is our mortal lot to suffef
and to raise our voices in praise of Him who jtfdges
the sin and offers the salvation through our trials
and tribulations .time out of mind amen. Not
even after Brother Whitfield, a godly man if ever
one breathed God’s breath, prayed for you and
strove as never a man could except him,” I said.
Because it is not us that can judge our sins or
know what is sin in the J.ord’s eyes. She has
had a hard life, but so does ever: woman. But
you’d think from the way she talked that she knew
more about sin and salvation than the Lord God
Himself, than them who have strove and laboured
with the sin in this human world. When the only
sin she ever committed was being partial to Jewel
that never loved her and was its own punishment,
in preference to Dari that was touched by God
Himself and consicfered queer by us mortals and
that did love her. • I said, “ There is your sin.
And your punishment too. Jewel is your punish-
ment. But where is your salvation ? And life is
short enough,” I»sajd, “ to win eternal grace in.
And God is a jealous God. It is His to judge
and to metef not yours.”
“ I know,” she sftid. “ I stopped, and I said.
99
73ien she
156 AS I LAY DYING
“ Know what ? ”
“ Nothing,” she said. “ He is my cross and he
will he my salvation. He will save me from the
water and from the fire. Even th9ugh I have
laid down my life, he will save me.”
“ How do you know, without you open your
heart to Him and lift your voice in His praise ? ”
I said. Then I realized that she did cot mean
God. I realized that out of the vanity of her
heart she had spoken sacrilege. And I went down
on my knees right there.* I begged her to kneel
and open her heart and cast from it the devil of
vanity and cast herself upon the mercy of the Lord.
But she wouldn’t. She just sat there, lost in her
vanity and her pride, that had closed her heart
to God and set that selfish mortal boy in His place.
Kneeling there I prayed for her. I prayed for
that poor blind woman as I had never prayed for
me and mine.
ADDIE
I N the afternoon when school was out and the
last one had left with his little dirty snuf]^g
nose, instead of going home 1 would go down
the hill tp the spring where I could be qu’ct and
hate them. It \yould be quie* there then, with
the water bubbling up and away and the sun slant-
ing quiet in the trees and the quiet smelling of
damp and rotting leaves and nev eartp ; especially
in the caily spring, for it was worst then.
I could just re. lember how rny father used to
say that the reason for living was to get ready to
stay dead a long time. And when I would have
to look at them day after day, each with his and
her secret and selfish thought, and blood strange
to each other blood and strange to mine, and
think that this seemed to be the only way I could
gee ready to stay dead, 1 would hate my father for
having ever planted me. I would look forward
to the times wheu mey faulted, so 1 could whip
them. When the savitch f^ll I could feel it upon
my flesh ; when it welted and ridged it was my
blood that ran, and I would think with each blow
of the switch : hiow you are aware of me 1 Now
I am something in your secret and Selfish lif?,
who have marked your blood with my own for
ever and ever.
And so I took Anse. I saw him pass the school-
IJ7
158 AS t LAY DYING
house three or four times before 1 learned that he
was driving four miles out of his way to do it.
I no(^ced then how he was beginning to, hump —
i tall man and young — so that he looked already
like a tall bird hunched in the colc^ weather, on
<^he wagon-seat. He would pass the school-house,
the '.vagon creaking slow, his head turning slow
to watch the door of the school-house as t^e wagon
passed, until he went on around the curve and
out of sight. One day I went to the door and
stood there when he passed. When he saw me
he looked quickly away and did not look back
again.
In the early spring ^it was worst. Sometimes I
thought that I could not bear it, lying in bed at
night, with the wild geese going north and their
honking coming faint and high and wild out of
the wild darkness, and during the day it would
seem as though I couldn’t wait for the last one to
go so I could go down to the spring. And so
when I looked up that day and saw Anse standing
there in his Sunday clothes, turning his hat round
and round in his hands, I sai(i :
“If you’ve got any womenfolks, why in the world don’t they make you get your hair cut ? ”
“I ain’t got none,” he said. Then he said
suddenly, driving his eyes at mq like two hounds
in a strange yard : “ That’s what I come to see
you about.”
“ And ^ make you hold your shoulders up,” I said. ** You haven’t got any ? But you’ve got
AD D I E 1J9
a house. ^ They tell me youVe got a house and a
good farm. And you live there alone, doing for
youtsel^i do you ? ” He just looked at me^ turn-
ing the hat in his hands. “ A new house,” ’ I
said. “ Are you going to get married ? ”
And he said again, holding his eyes to mins*: “ That*s what I come to see you about.”
Later Jie told me, “ I ain’t got no people. So
that won’t be no worry to you. I don’t reckon
you can say the same.”
“ No. I have people. In Jefferson.”
His face fell a little. “Well, I got a litde
property. I’m forehanded ; I got a good honest
name. I know how town folks are, but maybe
when they talk to me . . .”
“ They might listen,” I said. “ But they’ll be
hard to talk to.” He was watching my face.
“ They’re in the cemetery.”
“ But your living kin,” he said. “ They’ll be different.”
“ Will they ?” I said. “ I don’t know. I never had any other kind.”
So I took Anse.* And when I knew that I had
Cash, I knew that living was terrible and that this
was the answer to it. That was when I learned
that words are no good ; that words don’t ever
fit even what they are trying to say at. When he
was born I knew that motherhood wA invented
by someone ivho had to have a word for it because
the ones that had the children didn’t carp whether
there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear
i6o AS LA Y D YING
was invented by someone that had never had the
fear; pride, who never had the pride.* I knew
that Ij; had been, not that they had dirty noses,
but that we had had to use one another by words
like spiders dangling by their mouths from a
h^am, swinging and twisting and never touching,
ana '♦hat only through the blows of the switch
could my blood and their blood flow as one stream.
I knew that it had been, not that my aloneness
had to be violated over and over each day, but
that it had never been viplated until Cash came.
Not even by Anse in the nights.
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But
I had been used to words for a long time. I
knew that that word was like the others : just a
shape to fill a lack ; that when the right time came,
you wouldn’t need a word for that any more than
for pride 'or fear. Cash did not need to say it
to me nor I to him, and I would say. Let Anse
use it, if he wants to. So that it was Anse or love ;
love or Anse : it didn’t matter.
I would think that even while I lay with him
in the dark and Cash asleep ift the cradle within
the swing of my hand. I wqpld think that if he
were to wake and cry, I would suckle him, too.
Anse or love : it didn’t matter. My aloneness
had been violated and then madp whole again by
the violation : time, Anse, love, what you will,
outside the circle.
Then I^found that I had Dari. At first I would not beliew'it. Then I believed that I would kill
AD DIE i6i
Anse. It was as though he had tricked me, hidden
within a* word like within a paper screen and
struck gie in the back through it. But tj^en I
realized that I had been tricked by words older
thaft Anse or love, and that the same word had'
tricked Anse too, and that my revenge would lie
that he would never know I was taking revdtige.
And whep Dari was born I asked Anse to promise
to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because
I knew that father had been right, even when he
couldn’t have known he. was right any more than
I could have known I was wrot g.
“ Nonsense,” Anse said ; “ you and me ain’t nigh done chapping yet, with just two.”
He did not know that he was dead, then. Some-
times I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the
land that was now of my blood and flesh, and I
would think : Anse. Why Anse. Why are you
Anse. I would think about his name until after
a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel,
and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it
like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into
the vessel, until thenar stood full and motionless :
a significant shape profoundly without life like an
empty door frame ; and then I would find that I
had forgotten the name of the jar. I would think :
The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin
is in the shape of a and I couldh’t think
A/jsey couldnit remember Afjse. It was not that
I could think of mysglf as no longer vnvirgin,
because I was three now. And when •! would
i6z AS l‘ LAY DYING
think Cash and Dari that way until their names
would die and solidify into a shape and then fade
away^ I would say. All right. It doesn’t^ matter.
Tt doesn’t matter what they call them.
And so when Q>ra Tull would tell me I was not
i^crue mother, I \({ould think how words go straight
up a thin line, quick and harmless, and how
terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it,
so that after a while the two line^ are too far apart
for the same person to straddle from one to the
other; and that sin and love and fear are just
sounds that people who never sinned nor loved
nor feared have for what they never had and can-
not have until they fqrget the words. Like Cora,
who could never even cook.
She would tell me what I owed to my children
and to Anse and to God. I gave Anse the children.
1 did not* ask for them. I did not even ask him
for what he could have given me : not-Anse.
That was my duty to him, to not' ask that, and that
duty I fulfilled. 1 would be I ; I would let him
be the shape and echo of his word. That was
more than he asked, because* he could not have
asked for that and been Anse, using himself so
with a word.
And then he died. He did not know he was
dead. 1 would lie by him in ^he dark, hearing
the dark Itnd talking of God’s love and His beauty
and His sin; hearing the dark vofcelessness in
which tj^e words are the « deeds, and the other
words ^at are not deeds, that are just the gape in
AD DIE 163
peoples’ lacks, coming down like the cries of the
geese on/ of the wild darkness in the old terrible
nights, gambling at the deeds like orphans to whom
are pointed out in a crowd two faces and told.
That is your father, your mother.
I believed that I had found it. I believed that
the reason was the duty to the alive, to the teiffble
blood, tj^e red bitter flood boiling through the
land. I would think of sin as I would think of
the clothes we both wore in the world’s face, of
the circumspection necessary because he was he
and I was I; the sin the more utter and terrible
since he was the instrument ordained by God who
created the sin, to sanctify that sin He had created.
While I waited for him in the woods, waiting for him
before he saw me, I would think of him as dressed
in sin. 1 would think of him as thinking of me
as dressed also in sin, he the more beautiful since
the garment which he had exchanged for sin was
sanctified. I would think of the sin as garments
which we would remove in order to shape and
coerce the terrible blood to the forlorn echo of
the dead word higlf in the air. Then I would lay
with Anse again — X did net lie to him : I just
refused, just as I refused my breast to Cash and
Dari after thek time was up — ^hearing the dark
land talking the jroiceless speech.
I hid nothing. I tried to deceive iJb one. I
would not have cared. I merely took .the pre-
cautions that he thoi|ght necessary for, his sake,
not for my safety, but just as 1 wore Rothes in
x64 as r lay dying
the world’s face. And I would think then when
Cota, talked to me, of how the high d&d words
in ti^e seemed to lose even the signifiganee of
their dead sound.
Then it was over. Over in the sense that he
was gone and J ^ew that, see him again though
1 'T^uld, I would never again see him coming
swift and secret to me in the woods dressed in
sin like a gallant garment alrea^dy blowing aside
with the speed of his secret coming.
But for me it was not over. I mean, over in
the sense of begiiuiing and ending, because to me
there was no beginning nor ending to anything
then. I even held Ansc refraining still, not that
I was holding him recessional, but as though
nothing else had ever been. My children were
of me alone, of the wild blood boiling along the
earth, of me and of all that lived ; of none and of
all. Then I found that I liad Jewel. When 1
waked to remember to discover it, he was two
months gone.
My father said that the reason for living is
getting ready to stay dead, i knew at last what
he meant and that he could not have known what
he meant himself, because a man caimot know
anything about cleaning up the house afterward.
And so I have cleaned my house. With Jewel —
I lay by the lamp, holding up my own head, watch-
ing him cap and suture it before ke breathed —
the wild blood boiled aw?y and the sound of it
ceased.i ‘Then there was only the milk, warm* and
AD DIE 1615
calm, and I lying calm in the slow silence, getting ready to dean my house.
I ^a^ Anse Dewey Dell to negative Tewel.
Then I gave him Vardaman to replace the child
I hid robbed him of. And now he has three*
children that are his and not mine. And then/
could get ready to die.
■ One d^y I was talking to Cora. She prayed
for me because ^e believed I was blind to sin,
wanting me kneel and pray too, because people
to whom sin is just a ffiatter of nords, to them
salvation is just words too.
WHITFIELD
W HEN they told me she was dying, all
that *ight I wrestled with Satan, and
I emerged victorious. I woke to the
enormity of my sin; I saw the true light at last,
and I fell on my knees and confessed to God and
asked his guidance and received it. “ Rise,” He
said ; “ repair to that home in which you have
put a living lie, among those people with whom
you have outraged My Word ; confess your sin
aloud. It is for then), for that deceived husband,
to forgive you : not I.”
So I went. I heard that TulFs bridge was gone ;
I said Thanks, O Lord, O Mighty Ruler of all ” ;
for by tho'se dangers and difficulties which I should
have to surmount I saw that He had not abandoned
me ; that my reception again into His holy peace
and love would be the sweeter for it. “ Just let
me not perish before I have begged the forgive-
ness of the man whom I betrayed,” I prayed ;
“ let me not be too late ; let
and her transgression come from her lips instead
of mine. She had sworn then that she would
never tell it, but eternity is a fearsome thing to
face ; ha^e I not wresded thigh to thigh with
Satan myself? let me not have also dae sin of her
broken yow upon my souL Let not the waters
of Thydliighty wrath encompass me until I have
166
WHITFIELD 167
cleansed my soul in the presence of them whom I injured.**
It^ag His hand that bore me safely above the
flood, that fended from me the dangers of the
waters. My horse was frightened, and my own'
heart failed me as the logs and tj^e uprooted tre^
bore down upon my littleness. But not my soul :
time after^time I saw them averted at destruction’s
final instant, and I lifted my voice above the noise
of the flood : “ Praise to thee, O Mighty Lord and
King. By this token shall I cleanse my soul and
gain again into the fold of Thy undying love.”
