As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner [36]
It was like when we was across, up out of the water again and the hard earth under us, that I was surprised. It was like we hadn't expected the bridge to end on the other bank, on something tame like the hard earth again that we had tromped on before this time and knowed well. Like it couldn't be me here, because I'd have had better sense than to done what I just done. And when I looked back and saw the other bank and saw my mule standing there where I used to be and knew that I'd have to get back there someway, I knew it couldn't be, became I just think of anything that could make me cross bridge ever even once. Yet here I was, and the fellow that could make himself cross it twice, couldn't be met, not even if Cora told him to.
It was that boy. I said "Here; you better take a holt of my hand" and he waited and held to me. I be dam if it wasn't Wee he come back and got me? like he -was saying They wont nothing hurt you; Like he was saying about a fine place he knowed, where Christmas come twice with Thanksgiving and lasts on through the winter and the spring and the summer, had all just stayed with him I'd be all right too.
When I looked back at my mule it was like he was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated outen it like was the more the sweaty the broader the land; the more the sweat, the tighter the house because it would take a tight house for Cora, to hold Cora like a jar of milk in the spring; you've got to have a tight jar oaf you'll need a powerful spring, so if you have a big spring, why dies, you have the incentive to have tight, wellmade jars, because it is your milk, soar or not, because you would lather have milk that will sour than to have milk that wont, because you are a man.
And him holding to my hand, his hand that hot and confident; so that I was like to say: Look-a-here. Cant you see that mule yonder? He never had no business over here, so he never come, not being nothing but a mule. Because a fellow can see ever now and then that children have more sense than him. But he dont like to admit it to them until they have beards. After they have a beard, they are too busy because they dont know it they'll ever quite make it back to where they were in sense before they was haired, so you dont mind admitting then to folks that are worrying about the same thing that aint worth the worry that you are yourself.
Then we was over and we stood there, looking at Cash turning the wagon around. We watched them drive back down the road to where the trail tamed oil into the bottom. After a while the wagon was out of sight.
"We better get on down to the ford and git ready to help,” I said.
"I give her my word," Anse says. "It is sacred on me. I know you begrudge it, but she will bless you in heaven."
"Well, they got to finish circumventing the land before they can dare the water," I said. "Come on."
"It's the turning back," he said. “It aint no luck in turning back."
He was standing there, humped, mournful, looking at the empty road beyond the swagging and swaying bridge. And that gal, too, with the lunch basket on one arm and that package under the other. Just going to town. Bent on it. They would risk the fire and the earth and the water and all just to eat a sack of bananas. "You ought to laid over a day," I said. It would a fell some by morning. It mought not a rained tonight. And it cant get no higher."
"I give my promise," he says. "She is counting on it."
Darl
Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber