Faulkner-William-As-I-Lay-Dying.pdf

AS I LAY DYING

Hal Smith

Darl

Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although

I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see

Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.

The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked

brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laid-by cotton, to the cottonhouse

in the center of the field, where it turns and circles the cottonhouse at four

soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading

precision.

The cottonhouse is of rough logs, from between which the chinking has long

fallen. Square, with a broken roof set at a single pitch, it leans in empty and

shimmering dilapidation in the sunlight, a single broad window in two opposite

walls giving onto the approaches of the path. When we reach it I turn and follow

the path which circles the house. Jewel, fifteen feet behind me, looking

straight ahead, steps in a single stride through the window. Still staring

straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the

floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian dressed in

patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down, and steps in a single

stride through the opposite window and into the path again just as I come around

the corner. In single file and five feet apart and Jewel now in front, we go on

up the path toward the foot of the bluff.

Tull's wagon stands beside the spring, hitched to the rail, the reins

wrapped about the seat stanchion. In the wagon bed are two chairs. Jewel stops

at the spring and takes the gourd from the willow branch and drinks. I pass him

and mount the path, beginning to hear Cash's saw.

When I reach the top he has quit sawing. Standing in a litter of chips, he

is fitting two of the boards together. Between the shadow spaces they are yellow

as gold, like soft gold, bearing on their flanks in smooth undulations the marks

of the adze blade: a good carpenter, Cash is. He holds the two planks on the

trestle, fitted along the edges in a quarter of the finished box. He kneels and

squints along the edge of them, then he lowers them and takes up the adze. A

good carpenter. Addie Bundren could not want a better one, better box to lie in.

It will give her confidence and comfort. I go on to the house, followed by the

Chuck. Chuck. Chuck.

of the adze.

Cora

So I saved out the eggs and baked yesterday. The cakes turned out right well. We

depend a lot on our chickens. They are good layers, what few we have left after

the possums and such. Snakes too, in the summer. A snake will break up a hen-

house quicker than anything. So after they were going to cost so much more than

Mr Tull thought, and after I promised that the difference in the number of eggs

would make it up, I had to be more careful than ever because it was on my final

say-so we took them. We could have stocked cheaper chickens, but I gave my

promise as Miss Lawington said when she advised me to get a good breed, because

Mr Tull himself admits that a good breed of cows or hogs pays in the long run.

So when we lost so many of them we couldn't afford to use the eggs ourselves,

because I could not have had Mr Tull chide me when it was on my say-so we took

them. So when Miss Lawington told me about the cakes I thought that I could bake

them and earn enough, at one time to increase the net value of the flock the

equivalent of two head. And that by saving the eggs out one at a time, even the

eggs wouldn't be costing anything. And that week they laid so well that I not

only saved out enough eggs above what we had engaged to sell, to bake the cakes

with, I had saved enough so that the flour and the sugar and the stove wood

would not be costing anything. So I baked yesterday, more careful than ever I

baked in my life, and the cakes turned out right well. But when we got to town

this morning Miss Lawington told me the lady had changed her mind and was not

going to have the party after all.

"She ought to taken those cakes anyway," Kate says.

"Well," I say, "I reckon she never had no use for them now."

"She ought to taken them," Kate says. "But those rich town ladies can

change their minds. Poor folks cant."

Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.

"Maybe I can sell them at the bazaar Saturday," I say. They turned out real

well.

"You cant get two dollars a piece for them," Kate says.

"Well, it isn't like they cost me anything," I say. I saved them out and

swapped a dozen of them for the sugar and flour. It isn't like the cakes cost me

anything, as Mr Tull himself realises that the eggs I saved were over and beyond

what we had engaged to sell, so it was like we had found the eggs or they had

been given to us.

"She ought to taken those cakes when she same as gave you her word," Kate

says. The Lord can see into the heart. If it is His will that some folks has

different ideas of honesty from other folks, it is not my place to question His

decree.

