Vardaman
When they get it finished they are going to put her in it and then for a long 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 in it, Cash? Cash? Cash?” I got shut up in the crib the new door it was too heavy for me it went shut I couldn't breathe because the rat was breathing up all the air. I said "Are you going to nail it shut, Cash? Nail it? Nail 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 coffee costs so much. Because I am a country boy because boys in town. Bicycles. Why do flour 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 aint 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 cant He make them all in the town because flour and sugar and coffee. "Wouldn't you ruther have bananas?"
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 other one laid down in her bed and drew the quilt up. She went away. "Did she go as far as town?” "She went further than town." "Did all those rabbits and possums go further than town?" 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 rabbit.
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 rabbit. 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 tomorrow it will be cooked and et and she will be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and there wont be anything in the box and so she can breathe. It was laying right yonder on the ground. I can get Vernon. He was there and he seen it, and with both of us it will be and then it will not be.
Tull
It was nigh to midnight and it had set into rain when he woke us. It had been a misdoubtful 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 and 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 legs, 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, aint it?" she says. "You hitch up, now."
"What for?" I says. "If she is gone, we cant 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. "It stands to reason they'd send for us if they needed us. You dont even know she's gone yet."
"Why, dont you know that's Peabody's team? Do you claim it aint? Well, then." But I wouldn't go. When folks wants a fellow, it's best to wait till they sends for him, I've found. "It's my Christian duty," Cora says. "Will you stand between me and my Christian duty?"
"You can stay there all day tomorrow, 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 nothing. 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 drownded puppy, in them overalls, 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?" Cora 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 onto the lamp, hissing on it so I am scared every minute it'll break. "You was there," he says. "You seen it."
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 drownded puppy. "I told you," Cora says. "I told you it was a-happening. You go and hitch."
"But he aint said—" I says.
He looked at me, dripping onto the floor. "He's a-ruining the rug," Cora says. "You go get the team while 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 nail 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 durn 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 reckon she is right and you got to keep after it and I reckon I am blessed in having a wife that ever strives for sanctify and well-doing like she says I 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 time thinking, because his brain it's like a piece of machinery: it wont stand a whole lot of racking. It's best when it all runs along the same, doing the day's work and not no one part used no more than needful. I have said and I say again, that's ever living thing the matter with Darl: he just thinks by himself too much. Cora'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 Cora's right when she says the reason the Lord had to create women is because man dont 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 nightgownd, with a shawl over her head and her umbrella and her bible wrapped up in the oilcloth, and him sitting on a up-turned bucket on the stove-zinc where she had put him, dripping onto the floor. I cant get nothing outen him except about a fish," she says. It's a judgment on them. I see the hand of the Lord upon this boy for Anse Bundrens judgment and warning."
"The rain never come up till after I left," he says. "I had done left. I was on the way. And so it was there in the dust. You seen it. Cash 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 Cora's shawl. He hadn't said nothing else, just sitting there with Cora holding the umbrella over 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 of sin he is a-trodding." Then she would sing again, and him sitting there between us, leaning forward a little like the mules couldn't 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 aint 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 singing 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 somebody come by and set the pond up on edge and he aint missed it yet.
It was nigh toward daybreak when we drove the last nail and toted it into the house, where she was laying on the bed with the window open and the 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, until 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 aint 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 himself. And when folks talks him low, I think to myself he aint that less of a man or he couldn't a bore himself this long.
It aint right. I be durn if it is. Because He said Suffer little children to come unto Me dont make it right, neither. Cora said, I have bore you what the Lord God sent me. I faced it without fear nor terror because my faith 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 among His creatures because I trust in my God and my reward."
I reckon she's right. I reckon if there's ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora. And I reckon she would make a few changes, no matter how He was running it And I reckon they would be for man's good. Leastways, we would have to like them. Leastways, we might as well go on and make like we did.
Darl
The lantern sits on a stump. Rusted, grease-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 earth. Upon the dark ground the chips look like random smears of soft pale paint on a black canvas. The boards look like long smooth tatters torn from the flat darkness and turned backside out.