I knew then that forgiveness was mine. The
flood, the danger, behind, an 1 as I rode on across
the firm earth again and the scene of my Gethsemane
drew closer and closer, I framed the words which
I should use. I would enter the house ; I would
stop her before she had spoken ; I would say to
her husband ; ** Anse, I have sinned. Do with
me as you will.”
It was already as though it were done. My soul
felt freer, quieter than it had in years ; already I
seemed to dwell in tibiding peace again as I rode
on. To either side } saw His hand ; in my heart
I could hear His voice: “Courage. I am with
thee.”
Then I reached full’s house. His youngest girl
came out and called to me as I was passing. She
told me that^he was already dead.
I have sinned, O i^rd. Thou knoyest the
extent of my remorse and the will of my spirit.
i68 as i lay dying
But He is merciful ; He will accept the will for
the deedj Who knew that when I framed^the words
of n^ confession it was to Anse I spojre them,
even though he was not there. It was He in His
infinite wisdom that restrained the tale from her
^ing lips as sl\p lay surrounded by those who
la5^d and trusted her ; mine the travail by water
which I sustained by the strength of His hand.
Praise to Thee in Thy bounteous and omnipotent
love ; O praise.
I entered the house of, bereavement, the lowly
dwelling where another erring mortal lay while
her soul faced the awful and irrevocable judgment,
peace to her ashes.
“ God’s grace upon this house,” I said.
DARL
0 ~ N Ihe horse he rode up to Armstid’s and?
came hack on the horse^ leading Armsticyp
team. We hitched up and laid Cash on
top of Addie. When we laid him down he vomited
again, but he got his head over the wagon bed in
time.
“ He taken a lick in the stomach too,” Vernon said.
“ The horse may have kicked lum in the stomach
too,” I said. “ Di { he kick you in the stomach.
Cash ? ”
He tried to say something. Dewey Dell wiped his mouth again.
“ What’s he say ? ” Vernon said.
“ What is it. Cash ? ” Dewey Dell said. She
leaned down. “ His tools,” she said. Vernon
got them and put them into the wagon. Dewey
Dell lifted Cash’s head so he could see. We
drove on, Dewey Dell and I siring beside Cash
to steady him and ^e riding on ahead on the horse.
Vernon stood watching us for a while. Then he
turned and went back toward the bridge. He
walked gingerly, jjeginning to flap the wet sleeves
of his shirt as though he had just got wet.
He was sitting the horse before the gate. Armstid
was waiting at the gai|c. We stopped and he got
down and we lifted Cash down and carried* i2,im into
169
170 AS I* LAY D YING
the house, where Mrs. Armstid had the bed ready. We left her and Dewey Dell undressinj^ him.
Wc followed pa out to the wagon. He went
back and got into the wagon and drove on, we
following on foot, into the lot. The wetting had
h^^lped, because A^^mstid said, “You welcome to
the house. You can put it there.” He followed^
leading the horsey and stood beside the wagon^ the reirts
in his band.
“ I thank you,” pa said. “ We’ll use in the shed yonder. I know it’? a imposition on you.”
“ You’re welcome to the house,” Armstid said. He had that wooden look on his face again ; that boldy surly y high-coloured rigid look like his face and eyes were two colours of woody the wrong one pale and the wrong one dark. His shirt was be^nning to dryy but it still clung close upon him when he moved.
“ She would appreciate it,” pa said.
We took the team out and rolled the wagon
back under the shed. One side' of the shed was
open.
“ It won’t rain under,” Armstid said. “ But if you’d rather . . .”
Back of the barn was some, rusted sheets of tin
roofing. We took two of them and propped
them against the open side.
“ You’re welcome to the housf*,” Armstid said.
“ I than^^i. you,” pa said. “ I’d take it right kind if you’d give them a little snack.”
“ Sho,’’ Armstid said. “ Lula’U have supper ready sqoci as she gets Gish comfortable.” He
D A R L 171
bad gme hack to the horse and he was faking the saddle bis ^mp shirt lapping flat to him when he moved.
Pa viouldn*t come in the house.
“ Come in and eat,” Atmstid said. ** It’s nigh rea%.”
“ I wouldn’t crave nothing,” ju said. “ I thank you.”
■ “ You, come in and dry and eat,” Armstid said. “ It’ll be all right here.”
“ It’s for her,” pa said. “ It’s for her sake I am
taking the food. I got no team, no nothing.
But she will be grateful to ere a one of you.”
“ Sho,” Armstid said. “ Yop folks come in and dry.”
But after Armstid gave pa a drink, he felt better, and when we went in to see about Cash he badsft come in with us. When I looked back be was leading the horse into the bam be was already talking about getting another team, and by supper time he had good as bought it. He is down there in the homy sliding fluidly past the gaudy lun^ng swirly into the stall with it. He climbs on to the manger and drags the hay down and leaves^ the stall and seeks and finds the curry-comb. Then hetretums and slips quickly past the Single crashing thump and up against the horsCy where it cannot over-reach. He applies the curry-comby holding himself within the horse’s striking radius with the afflity of an acrobat y cursing the horse in a whispUr of obscene caress.
Its head flashes backy tooth-cropped ; its ^es roll in the dusk like marbles on a gaudy velvet floth as he strikes it upon the face with the back of the x»*ry-comb.
ARMSTID
B ut time I give him another sup of whisky
and suppqt was about ready, he had done
already bought a team from somebody, on
a credit. Picking and choosing he werq by then,
saying how he didn’t like this span and wouldn’t
put his money in nothing so-and-so owned, not
even a hen coop.
“ You might try Snopes,” I said. “ He’s got
three-four span. Maybe one of them would suit
you.”
Then he begun to mumble his mouth, looking
at me like it was me that owned the only span of
mules in the country and wouldn’t sell them to
him, when I knew that like as not it would be my
team that would ever get them out of the lot at
all. Only I don’t know what they would do with
them, if they had a team. Littlejohn had told me
that the levee through Haley bottom had done
gone for two miles and that fiie only way to get
to Jefferson would be to go jiround by Mottson.
But that was Anse’s business.
“ He’s a close man to trade with,” he says,
mumblmg his mouth. But whenj give him another
sup after isupper, he cheered up some. He was
aiming to go back to the barn and settup with her.
Maybe h^ bought that if hejust stayed down there
ready tc^ t^e out, Santa Gaus would maybe bnng
ARMSTID 173
him a span of mules. “ But I reckon I can talk
him arouftd,” he says. “ A man’ll always help a
fellow i© a tight, if he’s got ere a drop of Christian
blood in him.”
*‘‘-Of course you’re welcome to the use of mine,”
I said, me knowing how much, he believed thsy:
was the reason.
• “ I thank you,” he said. “ She’ll want to go
in ourn,’^ and him knowing how much I believed
that was the reason.
After supper Jewel rode over to the Bend to
get Peabody. I heard he was to be there to-day
at Varner’s. Jewel come back ^ about midnight.
Peabody had gone down below Inverness some-
where, but Uncle Billy come back with him, with
his satchel of horse-physic. Like he says, a man
ain’t so different from a horse or a mule, come
long come short, except a mule or a horse has got
a little more sense. “ What you been into now,
boy ? ” he says, looking at Cash. “ Get me a
mattress and a chair and a glass of whisky,” he
says.
He made Cash drink the whisky, then he run
Anse out of the ropm. “ Lucky it was the same
leg he broke last summer,” Anse says, mournful,
mumbling and blinking. “ That’s something.”
We folded the, mattress across Cash’s legs and
set the chair on the mattress and meiand Jewel
set on the i:hair and the gal held the lamp and
Uncle Billy taken a c^ew of tobacco and went to
work. Cash fought pretty hard for a while, until
174 y4S 1 LAY DYING
he £unted. Then he laid still, with big balls of
sweat standing on his face like they hid started
to roll down and then stopped to wait ^r ^lim.
WlSen he waked up. Unde Billy had done packed
«up and left. He kept on trying to say something
i^til the gal leaiysd down and wiped his mouth.
‘*It*s his tools,” she said.
“ I brought them in,” Dari said. ** I got them.”
He tried to talk again ; she leaned down. “ He
wants to see them,” she said. So Dari brought
them in where he could see them. They shoved
them under the side of the bed, where he could
reach his hand and touch them when he felt better.
Next morning Anse taken that horse and rode over
to the Bend to see Snbpes. Him and Jewel stood
in the lot talking a while, then Anse got on the
horse and rode off. 1 reckon that was the first
time Jewd ever let anybody ride that horse, and
until Anse come back he hung around in that
swole-up way, watching the road like he was half a
mind to take out after Anse and get the horse back.
Along toward nine o*clock it begun to get hot.
That was when I see the firsf buzzard. Because
of the wetting, I reckon. Anyway it wasn’t until
well into the day that I see them. Lucky the
breeze was setting away from the house, so it
wasn’t until well into the momipg. But soon as
I see theqr- it was like I could smdl it in the field
a mile away from just watching thei;}, and them
circling and circling for everybody in the county
to see was in my bam.
ARMSTID
175
I was still a good half a mile from the house when I leard that boy yelling. I thought maybe' he flaig];it have fell into the well or something, so I whipped up and come into the lot on thd lope.
There mu'st have been a doaen of them settingk
along the ridge-pole of the ba^n, and that b
was chasing another one around the lot like it was
a turkey and it just lifting enough to dodge him
and go topping back to the roof of the shed again
where he had found it setting on the coffin. It
had got hot tlien, right, ^nd the breeze had dropped
or changed or something, so T went and found
Jewel, but Lula come out.
“ You got to do someth'ng,’^ she said. “ It's a outrage.”
“ That’s what I aim to do,” I said.
“ It’s a outrage,” she said. “ He should be lawed for treating her so.”
“ He’s getting her into the ground the best he
can,” I said. So I found Jewel and asked him if
he didn’t want to take one of the mules and go
over to the Bend and see about Anse. He didn’t
say nothing. He ^st looked at me with his jaws
going bone-white ^and them bone-white eyes of
hisn, then he went and begun to call Dari.
“ What you fixing to do ? ” I said.
He didn’t ar^wer. Dari come out. “ Q>me on,” Jewel said. .
“ What jou aim to do ? ” Dari said.
“ Going to move the wagon,” Jewel said over his shoulder.
176 AS I LAY DYING
“Don*t be a fool/* I said. “I never meant
nothing. You couldn’t help it.” And Dari hung
back too, but nothing wouldn’t suit Jew^l.
• “ Sliut your goddamn mouth,” he says.
“ It’s got to be somewhere,” Dari skid. “ We’ll ^e out soon as^pa gets back.”
“ You won’t help me ? ” Jewel says, them white
eyes of hisn kind of blaring and his face shaking
like he had a aguer.
“ No,” Dari said. “ I won’t. * Wait till pa gets back.”
So I stood in the door and watched him push
and haul at that wagon. It was on a downhill,
and once I thought he was fixing to beat out the
back end of the shed.‘ Then the dinner-bell rung.
I called him, but he didn’t look around. “ Come
on to dinner,” I said. “ Tell that boy.” But he
didn’t answer, so I went on to dinner. The gal
went down to get that boy, but she come back
without him. About half through dinner we
heard him yelling again, running that buzzard out.
“ It’s a outrage,” Lula said ; “ a outrage.”
“ He’s doing the best he can,” I said. A
fellow don’t trade with Snopes in thirty minutes.
They’ll set in the shade all afternoon to dicker.”
“ Do ? ” she says. “ Do ? He’s done too much, already.”
And I j^ckon he had. Trouble is, his quitting
was just about to start our doing. Jie couldn’t
buy no team from nobody, let alone Snopes, with-
outen he*, had something to mortgage he didti’t
ARMSTID 177
know would mortgage yet. And so when I went
back to llie field I looked at my mules and same
as tQld^them good-bye for a spell. And when I
come back that evening and the sun shinihg all
days on that s\ied, I wasn’t so sho I would regret it.
He come riding up just as I, went out to thp
porch, where they all was. He looked kind of
funny ; kind of more hang-dog than common, and
kind of ^roud too. Like he had done something
he thought was cute but wasn’t so sho now how
other folks would take jt.
“ I got a team,” he said.
“ You bought a team from Snopcs ? ” I said.
“I reckon Snopes ain’t the only man in this country that can drive a tra'de,” said.
“ Sho,” I said. He was looking at Jewel, with
that funny look, but Jewel had done got down
from the porch and was going toward the horse.
To see what Anse had done to it, 1 reckon.
** Jewel,” Anse says. Jewel looked back.
“ Come here,” Anse says. Jewel come back a
little and stopped again.
“ What you wani*.^ ” he said.
“ So you got a ^team from Snopes,” I said.
“ He’ll send them over to-night, I reckon ? You’ll
want a early start to-morrov’^, long as you’ll have
to go by MottsoQ.”
Then he quit looking like he had bjen for a
while. He got that badgered look like he used
to have, mumbling his mouth.
‘V do the best I can/’ he said. “ ’Fore God, if
178 AS r LA Y D YING
there were ere a man in the living world suffered the trialtf' and floutings I have suffered.^
“ A fellow that just beat Snopes in ,a /:rade
oughf to feel pretty good,” I said. “ What did
'you give him, Anse?”
He didn’t look {it me. “ I give a chattel mortgage on my cultivator and seeder,” he said.
