As I Lay Dying Read online

  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 dont 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.

  “Aint nobody on my end of it,” he says.

  “Pull it in,” I say. But he has already done that, holding the end above the water; and then we see Jewel. He is ten yards away; he comes up, blowing, and looks at us, tossing his long hair back with a jerk of his head, then he looks toward the bank; we can see him filling his lungs.

  “Jewel,” Vernon says, not loud, but his voice going full and clear along the water, peremptory yet tactful. “It’ll be back here. Better come back.”

  Jewel dives again. We stand there, leaning back against the current, watching 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 water. “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 holding 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 about 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 water within the bend.

  “What did you do with the hammer, Vernon?” Jewel says.

  “I give it to him,” Vernon says, jerking his head at Vardaman. Vardaman is looking after pa. Then he looks at Jewel. “With the square.” Vernon is watching Jewel. He moves toward the bank, passing Dewey Dell and me.

  “You get on out of here,” I say. She says nothing, looking at Jewel and Vernon.

  “Where’s the hammer?” Jewel says. Vardaman scuttles up the bank and fetches it.

  “It’s heavier than the saw,” Vernon says. Jewel is tying the end 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 dont you get out of the water?” I say.

  “It wont float like a saw,” Jewel says.

  “It’ll float nigher to a saw than a hammer will,” Vernon says.

  “Bet you,” Jewel says.

  “I wont bet,” Vernon says.

  They stand there, watching Jewel’s still hands.

  “Hell,” Jewel says. “Get the plane, then.”

  So they get the plane and tie it to the chalk-line and enter the water again. Pa comes back along the bank. He stops for a while and looks at us, hunched, mournful, like a failing steer or an old tall bird.

  Vernon and Jewel return, leaning against the current. “Get out of the way,” Jewel says to Dewey Dell. “Get out of the water.”

  She crowds against me a little so they can pass, Jewel holding the plane high as though it were perishable, the blue string trailing back over his shoulder. They pass us and stop; they fall to arguing quietly about just where the wagon went over.

  “Darl ought to know,” Vernon says. They look at me.

  “I dont know,” I 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 aint so deep there,” Vernon says. He does not look back. He is watching the water where Jewel went under.

  When Jewel comes up he has the saw.

  When we pass the wagon pa is standing beside it, scrubbing 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 has 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 misfortunate 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 above us as we squat; he looks like a figure carved clumsily from tough wood by a drunken caricaturist. “It’s a trial,” he says. “But I dont begrudge her it. No man can say I begrudge her it.” Dewey Dell has laid Cash’s head back on the folded coat, twisting his head a little to avoid the vomit. Beside him his tools lie. “A fellow might call it lucky it was the same leg he broke when he fell offen that church,” pa says. “But I dont begrudge her it.”

  Jewel and Vernon are in the river again. 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 torsos moving with infinitesimal 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

  It wasn’t on a balance. I told them that if they wanted it to tote and ride on a balance, they would have to

  CORA

  One 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.” I 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 I 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 acknowledgment 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 cant 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 faithful wife is no sign that there is no sin in your heart, and just because your life is hard is no sign that the Lord’s grace is absolving you.” And she said, “I know my own sin. I know that I deserve my punishment. I do not begrudge it.” And I said, “It is out of your vanity that you would judge sin and salvation in the Lord’s place. It is our mortal lot to suffer and to raise our voices in praise of Him who judges 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 Lord’s eyes. She has had a hard life, but so does every 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 labored 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 Darl that was touched by God Himself and considered queer by us mortals and that did love her. I said, “There is your sin. And your punishment too. Jewel is your punishment. But where is your salvation? And life is short enough,” I said, “to win eternal grace in. And God is a jealous God. It is His to judge and to mete; not yours.”

  “I know,” she said. “I——” Then she stopped, and I said,

  “Know what?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “He is my cross and he will be my salvation. He will save me from the water and from the fire. Even though 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 realised that she did not mean God. I realised 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

  In the afternoon when school was out and the last one had left with his little dirty snuffling nose, instead of going home I would go down the hill to the spring where I could be quiet and hate them. It would be quiet there then, with the water bubbling up and away and the sun slanting quiet in the trees and the quiet smelling of damp and rotting leaves and new earth; especially in the early spring, for it was worst then.

  I could just remember how my 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 get ready to stay dead, I would hate my father for having ever planted me. I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell 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: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.

  And so I took Anse. I saw him pass the school house three or four times before I learned that he was driving four miles out of his way to do it. I noticed then how he was beginning to hump—a tall man and young—so that he looked already like a tall bird hunched in the cold weather, on the wagon seat. He would pass the school house, the wagon creaking slow, his head turning slow to watch the door of the school house as the 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 said:

  “If you’ve got any womenfolks, why in the world dont they make you get your hair cut?”

  “I aint got none,” he said. Then he said suddenly, driving his eyes at me 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 a house. They tell me you’ve got a house and a good farm. And you live there alone, doing for yourself, do you?” He just looked at me, turning the hat in his hands. “A new house,” I said. “Are you going to get married?”

  And he said again, holding his eyes to mine: “That’s what I come to see you about.”

  Later he told me, “I aint got no people. So that wont be no worry to you. I dont reckon you can say the same.”

  “No. I have people. In Jefferson.”

  His face fell a little. “Well, I got a little 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 dont 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 dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride. I knew that it 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 beam, swinging and twisting and never touching, and that 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 violated 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 anymore 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 in the cradle within the swing of my hand. I would 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 made whole again by the violation: time, Anse, love, what you will, outside the circle.

  Then I found that I had Darl. At first I would not believe it. Then I believed that I would kill Anse. It was as though he had tricked me, hidden within a word like within a paper screen and struck me in the back through it. But then I realised that I had been tricked by words older than Anse or love, and that the same word had tricked Anse too, and that my revenge would be that he would never know I was taking revenge. And when Darl was born I asked Anse to promi
se 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 anymore than I could have known I was wrong.

  “Nonsense,” Anse said; “you and me aint nigh done chapping yet, with just two.”

  He did not know that he was dead, then. Sometimes 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 liquify and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar 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 couldn’t think Anse, couldn’t remember Anse. It was not that I could think of myself as no longer unvirgin, because I was three now. And when I would think Cash and Darl 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. It doesn’t matter what they call them.

  And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines 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 cannot have until they forget the words. Like Cora, who could never even cook.