"I reckon she never had any use for them," I say. They turned out real

well, too.

The quilt is drawn up to her chin, hot as it is, with only her two hands

and her face outside. She is propped on the pillow, with her head raised so she

can see out the window, and we can hear him every time he takes up the adze or

the saw. If we were deaf we could almost watch her face and hear him, see him.

Her face is wasted away so that the bones draw just under the skin in white

lines. Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the

sockets of iron candle-sticks. But the eternal and the everlasting salvation and

grace is not upon her.

"They turned out real nice," I say. "But not like the cakes Addie used to

bake." You can see that girl's washing and ironing in the pillow-slip, if ironed

it ever was. Maybe it will reveal her blindness to her, laying there at the

mercy and the ministration of four men and a tom-boy girl. "There's not a woman

in this section could ever bake with Addie Bundren," I say. "First thing we know

she'll be up and baking again, and then we wont have any sale for ours at all."

Under the quilt she makes no more of a hump than a rail would, and the only way

you can tell she is breathing is by the sound of the mattress shucks. Even the

hair, at her cheek does not move, even with that girl standing right over her,

fanning her with the fan. While we watch she swaps the fan to the other hand

without stopping it.

"Is she sleeping?" Kate whispers.

"She's just watching Cash yonder," the girl says. We can hear the saw in

the board. It sounds like snoring. Eula turns on the trunk and looks out the

window. Her necklace looks real nice with her red hat. You wouldn't think it

only cost twenty-five cents.

"She ought to taken those cakes," Kate says.

I could have used the money real well. But it's not like they cost me

anything except the baking. I can tell him that anybody is likely to make a

miscue, but it's not all of them that can get out of it without loss, I can tell

him. It's not everybody can eat their mistakes, I can tell him.

Someone comes through the hall. It is Darl. He does not look in as he

passes the door. Eula watches him as he goes on and passes from sight again

toward the back. Her hand rises and touches her beads lightly, and then her

hair. When she finds me watching her, her eyes go blank.

Darl

Pa and Vernon are sitting on the back porch. Pa is tilting snuff from the lid of

his snuff-box into his lower lip, holding the lip outdrawn between thumb and

finger. They look around as I cross the porch and dip the gourd into the water

bucket and drink.

"Where's Jewel?" pa says. When I was a boy I first learned how much better

water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a

faint taste like the hot July wind in cedar trees smells. It has to set at least

six hours, and be drunk from a gourd. Water should never be drunk from metal.

And at night it is better still. I used to lie on the pallet in the hall,

waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get up and go back to the

bucket. It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a

round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I

could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or

two before I drank. After that I was bigger, older. Then I would wait until they

all went to sleep so I could lie with my shirt-tail up, hearing them asleep,

feeling myself without touching myself, feeling the cool silence blowing upon my

parts and wondering if Cash was yonder in the darkness doing it too, had been

doing it perhaps for the last two years before I could have wanted to or could

have.

Pa's feet are badly splayed, his toes cramped and bent and warped, with no

toenail at all on his little toes, from working so hard in the wet in homemade

shoes when he was a boy. Beside his chair his brogans sit. They look as though

they had been hacked with a blunt axe out of pig-iron. Vernon has been to town.

I have never seen him go to town in overalls. His wife, they say. She taught

school too, once.

I fling the dipper dregs to the ground and wipe my mouth on my sleeve. It

is going to rain before morning. Maybe before dark. "Down to the barn," I say.

"Harnessing the team."

Down there fooling with that horse. He will go on through the barn, into

the pasture. The horse will not be in sight: he is up there among the pine

seedlings, in the cool. Jewel whistles, once and shrill. The horse snorts, then

Jewel sees him, glinting for a gaudy instant among the blue shadows. Jewel

whistles again; the horse comes dropping down the slope, stiff-legged, his ears

cocking and flicking, his mis-matched eyes rolling, and fetches up twenty feet

away, broadside on, watching Jewel over his shoulder in an attitude kittenish

and alert.

