As I Lay Dying

by William Faulkner

“It means three dollars,” I say.

“But if she dont last until you get back,” he says. “She will be disappointed.”

he lost his teeth

that’s why ma always whipped him and petted him more. Because he was peakling around the house more. That’s why she named him Jewel I told them.

With that family burying-ground in Jefferson and them of her blood waiting for her there, she’ll be impatient.

Darl was different from those others. I always said he was the only one of them that had his mother’s nature, had any natural affection.

A Bundren through and through, loving nobody, caring for nothing except how to get something with the least amount of work.

She lived, a lonely woman, lonely with her pride, trying to make folks believe different, hiding the fact that they just suffered her, because she was not cold in the coffin before they were carting her forty miles away to bury her, flouting the will of God to do it. Refusing to let her lie in the same earth with those Bundrens.

that near-naked girl always standing over Addie with a fan so that every time a body tried to talk to her and cheer her up, would answer for her right quick, like she was trying to keep anybody from coming near her at all.

“Poor Anse,” I say. “She kept him at work for thirty-odd years. I reckon she is tired.” “And I reckon she’ll be behind him for thirty years more,” Kate says. “Or if it aint her, he’ll get another one before cotton-picking.”

Too bad the Lord made the mistake of giving trees roots and giving the Anse Bundrens He makes feet and legs. If He’d just swapped them, there wouldn’t ever be a worry about this country being deforested someday.

Anse has not been in town in twelve years. And how his mother ever got up there to bear him, he being his mother’s son.

She lies back and turns her head without so much as glancing at pa. She looks at Vardaman; her eyes, the life in them, rushing suddenly upon them; the two flames glare up for a steady instant. Then they go out as though someone had leaned down and blown upon them.

then nobody would have to know it except you and me and Darl

Pa breathes with a quiet, rasping sound, mouthing the snuff against his gums. “God’s will be done,” he says. “Now I can get them teeth.”

I say, she is dead, Jewel. Addie Bundren is dead

I would let him come in between me and Lafe, like Darl came in between me and Lafe, and so Lafe is alone too. He is Lafe and I am Dewey Dell, and when mother died I had to go beyond and outside of me and Lafe and Darl to grieve because he could do so much for me and he dont know it. He dont even know it.

And I am Lafe’s guts. That’s it. I dont see why he didn’t stay in town. We are country people, not as good as town people. I dont see why he didn’t.

“It was laying right yonder,” he says, “but the rain come up after I taken and left. So I can go and open the windows, because Cash aint nailed her yet.”

Anse standing there like a scarecrow, like he was a steer standing knee-deep in a pond

the next morning they found him in his shirt tail, laying asleep on the floor like a felled steer, and the top of the box bored clean full of holes and Cash’s new auger broke off in the last one. When they taken the lid off they found that two of them had bored on into her face.

I reckon she’s right. I reckon if there’s ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora. And I reckon she would make a few changes, no matter how He was running it. And I reckon they would be for man’s good. Leastways, we would have to like them. Leastways, we might as well go on and make like we did.

“Darl taken his coat with him.”

It’s not your horse that’s dead, Jewel,” I say.

“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.

“Goddamn him. Goddamn him.”

“Goddamn you. Goddamn you.”

“But you are, Darl,” I said. “I know it,” Darl said. “That’s why I am not is. Are is too many for one woman to foal.”

Pa shaves every day now because my mother is a fish.

And Darl setting on the plank seat right above her where she was laying, laughing.

But now I can get them teeth. That will be a comfort. It will.

“Who’s talking about him?” she says. “Who cares about him?” she says, crying. “I just wish that you and him and all the men in the world that torture us alive and flout us dead, dragging us up and down the country——” “Now, now,” I says. “You’re upset.” “Dont you touch me!” she says. “Dont you touch me!” A man cant tell nothing about them. I lived with the same one fifteen years and I be durn if I can. And I imagined a lot of things coming up between us, but I be durn if I ever thought it would be a body four days dead and that a woman. But they make life hard on them, not taking it as it comes up, like a man does.