Cash labors about the trestles, moving back and forth, lifting and placing the planks with long clattering reverberations in the dead air as though he were lifting and dropping them at the bottom of an invisible well, the sounds ceasing without departing, as if any movement might dislodge them 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 plank he wants, sweeping pa away with the long swinging gleam of the balanced board.
The air smells like sulphur. Upon the impalpable 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, half turned into the feeble light, one 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 young.
It begins to rain. The first 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 at 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 any sort; he is swept onto the porch upon the edge of it and in an instant Cash is wet to the skin. Yet the motion of the saw has not faltered, as though it and the arm functioned in a tranquil conviction that rain was 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 had been abruptly turned wrong, side out, shirt and all.
Pa returns. He is wearing Jewel's raincoat and carrying Dewey Dell's. Squatting over the lantern, Cash reaches back and picks 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 the lantern. Pa watches him. "I dont know what you'll do," he says. "Darl taken his coat with him."
"Get wet", Cash says. He takes up the saw again; again it moves 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 dont you go on to the house, out of the rain?" Cash says. Pa looks at him, his face streaming slowly. It is as though upon a face carved by a savage caricaturist a monstrous "burlesque of all bereavement flowed. "You go on in," Cash says. "Me and Vernon can finish it."
Pa looks at item. The sleeves of Jewel's coat are too short for him. Upon his face the rain streams, slow as cold glycerin. "I dont begrudge her the wetting," he says. He moves again and falls to shifting the planks, picking them up, laying them down again carefully, as though they are glass. He goes to the lantern and pulls at the propped raincoat until he knocks it down and Cash conies 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 says. "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 more 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, bevels the edge of it with the tedious and minute care of a jeweler. Mrs Tull comes to the edge of the porch and calls Vernon. "How near are you done?" she says.
Vernon does not look up. "Not long. Some, yet."
She watches Cash stooping at the plank, the turgid savage gleam of the lantern slicking on the raincoat AS he moves. "You go down and get some planks off the barn and finish it and come in out of the rain," she says. "You'll both catch your death." Vernon does not move. "Vernon," she says.
"We wont be long," he says. "We’ll be done after a spell." Mrs Tull watches them a while. Then she reenters the house.
"If we get in a tight, we could take some of them planks," Vernon says. "I'll 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 rain-coated thighs in a gesture deliberate, final and composed. Then the four of them—Cash and pa and Vernon and Peabody—raise the coffin to their shoulders and turn toward the house. It is light, yet they move slowly; empty, yet they carry it carefully; lifeless, yet they move with hushed precautionary words to one another, speaking of 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 long 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 wipes 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 raincoat 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 dont know what I am. I dont 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 hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, 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 is.
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
Cash
I 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 easiest up and down or straight across.
4. In a house people are upright two thirds of the time. So the seams and joints are made up-and-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 sideways, because the stress is sideways.
6. Except.
7. A body is not square like a crosstie.
8. Animal magnetism.
9. The animal magnetism of a dead body makes the stress come slanting, so the seams and joints of a coffin are made on the bevel.
10. You can see by an old grave that the earth sinks down on the bevel.
11. While in a natural hole it sinks by the center, the stress being up-and-down.
12. So I made it on the bevel.
13. It makes a neater job.
Vardaman
My mother is a fish.
Tull
It was ten oclock when I got back, with Peabody's team hitched on to the back of the wagon. They had already dragged the buckboard back from where
Quick found it upside down straddle of the 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 rive was up and still rising. He said it had already covered the highest water-mark on the bridge-piling he ever seen. "That bridge wont stand a whole lot water," I said. "Has somebody told Anse about it?"
"I told him," Quick said. "He says he reckons the boys has heard and unloaded and are on the way 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 jaw, and he is wearing his Sunday pants and a white shirt with the neckband buttoned. It is drawn smooth over his hump, making it look bigger than ever, like a white 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 walk up onto the porch and scrape our shoes, a little 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 giveth."
