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By Root 4397 0

and a half times as high as me now and she says she’d be dead soon and then we’d all be better off and so I says all right, all right, have it your way. It’s your grandchild, which is more than any other grandparents it’s got can say for certain. Only I says it’s only a question of time. If you believe she’ll do what she says and not try to see it, you fool yourself because the first time that was the Mother kept on saying thank God you are not a Compson except in name, because you are all I have left now, you and Maury and I says well I could spare Uncle Maury myself and then they came and said they were ready to start. Mother stopped crying then. She pulled her veil down and we went down stairs. Uncle Maury was coming out of the diningroom, his handkerchief to his mouth. They kind of made a lane and we went out the door just in time to see Dilsey driving Ben and T. P. back around the corner. We went down the steps and got in. Uncle Maury kept saying Poor little sister, poor little sister, talking around his mouth and patting Mother’s hand. Talking around whatever it was.

“Have you got your band on?” she says. “Why dont they go on, before Benjamin comes out and makes a spectacle. Poor little boy. He doesn’t know. He cant even realise.”

“There, there,” Uncle Maury says, patting her hand, talking around his mouth. “It’s better so. Let him be unaware of bereavement until he has to.”

“Other women have their children to support them in times like this,” Mother says.

“You have Jason and me,” he says.

“It’s so terrible to me,” she says. “Having the two of them like this, in less than two years.”

“There, there,” he says. After a while he kind of sneaked his hand to his mouth and dropped them out the window. Then I knew what I had been smelling. Clove stems. I reckon he thought that the least he could do at Father’s or maybe the sideboard thought it was still Father and tripped him up when he passed. Like I say, if he had to sell something to send Quentin to Harvard we’d all been a dam sight better off if he’d sold that sideboard and bought himself a one-armed strait jacket with part of the money. I reckon the reason all the Compson gave out before it got to me like Mother says, is that he drank it up. At least I never heard of him offering to sell anything to send me to Harvard.

So he kept on patting her hand and saying “Poor little sister”, patting her hand with one of the black gloves that we got the bill for four days later because it was the twenty-sixth because it was the same day one month that Father went up there and got it and brought it home and wouldn’t tell anything about where she was or anything and Mother crying and saying “And you didn’t even see him? You didn’t even try to get him to make any provision for it?” and Father says “No she shall not touch his money not one cent of it” and Mother says “He can be forced to by law. He can prove nothing, unless——Jason Compson,” she says. “Were you fool enough to tell—”

“Hush, Caroline,” Father says, then he sent me to help Dilsey get that old cradle out of the attic and I says,

“Well, they brought my job home tonight” because all the time we kept hoping they’d get things straightened out and he’d keep her because Mother kept saying she would at least have enough regard for the family not to jeopardise my chance after she and Quentin had had theirs.

“And whar else do she belong?” Dilsey says. “Who else gwine raise her cep me? Aint I raised ev’y one of y’all?”

“And a dam fine job you made of it,” I says. “Anyway it’ll give her something to sure enough worry over now.” So we carried the cradle down and Dilsey started to set it up in her old room. Then Mother started sure enough.

“Hush, Miss Cahline,” Dilsey says. “You gwine wake her up.”

“In there?” Mother says. “To be contaminated by that atmosphere? It’ll be hard enough as it is, with the heritage she already has.”

“Hush,” Father says. “Dont be silly.”

“Why aint she gwine sleep in here,” Dilsey says. “In the same room whar I put her maw to bed ev’y night of her life since she was big enough to sleep by herself.