“ But they ain’t worth forty dollars. How far do you aim to get with a forty-dollar team ? ”
They were all watching him now, quiet and
steady. Jewel was stopped, half-way back, wait-
ing to go on to the horse. “ I give other things,”
Anse said. He begun to mumble his mouth again,
standing there like he was waiting for somebody
to hit him and him Vith his mind already made
up not to do nothing about it.
“ What other things ? ” Dari said.
** Hell,” I said. “ You take my team. You can bring them back. I’ll get along some way.”
“ So that’s what you were ' doing in Cash’s
clothes last night,” Dari said. He said it just like
he was reading it outen the paper. Like he never
give a durn himself one way t)r the other. Jewel
had come back now, standing there, looking at
Anse with them marble eyes of hisn. “ Cash
aimed to buy that talking machine from Suratt
with thaf money,” Dari said.
Anse sl^ood there, mumbling his mouth. Jewel watched him. He ain’t never blinkod yet.
“ But that’s just eight dollars more,” Dari said, in that^voice like he was just listening and never
AKMSTID
179
give a dum himself. “ That still won’t buy a team.”
Ajuse^looked at Jewel quick, kind of sliding his
eyes that waj^ then he looked down again. * God
kndws, if there were ere a man,” he says. Still
they didn’t say nothing. They just watched him,
waiting, and him sliding his eyes toward their feet
and up their legs but no higher. “ And the horse,”
he says. ,
“ \^at horse ? ” Jewel said. Anse just stood
there. I be durn, if a man can’t keep the upper
hand of his sons, he ought to run them away
from home, no matter how big they are. And if
he can’t do that, I be durn h' he oughtn’t to leave
himself. I be durn if I wouldn’t. “ You mean,
you tried to swap my horse ? ” Jewel says.
Anse stands there, dangle-armed. “ For fifteen
years I ain’t had a tooth in my head,” he says.
“ God knows it. He knows in fifteen years I ain’t
et the victuals He aimed for man to eat to keep
his strength up, and me saving a nickel here and
a nickel there so my family wouldn’t suffer it, to
buy them teeth so*I could eat God’s appointed
food. I give that^oney. I thought that if I
could do without eating, my sons could do with-
out riding. God knows I did.”
Jewel stands with his hands on his hipS, looking
at Anse. Then he looks away. He Icipked out
across the fi^ld, his face still as a rock, like it was
somebody else talking ^bout somebody el^e’s horse
and him not even listening. Then he slow.
i8o AS 1 LAY DYING
and said “ Hell ” and he turned and went on to
the gate ''and unhitched the horse and |ot on it.
It was moving when he come into the saddle and
by the time he was on it they was |:earing down
the road like the Law might have been behind
them. They went out of sight that way, the two
of them looking like some kind of a spotted cyclone.
“ Well,” I says. “ You take my team,” I said.
But he wouldn’t do it. And th,ey wouldn’t even
stay, and that boy chasing them buzzards all day
in the hot sun until he was nigh as crazy as the
rest of them. “ Leave Cash here, anyway,” I said.
But they wouldn’t do that. They made a pallet
for him with quilts on top of the coffin and laid
him on it and set his tools by him, and we put
my team in and hauled the wagon about a mile
down the road.
“ If we’ll bother you here,” Anse says, “ just say so.”
** Sho,” I said. “ It’ll be fine here. Safe, too. Now let’s go back and eat supper.”
“ I thank you,” Anse said. “ We got a little something in the basket. W^:' can make out.”
“ Where’d you get it ? ” I csaid.
“ We brought it from home.”
“ But it’ll be stale now,” I said. “ Come and get some hot victuals.”
But th^y wouldn’t come. “ I reckon we can
make out,” Anse said. So I went home and et
and taken a basket back to them and tried again
to make
ARMSTID
i8i
“I thank you,” he said. “I reckon we can
make outf * So I left them there, squatting around
a littie ^ure, waiting ; God knows what for.
I come or^ home. I kept thinking about* them
the^e, and about that fellow tearing away on that
horse. And that would be the* last they would
see of him. And I be durn if I could blame him.
Not for wanting to not give up his horse, But
for getting shut pf such a durn fool as Anse.
Or that’s what I thought then. Because be
durn if there ain't someshing about a durn fellow
like Anse that seems to make a man have to help
him, even when he knows he’U be wanting to
kick himself next minute, decausc about a hour
after breakfast next morning Eustace Grimm that
works Snopes’ place come up with a span of mules,
hunting Anse.
“ I thought him and Anse never traded,” I said.
“ Sho,” Eustace said. “ Ail they liked was the
horse. Like I said to Mr. Snopes, he was letting
this team go for fifty dollars, because if his uncle
Flem had a just kept them Texas horses when he
owned them, Anse Vouldn’t a never ”
“ The horse ? ” I #aid. “ Anse’s boy taken that
horse and cleared out last night, probably half-
way to Texas by now, and Anse ”
“ I didn’t know who brung it,” Eustace said.
“ I never see them. I just found the hc#se in the
barn this morning when I went to feed, and I
told Mr. Snopes and bp said to bring thcj:eam on
ovA here.”
I82
AS P LAY DYING
Well, thaf 11 be the last theyll ever see of him
now, sho enough. Come Christmas tiine they’ll
^ybe get a postal card from him in iTexas, I
reckon. And if it hadn’t a been Je^vel, I reckon
it’d a been me; 1 owe him that much, myself,
i be durn if Ansa don’t conjure a man, some way.
I be durn if he ain’t a sight.
VARDAMAN
OW there are seven of them, in little tall black circles.
“ Look, Dari,” I say ; “ see ? ”
■ He looks up. We watch them in littl'* tall black circles of not-moying.
“ Yesterday there were just four.” I say.
There were mote than four on the barn.
Do you know what I would do if he tries to light on the wagon again ? ” 1 say.
“ What would you do ? ” Dari says.
“I wouldn’t let him light on her,” I say. “I wouldn’t let him light on Cash, either.”
Cash is sick. He is sick on the box. But my mother is a fish.
“ We got to get some medicine in Mottson,” pa says. “I reckon we’ll just have to.”
“ How do you feel. Cash ? ” Dari says.
“It don’t bother none,” Cash says.
“ Do you want ft propped a littie higher ? ” Dari says.
Cash has a broken leg. He has had two broken
legs. He lies on the box with a quilt rolled under
his head and a piece of wood under ^is knee.
“ I reckon we ought to left him at Aomstid’s,”
pa says.
I haven’t got a broken and pa hasn’t ^nd Dari
hasft’t and “ It’s just the bumps,” Cash say§. “ It
183
i 84 as / LAY DYING
kind of grinds together a little on a bump. I don’t
bother done.” Jewel has gme away. lie and bis
horse went awey one supper time.
“ fi’s because she wouldn’t have ys beholden,”
pa says. “ ’Fore God, I do the best that ere a
man.” Is it heca'ise Jewel's mother is a horse ^ Dari?
I said.
“ Maybe I can draw the ropes a little tighter,”
Dari says. That’s why Jewel and I were both in the
shed and she was in the wagon because the horse lives in the
bam and I had to keep on running the bm^rd away
from
“ If you just would,” Cash says. And Dewey
Dell hasn’t got a broken leg and I haven’t. Cash
is my brother.
We stop. When Dari loosens the rope Cash begins to sweat again. His teeth look out.
“ Hurt'? ” Dari says.
“ I reckon you better put it back,” Cash says.
Dari puts the tope back, pulling hard. Cash’s teeth look out.
“ Hurt ? ” Dari says.
“It don’t bother none,” Gish says.
“ Do you want pa to drive .•slower ? ” Dari says.
“ No,” Cash says. “ Ain’t no time to hang back, it don’t bother none.”
“ We’ll have to get some medicine at Mottson,” pa says. » “ I reckon we’ll have to.”
“ Tell him to go on,” Cash says. , We go on.
Dewey JDdl leans back apd wipes Cash’s face.
Cash is, my brother. But Jewel’s mother is a h6rse.
VARDAMAN i8j
Afy mother is a fish. Dari says that when we come to the water pgeun I might see her and Dewey Dell said. She* s in the box ; how could she have got out ? She got out t^^ough the holes I bored, into the water I said,
. “ Those cakes will be in fine shape by the tjjPC we get td Jefferson,” Dari says.
Dewey Dell dbes not look around.
“ You better tiy to sell them in Mottson,” Dari says.
“ When will we get to Mottson, Dari ? ” 1 say.
“ To-morrow,” Dari says. “ if this team don’t
rack to pieces. Snopes must have fed them on saw-
dust.”
“ Why did he feed them on sawdust, Dari ? ” I say.
“ Look,” Dari says. “ See ? ”
Now there are nine of them, tall in little tall black circles.
When we come to the foot of the hill pa stops and
Dari and Dewey Deli and I get out. Cash can’t walk
because he has a broken leg. “ Come up, mules,”
pa says. The mule# walk hard ; the wagon creaks.
Dari and Dewey Dell and I walk behind the wagon,
up the hill. When we come to the top pf the hill
pa stops and we ^et back into the wagon.
Now there are ten of them, tall in littlc^tall black < circles on tffe sky.
MOSELEY
I HAPPENED to look up, and her outside
the window,^ looking in. Not close to the
glass, and not looking at anything in particular ;
jitft, standing there with her head turned this way
and her eyes full on me and kind of blank too, like
she was waiting for a sign. When I looked up
again she was moving toward the door.
She kind of bumbled at the screen door a minute,
like they do, and came in. She had on a stilF-
brimmed straw hat setting on the top of her head
and she was carrying a package wrapped in news-
paper : I thought that she had a quarter or a dollar
at the most, and that after she stood around awhile
she would maybe buy a cheap comb or a bottle of
nigger toilet water, so I never disturbed her for a
minute or so except to notice that she was pretty
in a kind of sullen, awkward way, and that she
looked a sight better in her gingham dress and her
own complexion than she wo’„dd after she bought
whatever she would finally decide on. Or tell
that she wanted. I knew that she had already
decided before she came in. But you have to let
them tak« their time. So I went on with what I was
doing, figuring to let Albert wait on her when he
caught up at the fountain, when he came back to me.
“ That woman,” he said. “ You better see what she wanj.”
i86
i87
MOSELEY
“ What does she want ? ” I said.
I don’A know. I can’t get anything out of her.
You Vljer wait on her.”
So I went around the counter. I saw that she'
was''>barefoote&, standing with her feet flat and easy
on the floor, like she was used ,to it. She wa^
looking at me, hard, holding the package ; I saw
she had about as black a pair of eyes as ever I
and she vfas a stranger. I never remembered see-
ing her in Mottsolti before. “ What can I do for
you ? ” I said.
Still she didn’t say anything. She stared at me
without winking. Then she looked back at the
folks at the fountain. Then she looked past me,
toward the back of the store.
“ Do you want to look at some toilet things ? ” I said. “ Or is it medicine you want ? ”
“ That’s it,” she said. She looked quick back at
the fountain again. So I thought maybe her ma or
somebody had sent her in for some of this female
dope and she was ashamed to ask for it. I knew she
couldn’t have a complexion like hers and use it her-
self, let alone not beiag much more than old enough
to barely know what it was for. It’s a shame, the
way they poison themselves with it. But a man’s
got to stock it or go out of business in this country.
“ Oh,” I sai<^ “ What do you use ? We
have ” She looked at me again, al|tiost like
she had said hush, and looked toward the back of the store again.
I’d liefer go back there,” she said.
i88
AS I LAY DYING
“ All right,” I said. You have to humour them.
You save time by it. I followed her toithe back
She put her hand on the gate. “ There’s nq/Ching
back f there but the prescription case,” I said.
** What do you want ? ” She stopped and looked
at me. It was Ijke she had taken some kind of a
lid off her face, her eyes. It was her eyes : kind of
diKrb and hopeful and sullenly willing to be dis-
appointed all at the same time. But she was in
trouble of some sort ; I could sie that. “ What’s
your trouble ? ” I said. “ Tell me what it is you
want I’m pretty busy.” I wasn’t meaning to
hurry her, but a man just hasn’t got the time they
have out there.
“ It’s the female trouble,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Is that all?” I thought may-
be she was younger than she looked, and her first
one had -scared her, or maybe one had been a little
abnormal as it will in young women. “ Where’s
your ma ? ” I said. “ Haven’t you got one ? ”
“ She’s out yonder in the wagon,” she said.
“ Why not talk to her about it before you take
any medicine,” I said. “ Any# woman would have
told you about it.” She looked at me, and I
looked at her again and said, “ 'riow old are you ? ”
“ Seventeen,” she said.
“ Oh,”' I said. “ I thought maybe you
were . . She was watching me. But then, in
the eyes all of them look like they had no age and
knew everything in the world, anyliow. “ Are
you too Regular, or not regular enough ? ”
MOSELEY 189
She quit looking at me but she didn’t move. “ Yes,” ^e said. “ I reckon so. Yes.”
“ Weil, which ? ” I said. “ Don’t you know ? ’.’
It’s a crime ^d a shame ; but after all, theyll buy
it B:om somebody. She stood there, not looking
at me. “ You want something tcf stop it ? ” I said.
“ Is that it ? ”
“No,”, she said. “That’s it. It’s already stopped.”
“ Well, u'hat ” Her face was lowered a
little, still, like they do in all their dealings with a
man so he don’t ever know just v’here the lightning
will strike next. “You are not married, are
you ? ” I said.
“ No.”
“ Oh,” I said. “ And how long has it been since it stopped ? about five months maybe ? ”
“It ain’t been but two,” she said.
