As I Lay Dying

by William Faulkner

Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cotton-house can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.

A good carpenter. Addie Bundren could not want a better one, a better box to lie in. It will give her confidence and comfort. I go on to the house, followed by the Chuck Chuck Chuck of the adze.

So I baked yesterday, more careful than ever I baked in my life, and the cakes turned out right well. But when we got to town this morning Miss Lawington told me the lady had changed her mind and was not going to have the party after all.

Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.

“She ought to take those cakes when she same as gave you her word,” Kate says. The Lord can see into the heart. If it is His will that some folks has different ideas of honesty from other folks, it is not my place to question His decree.

I could have used the money real well. But it’s not like they cost me anything except the baking. I can tell him that anybody is likely to make a miscue, but it’s not all of them that can get out of it without loss, I can tell him. It’s not everybody can eat their mistakes, I can tell him.

It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water around orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank.

It’s because he stays out there, right under the window, hammering and sawing on that goddamn box. Where she’s got to see him. Where every breath she draws is full of his knocking and sawing where she can see him saying See. See what a good one I am making for you.

It would just be me and her on a high hill and me rolling the rocks down the hill at their faces, picking them up and throwing them down the hill, faces and teeth and all by God until she was quiet and not that goddamn adze going. One lick less. One lick less and we could be quiet.

“It’s that durn doctor, liable to come at any time. I couldn’t get word to him till so late. If he was to come to-morrow and tell her the time was nigh, she wouldn’t wait. I know her. Wagon or no wagon, she wouldn’t wait. Then she’d be upset, and I wouldn’t upset her for the living world. With that family burying-ground in Jefferson and them of her blood waiting for her there, she’ll be impatient. I promised my word me and the boys would get her there quick as mules could walk it, so she could rest quiet.”

Jewel glances back, then he goes on around the house. I enter the hall, hearing the voices before I reach the door. Tilting a little down the hill, as our house does, a breeze draws through the hall all the time, upslanting. A feather dropped near the front door will rise and brush along the ceiling, slanting backward, until it reaches the down-turning current at the back door: so with voices. As you enter the hall, they sound as though they were speaking out of the air about your head.

It was like he knew he would never see her again, that Anse Bundren was driving him from his mother’s death-bed, never to see her in this world again. I always said 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.

Why, for the last three weeks I have been coming over every time I could, coming sometimes when I shouldn’t have, neglecting my own family and duties so that somebody would be with her in her last moments and she would not have to face the Great Unknown without one familiar face to give her courage. Not that I deserve credit for it: I will expect the same for myself. But thank God it will be the faces of my loved kin, my blood and flesh, for in my husband and children I have been more blessed than most, trials though they have been at times.

Not like Addie Bundren dying alone, hiding her pride and her broken heart. Glad to go. Lying there with her head propped up so she could watch Cash building the coffin, having to watch him so he would not skimp on it, like as not, with those men not worrying about anything except if there was time to earn another three dollars before the rain came and the river got too high to get across it.

We picked on down the row, the woods getting closer and closer and the secret shade, picking on into the secret shade with my sack and Life’s sack. Because I said will I or won’t I when the sack was half-full because I said if the sack is full when we get to the woods it won’t be me. I said if it don’t mean for me to do it the sack will not be full and I will turn up the next row but if the sack is full, I cannot help it. It will be that I had to do it all the time and I cannot help it.

“When is she going to die?” I say. “Before we get back,” he says. “Then why are you taking Jewel?” I say. “I want him to help me load,” he says.

It’s a hard life on women, for a fact. Some women. I mind my mammy lived to be seventy and more. Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went and taken that lace-trimmed nightgown she had had forty-five years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes.

It’s true. Never a truer breath was ever breathed. “The Lord giveth,” I say.

And Darl, too. Talking me out of him, durn them. It ain’t that I am afraid of work; I always have fed me and mine and kept a roof above us: it’s that they would short-hand me just because he tends to his own business, just because he’s got his eyes full of the land all the time. I says to them, he was all right at first, with his eyes full of the land, because the land laid up-and-down ways then; it wasn’t till that ere road come and switched the land around long ways and his eyes still full of the land, that they begun to threaten me out of him, trying to short-hand me with the law.

I have heard men cuss their luck, and right, for they were sinful men. But I do not say it’s a curse on me, because I have done no wrong to be cussed by. I am not religious, I reckon. But peace is my heart: I know it is. I have done things but neither better nor worse than them that pretend other like, and I know that Old Marster will care for me as for ere a sparrow that falls. But it seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.

But couldn’t no woman strove harder than Addie to make them right, man and boy: I’ll say that for her.