But when I went to the barn I knew different. When I walked into the hallway I saw something. It kind of hunkered up when I come in and I thought at first it was one of them got left, then I saw what it was. It was a buzzard. It looked around and saw me and went on down the hall, spraddle-legged, with its wings kind of hunkered out, watching me first over one shoulder and then over the other, like a old baldheaded man. When it got outdoors it begun to fly. It had to fly a long time before it ever got up into the air, with it thick and heavy and full of rain like it was.

Once I waked with a black void rushing under me. I could not see. I saw Vardaman rise and go to the window and strike the knife into the fish, the blood gushing, hissing like steam but I could not see. He’ll do as I say. He always does. I can persuade him to anything. You know I can. Suppose I say Turn here. That was when I died that time. Suppose I do. We’ll go to New Hope. We wont have to go to town. I rose and took the knife from the streaming fish still hissing and I killed Darl.

It was ma that got Dewey Dell to do his milking, paid her somehow, and the other jobs around the house that Jewel had been doing before supper she found some way for Dewey Dell and Vardaman to do them. And doing them herself when pa wasn’t there. She would fix him special things to eat and hide them for him. And that may have been when I first found it out, that Addie Bundren should be hiding anything she did, who had tried to teach us that deceit was such that, in a world where it was, nothing else could be very bad or very important, not even poverty. And at times when I went in to go to bed she would be sitting in the dark by Jewel where he was asleep. And I knew that she was hating herself for that deceit and hating Jewel because she had to love him so that she had to act the deceit.

But now it was like we had all—and by a kind of telepathic agreement of admitted fear—flung the whole thing back like covers on the bed and we all sitting bolt upright in our nakedness, staring at one another and saying “Now is the truth. He hasn’t come home. Something has happened to him. We let something happen to him.”

That night I found ma sitting beside the bed where he was sleeping, in the dark. She cried hard, maybe because she had to cry so quiet; maybe because she felt the same way about tears she did about deceit, hating herself for doing it, hating him because she had to. And then I knew that I knew. I knew that as plain on that day as I knew about Dewey Dell on that day.

he and I look at one another with long probing looks, looks that plunge unimpeded through one another’s eyes and into the ultimate secret place where for an instant Cash and Darl crouch flagrant and unabashed in all the old terror and the old foreboding, alert and secret and without shame. When we speak our voices are quiet, detached.

When he was born, he had a bad time of it. Ma would sit in the lamp-light, holding him on a pillow on her lap. We would wake and find her so. There would be no sound from them.

“That pillow was longer than him,”

“That’s right,” I say. “Neither his feet nor his head would reach the end of it.

“Jewel,” I say, “whose son are you?”

then she talks in little trickling bursts of secret and murmurous bubbling.

“Your mother was a horse, but who was your father, Jewel?”

Jewel, I say, Who was your father, Jewel? Goddamn you. Goddamn you.

“Hear?” Darl says. “Put your ear close.” I put my ear close and I can hear her. Only I cant tell what she is saying. “What is she saying, Darl?” I say. “Who is she talking to?” “She’s talking to God,” Darl says. “She is calling on Him to help her.” “What does she want Him to do?” I say. “She wants Him to hide her away from the sight of man,” Darl says. “Why does she want to hide her away from the sight of man, Darl?” “So she can lay down her life,” Darl says. “Why does she want to lay down her life, Darl?” “Listen,” Darl says. We hear her. We hear her turn over on her side. “Listen,” Darl says. “She’s turned over,” I say. “She’s looking at me through the wood.” “Yes,” Darl says. “How can she see through the wood, Darl?” “Come,” Darl says. “We must let her be quiet. Come.”

And I saw something Dewey Dell told me not to tell nobody

And I saw something Dewey Dell told me not to tell nobody. It is not about pa and it is not about Cash and it is not about Jewel and it is not about Dewey Dell and it is not about me

Against the dark doorway he seems to materialise out of darkness, lean as a race horse in his underclothes in the beginning of the glare. He leaps to the ground with on his face an expression of furious unbelief. He has seen me without even turning his head or his eyes in which the glare swims like two small torches. “Come on,” he says, leaping down the slope toward the barn.

As the scene opens, Darl's back is to the burning barn.