That boy is not there. Peabody told about how he come into the kitchen, hollering, swarming and clawing at Cora 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 morning. Your buggy seems all right too. It aint hurt."
"And no fault of somebody's," he says. "I'd 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 sounding kind of like "bees murmuring in a water bucket. The men stop on the porch, talking some, not looking at one another.
"Howdy, Vernon," they say. "Howdy, Tull."
"Looks like more rain."
"It does for a fact."
"Yes, sir. It will rain some more."
"It come up quick."
"And going away slow. It dont fail."
I go around to the back. Cash is filling up the holes lie 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 nobody 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 tip 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 little piece from the house, sitting on the ends of the boards and on the sawhorses where we made it last night, some sitting and some squatting, Whitfield aint come yet.
They look up at me, their eyes asking.
"It's about," I say. "He's ready to nail."
While they are getting up Anse comes to file clod and looks at us and we return to the porch. We scrape our shoes again, careful, waiting for one another to go in first, milling a little at the door. Anse stands inside the door, dignified, composed. He waves us in and leads the way into the room.
They had laid her in it reversed. Cash made it clock-shape, like this
seam bevelled and with every joint a 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 the 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, yon mean," Uncle Billy says. "I dont 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 because the first man to cross it was Peabody coming to my house when Jody was born."
"If I'd a crossed it every time your wife littered since, it'd a been wore out long before this, Billy," Peabody says.
We laugh, suddenly loud, then suddenly quiet again. We look a little aside at one another.
"Lots of folks has crossed it that wont cross no more bridges," Houston says.
"It's a fact," Littlejohn says. It's so."
"One more aint, no ways," Armstid says. "lt'd taken them two-three days to got her to town in the wagon. They'd be gone a week, getting her to Jefferson and back."
"What's Anse so itching to take her to Jefferson for, anyway?" Houston says.
"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 something that will make the most trouble for everybody he knows."
"Well, it'll take the Lord to get her over that river now," Peabody says. "Anse cant 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 cant quit."
Cash comes out. He has put on a clean shirt; his hair wet, is combed smooth down on his brow, smooth and black as if he had painted it onto his head, squats stiffly among us, we watching him.
"You feeling this weather, aint you?" Armstid says.
Cash says nothing.
"A broke bone always feels it," Littlejohn says. . 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 foot, 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," I 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"
If it takes wet boards for folks to fall, it’s fixing to be lots of falling before this spell is done.
"You couldn't have holp it" I say.
I dont mind the folks falling. It's the cotton and corn I mind.
Neither does Peabody mind the folks falling. How bout it, Doc?
It's a fact. Washed clean outen the ground it will be. Seems like something is always happening to it.
Course it does. That's why it's worth anything. If nothing didn't happen and everybody made a big crop, do you reckon it would be worth the raising?
Well, I be durn if I like to see my work washed outen the ground, 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 the color of his eyes?
Ay. The Lord made it to grow. It's Hisn to wash up if He sees it fitten so.
"You couldn't have holp it," I say.
"It's them durn women," he says.
In the house the women 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 in 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, triumphant and sad. Somebody in the house begins to cry. It sounds like her eyes and her voice were turned back inside her, listening; we move, shifting to the other 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, comforting tunes, When they cease it's like they hadn't gone away. It's like they had just disappeared 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 movements stiff, like we hadn't never wore hats before.
On the way home Cora is still singing. "I am bounding toward my God and my reward," she sings, sitting on the wagon, the shawl around her shoulder and the umbrella open over her, though it is not raining.
"She has hern," I say. "Wherever she went, she has her reward in being free of Anse Bundren." She laid there three days in that box, waiting for Darl and Jewel to come clean back home and get a new wheel and go back to where the wagon was in the ditch. Take my team, Anse, I said.
We'll wait for ourn, he said. She'll want it so. She was ever a particular woman.
