As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner [24]
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 in 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 shoulder 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,