As I Lay Dying (9 page)

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 river was up and still rising. He said it had already covered the highest water-mark on the bridge-piling he had ever seen. “That bridge wont 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 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 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 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 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 little 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 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 the door 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
with every 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 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, you 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. “It’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. He 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. “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 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?