"Come here, sir," Jewel says. He moves. Moving that quick his coat,

bunching, tongues swirling like so many flames. With tossing mane and tail and

rolling eye the horse makes another short curvetting rush and stops again, feet

bunched, watching Jewel. Jewel walks steadily toward him, his hands at his

sides. Save for Jewel's legs they are like two figures carved for a tableau

savage in the sun.

When Jewel can almost touch him, the horse stands on his hind legs and

slashes down at Jewel. Then Jewel is enclosed by a glittering maze of hooves as

by an illusion of wings; among them, beneath the up-reared chest, he moves with

the flashing limberness of a snake. For an instant before the jerk comes onto

his arms he sees his whole body earth-free, horizontal, whipping snake-umber,

until he finds the horse's nostrils and touches earth again. Then they are

rigid, motionless, terrific, the horse back-thrust on stiffened, quivering legs,

with lowered head; Jewel with dug heels, shutting off the horse's wind with one

hand, with the other patting the horse's neck in short strokes myriad and

caressing, cursing the horse with obscene ferocity.

They stand in rigid terrific hiatus, the horse trembling and groaning.

Then Jewel is on the horse's back. He flows upward in a stooping swirl like the

lash of a whip, his body in midair shaped to the horse. For another moment the

horse stands spraddled, with lowered head, before it bursts into motion. They

descend the hill in a series of spine-jolting jumps, Jewel high, leech-like on

the withers, to the fence where the horse bunches to a scuttering halt again.

"Well," Jewel says, "you can quit now, if you got a-plenty."

Inside the barn Jewel slides running to the ground before the horse stops.

The horse enters the stall, Jewel following. Without looking back the horse

kicks at him, slamming a single hoof into the wall with a pistol-like report.

Jewel kicks him in the stomach; the horse arches his neck back, crop-toothed;

Jewel strikes him across the face with his fist and slides on to the trough and

mounts upon it. Clinging to the hay-rack he lowers his head and peers out across

the stall tops and through the doorway. The path is empty; from here he cannot

even hear Cash sawing. He reaches up and drags down hay in hurried armsful and

crams it into the rack.

"Eat," he says. "Get the goddamn stuff out of sight while you got a

chance, you pussel-gutted bastard. You sweet son of a bitch," he says.

Jewel

It’s because he stays out there, right under the window, hammering and sawing on

that goddamn box. Where she’s got to see him. Where every breath she draws is

full of his knocking and sawing where she can see him saying See. See what a

good one I am making for you. I told him to go somewhere else. I said Good God

do you want to see her in it. It’s like when he was a little boy and she says if

she had some fertilizer she would try to raise some flowers and he taken the

bread pan and brought it back from the barn full of dung.

And now them others sitting there, like buzzards. Waiting, fanning

themselves. Because I said If you wouldn’t keep on sawing and nailing at it

until a man cant sleep even and her hands laying on the quilt like two of them

roots dug up and tried to wash and you couldn’t get them clean. I can see the

fan and Dewey Dell’s arm. I said if you’d just let her alone. Sawing and

knocking, and keeping the air always moving so fast on her face that when you’re

tired you cant breathe it, and that goddamn adze going One lick less. One lick

less. One lick less until everybody that passes in the road will have to stop

and see it and say what a fine carpenter he is. If it had just been me when Cash

fell off of that church and if it had just been me when pa laid sick with that

load of wood fell on him, it would not be happening with every bastard in the

county coming in to stare at her because if there is a God what the hell is He

for. It would just be me and her on a high hill and me rolling the rocks down

the hill faces and teeth and all by God until she was quiet and not that goddamn

adze going One lick less. One lick less and we could be quiet.

Darl

We watch him come around the corner and mount the steps. He does not look at us.

"You ready?" he says.

"If you're hitched up," I say. I say "Wait." He stops, looking at pa.

