As I Lay Dying

by William Faulkner

the whole loft of the barn takes fire at once,

Behind me pa and Gillespie and Mack and Dewey Dell and Vardaman emerge from the house.

As Jewel ran past Darl from the bouse to the barn, Darl turns around to watch Jewel. Darl's back is to the house as the others emerge.

He pauses at the coffin, stooping, looking at me, his face furious. Overhead the flames sound like thunder; across us rushes a cool draft:

Darl is now at the opening to the barn, and he's close enough to Jewel--who's on the barn, to see Jewel's expression. Jewel "pauses at the coffin, stooping." Does Jewel see evidence of the fire started there? If so, why is the fire not there around the coffin.

“Quick,” I say; “the horses.”

Darl expresses urgency and concern for the horses. (If Darl set the fire, why is it now that he's concerned about the horses.)

Jewel returns, running; again he looks down at the coffin. But he comes on. “Where’s cow?” he cries, passing me. I follow him.

Jewel--not Darl--is doing the rescuing, with Mack. Darl is showing no sense of urgency.

I lean to Mack’s ear: “Nightshirt. Around his head.”

Darl helps in his own way, an observer, a consultant.

The cow watches us as we enter.

Darl is moving with Jewel, as Jewel sets on saving the cow.

we tear the fragments away.

Daryl working with Jewel to enable the cow to escape.

For an instant he looks up and out at us through the rain of burning hay like a portière of flaming beads, and I can see his mouth shape as he calls my name.

When I went to find where they stay at night, I saw something They said, “Where is Darl? Where did Darl go?”

Cash’s leg and foot turned black. We held the lamp and looked at Cash’s foot and leg where it was black.

It just cracked. It wouldn’t come off. “It’ll take the hide, too,” Mr Gillespie said. “Why in the tarnation you put it on there. Didn’t none of you think to grease his leg first?” “I just aimed to help him,” pa said. “It was Darl put it on.”

“Where is Darl?” they said.

“Where is Darl?” they said. He is out there under the apple tree with her, lying on her. He is there so the cat wont come back.

“You needn’t to cry,” I said. “Jewel got her out. You needn’t to cry, Darl.”

When I went to find where they stay at night, I saw something that Dewey Dell says I mustn’t tell nobody

or have Gillespie sue us, because he knowed some way that Darl set fire to it. I dont know how he knowed, but he did. Vardaman seen him do it, but he swore he never told nobody but Dewey Dell and that she told him not to tell nobody. But Gillespie knowed it. But he would a suspicioned it sooner or later. He could have done it that night just watching the way Darl acted.

But I thought more than once before we crossed the river and after, how it would be God’s blessing if He did take her outen our hands and get shut of her in some clean way, and it seemed to me that when Jewel worked so to get her outen the river, he was going against God in a way, and then when Darl seen that it looked like one of us would have to do something, I can almost believe he done right in a way.

It’s because me and him was born close together, and it nigh ten years before Jewel and Dewey Dell and Vardaman begun to come along. I feel kin to them, all right, but I dont know. And me being the oldest, and thinking already the very thing that he done: I dont know.