“ Well, I haven’t got anything in my store you
want to buy,” I said, “ unless it’s a nipple. And
I’d advise you to buy that and go back home and
tell your pa, if you have one, and let him make
somebody buy you*a wedding licence. Was that
all you wanted ? ”
But she just stood there, not looking at me.
“ I got the money to pay you,” she said.
“ Is it your owfi, or did he act enough^ of a man to give you the money ? ”
“ He give»it to me. Ten dollars. He said that would be enough.”
^ A thousand dollars wouldn’t be enofltgh in my
190 AS J LAY DYING
stote and ten cents wouldn^t be enough,” I said.
“ You t^e my advice and go home and ibll you pa
or your brothers if you have any or the f rsl man
you tome to in the road.”
But she didn^t move. “ Lafe said I could get it
s?t the drug-stort. He said to tell you me and
him wouldn’t never tell nobody you sold it to us.”
'And I just wish your precious Lafe had come
for it himself ; that’s what I wish. I don’t know :
I’d have had a little respect for him then. And you
can go back and tell him I said so — ^if he ain’t
half-way to Texas by now, which I don’t doubt.
Me, a respectable druggist, that’s kept store and
raised a family and been a church-member for
fifty-six years in this "town. I’m a good mind to
tell your folks myself, if I can just find who they
are.”
She looked at me now, her eyes and face kind of
blank again like when I first saw her through the
window. “ I didn’t know,” she said. “ He told
me I could get something at the drug-store. He
said they might not want to sell it to me, but if I
had ten dollars and told them i wouldn’t never tell
nobody . . .”
“ He never said this drug-store,” I said. “ If he did or mentioned my name, I defy him to prove it. I defy him to repeat it or I’ll < prosecute him to the full extent of the law, and you can tell him so.”
“ But maybe another drug-store wou’d,” she said.
** Thep ^ I don’t wanu to know it. Me, that’s — ” Then I looked at her. But it’’s a
MOSELEY 191
hard life they have ; sometimes a man ... if
there cac^ever be any excuse for sin, which it can’t
be. %A«d then, life wasn’t made to be easy on
folks : they ^wouldn’t ever have any reason* to be
godd and ^e. “ Look here,” I said. “ You get
that notion out of your head. The Lord gave ywu
what you have, even if He did use the devil to do it ;
you let ^im take it away from you if it’s Hi * will
to do so. You^o on back to Lafe and you and
him take thct ten dollars and get married with it.”
“ Lafe said I ct>uld get something at the drug- store,” she said.
“ Then go and get it,” I said. • “ You won’t get it here.”
She went out, carrying the package, her feet
making a little hissing on the floor She bumbled
again at the door and went out. I could see her
through the glass going on down the street.
It was Albert told me about the rest of it. He
said the wagon was stopped in front of Grummet’s
hardware store, with the ladies all scattering up and
down the street with handkerchief to their noses,
and a crowd of harfi-nosed men and boys standing
around the wagon, listening to the marshal arguing
with the man. He was a kind of tall, gaunted man
sitting on the wagon, saying it was a public street
and he reckoned he had as much righi there as
anybody, and the marshal telling him he vipuld have
to move on*; folks couldn’t stand it. It had been
dead eight days, Albert said. They cjy;ne from
some place out in Yoknapatawpha county, trying
192 AS PLAY DYING
to get t9 Jefferson with it. It must have been like a
piece of rotten cheese coming into an £ftit-hill, in
that ramshackle wagon that .Mbert said folksrwere
scared would fall all to pieces before tjiey could get
it out of town, with that home-made box and
another fellow w'ith a broken leg lying on a quilt
on top of it, and the father and a little boy sitting
on *the seat and the marshal trying to iqake them
get out of town.
“ It*s a public street,” the man says. “ I reckon
we can stop to buy something same as airy other
man. We got the money to pay for hit, and hit
ain’t airy law that'-says a man can’t spend his money
where he wants.”
They had stopped ’to buy some cement. The
other son was in Grummet’s, trying to make Grum-
met break a sack and let him have ten cents’ worth,
and finally Grummet broke the sack to get him out.
They wanted the cement to fix the fellow’s broken
leg, someway.
“ Why, you’ll kill him,” the marshal said.
“ You’ll cause him to lose his leg. You take him
on to a doctor, and you get this thing buried soon
as you can. Don’t you know, you’re liable to jail
for endangering the public health ? ”
“ We’re doing the best we can,” the father said.
Then he told a long tale about hovr they had to wait
for the w9gon to come back and how the bridge was
washed away and how they went eight, miles to
another {>ijdge and it was gone too so they came
back an^ cwum the ford and the mules got drowned
MOSELEY 193
and how they got another team and found that the
road wa# washed out and they had to come clean*
around* by Mottson/and then the one with the
cement cam| back and told him to shut up*.
** We’ll be gone in a minute,” he told the marshal.
“ We never aimed to bother nftbody,” the father said.
“ You^take that fellow to a doctor,” the marshal told the one with the cement.
“I rerkori he’s all right,” he said.
“It ain’t that we’re hard-hearted,” the marshal
said. “ But I reckon you can tell yourself how
it is.”
“ Sho,” the other said. “ We’ll take out soon as
Dewey Dell comes back. She went to deliver a
package.”
So they stood there with the folks backed off
with han^erchiefs to their faces, until in a minute
the girl came up with that newspaper package.
“ Come on,” the one with the cement said,
“ we’ve lost too much time.” So they got in the
wagon and went on. And when I went to supper
it still seemed like f could smell it. And the next
day 1 met the marsl^ and I began to sniff and said,
“ Smell anything ? ”
“ I reckon they’re in Jefferson by now,” he said.
“ Or in jail. Well, thank the Lord it^'s not our jail.”
“ That’s a fact,” he said.
DARL
H ERE’S a place,” pa says. He pulls the
team up and sits looking at the house.
“ We could get some water over
yonder.”
“ All right,” I say. ** You’ll Ivive to borrow a bucket from them, Dewey Dell.”
*‘God knows,” pa say». “I wouldn’t be be- holden, God knows.”
** If you see a good-sized can, you might bring
it,” I say. Dewey Dell gets down from the wagon,
carrying the package.* “ You had more trouble
than you expected, selling those cakes in Mottson,”
I say. How do our lives ravel out into the no-
wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapi-
tulant : echoes of old compulsions with no-hand
on no-strings : in sunset we fall into furious
attitudes, dead gestures of dolls. Cash broke his
leg and now the sawdust is running out. He is
bleeding to death is Cash.
“ I wouldn’t be beholden,’*’ pa says. “ God knows.”
** Then make some water yourself,” I say. “ We can use (hash’s hat.”
When ©ewey Dell comes back the man comes
with her. Then he stops and she comes on and
he stand; there and after a while he goes back to
the hotwc'and stands on the porch, watching us.
*94
DARL
195
** We better not try to lift him down/* pa says. ** We cah fix it here.’*
“ Do you want to be lifted down. Cash ? ** I say.
“ Won’t yre get to Jefferson to-morrow*? ” he
sa^s. He is watching us, his eyes interrogatory,
intent, and sad. ‘I can last it out.”
“ It’ll be easier on you,” pa says. “ It’ll keep it from rubbing together.”
“ I can last it,” Cash says. “ We’ll lose time stopping ”
“ We done bought the cement, now,” pa says.
“ I could last it,” Cash says. “ It ain’t but one
more day. It don’t bother t© speak of.” He
looks at us, his eyes wide in his thin grey face,
questioning. “ It sets up so,” he says.
“ We done bought it now,” pa says.
I mix the cement in the can, stirring the slow water into the pale-green thick coils. I bring the can to the wagon where Cash can see. He lies on his back, his thin profile in silhouette, ascetic and profound against the sky. “ Does that look about right ? ” I say.
“You don’t want too much water, or it won’t work right,” he sa’^rs.
“ Is this too mu ch ? ”
“ Maybe if you could get a little sand,” he says.
“ It ain’t but one more day,” he says. “ It don’t
bother me none^’
Vardaman goes back down the road tc*where we
crossed th» branch and returns with sand. He
pours it slowly into the thick coiling in tljp can. I
go to the wagon again.
196 AS r LAY DYING
** Does that look all right ? ”
‘ “Yes,^* Cash says. “I could have lasted. It
don’t bother me none.”
We loosen the splints and pour the, cement over his leg, slow.
'•“Watch out for it,” Cash says. “Don’t get none on it if you can help.”
“ Ves,” I say. Dewey Dell tears a piece of paper
from the package and wipes the^cement from the
top of it as it drips from Cash’s leg.
“ How does that feel ? ”
“ It feels fine,” he says. “ It’s cold. It feels fine.”
“ If it’ll just help you,” pa says. “ I asks your forgiveness. I never forseen it no more than you.”
“It feels fine,” Cash says.
If you could just ravel out into time. That
would be nice. It would be nice if you could just
ravel out into time.
We replace the splints, the cords, drawing them
tight, the cement in thick pale green slow surges
among the cords. Cash watching us quietly with
that profound questioning look.
“ That’ll steady it,” I say. ‘
“Ay,” Cash says. “I’m obliged.”
Then we all turn on the wagon and watch him. He
is coming up the road behind us, wooden-backed,
wooden-raced, moving only from his hips down.
He com«s up without a word, with his pale rigid
eyes in his high sullen face, and gets into dM wagon.
“ Herf’s.a hill,” pa says. "“I reckon you’ll hjivc to get otrt and walk.”
VARDAMAN
D ari? and Jewel and Dewey Dell and i are
walking up the hill behind the wagop.
Jewel came back. He came up the road
and got into the wagon. He was walking. Jewel
hasn’t go\ a horse any more. Jewel is my brother.
Cash is mv brother. Cash has a broken leg. We
fixed Cash’s leg so it doesn’t hurt. Cash is my
brother. Jewel is my brother tDo, but he hasn’t
got a broken leg.
Now .there are five of their , tall in little tall black circles.
“ Where do they stay at night, Dari ? ” I say.
“ When we stop at night in the barn, where do they
stay ? ”
The hill goes off into the sky. Then the sun
comes up from behind the hill and the mules and the
wagon and pa walk on the sun. You cannot watch
them, walking slow on the sun. In Jefferson it is
red on the track behind the glass. The track goes
shining round and ^ round. Dewey Dell says so.
To-night I am going to see where they stay while we are in the bam.
197
D ARL
J EWEL,” I say, “ whose son are you ? ”
The breeze was setting up from the bam, so
we put her under the apple tree, where the
moonlight can dapple the apple tree upon the long
slumbering flanks within which now and then she
talks in litde trickling bursts of secret and mur-
murous bubbling. I took Vardaman to listen. When
we came up the cat leaped down from it and flicked
away with silver claw and silver eye into the shadow.
** Your mother was a horse, but who was your father. Jewel ? ”
You goddamn lying son of a bitch.”
“ Don’t call me that,” I say.
“You 'goddamn lying son of a bitch.”
“ Don’t you call me that. Jewel.” In the tall
moonlight his eyes look like sp6ts of white paper
pasted on a high small football.
After supper Cash began to sweat a little. “ It’s
getting a little hot,” he said.' “ It was the sun
shining on it all day, I reckoij.”
“ You want some water poured on it ? ” we say. “ Maybe that will ease it some.”
“ I’d bt obliged,” Cash said. ^ * It was the sun
shining o^ it, I reckon. I ought to thought and
kept it covered.”
“ We ought to though,r,” we said. “ You couldn’t ‘have suspicioned.”
198
D A KL 199
** I never noticed it getting hot,” Cash said. “ I ought to^ minded it.”
So we poured the water over it. His leg and
foot below the cement looked like they had beeA
boiled. “ Efees that feel better ? ” we said.
I’m obliged,” Cash said. “ It feels fine.”
Dewey Dell wipes his face with the hem of her dress.
“ See. if you can get some sleep,” we say.
“ Sho,” Cash slys. “ Fm right obliged. It feels fine now.”
Jewely I saj/^ Who was your Jathe<^^ Jewel?
Goddamn you. Goddamn you.
VARDAMAN
S HE was under the apple tree add Dari and I
go across the moon and the cat jumps down
and runs and we can hear her inside the wood.
“Hear?” Dari says. “Put your ear dose.”
I put my ear dose and I can hear her. Only I
can’t tell what she is saying.
“ What is she saying, Dari ? ” I say. “ Who is she talking to ? ”
“ She’s talking, to God,” Dari says. “ She is calling on Him to help her.”
“ What does she want Him to do ? ” I say.
“ She wants Him to hide her away from the sight of man,” Dari says.
“ Why does she want to hide her away from the sight of man, Dari ? ”
“ So she can lay down her life,” Dari says.
“ Why does she want to lay down her life, Dari?”
“ Listen,” Dari says. We ihear her. We hear her turn over on her side. “ Listen,” Dari says.
“ She’s turned over,” I say.' “ She’s looking at me through the wood.”
“ Yes,l’ Dari says. ,
“ How can she see through the wood, Dari ? ”
“ Q)me,” Dari says. “ We must let her be quiet.
G)me.”
“ She* jpm’t see out there, because the holes
200
201
VARDAMAN
are in the top/* I say. “ How can she see, Dari ? **
“ I^t*s go see about Cash,*’ Dari says.
And*[ saw something Dewey Dell told me not do tell nobody.
Cash is sick in his leg. We fixed his leg this
afternoon, but he is sick in it again, lying on the
bed. We pour water on his. leg and then ho-feels
fine.