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.

“Jewel,” I say, “do you know that Addie Bundren is going to die? Addie Bundren is going to die?”

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.

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.

Jewel’s hat droops limp about his neck, channelling water on to the soaked tow-sack tied about his shoulders as, ankle-deep in the running ditch, he pries with a slipping two-by-four, with a piece of rotting log for fulcrum, at the axle. Jewel, I say, she is dead, Jewel. Addie Bundren is dead.

I am not crying now. I am not anything. Dewey Dell comes to the hill and calls me. “Vardaman.” I am not anything. I am quiet. “You, Vardaman.” I can cry quiet now, feeling and hearing my tears.

He is a big tub of guts and I am a little tub of guts and if there is not any room for anything else important in a big tub of guts, how can it be room in a little tub of guts. But I know it is there because God gave women a sign when something has happened bad.

He said I worry more than you do and I said you don’t know what worry is so I can’t worry. I try to but I can’t think long enough to worry.

“You’ll just have to wait. What you got in you ain’t nothing to what I got in me, even if you are a woman too.” She follows me, moaning. Then the dead, hot, pale air breathes on my face again. He could fix it all right, if he just would. And he don’t even know it. He could do everything for me if he just knowed it.

I said God made me. I did not said to God to made me in the country. If He can make the train, why can’t He make them all in the town because flour and sugar and coffee. “Wouldn’t you ruther have bananas?”

God made the rabbits and possums. He made the train. Why must He make a different place for them to go if she is just like the rabbit.

It was not her because it was laying right yonder in the dirt. And now it’s all chopped up. I chopped it up. It’s laying in the kitchen in the bleeding pan, waiting to be cooked and et. Then it wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t. And to-morrow it will be cooked and et and she will be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and there won’t be anything in the box and so she can breathe. It was laying right yonder on the ground. I can get Vernon. He was there and he seen it, and with both of us it will be and then it will not be.

But he hung back, dripping, watching me with them eyes. “You was there. You seen it laying there. Cash is fixing to nail her up, and it was a-laying right there on the ground. You seen it. You seen the mark in the dirt. The rain never come up till after I was a-coming here. So we can get back in time.”

I have said and I say again, that’s ever living thing the matter with Darl: he just thinks by himself too much. Cora’s right when she says all he needs is a wife to straighten him out. And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he’s durn nigh hopeless. But I reckon Cora’s right when she says the reason the Lord had to create women is because man don’t know his own good when he sees it.

If it’s a judgment, it ain’t right. Because the Lord’s got more to do than that. He’s bound to have. Because the only burden Anse Bundren’s ever had is himself. And when folks talks him low, I think to myself he ain’t that less of a man or he couldn’t a bore himself this long.

Pa lifts his face, slack-mouthed, the wet black rim of snuff plastered close along the base of his gums; from behind his slack-faced astonishment he muses as though from beyond time, upon the ultimate outrage. Cash looks once at the sky, then at the lantern. The saw has not faltered, the running gleam of its pistoning edge unbroken. “Get something to cover the lantern,” he says.

He goes to the lantern and pulls at the propped raincoat until he knocks it down and Cash comes and fixes it back.

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not.

Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is. How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

10. You can see by an old grave that the earth sinks down on the bevel. 11. While in a natural hole it sinks by the centre, the stress being up-and-down. 12. So I made it on the bevel. 13. It makes a neater job.

My mother is a fish.

He looks folks in the eye now, dignified, his face tragic and composed, shaking us by the hand as we walk up on to the porch and scrape our shoes, a little stiff in our Sunday clothes, our Sunday clothes rustling, not looking full at him as he meets us.

“It’s them durn women,” he says. “I made it to balance with her. I made it to her measure and weight.” If it takes wet boards for folks to fall, it’s fixing to be lots of falling before this spell is done.

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.

It won’t balance. If they want it to tote and ride on a balance, they will have——

“Wait, Jewel,” I say. But he will not wait. He is almost running now and Cash is left behind. It seems to me that the end which I now carry alone has no weight, as though it coasts like a rushing straw upon the furious tide of Jewel’s despair. I am not even touching it when, turning, he lets it overshoot him, swinging, and stops it and sloughs it into the wagon-bed in the same motion and looks back at me, his face suffused with fury and despair.

We are going to town. Dewey Dell says it won’t be sold because it belongs to Santa Claus and he has taken it back with him until next Christmas. Then it will be behind the glass again, shining with waiting.

It’ll be there. It’ll be there come Christmas, she says, shining on the track. She says he won’t sell it to no town boys.