Vernon spits, without moving. He spits With decorous and deliberate precision

into the pocked dust below the porch. Pa rubs his hands slowly on his knees. He

is gazing out beyond the crest of the bluff, out across the land. Jewel watches

him a moment, then he goes on to the pail and drinks again.

"I mislike undecision as much as ere a man," Pa says.

"It means three dollars," I say. The shirt across pa's hump is faded

lighter than the rest of it. There is no sweat stain on his shirt. I have never

seen a sweat stain on his shirt. He was sick once from working in the sun when

he was twenty-two years old, and he tells people that if he ever sweats, he will

die. I suppose he believes it.

"But if she dont last until you get back," he says. "She will be

disappointed."

Vernon spits into the dust. But it will rain before morning.

"She's counted on it," pa says. "She'll want to start right away. I know

her. I promised her I'd keep the team here and ready, and she's counting on it."

"We'll need that three dollars then, sure," I say. He gazes out over the

land, rubbing his hands on his knees. Since he lost his teeth his mouth

collapses in slow repetition when he dips. The stubble gives his lower face that

appearance that old dogs have. "You'd better make up your mind soon, so we can

get there and get a load on before dark," I say.

"Ma aint that sick," Jewel says. "Shut up, Darl."

“That's right," Vernon says. "She seems more like herself today than she

has in a week. Time you and Jewel get back, she'll be setting up."

"You ought to know," Jewel says. "You been here often enough looking at

her. You or your folks." Vernon looks at him. Jewel's eyes look like pale wood

in his high-blooded face. He is a head taller than any of the rest of us, always

was. I told them that's why ma always whipped him and petted him more. Because

he was peakling around the house more. That's why she named him Jewel I told

them.

"Shut up, Jewel," pa says, but as though he is not listening much. He

gazes out across the land, rubbing his knees.

"You could borrow the loan of Vernon's team and we could catch up with

you," I say. "If she didn't wait for us."

"Ah, shut your goddamn mouth," Jewel says.

"She'll want to go in ourn," pa says. He rubs his knees. "Dont ere a man

mislike it more."

"It's laying there, watching Cash whittle on that damn . . ." Jewel says.

He says it harshly, savagely, but he does not say the word. Like a little boy in

the dark to flail his courage and suddenly aghast into silence by his own noise.

"She wanted that like she wants to go in our own wagon," pa says. "She'll

rest easier for knowing it's a good one, and private. She was ever a private

woman. You know it well."

“Then let it be private," Jewel says. "But how the hell can you expect it

to be--" he looks at the back o£ pa's head, his eyes like pale wooden eyes.

"Sho," Vernon says, "she'll hold on till it's finished. She'll hold on

till everything's ready, till her own good time. And with the roads like they

are now, it wont take you no time to get her to town."

"It's fixing up to rain," pa says. "I am a luckless man. I have ever

been." He rubs his hands on his knees. "It's that durn doctor, liable to come at

any time. I couldn't get word to him till so late. If he was to come tomorrow

and tell her the time was nigh, she wouldn't wait, I know her. Wagon or no

wagon, she wouldn't wait. Then she'd be upset, and I wouldn't upset her for the

living world. With that family burying-ground in Jefferson and them of her blood

waiting for her there, she'll be impatient. I promised my word me and the boys

would get her there quick as mules could walk it, so she could rest quiet." He

rubs his hands on his knees. "No man ever misliked it more."

"If everybody wasn't burning hell to get her there," Jewel says in that

harsh, savage voice. "With Cash all day long right under the window, hammering

and sawing at that--"

"It was her wish," pa says. "You got no affection nor gentleness for her.

You never had. We would be beholden to no man," he says, "me and her. We have

never yet been, and she will rest quieter for knowing it and that it was her own

blood sawed out the boards and drove the nails. She was ever one to clean up

after herself."

“It means three dollars," I say. "Do you want us to go, or not?" Pa rubs

his knees. "We’ll be back by tomorrow sundown."

"Well ..." pa says. He looks out over the land, awry-haired, mouthing the

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