As I Lay Dying

  “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

  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 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.”

  “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 Tull’s 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 it’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.


  DARL

  He 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 flicking drive of the hooves. Then he slows a little, light and erect in the saddle, the horse mincing through the mud.

  Tull is in his lot. He looks at us, lifts his hand. We go on, the wagon creaking, the mud whispering on the wheels. Vernon 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: New 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, unscarred, the white signboard turns away its fading and tranquil assertion. Cash looks up the road quietly, his head turning as we pass it like an owl’s head, his face composed. Pa looks straight 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 in those of Cash, for a smoldering while. The signboard passes; the unscarred road wheels on. Then Dewey Dell turns her head. The wagon creaks on.

  Cash spits over the wheel. “In a couple of days now it’ll be smelling,” he says.

  “You might tell Jewel that,” I say.

  He is motionless now, sitting the horse at the junction, upright, watching us, no less still than the signboard that lifts its fading capitulation opposite him.

  “It aint balanced right for no long ride,” Cash says.

  “Tell him that, too,” I say. The wagon creaks on.

  A mile further along he passes us, the horse, archnecked, reined back to a swift singlefoot. 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, backflung, plops onto the box. Cash leans forward and takes a tool from his box and removes it carefully. When the road crosses Whiteleaf, the willows leaning near enough, he breaks off a branch and scours at the stain with the wet leaves.

  ANSE

  It’s a hard country on man; it’s hard. Eight miles of the sweat of his body washed up outen the Lord’s earth, where the Lord Himself told him to put it. Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hardworking man profit. It takes them that runs the stores in the towns, doing no sweating, living off of them that sweats. It aint the hardworking man, the farmer. Sometimes I wonder why we keep at it. It’s because there is a reward for us above, where they cant take their autos 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 must 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 see the river so high, and it not done raining yet. There was old men that hadn’t never see nor hear 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 dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.

  But now I can get them teeth. That will be a comfort. It will.

  SAMSON

  It was just before sundown. We were sitting on the porch when the wagon came up the road with the five of them in it and the other one on the horse behind. One of them raised his hand, but they was going on past the store without stopping.

  “Who’s that?” MacCallum says: I cant think of his name: Rafe’s twin; that one it was.

  “It’s Bundren, from down 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?” MacCallum says.

  “Taking a holiday since he got his wife buried, I reckon,” Quick says. “Heading for town, I reckon, with Tull’s bridge gone too. I wonder if they aint heard about the bridge.”

  “They’ll have to fly, then,” I says. “I dont reckon there’s ere a bridge between here and Mouth of Ishatawa.”

  They had something in the wagon. But Quick had been to the funeral three days ago and we naturally never thought anything about it except that they were heading away from home mighty late and that they hadn’t heard about the bridge. “You better holler at them,” MacCallum says. Durn it, the name is right 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, and 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 Cash that they’d have to pass by New Hope again and what they’d better do, he just says,

  “I reckon we can get there.”

  I aint much 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 down to the barn and tried to talk to Bundren about it.

  “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 get started off, the same as he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping. And like he would be kind of proud of whatever come up to make the moving or the setting still 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 wont go down much by morning, neither,” he says.

  “You better stay here tonight,” I says, “and get a early start for New Hope tomorrow morning.” I was just sorry for them bone-gaunted mules. I told Rachel, 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 wont 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 tonight and early tomorrow 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 they want” and then I found that girl watching me. If her 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 barn I come on them, her talking so she never noticed when I come up.

  “You promised her,” she says. “She wouldn’t go until you promised. She thought she could depend on you. If you dont do it, it will be a curse on you.”

  “Cant no man say I dont aim to keep my word,” Bundren says. “My heart is open to ere a man.”

  “I dont 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 wouldn’t be talking now. So when I talked to h
im 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 promise 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 ready. Only they didn’t want to come in.

  “I thank you,” Bundren says. “We wouldn’t discommode you. We got a little something in the basket. We can make out.”

  “Well,” I says, “since you are so particular about your womenfolks, I am too. And when folks stops with us at meal time and wont come to the table, my wife takes it as a insult.”

  So the girl went on to the kitchen to help Rachel. And then Jewel come to me.

  “Sho,” I says. “Help yourself outen the loft. Feed 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 for his horse.”

  “I rather pay you,” he says; I thought he said extra.

  “Extra for what?” I says. “Wont he eat hay and corn?”

  “Extra feed,” he says. “I feed him a little extra and I dont want him beholden to no man.”

  “You cant buy no feed from me, boy,” I says. “And if he can eat that loft clean, I’ll help you load the barn onto the wagon in the morning.”

  “He aint 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 wanted to say. But I just says, “Then it’s high time he commenced. You cant buy no feed from me.”

  When Rachel put supper on, her and the girl went and fixed some beds. But wouldn’t any of them come in. “She’s been dead long enough to get over that sort of foolishness,” I says. Because I got just as much respect for the dead as ere a man, but you’ve got to respect the dead themselves, and a woman that’s been dead in a box four days, the best way to respect her is to get her into the ground as quick as you can. But they wouldn’t do it.