As I Lay Dying (10 page)

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 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, 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 shoulders 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. “I’ll 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 here and
carry them up to Tull’s afoot?” Darl says. Pa looks 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