** I feel fine,*’ Cash says. “ I’m obliged to you.”
“ Try to get some slqep,” we say.
I feel fine,” Cash says. “ I’m obliged to vou.”
And I saw something Dewey Dfll told me not to
tell nobo^. It is noi about pa . 'nd it is not edfout Cash
and it is not about Jewel and it ns not about Dewey Dell
and it is not about me.
Dewey Dell and I are going to sleep on the pallet.
It is on the back porch, where we can see the barn,
and the moon shines on half of the pallet and we
will lie half in the white and half in the black, with
the moonlight on our legs. And then I am going
to see where they stay at night while we are in the
barn. We are not in the bam to-night but I can see
the bam and so I am going to find where they stay
at night.
We lie on the pallet, with our legs in the moon.
“ Look,” I say^“ my legs look black. Sfour legs look black, too.”
“Go to sleep,” Dewey Dell says.
Jefferson is a far piece.
Dewey Dell.”
202 AS I LAY DYING
“If it*s not Christmas now, how will it be there? ”
It goes round and round on the shining track. Then, the track goes shining round and round.
“ Will what be there ? ”
“ That train, cin the window.”
“You go to sleep. You can see to-morrow if it^s ther«/’
Maybe Santa Claus won’t know they are town boys.
“ Dewey Dell.”
“ You go to sleep. He ain’t going to let none of them town boys have it.”
It was behind the window, red on the track, and
the track shining round and round. It made my
heart hurt. And then it was pa and Jewel and Dari
and Mr. Gillespie’s boy. Mr. Gillespie’s boy’s legs
come down under his nightshirt. When he goes
into the moon, his legs fuzz. They go on around
the house toward the apple tree.
“ What are they going to do, Dewey Dell ? ”
They went around the house toward the apple tree.
“ I can smell her,” I say. “ Can you smell her, too ? ”
“ Hush,” Dewey Dell says. “ The wind’s changed. Go to sleep.”
And so I am going to know where they stay at
night soon. They come around the house, going
across the yard in the moon, carrying her on their
shouldeif. They carry her down to the barn, ‘the
VARDAMAN 203
moon shining fiat and quiet on het. Then they
come ba^ and go into the house again. While
they were in the moon, Mr. Gillespie^s boy*s legs
fuzzed. * And then 1 waited and 1 said Dewey Pell ?
and!»then I \^ited and then 1 went to find where
they stay at night and I saw something that Dewey
Dell told me not to tell nobody.
DARL
A GAINST the dark doorway* he seems to
materialia-^ out of darkness, lean as a race-
Jl .j\.horse in his underclothes in the beginning
of the glare. He leaps to the ground with on his
face an expression of furious unbelief.'' He has
seen me without even turning his head or his eyes
in which the glare swims like two small torches.
“ Come on,” he says, leaping down the slope
toward the bam.
For an instant longer he runs silver in the moon- light, then he springs out like a flat figure cut cleanly from tin against an abmpt and soundless explosion as the whole loft of the barn takes fire at once, as though k had been stuffed with powder. The front, the conical facade with the square orifice of doorway broken only by the square squat shape of the coffin on the saw-horses like a cubistic bug, comes into relief. Behind me pa and Gillespie and Mack and Dewey Dell and Vardaman emerge from the house.
He pauses at the coffin, stooping, looking at me,
his face furious. Overhead the flames sound like
thunder ; across us rushes a cool draught : there is
no heat ir it at all yet, and a handful of chaff lifts
suddenly and sucks swiftly along the stalls where
a horse * is screaming. ** Quick,” I say ; “ the
horses.”
He glstifes a moment longer at me, then at the roof
204
D yi K L 405
overhead, then he leaps toward the stall where the
horse scftams. It plunges and kicks, the sound of'
the Clashing blows sucking up into the sound of the
flames, sound like an interminablef train
crossing an endless tresde. Gillespie and Mack
pass me, in knee-length nightshirts, shouting, their
voices thin and high and meaningless and at the
same time profoundly wild and sad : “ . . . cow
. . . stall . . Gillespie’s nightshirt rushes ahead
of him oil the draft, ballooning about his hairy
thighs.
The stall door has swung shu*. Jewel thjusts it
back with his buttocks and he 'appears, his back
arched, 'the muscles ridged through his garments as
he drags the horse out by its* head. In the glare its
eyes roll with soft, fleet, wild opaline fire ; its
muscles bunch and run as it flings its head about,
lifting Jewel clear of the ground. He drags it on,
slowly, terrifically ; again he gives me across his
shoulder a single glare furious and brief. Even
when they are clear of the barn the horse continues
to fight and lash backward toward the doorway
until Gillespie passes me, stark naked, his night-
shirt wrapped about the mule’s head, and beats the
nuddened horse on out of the door.
Jewel returns, running ; again he looks down at
the coffin. But 4ic comes on. “ Wher^s cow ? ”
be cries, passing me. I follow him. I9 the stall
Mack is struggling with the other mule. When its
h^ul turns into the glare I can see the wfld rolling
of its eye too, but it makes no sound. Itijiy:t stands
2o6 as f LAY DYING
there, watching Mack over its shoulder, swinging
its hindlj^uarters toward him whenever he approaches.
He looks back at us, his eyes and moufb three
round holes in his face on which the^freckles look
like English peas on a plate. His voice is thin, high,
fyx away.
“ I can’t do nothing. . . It is as though the
sound had been swept from his lips and up and
away, speaking back to us fro'm an immense dis-
tance of exhaustion. Jewel slides past us ; the
mule whirls and lashes out, but he has already
gained its head. I lean to Mack’s ear :
“ Nightshirt. Around his head.”
Mack stares at me. Then he rips the nightshirt
off and flings it over tKe mule’s head, and it becomes
docile at once. Jewel is veiling at him : “ Cow ?
Cow ? ”
“ Back,” Mack cries. “ Last stall.”
The cow watches us as we enter. She is backed
into the comer, head lowered, still chewing though
rapidly. But she makes no move. Jewel has
paused, looking up, and suddenly we watch the
entire floor to the loft dissol>)*e. It just turns to
fire ; a faint litter of sparkr rains down. He
glances about. Back under the trough is a three-
legged milking-stool. He catches it up and swinge
it into tht planking of the rear wall. He splinters
a plank, then another, a third ; we tear the frag-
ments away. While we are stooping at the opening
something charges into us from behind. It is the
cow; with a single whistling breath she rushes
P A RL 207
between us and through the gap and into the outer
glare, he{ tail erect and rigid as a broom nailed,
uprigljt^to the end of her spine.
Jewel turns back into the barn. “ Here,” 1 say ;
“ J^el 1 ” I* grasp at him ; he strikes my hand
down. “ You fool,” I say, “ dAn‘’t you see you
can’t make it back yonder ? ” The hall-way looks
like a searchlight turned into rain. “ Comef on,”
I say, “ around this way.”
When wc are through the gap he begins to run.
“ Jewel,” I say, “unning. He darts around the
corner. When I reach it he has ..Imost reached the
next one, running against the glare like that figure
cut from tin. Pa and Gillespie and Mack are some
distance away, watching the*barn, pink against the
darkness where for the time the moonlight has
been vanquished. “ Catch him ! ” I cry ; “ stop
him I ”
When I reach the front, he is struggling with
Gillespie ; the one lean in underclothes, the other
stark naked. They are like two figures in a Greek
frieze, isolated out of all reality by the red glare.
Before I can reach^ them he has struck Gillespie
to the ground and, turned and run back into the
barn.
The sound of it has become quite peaceful now,
like the sound of^he river did. We watoh through
the dissolving proscenium of the doorway as Jewel
ruflf crouej^ng to the far end of the coffin and
stoops to it. For an,instant he looks up and out
at*us through the rain of burning hay lik^.^ portiere
2o8 AS I LAY DYING
of flaming beads, and I can see his mouth shape as he calls *my name.
**J
seems«to me that I now hear the accumulation of her
voice through the last five minutes, ^d I hear her
shilling and struggling as pa and Mack hold her,
screanung, “ Jewel ! Jewel ! ” But he is no longer
lookiftg at us. We see his shoulders strain as he
up-ends the coffin and slides it single-handed from
the saw-horses. It looms unbelievably tall, hiding
him : I would not have believed that Addie Bun-
dren would have needed that much room to lie
comfortable in; ^for another instant it stands
upright while the sparks rain on it in scattering
bursts as though they Engendered other sparks from
the contact. Then it topples forward, gaining
momentum, revealing Jewel and the sparks raining
on him too in engendering gusts, so that he appears
to be enclosed in a thin nimbus of fire. Without
stopping it over-ends and rears again, pauses, then
crashes slowly forward and through the curtain.
This time Jewel is riding upon it, clinging to it,
until it crashes down and flings him forward and
dear and Mack leaps forward ,into a thin smell of
scorching meat and slaps at the widening crimson-
edged holes that bloom like flowers in his under-,
shirt.
VARDAMAN
W flEN I went to find where they stay
at nighty I saw something. They said,
“Where is Dari? Where did Daxl
go?''
They Carried her back under the apple tree.
The barn was still red. but it wasn’t a barn now.
It was sunk down, and .the ted went swirling up.
The barn went swirling up in little red pieces,
against the sky and the stars so tltat the stars moved
backward.
And then Cash was still iPwake. He turned his head from side to side, with sweat on his face.
“ Do you want some more water on it, Cash ? ” Dewey Dell said.
Cash’s le'g and foot turned black. We held the
lamp and looked at Cash’s foot and leg where it was
black.
“ Your foot looks like a nigger’s foot, Cash,” I said.
“ I reckon we’ll have to bust it off,” pa said.
“ What in the tarnation you put it on there for ? ” ^r. Gillespie said.
“ I thought it \^puld steady it some,” potsaid. “ 1 just aimed to help him.”
T]|iey got the flat iron and the hammer. Dewey
Dell held the lamp. ^ They had to hit it hard.
Affd then Cash went to sleep.
209
210
AS I LAY D YING
(
“ He*s asleep now,” I said. “ It can’t hurt him awhile hfe’s asleep.”
It jjist cracked. It wouldn’t come oft.
“ Itfll take the hide, too,” Mr. Gillespie said.
“ Why in the tarnation you put it on tfiere ? Didn’t
none of you think to grease his leg first ? ”
“ I just aimed to help him,” pa said. “ It was Dari ‘put it on.”
“ Where is Dari ? ” they said...
“ Didn’t none of you have more sense than
that ? ” Mr. Gillespie said. “ I’d ’a’ thought he
would, anyway.”
Jewel was lying on his face. His back was red.
Dewey Dell put the medicine on it. The medicine
was made out of butttr and soot, to draw out the
fire. Then his back was black.
“ Does it hurt, Jewel ? ” I said. “ Your back
looks like a nigger’s. Jewel,” I said. Cash’s foot
and leg looked like a nigger’s. Then they broke
it off. Cash’s leg bled.
“ You go on back and lay down,” Dewey Dell said. “ You ought to be asleep.”
“ Where is Dari ? ” they said.
He is out there under the ^pple tree with her,
lying on her. He is there so the cat won’t come
back. I said, “ Are you going to keep the cat away,
Dari ? ” *
The moonlight dappled on him too. On her it was still, but on Dari it dappled up ar^d down,
“ You needn’t to cry,” I ,said. “ Jewel got her out. Y(|ji needn’t to cry, Dari.”
YARD AM A N
211
The bam is still red. It used to be redder than
this. Then it went swirling, making the stars run
backward without falling. It hurt my heart like
the train did.
lYben I went to find where they slay at night, T saw
something that Dewey Dell says I* mustn’t never t^l
nobody.
DARL
W E have been passing the signs fot some
time now : the drug-stores, the cloth-
ing stores, the patent medicine and the
garages and cafi6s, and the mile-boards diminishing,
becoming more starkly re-accrucnt : 3 mi. 2 mi.
From the crest of a hill, as we get into the wagon
again, we can see the smoke low and flat, seemingly
unmoving in the unwinded afternoon.
“ Is that it, Dari ? ” Vardaman says. “ Is that
Jefferson ? ” He too has lost flesh ; like ours,
his face has an expression strained, dreamy, and
gaunt.
Yes^” I say. He lifts his head and looks at the
sky. High against it they hang in narrowing circles,
like the smoke, with an outwarcj semblance of form
and purpose, but with no inference of motion,
progress or retrograde. We mount the wagon
again where Cash lies on the box, the jagged shards
of cement cracked about his legt The shabby mules
droop ratding and clanking down the hill.
“ We’ll have to take him to the doctor,” pa says.
** I reckon it ain’t no way around it.” The back of
Jewel’s s'nirt, where it touches him, stains slow and
black wifh grease. Life was created in the valleys.
It blew up on to the hills on the old terrors, the old
lusts, Ihe.old despairs. That’s why you must 'wjalk
up the, hills so you can ride down.
212
D A.KL. 213
Dewey Dell sits on tne seat, the newspaper
package on her lap. When we reach the foot of
the hill T^ere the road flattens between close walls
of tree^, she begins to look about quietly *from
one^side of ihe road to the other. At last she
says,
** I got to st^.”
. Pa looks at her, his shabby profile that of antici-
pant and» disgruntled annoyance. He does not
check the team. * “ What for ? ”
“ I got to go to the bushes,” Dewey Dell says.
Pa does . not check the team. “ Can’t you
wait till we get to town ? It ain’t over a mile
now.”
