Free As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner Page A

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, the tall buzzards hang in soaring circles, the clouds giving them an illusion of retrograde.
    Motionless, wooden-backed, wooden-faced, he shapes the horse in a rigid stoop like a hawk, hook-winged. They are waiting for us, ready for the moving of it, waiting for him. He enters the stall and waits until it kicks at him so that he can slip past and mount onto the trough and pause, peering out across the intervening stall-tops toward the empty path, before he reaches into the loft.
    “Goddamn him. Goddamn him.”

CASH

    It wont balance. If you want it to tote and ride on a balance, we will have——”
    “Pick up. Goddamn you, pick up.”
    “I’m telling you it wont tote and it wont ride on a balance unless——”
    “Pick up! Pick up, goddamn your thick-nosed soul to hell, pick up!”
    It wont balance. If they want it to tote and ride on a balance, they will have

DARL

    He stoops among us above it, two of the eight hands. In his face the blood goes in waves. In between them his flesh is greenish looking, about that smooth, thick, pale green of cow’s cud; his face suffocated, furious, his lip lifted upon his teeth. “Pick up!” he says. “Pick up, goddamn your thick-nosed soul!”
    He heaves, lifting one whole side so suddenly that we all spring into the lift to catch and balance it before he hurls it completely over. For an instant it resists, as though volitional, as though within it her pole-thin body clings furiously, eventhough dead, to a sort of modesty, as she would have tried to conceal a soiled garment that she could not prevent her body soiling. Then it breaks free, rising suddenly as though the emaciation of her body had added buoyancy to the planks or as though, seeing that the garment was about to be torn from her, she rushes suddenly after it in a passionate reversal that flouts its own desire and need. Jewel’s face goes completely green and I can hear teeth in his breath.
    We carry it down the hall, our feet harsh and clumsy on the floor, moving with shuffling steps, and through the door.
    “Steady it a minute, now,” pa says, letting go. He turns back to shut and lock the door, but Jewel will not wait.
    “Come on,” he says in that suffocating voice. “Come on.”
    We lower it carefully down the steps. We move, balancing it as though it were something infinitely precious, our faces averted, breathing through our teeth to keep our nostrils closed. We go down the path, toward the slope.
    “We better wait,” Cash says. “I tell you it aint balanced now. We’ll need another hand on that hill.”
    “Then turn loose,” Jewel says. He will not stop. Cash begins to fall behind, hobbling to keep up, breathing harshly; then he is distanced and Jewel carries the entire front end alone, so that, tilting as the path begins to slant, it begins to rush away from me and slip down the air like a sled upon