On the third day they got back and they loaded her into the wagon and started and it already too late. You'll have to go all the way round by Samson's bridge. It'll take you a day to get there. Then you'll be forty miles from Jefferson. Take my team, Anse.
We'll wait for ourn. She'll want it so.
It was about 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. Cora was still singing.
"This aint 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 fish."
"It's one in here,' he said. "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 bounding toward my God and my reward," Cora sung.
Darl
It's not your horse that's dead, Jewel," I say. He sits erect on the seat, leaning a little forward, 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 long across the valley to where the barn leans against the bluff, shaping the invisible horse. "See them?" I say. High above the house, against the quick thick sky, they hang in narrowing circles. From here they are no more than specks, implacable, patient, portentous. "But it's not your horse 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 him. He enters the stall and waits until it kicks at him so that he can slip past and mount onto the trough and pause, peering out across the intervening stall-tops toward the empty path, before he reaches into the loft.
"Goddamn him. Goddamn him."
Cash
It wont balance. If you want it to tote and ride on a balance, we will have—"
"Pick up. Goddamn you, pick up."
"I'm telling you it wont tote and it wont ride on a balance unless—"
"Pick up! Pick up!, goddamn your thick-nosed soul to hell, pick up!”
It wont balance. If they want it to tote and ride on a balance, they will have
Darl
He 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 suffocated, furious, his lip lifted upon his teeth. "Pick up!" he says. "Pick up, goddamn your thick-nosed soul!"
He heaves, lifting one 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 torn 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 through the door.
"Steady it a minute, now," pa says, letting go. 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 says. "I tell you it aint balanced now. We’ll need another hand on that hill."
"Then turn loose," Jewel says. 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 same motion and looks back at me, his face suffused with fury and despair.
"Goddamn you. Goddamn you."
Vardaman
We are going to town. Dewey Dell says it wont be sold because it belongs to Santa Claus and he 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. "Where you going?" pa says. But Jewel does not stop. "You leave that horse here," pa says. Jewel stops and looks at pa. Jewel's eyes look like marbles. "You leave that horse here," 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," Darl said.
"Then mine can be a fish, cant it, Darl?" I said.
Jewel is my brother.
"Then mine will have to be a horse, too," I said.
"Why?" Darl 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, Darl?"
Darl is my brother.
"Then what is your ma, Darl?" I said.
"I haven't got ere one," Darl said. "Because if I had one, it is was. And if it is was, it cant be is. Can it?"
"No," I said.
"Then I am not," Darl said. "Am I?"
"No," I said.
I am. Darl is my brother.
"But you are, Darl," I said.
"I know it," Darl 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. "Ill stop at Tull's on the way back," Cash. says. "Get on that barn roof."
"It aint respectful," pa says. "It's a deliberate flouting of her and of me."
"Do you want him to come all the way back hero and carry them up to Tull's afoot?" Darl says. Pa look's at Darl, his mouth chewing. Pa shaves every day now because my mother is a fish.
"It aint right," pa says.
Dewey Dell has the package in her hand. She has the basket with 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 aint right," pa says. "It's a flouting of the dead."
It'll be there. It'll be there come Christmas, she says, shining on the track. She says he wont sell it to no town boys.
Darl
He goes on toward the barn, 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 alert; within them I can see Peabody's back like two round peas in two thimbles: perhaps in Peabody's back two 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 barn. He has not looked back.
"It aint rights" 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."
"He’ll catch us," I say. "He’ll cut across and meet us at Tull's lane."
"He would have rid that horse, too," pa says, "if I hadn't a stopped him. A durn 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 respect 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; from her flesh and blood, but we hadn't no more than passed Tuffs lane when Darl begun to laugh. Setting: back there on the plank seat with Cash, with his dead ma laying in her coffin at his feet, laughing. How many times I told him if s doing such things as that that makes folks talk about him, I dont 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 and him setting there, laughing.
“I dont 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 dont have to be told who it is. I just looked back at Darl, setting there laughing.
"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 Darl setting on the plank seat right above her where she was laying, laughing.