“ Stop,” Dewey Dell sayn. “ I got to go to the bushes.”
Pa stops in the middle of the road and we watch
Dewey Dell descend, carrying the package. She
does not look back.
“ Why not leave your cakes here ? ” I say.
We’ll watch them.”
She descends steadily, not looking at us.
“ How would sh^ know where to go to if she
waited till we get to town ? ” Vardaman says.
“ Where would yod go to do it in town, Dewey
Dell?”
* She lifts the package (down and turns^ and dis- appears among tfie trees and undergrowth.
“ Don’t be no longer than you can help,'** pa says.
“ We ain’t ^ot no time to waste.” She does not
answer. After a whift we cannot hear her even.
214 I LAY DYING
** We ought to done like* Armstid and Gillespie
said and sent word to town and had it . dug and
ready,” he said.
“ why didn’t you ? ” I say. “ You could have telephoned.” '
** What for ? ’ Jewel says. “ Who the hell ckn’t dig a hole in the ground ? ’
A car comes over the hill. It begins to sound
the horn, slowing. It runs along the roadside in
low gear, the outside wheels in the ditch, and
passes us and goes on. Vardaman watches it
until it is out of sight.
“ How far is it now, Dari ? ” he says.
“ Not far,” I say.
“ We ought to done it,” pa says. “ 1 just
never wanted to be beholden to none except her
flesh and blood.”
“ Who the hell can’t dig a damn hole in the ground ? ” Jewel says.
“ It ain’t respectful, talking that way about her
grave,” pa says. “ You all don’t know what it
is. You never pure loved her, none of you.”
Jewel does not answer. He sits a little stiffly erect,
his body arched away from his shirt. His high-
coloured jaw juts.
Dewey Dell returns. We watch her emerge
from the^ bushes, carrying the package, and climb
into the wagon. She now wears her Sunday
dress, hdl: beads, her shoes and stockings.
“ I ^^hought I told you to leave them clothes to home,”‘i3a says. She does* not answer, does fiot
D ^ R L 215
look at us. She sits the package in the wagon and gets in. The wagon moves on.
How many more hills now, Dari ? ” Vardaman savs.
“'Just onef” I say. “ The next one goes right up into town.”
This hill is red sand, bordered on either hand by
negro cabins ; against the sky ahead the ntassed
telephone? lines run, and the clock on the court-
house lifts among* the trees. In the sand the wheels
whisper, as though the earth would hush our
entry. We ^descend as the hill commences to rise.
We follow the wagon, the whispering wheels,
passing .the cabins where faces come suddenly to
the doors, white-eyed. Wo hear sudden voices,
ejaculant. Jewel has been looking from side to
side ; now his head turns forward and I can see
his ears taking on a still deeper tone of furious
red. Three negroes walk beside the road ahead of
us ; ten feet ahead of them a white man walks.
When we pass the negroes their heads turn suddenly
with that expression of shock and instinctive out-
rage. “ Great God^” one says ; “ what they got
in that wagon ? ”
Jewel whirls, “^on of a bitches,” he says. As
he does so he is abreast of the white man, who has
paused. It is asjthough Jewel had gone^blind for
the moment, for it is the white man toward whom
he whirls.
‘^Darl ! " Cash says from the wagon. I g/rasp at JdWel. The white man has fallen back a^^ace, his
2i6 as I LAY DYING
face still slack-jawed ; then his jaw tightens, claps
to. Jewel leans abov£ him, his jaw muscles gone
white.
“ t^That did you say ? ” he says.
“ Here,” I say. “ He don’t mean anything,
mistet. Jewel,” I say. When I touch him he
^ings at the man. I grasp his atm ; we struggle.
Jewel has never looked at me. He is trying to
free his arm. When I see the man again he has
an open knife in his hand.
“ Hold up, mister,” I say ; “ I’ve got him. Jewel,” I say.
“ Thinks because he’s a goddam town fellow,”
Jewel says, panting, wrenching at me. “ Son of a
bitch,” he says.
The man moves. He begins to edge around me,
watching Jewel, the knife low against his flank.
** Can’t no man call me that,” he says. Pa has got
down, and Dewey Dell is holding Jewel, pushing
at him. I release him and face the man.
“ Wait,” I say. “ He don’t mean nothing. He’s
sick ; got burned in a fire last night, and he ain’t
himself.”
“ Fire or no fire,” the man says, “ can’t no man call me that.”
** He thought you said something to him,” I sa^.
“ I never said nothing to him. I never see him before.”
“ ’Fore God,” pa says ; “ ’fore God.”
“ I know,” I say. “ He never meant anything. He’ll take- it back.”
217
DARL
Let him take it back, then.
Put ,up your knife, and he will.
Th^^man looks at me. He looks at Jewel. Jewel IS quiet now.
"-Put up'^out knife, I say.
The man shuts the knife.
“ Fore God,’ pa says. “ ’Fore God.”
“ Tell hion you didn’t mean anything. Jewel,” I say.
“ I thought he said something,” Jewel says. “ Just, because he’*’.
“ Hush,”^I say. “ Tell him yo\i didn’t mean it.”
“ I didn’t mean it,” Jewel says.
“ He. better not,’' the mar. says. “ Calling me a ”
“ Do you think he’s afraid to call you that ? ” I say.
The man looks at me. “ I never said that,” he said.
“ Don’t think it, neither,” Jewel says.
“ Shut up,” I say. “ Come on. Drive on, pa.”
The wagon moves. The man stands watching
us. Jewel does not look back. “ Jewel would
’a’ whipped him,” Vardamaix says.
We approach the crest, where the street runs,
where cars go back and forth ; the mules haul
the wagon up an^ on to the crest and the street. Pa
stops them. The street runs on ahead, where the
sqi^are opens and the monument stands before the
court-house. We mount again while thg heads
tdrn with that expression which we kncbv; save
p
2X8 AS I LAY DYING
Jewel. He does not get ^on, even though the
.wagon has started again. “ Get in, J^wel,” I
say. “ G)me on. Let’s get away from here.”
But hf does not get in. Instead he sets his foot
on the turning hub of the rear whe64, one hand
grasping the stanchion, and with the hub turning
sAioothly under his sole he lifts the other foot and
squats' there, staring straight ahead, motionless,
lean, wooden-backed, as though carved Squatting
out of the lean wood.
CASH
I T wasn’P nothing else to do. It was either
send him to Jackson, or have’Gillespie sue us,
because he knowed some way that Dari set
fire to it. I don’t know how he knowed, Wiit he
did. Valdaman see him do it, but he swore he
never told nobody but Dewey Dell and that she
told him not to tell nobody. But Gillespie knowed
it. But he would ’a’ suspicioned ic sooner or later.
He could have done it that night* just watching the
way Dari acted.
And so pa said, “ I reckon there ain’t nothing else to do,” and Jewel said,
“ You want to fix him now ? ”
“ Fix him ? ” pa said.
“ Catch him and tie him up,” Jewel said. “ God-
dam it, do you want to wait until he sets fire to
the goddam team and wagon ? ”
But there wasn’t ^o use in that. “ There ain’t
no use in that,” I said. “ We can wait till she is
underground.” A ^fellow that’s going to spend
the rest of his life locked up, he ought to be let
^ have what pleasure he can have before he goes.
“ I reckon he opght to be there,” pa say{;% “ God
knows, it’s a trial on me. Seems like it ain’t no
enc^ to bad luck when once it starts.”
Sometimes I ain’t so sho who’s got ere a light to say when a man is cra:^ and when he ain’t.* Some-
“9
220
AS I LA r DYING
times I think it ain’t none oi us pure crazy and ain't
^none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks
him that-a-way. It’s like it ain’t so mucfi what a
fellow* does, but it’s the way the majority of folks
is looking at him when he does it. «•
Because Jewel is too hard on him. Of course it
Jewel’s horse was traded to get her that nigh
to town, and in a sense it was the value of his horse
Dari tried to burn up. But I thought more than
once before we crossed the river knd after, how it
would be God’s blessing if He did take her outen
our hands and get shut of her in some clean way,
and it seemed to pie that when Jewel worked so
to get her outen the river, he was going against
God in a way, and then when Dari seen that it
looked like one of us would have to do something,
I can almost believe he done right in a way. But
I don’t reckon nothing excuses setting fire to a
man’s barn and endangering his stock and destroy-
ing his property. That’s how I ‘ reckon a man is
cra2y. That’s how he can’t see eye to eye with
other folks. And I reckon they ain’t nothing else
to do with him but what the, most folks says is
right.
But it’s a shame, in a way. 'Folks seems to get
away from the olden right teaching that says to drive
the nails down and trim the edges well always like
it was for your own use and comfort you were
making it. It’s like some folks has the smooth,
pretty l^ards to build a court-house with and others
don’t hare" no more than rough lumber fitten to
221
CASH
build a chicken coop. But it’s better to build a
tight chi^en coop than a shoddy court-house, and*
when^];iey both build shoddy or build well, ^either
because it’s one or tother is going to make« man
feer"*the betfer nor the worse.
So we went up the street, toward the square, and
he said, “ We better take Cash to the doctor first.
We can leave him there and come back for* him.”
Tljat’s it. It’s bipcause me and him was born close
together, and it nigh ten years before Jewel and
Dewey Dell and Vardaman begun to come along.
I feel kin to'them, all right, but I don’t know. And
me being the oldest, and thinking already the very
thing that he done : I don’, know.
Pa was looking at me, theh at him, mumbling his mouth.
“ Go on,” I said. “ We’ll get it done first.”
“ She would want us all there,” pa says.
“ Let’s take Cash to the doctor first,” Dari said. “ She’ll wait. She’s already waited nine days.”
“ You all don’t know,” pa says. “ The some-
body you was young with and you growed old in her
and she growed oli in you, seeing the old coming
on and it was the,one somebody you could hear
say it don’t matter and know it was the truth outen
the hard world and all a man’s grief and trials.
You all don’t know.”
“ We got the digging to do, too,” I said.
» Armstjd and Gillespie both told you to send
word ahead,” Dari s^d. “ Don’t you waqjt to go
to Peabody’s now. Cash ? ”
222
AS I LAY DYING
“ Go on,” I said. “ It feels right easy now.
• It’s best to get things done in the right place.”
“ I^it was just dug,” pa says. “ We forgot our spade/ too.”
“ Yes,” Dari said. “ I’ll go to ^ne hardware store. We’ll ha^e to buy one.”
“ It’ll cost money,” pa says.
“ 0o you begrudge her it ? ” Dari says.
“ Go on and get a spade,” Je^^el said. “ Here, give me the money.”
But pa didn’t stop. “ I reckon we can get a
spade,” he said. “ I reckon there art Christians
here.” So Dari set still and we went on, with
Jewel squatting on the tail gate, watching the back
of Dari’s head. He Idbked like one of these bull-
dogs, one of these dogs that don’t bark none,
squatting against the rope, watching the thing he
was waiting to jump at.
He set that way all the time we was in front of
Mrs. Bundren’s house, hearing the music, watching
the back of Dari’s head with them hard white eyes
of hisn.
The music was playing in the? house. It was one
of them graphophones. It was^atural as a music-
band.
“ Do you want to go to Peabody’s ? ” DaiL
said. “ They can wait here and. tell pa, and I’ll
drive you to Peabody’s and come back for
them.”
“ No>” I said. It was better to get her under- ground, Vipw we was this close, just waiting until
CASH
223
pa borrowed the shovel. He drove along the street uptil we could hear the music.
“ l^aybe they got one here,” he said. Hejjulled
up at Mrs. Bundren’s. It was like he kijowed’.
Sometimes f think that if a working man could see
work as far ahead as a lazy mad can see laziness.
So he stopped there like he knowed, before th'at
Httle new hpuse, where the music was. We Vaited
there, hfiaring it. I believe I could have dickered
Suratt down to ^ve dollars on that one of his. It’s
a comfortable thing, .music is. “ Maybe they
got one hore,” pa says.
“ You want Jewel to go,” Dari says, “ or do you reckon. I better ? ”
“ I reckon I better,” pa s4ys. He got down and
went up the path and around the house to the back.
The music stopped, then it started again.
“ He’ll get it, too,” Dari said.
. “ Ay,” I said. It was just like he knowed, like
he could see through the walls and into the next ten
minutes.
Only it was morj than ten minutes. The music
stopped and nevei* commenced again for a good
spell, where her apd pa was talking at the back.
We waited in the wagon.
“ You let me take you back to Peabody’s,” Dari said.
” No,” I said. “ We’ll get her underground.”
“ If he ever gets back,” Jewel said, *He began
to cuss, fie started to get down froth the,wagon.
‘'I’m going,” he saici.
224 I LAY DYING
Then we saw pa coming back. He had two
.spades, doming around the house. He l^d them
in the^ wagon and got in and we went on. ^ The
thusic , never started again. Pa was looking back
at the house. He kind of lifted his liand a litde
and I saw the shado pulled back a little at the window
arid her face in it.
But' the curiousest thing was Dewey Dell. It
surprised me. I see all the while how folks could
say he was queer, but that was ‘the very reason
couldn’t nobody hold it personal. It was like he
was outside of it too, same as you, and getting mad
as it would be kind of like getting mad at a mud-
puddle that splashed you when you stepped in it.
And then I always kind of had a idea that him and
Dewey Dell kind of knowed things betwixt them.
