As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner [38]
"That pillow was longer than him," Cash says. He is leaning a little forward, "I ought to come down last week and sighted. I ought to done it."
"That's right," I say. "Neither his feet nor his head would reach the end of it. You couldn't have known." I say.
"I ought to done it," he says. He lifts the reins. The mules move, into the traces; the wheels murmur alive in the water. He looks back and down at Addie. "It aint on a balance," he says.
At last the trees open; against the open river Jewel sits the horse, half turned, it belly deep now. Across the river we can see Vernon and pa and Vardaman and Dewey Dell Vernon is waving at us, waving us further down stream.
"We are too high up," Cash says. Vernon is shouting too, but we cannot make out what he says for tie noise of the water. It runs steady and deep now, tin-broken, without sense of motion until a log comes along, turning slowly. "Watch it," Cash says. We watch it and see it falter and hang for a moment, the current building up behind it in a thick wave, submerging it for an instant before it shoots up and tumbles on.
"There it is," I say.
"Ay," Cash says. It's there." We look at Vernon again. He is now flapping his arms up and down. We move on downstream, slowly and carefully, watching Vernon. He drops his hands. "This is the place," Cash says.
"Well, goddamn it, let's get across, then," Jewel says, He moves the horse on.
"You wait," Cash says. Jewel stops again.
"Well, by God—" he says. Cash looks at the water, then he looks back at Addie. "It aint on a balance," he says.
"Then go on back to the goddamn bridge and walk across," Jewel says. "You and Darl both. Let me on that wagon."
Cash does not pay him any attention. It aint on a balance," he says. "Yes, sir. We got to watch it."
"Watch it, hell," Jewel says. "You get out of that wagon and let me have it. By God, if you're afraid to drive it over . . ." His eyes are pale as two bleached chips in his face. Cash is looking at him.
"We'll get it over," he says. "I tell you what you do. You ride on back and walk across the bridge and come down the other bank and meet us with the rope. Vernon'll take your horse home with him and keep it till we get back."
"You go to hell," Jewel says.
"You take the rope and come down the bank and be ready with it," Cash says. "Three cant do no more than two can—one to drive and one to steady it."
"Goddamn you," Jewel says.
"Let Jewel take the end of the rope and cross upstream of us and brace it," I say. "Will you do that, Jewel?"
Jewel watches me, hard. He looks quick at Cash, then back at me, his eyes alert and hard. "I dont give a damn. Just so we do something. Setting here, not lifting a goddamn hand ..."
"Let’s do that, Cash," I say.
"I reckon we’ll have to," Cash says.
The river itself is not a hundred yards across, and pa and Vernon and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with, that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice. Yet they appear dwarfed. It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, tie distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between. The mules stand, their fore quarters already sloped a little, their romps high. They too are breathing now with a deep groaning sound; looking back once, their gaze sweeps across us with in their eyes a wild, sad, profound and despairing quality as though they had already seen in the thick water the shape of the disaster which they could not speak and we could not see.
Cash turns back into the wagon. He lays his hands flat on Addie, rocking her a little. His face is calm, down-sloped, calculant, concerned. He lifts his box