If I’d ’a’ said it was ere a one of us she hked better
than ere a' other, I’d ’a’ said it was Dari. But when
we got it filled and covered and drove out the gate
and turned into the lane where them fellows was
waiting, when they come out and come on him
and he jerked back, it was Dewey Dell that was
on him before even Jewel could* get at him, And
then I believed I knowed how Gillespie knowed
about how his bam taken fire.
She hadn’t said a word, hadn’t even looked a^
him, but jirhen them fellows tolc^ him what they
wanted and that they had come to get him and he
throwed back, she jumped on him like a wild cat
so that pne of the fellows had to quit and hold her
and her ^ratching and clawing at him like a wilH
CASH 225
cat, while the other one and pa and Jewel throwed
Dari down and held him lying on his back, looking
up at me.
“ I tJibught you would have told me,” he.said. “i never th^ght you wouldn’t have.”
“ Dari,” I said. But he foughtf again, him and
Jewel and the fellow, and the other one holding
Dewey Dell ^d Vardaman yelling and Jewel s^ing.
Kill- him. Kill the son of a bitch.”
If was bad so. * It was bad. A fellow can’t get
5^ay from a shoddy job.. He can’t do it. I tried
to tell him, hut he just said, “ I thought you’d ’a’
told me. It’s not that I,” he said, then he began
to laugh. The other fellow pulled Jewel off of
him and he sat there on tht* ground, laughing.
I tried to tell him. If I could have just moved,
even set up. But I tried to tell him and he quit
laughing, looking up at me.
Do you want me to go ? ” he said.
“ It’ll be better for you,” I said, “ Down there
it’ll be quiet, with none of the bothering and such.
It’ll be better for yoy, Dari,” I said.
“ Better,” he said He began to laugh again.
“ Better,” he said. ^He couldn’t hardly say it for
laughing. .He sat on the ground and us watching
h^, laughing and laughing. It was bad. It
was bad so. I b^ durn if I could see anvthing to
laugh at. Because there just ain’t nothing justifies
the deliberate destruction of what a man has built
with his own sweat and stored the fruit of hi^ sweat
info.
226
AS I LAY DYING
f
But I ain’t so sho that ere a man has the right to
say whrft is crazy and what ain’t. It’s like, there was
a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity
or thje insanity, that watches the sane and the insane
doings of that man with the same hbrror and the
same astonishmtot.
PEABODY
I SAID, I reckon a man in a tight might let
Bill Varner patch him up like a damn mule, but
I be damned if the man that’d let Anse Bundren
treat him with raw cement ain’t got more spare
legj than I have,”
“ They jujt aimed to ease hit some,” he said.
‘ Aimed, hell,” I said. • “ What in hell did Armstid
mean by ev6n letting them put y-ju on that wagon
again ? ”
“ Hit* was gittin’ right noticeable,” he said.
“ We never had time to w^it.” I just looked at
him. “ Hit never bothered me none,” he said.
“ Don’t you lie there and try to tell me you rode
six days on a wagon without springs, with a broken
leg and it never bothered you.”
“ I never bothered me much,” he said.
“You mean, it never bothered Ansc much,” I
said. “No more than it bothered him to throw
that poor devil dowh in the public street and hand-
cuff him like a daym murderer. Don’t tell me.
And don’t- tell me it ain’t going to bother you to
iQse sixty-odd square inches of skin to get that
concrete off. Arid don’t tell me it ain’t igoing to
bother you to have to limp around on one short
leg^or the J?alance of your life — if you walk at all
ag^in. Concrete,” I ^d. “ God Amighty, why
didn’t Anse carry you to the nearest sayAiill and
Z27
228 AS I LAY DYING
stick your leg in the saw? That would have
cured it. Then you all could have stuck his head
into the saw and cured a whole family. . . Where
is Aiise, anyway ? What’s he up to now ? ”
“ He’s takin’ back them spades he borrowed,” he said.
' “ That’s right,” I said. “Of course he’d have to
borrow a spade to bury his wife with. Unless he
could borrow a hole in the ground. Too bad jou
all didn’t put him in it too. . . . Does that
hurt?”
“ Not to speak of,” he said, and the sweat big
as marbles running down his face and his face
about the colour of blotting-paper.
“ Q)urse not,” I Uid. “ About next summer
you can hobble around fine on this leg. Then it
won’t bother you, not to speak of . . . If you
had anything you could call luck, you might say
it was lucky this is the same legjou broke before,”
I said.
“ Hit’s what paw says,” he said.
MacGOWAN
1 ^ happeried I am back of the prescription case,
pouring up some chocolate sifuce, when Jody
comes back and says, “ Say, Skeet, there’s k
woman up front that wants to see the doctcft and
when I said What doctor you want to see, she said
she* want to see *the doctor that works here and
^hen I said There ain’t apy doctor works here, she
just stood there, looking back this way.”
“ What kind of a woman is it ? ” I says. “ 1 ell her to go upstairs to Alford’s office.”
“ Country woman,” he says.
“ Send her to the court-house,” I says. “ Tell
her all the doctors have gone to Memphis to a
Barbers’ Convention.”
“ All right,” he says, going away. “ She looks pretty good for a country girl,” he says.
“ Wait,” I says. He waited and I went and
peeped through the crack. But I couldn’t tell
nothing except she •had a good leg against the
light. Is she young, you say ? ” I says.
“ She loqks like a pretty hot mamma, for a country girl,” he says.
.’“Take this,” I says, giving him the chocolate.
I took oflF my apron and went up there. She looked
pretty good. One of them black-eyed unes that
lool^ like sh€’d as soon put a knife in you ^s not
if ^ou two-timed her.* She looked pretty good.
229
230 AS I LAY D YING
There wasn’t nobody else in the store ; it was dinner-tkne.
“ What can I do for you ? ” I says.
“ ^rc you the doctor ? ” she says.
“ Sure,” T says. She quit lookinj, at me and was kind of looking around.
' “ Can we go back yonder ? ” she says.
It was just a quarter-past twelve, but I went and
told Jody to kind of watch out and whistle if the
old man come in sight, because He never got back
before one.
“ You better lay off of that,” Jody sgys. “ He’ll
fire your stern ojit of here so quick you can’t
wink.”
“ He don’t never get back before one,” I says.
You can see him go into the post-office. You keep your eye peeled, now, and give me a whistle.”
“ What you going to do ? ” he says.
“ You keep your eye out. I’ll tell you later.”
“ Ain’t you going to give me rio seconds on it ? ” he says.
“ What the hell do you think this is ? ” I says ;
“ a stud-farm ? You watch ',out for him. I’m
going into conference.”
So I go on to the back. I stopped at the glass
and smoothed my hair, then I went behind the
prescription case, where she was waiting. She
is looking at the medicine cabinet, then she looks
at me. «
“ Now, madam,” I says ; “ wh4t is your
trouble 9 ”•
MacGOITAN 251
“ It’s the female trouble,” she says, watching me. “I got the money,” she says.
“ Ah,”*I says. “ Have you got female trophies
or do ylfu want female troubles ? If so, you fome
to • the righf doctor.’* Them country people.
Half the time they don’t know 'drhat they want,
and the balance of the time they can’t tell it to you?
The clock ssud twenty past twelve.
“ No,” ‘she says.
‘*No which ? I says.
I ain’t had it,” she ^ays. “ That’s it.” She
looked at me. “ I got the moncv she says.
So I knew what she was talking about.
“ Oh,’.’ I says. “ Tou got something in your
belly you wish you didn’t ha\«.” She looks at me.
“ You wish you had a little more or a little less,
huh ? ”
“ I got the money,” she says. “ He said 1 could git sometliing at the drug-store for hit.”
“ Who said so ? ” I says.
“ He did,” she says, looking at me.
“ You don’t want to call no names,” I says.
“ The one that put ths acorn in your belly ? He the
one that told you ^ ” She don’t say nothing.
** You ain’t married, are you ? ” I says. I never
saw no ring. But like as not, they ain’t heard yet
out there that thev use rings.
“I got the money,” she says. She showed it to me, tied up in her handkerchief : a tin spot.
'*1’11 swe^r you have,” I says. “ He give it to yofl ? ”
AS I LA Y D YING
232
“ Yes,” she says.
** Which one ? ” I says. She looks at me. “ WJiich one of them give it to you ?
“ Jt ain’t but one,” she says. She loo&s at me.
“ Go on,” 1 says. She don’t say frothing. The
.trouble about the cellar is, it ain’t but one way out
and that’s back up the inside stairs. The clock
says twenty-five to one. “ A pretty girl like you,” I
says.
She looks at me. She begins to tie the mbney
back up in the handkerchief. “ Excuse me^
minute,” I says. I go around the prescription case.
“ Did you hear about that fellow sprained his ear ? ”
I says. “ After that he couldn’t even hear a
belch.”
You better get her out from back there before the old man comes,” Jody says.
“ If you’ll stay up there in front where he pays
you to stay, he won’t catch nobody but me,” I
says.
He goes on, slow, toward the front. “ What you doing to her, Skeet ? ” he says.
“ I can’t teU you,” I say*!. “ It wouldn’t be ethical. You go on up there and watch.”
“ Say, Skeet,” he says.
“ Ah, go on,” I says. “ I ain’t doing nothing but filling a prescription.”
“ He may not do nothing about that woman back
there, but if he finds you monkeying with that
prescription case, he’ll kick your stern clean down
them cellar stairs.”
MacGOITAN 255
“ My stem has been* kicked by bigger bastards
than hic^” I says. “ Go back and watch out for
him, now.”
So fcome back. The clock said fifteen tq one.
Sheris tying fhe money in the handkerchief. “You
ain’t the doctor,” she says.
“ Sure I am,” I says. She watches me. “ Is It
because I look too young, or am I too handsolne ? ”
I says. • We used to have a bunch of old water-
jointed doctors here,” I says ; “ Jefferson used to
bb a kind of Old Doctors’ Home for them. But
business stasted falling off and folks stayed so well
until one day they found out that the women
wouldnft never get sick at all, So they run all the
old doctors out and got us’ young good-looking
ones that the women would like and then the
women begun to get sick again and so business
picked up. They’re doing that all over the country.
Hadn’t you heard about it ? Maybe it’s because
you ain’t never needed a doctor.”
“ I need one now,” she says.
“ And you come to the right one,” I says. “ I already. told you that.”
“Have you got ^something for it?” she says. “ I got the money.”
“ Well,” I says, “ of course a doctor has to learn
all sorts of things ;vhile he’s learning to roll calomel ;
he can’t help himself. But I don’t know about
yoyr trouble.”
“ He tol
Q
254 AS I LAY D YING
“ Did he tell you the name of it ? ” I says. “ You better ^o back and ask him.”
She quit looking at me, kind of turning the
handkerchief in her hands. “ I got to do some-
thing,” she says.
“ How bad db you want to do something ? ” I
says. She looks at me. “ Of course, a doctor
learns all sorts of things folks don’t think he knows.
But he ain’t supposed to tell all he kn6ws. It’s
against the law.”
Up front Jody says, ‘%Skeet.”
“ Excuse me a minute,” 1 says. I went up front. “ Do you see him ? ” I says.
“ Ain’t you done yet ? ” he says. “ Maybe
you better come up here and watch and let me do
that consulting.”
“ Maybe you’ll lay a egg,” I says. I come back.
She is looking at me. “ Of course you realize that
I could be put in the penitentiary for doing what
you want,” I says. “ I would lose my licence and
then I’d have to go to work. You realize that ? ”
“ 1 ain’t got but ten dollars,” she says. “ I could bring the rest next month, njaybe.”
“ Pooh,” I says, “ ten dqllars ? You see, I
can’t put no price on my knowledge, and skill.
Certainly not for no little paltry sawbuck.”
She looks at me. She don’t even blink. “ What
I f
you want, then ? ”
The clock said four to one. So I d#*cided 1
better get her out. “ You guess three times and
then I^li: show you,” I says.
MacGO wan
^35
She don’t even blink* her eyes. “ I got to do
something,” she says. She looks behind her and
around, tnen she looks toward the front. “ Gimme
the medicine first,” she says.
•** You me«i, you’re ready to right now ? ” I says. “ Here ? ”
“ Gimme the medicine first,” she says.
•So I took a graduated glass and kind of turntd my
back to h«r and picked out a bottle that looked all
rigltt, becau‘;e a m*an that would keep poison setting
'around in a unlabclled bottle ought to be in jail,
anyway. It, smelled like turpentine. I poured
some into the glass and give it to Jicr. She smelled
it, looking at me across the glass.
“ Hit smells like turpentine,” sh.' says.
“ Sure,” I says. “ That’s just the beginning of
the treatment. You come back at ten o’clock
to-night and I’ll give you the rest of it and perform
the operation.”
“ Operation ? ” she says.
“ It won’t hurt you. You’ve had the same
operation before. Ever hear about the hair of
the dog ? ”
She looks at me. “ Will it work?” she says.
“ Sure ij’ll work. If you come back and get it.”
So she drunk whatever it was without batting a*cye, and went out. 1 went up front.
“ Didn’t you get it ? ” Jody says.
“ Ge^what ? ” I says.
^ Ah, cofhe on,” he says. “ 1 ain’t going to try t
2}6 AS I LAY DYING
“ Oh, her,” I says. “ She just wanted a little
medicines She’s got a bad case of dysentery and
she’s a little ashamed about mentioning It with a
stranger there.”
It Vas my night, anyway, so I ho’ped the old
bastard check up and I got his hat on him and got
him out of the store by eight-thirty. I went as
far as* the corner with him and watched him until
he passed under two street lamps and went on out
of sight. Then I come back to th6 store and waked
until nine-thirty and turned out the front lights and*
locked the door and left just one light byrning at the
back, and I went back and put some talcum powder
into six capsules and kind of cleared up the cellar
and then I was all re^ady.
She come in just at ten, before the clock had
done striking. I let her in and she come in, walking
fast. I looked out the door, but there wasn’t
nobody but a boy in overalls sitting on the curb.
“ You want something ? ” I says. He never said
nothing, just looking at me. I locked the door
and turned off the light and went on back. She
was waiting. She didn’t look at me now.
“ Where is it ? ” she said.
I gave her the box of capsfJes. She held the
box in her hand, looking at the capsules.
** Are you sure it’ll work ? ” she says.
“ Sure,*^’ I says. “ When yovt take the rest of the treatpient.”
“ Where do I take it ? ” she says.
“ Ddyrn in the cellar,” I ‘says.
VARDAMAN
it is wider and lighter, but the stores
are dark because they have all gone home.
The stores are dark, but the lights pass on
tlie windows when we pass. The lights are in
thj trees around the court-house. They roost
in the tr«-es, but the court-house is dark. The
clock on it looks four ways, because it is not
dark. The* moon is not dark too. Not very dark.
Dari he went to Jarkson Is my Isrother Dari is my
brother Only it was over thac way, shining on the
track.
“ Let’s go that way, Dewey Dell,” I say.
“ What for ? ” Dewey Dell says. The track
went shining around the window, it red on the
track. But she said he would not sell it to the
town boys. “ But it will be there Christmas,”
Dewey Dell says. “ You’ll have to wait till then,
when he brings it Jaack.”
Dari went to Jackson. Lots of people didn*t go to
Jackson. Dari is n§i brother. My brother is going to
Jackson
• While we walk the lights go around, roosting
in the trees. Oiball sides it is the same. • They go
around the court-house and then you cannot see
th«m. Bijjt you can see them in the black windows
Ijpyond. They have,all gone home to bed except
me and Dewey Dell.
*37
238 AS I LAY D YING
i
Going on the train to Jackson. My brother
There is a light in the store, far bacl^. In the
wincV^w are two big glasses of soda-water^ed and
greeQ. Two men could not drink them. Two
mules could not. Two cows coufd not. Dari
A man comes to the door. He look’s at Dewey Dell.
“ "You wait out here,” Dewey Dell says.
** Why can’t I come in ? ” I §ay. “ 1 want to come in, too.”
“ You wait out here,”, she says,
“ All right,” I say.
Dewey Dell goes in.
Dari is my brother. Dari went crasg
The walk is hardei' than sitting on the ground.
He is in the open door. He looks at me. “ You
want sometliing ? ” he says. His head is slick.
Jewel’s head is slick sometimes. Cash’s head is
not slick. Dari he went to Jacksqn my Brother Dari
In the street he ate a banana. Wouldn't you rather
have bananas ? Dewey Dell said. You wait till
Christmas. It'll be there then. , Then you can see it.
So we are going to have some bananas. We are going
to have a bagfull^ me and Dewey ^^ell. He locks the
door. Dewey Dell is inside. Then the kght winks
out.
He wer^t to Jackson. He wenf^cra^ and went to
Jackson both. Lots of people didn't go crasgy. Pa and
Cash an^ Jewel and Dewey Dell and me didp’/)go cra^.
We nevyr did go crasg. We didn't go to Jackson either.
Dari
VAKDAMAN
239
I hear the cow a long time, clopping on the
street. Then she comes into the square. She goes ,
across th^ square, her head down clopping;
She 10^9%. There was nothing in the square before
sheMowed, but it wasn’t empty. Now it is empty
after she IcTwed. She goes on, cl&pping . She
lows. Mj brother is Dari. He went to Jackson on
the train. He didn*t go on the train to go cra^. He
went cras^ in onr wagon. Dari She had been in
thcflre a long time. And the cow is gone too. A
long time. She h.’s beep in there longer than the
cow was.- 3ut not as long as empty. Dari is my
brother. i\Iy brother Dari
Dewey Dell com^s out. She Jooks at me.
“Let’s go around that way now,” I say.
She looks at me. “ It ain’t going to work,” she says. “ That son of a bitch.”
“ What ain’t going to work, Dewey Dell ? ”
“ I just know it won’t,” she says. She is not looking at anything. “ 1 just know it.”
“ Let’s go that way,” I say.
“ We got to go back to the hotel. It’s late. We got to slip back in?”
“ Can’t we go by and see, anyway ? ”
“ Hadn’t you ratner have bananas ? Hadn’t you rather ? ”
* “ All right.” Aly brother he went crasg and he
went to Jackson %o. Jackson is further hway than
crasy
* It woft’t work,” Dewey Dell says. “ I just khow it won’t.”
240 AS I LAY DYING
“ What won’t work ? ” 'I say. He had te get
on the train to go to Jackson. I have not been on the
train^ but Dari has been on the train. Dari. * Dari is
my brother. Dari. Dari
DARL
D ARi has gone to Jackson. They put him
oif the train, laughing, ddwn the long car
laughing, the heads turning like the heads
of owls when he passed. “ What are you laughing
at ? ” I. said.
Yes yes yes yes.”
•Two men put him 9n the train. They wore
mis-matched coats, bulging behind over their right
hip pockets. Their necks were; shaved to a hair-
line, as ihough the lecent and simultaneous barbers
had had a chalk-line like Cash’s. “ Is it the pistols
you’re laughing at ? ” I said. “ Why do you
laugh ? ” I said. “ Is it because you hate the sound
of laughing ? ”
They pulled two seats together so Dari could sit
by the window to laugh. One of them sat beside
him, the other sat on the seat facing him, riding
backward. One of them had to ride backward
because the state’s pjoney had a face to each backside
and a Backside to each face, and they are riding on
the state’s moiiey Vhich is incest. A nickel has
a woman on one side and a buffalo on the other ;
two faces and no back. I don’t know what that is.
Dari had a little^py-glass he got in Fraftce at the
WM. ^ it it had a woman and a pig with two backs
and no faft. I know what that is. “ Is that why
)^u are laughing, D&rl ? ”
Z4i
242
AS I LAY DYING
“ Yes yes yes yes yes yeL”
The wa'^on stands on the square, hitched, the
mules motionless, the reins wrapped abV)ut the
scat-spring, the back of the wagon tow^fd the
court-liousc. Tt looks no different from a hundred
other wagons there ; Jewel standing * beside it
and looking up the street like any other man in
town that day, yet there is something different,
distinctive. There is about it that unmistakable
air of definite and imminent departure that trail is
have, perhaps due to the f^ct that Dewey Dell and
Vardaman on the seat and Cash on a pnllet in the
wagon bed are eating bananas from a paper bag.
“ Is that why you are laughing, Dari ? ”
Dari is our brother, our brother Dari. Our
brother Dari in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed
hands lying light in the quiet interstices, looking
out he foams.
“ Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.”
DEWEY DELL
*HEN he saw the money I said, “ It’s not my money, it doesn’t belong to
me.
“ Whose is it, then ? ”
“ It’s* Cora Xull’s money. It’s Mrs. Tull’s. I s^ld the for it.”
“ Ten dollars lor two cakes ? ”
“Don’t* you touch it. Tt’^uot mine.”
“ You never had them cakes.* It’s a lie. It was them Sunday clothes you had in that package.”
“ Don’t vou touch it ! If you take it you are a thief.”
“ My own daughter accuses me of being a thief. My own daughter.”
“ Pa. Pa.”
“ I have fed you and sheltered you. I give you
love and care, yet my own daughter, the daughter
of my dead wife me a thief over her mother’s
grave..”
“ It’s not mine, j ten you. If it was, God knows you couW have it.”
“ Where did you get ten dollars ? ”
“ Pa. Pa.”
“ You won’t tell me. Did you con*; dv it so skameJEfl ^ou dare not ? ”
“ It’s not mine, I tell you. Can’t you understand it’s not mine ? ”
1A.X
244 I LAY DYING
** It*s not like I wouldn*^ pay it back.' Bu^ she calls her own father a thief.”
“ I^an’t, I tell you. I tell you it’s not my money. God knows you could. have it.”
I wouldn’t take it. My own bom fiaughter that
has et my food for seventeen years, begrudges me
the loan of ten dollars.”
“ It's not mine. I can’t.”
“Whose is it, then?”
“ It was give to me. To buy something witft.”
“ To buy what with ?
“Pa. Pa.”
“ It’s just a loah. God knows, I hate for my
blooden children to reproach me. But I give them
what was mine without stint. Cheerful I give
them, without stint. And now they deny me.
Addie. I^ was lucky for you you died, Addie.”
“Pa. Pa.”
“ God knows it is.”
He took the money and went out.
CASH
S o whe«i we stopped" there to borrow the
shovtfls we heard the graphophone playing
in the house, and so when we got done with
the shovels pa says, “ I reckon I better take them
’back.”
€o we wj-nt back to the house. “ We better take Cash on to P-tabo4y’s,” Jewel said.
“ It won^ take but a minute,” pa said. He got
down from the wagon. The miifiir was not playing
now. . ,
“ Let Vardaman do it,” Jewel said. “ He can do it in half the time you can. Or here, you let
“ I reckon I better do it,” pa says. “ Long as it was me that borrowed them.”
So we set in the wagon, but the music wasn’t
playing now. I reckon it’s a good thing we ain’t
got ere a one of them. I reckon I wouldn’t never
get no work done j^all for listening to it. I don’t
know if a little music ain’t about the nicest thing a
fellow can have, ^eems like when he comes in
tired of a night, it ain’t nothing could rest him like
having a little ‘music played and him resting. I
have seen them that shuts up like a hand-irip, with
a handl&and ;ill, so a fellow can carry it 4(rith him
wherever Tie wants.
** What you teckoh he’s doing ? ” Je\«el says.
*45
246 AS I LAY DYING
“ I could a toted them sho^*cls back and /brth4en /imes by now.”
“ Let him take his time,” I said. “ Hc*ain’t as spry as you, remember.”
“ \C^hy didn’t he let mc« take them back, then ?
We got to get youV leg fixed up so wc can ^tart home
to»morrow.”
“ Wc got plenty of time,” I said. “ I wonder what them machines costs on the instalrrtent.”
“ Instalment of what ? ” Jewef said. “ Wlfttt you got to buy it with ? ”,
“ A fellow can’t tell,” T said. “ k could ’a’
bought that one fifom Suratt for five dollars, I
believe.”
And so pa come back and wc went to Peabody’s.
While we was there pa said he was going to the
barber-shop and get a shave. And so that night
he said he had some business to tend to, kind
of looking away from us while he said it, with
his hair combed wet and slick and smelling
sweet with perfume, but I said leave him be ; I
wouldn’t mind hearing a little more of that music
myself.
And so next morning he was gone again, then
he come back and told us get hitched up ^nd ready
to take out and he would meet us and when they was
gone he said,
“ 1 dorj t reckon you got no rtiorc money.”
“ PeabI Jy just give me enough to pay ho^el
with,” I said. “ We don’t need nothi^ else, do
we?” ‘
CASH
M7
‘VNo/^pa said ; “ no. We don’t need nothing.” He stood there, not looking at me.
“ If it is something we got to have, I ipckon maybe Peabody,” I said. ,
No,” h? said ; “ it ain’t nothjng else. You all wait for die at the corner.”
So Jewel got the team and come for me and thty
fixed me a pallet in the wagon and we drovd across
the squifre to thg corner where pa said, and we was
wtiting
Vardaman eating banana, when we sec them coming
up the staeet. Pa was comi«ig along whh that
kind of daresomc and hangddj^ look all at once
like whenjie has been up lo something he knows
ma ain’t going to like, carrying a grip in his hand,
and Jewel says,
“ Who’s that ? ”
Then we see it wasn’t the grip that made him
look different ; it was his face, and Jewel says,
“He got them teeth.”
It was a fact. It made him look a foot taller,
kind of holding his head up, hangdog and proud
too, and then we s^e her behind him, carrying the
other ‘grip — a kii^ of duck-shaped woman all
dressed up, with tnem kind of hard-looking pop
eyes like she was daring cie a man to say nothing.
And there we st^^’atching them, with Dewey Dell’s
and Vardaman’^ mouth half open aili half-et
b^ana^^4n th«ir hands and her coming arditnd from
behind pa'ftboking at us like she dared er^a man.
And then I see that ftie grip she was carrying was
248 AS I LA Y DYING
one of ^ them little graphdphones. It yras iot a
fact, all shut up as pretty as a picture, and every
time fl. new record would come from the mail order
dnd setting in the hoi^e in the winter, listening to
it, I would think what a Shame Dari couldn’t be to
enjoy it too. But it is better so for him. This
world is not his world ; this life his life.
“ It*^ Cash and Jewel and Vardaman and Dewfey,
Dell,” pa saysi kind of hangdog, and proud too,
with his teeth and all, even if he wouldn’t look at as.
“Meet Mrs. Bundren,” he says.
*** END OF THIS BOOK ***
This eBook was provided by Book Renzo — Free Classic Books Online. Website: https://bookrenzo.com Read more free books: https://bookrenzo.com/genres Search our library: https://bookrenzo.com/search
Book Renzo is a free digital library offering classic literature from the public domain. All books are free to read online with adjustable fonts, themes, bookmarks, and highlights. No account required.
