Pa goes to the house. The rain rushes suddenly down, without thunder, without warning of any sort; he is swept on to the porch upon the edge of it and in an instant Cash is wet to the skin. Yet the motion of the saw has not faltered, as though it and the arm functioned in a tranquil conviction that rain was an illusion of the mind. Then he puts down the saw and goes and crouches above the lantern, shielding it with his body, his back shaped lean and scrawny by his wet shirt as though he had been abruptly turned wrong-side out, shirt and all.
Pa returns. He is wearing Jewel’s raincoat and carrying Dewey Dell’s. Squatting over the lantern, Cash reaches back and picks up four sticks and drives them into the earth and takes Dewey Dell’s raincoat from pa and spreads it over the sticks, forming a roof above the lantern. Pa watches him. “I don’t know what you’ll do,” he says. “Darl taken his coat with him.”
“Get wet,” Cash says. He takes up the saw again; again it moves up and down, in and out of that unhurried imperviousness as a piston moves in the oil; soaked, scrawny, tireless, with the lean light body of a boy or an old man. Pa watches him, blinking, his face streaming; again he looks up at the sky with that expression of dumb and brooding outrage and yet of vindication, as though he had expected no less; now and then he stirs, moves, gaunt and streaming, picking up a board or a tool and then laying it down. Vernon Tull is there now, and Cash is wearing Mrs. Tull’s raincoat and he and Vernon are hunting the saw. After a while they find it in pa’s hand.
“Why don’t you go on to the house, out of the rain?” Cash says. Pa looks at him, his face streaming slowly. It is as though upon a face carved by a savage caricaturist a monstrous burlesque of all bereavement flowed. “You go on in,” Cash says. “Me and Vernon can finish it.”
Pa looks at them. The sleeves of Jewel’s coat are too short for him. Upon his face the rain streams, slow as cold glycerine. “I don’t begrudge her the wetting,” he says. He moves again and falls to shifting the planks, picking them up, laying them down again carefully, as though they are glass. He goes to the lantern and pulls at the propped raincoat until he knocks it down and Cash comes and fixes it back.
“You get on to the house,” Cash says. He leads pa to the house and returns with the raincoat and folds it and places it beneath the shelter where the lantern sits. Vernon has not stopped. He looks up, still sawing.
“You ought to done that at first,” he says. “You knowed it was fixing to rain.”
“It’s his fever,” Cash says. He looks at the board.
“Ay,” Vernon says. “He’d a come, anyway.”
Cash squints at the board. On the long flank of it the rain crashes steadily, myriad, fluctuant. “I’m going to bevel it,” he says.
“It’ll take more time,” Vernon says. Cash sets the plank on edge; a moment longer Vernon watches him, then he hands him the plane.
Vernon holds the board steady while Cash bevels the edge of it with the tedious and minute care of a jeweller. Mrs. Tull comes to the edge of the porch and calls Vernon. “How near are you done?” she says.
Vernon does not look up. “Not long. Some, yet.”
She watches Cash stooping at the plank, the turgid savage gleam of the lantern slicking on the raincoat as he moves. “You go down and get some planks off the barn and finish it and come in out of the rain,” she says. “You’ll both catch your death.” Vernon does not move. “Vernon,” she says.
“We won’t be long,” he says. “We’ll be done after a spell.” Mrs. Tull watches them a while. Then she re-enters the house.
“If we get in a tight, we could take some of them planks,” Vernon says. “I’ll help you put them back.”
Cash ceases the plane and squints along the plank, wiping it with his palm. “Give me the next one,” he says.
Some time toward dawn the rain ceases. But it is not yet day when Cash drives the last nail and stands stiffly up and looks down at the finished coffin, the others watching him. In the lantern-light his face is calm, musing; slowly he strokes his hands on his raincoated thighs in a gesture deliberate, final and composed. Then the four of them—Cash and pa and Vernon and Peabody—raise the coffin to their shoulders and turn toward the house.
It is light, yet they move slowly; empty, yet they carry it carefully; lifeless, yet they move with hushed precautionary words to one another, speaking of it as though, complete, it now slumbered lightly alive, waiting to come awake. On the dark floor their feet clump awkwardly, as though for a long time they have not walked on floors.
They set it down by the bed. Peabody says quietly: “Let’s eat a snack. It’s almost daylight. Where’s Cash?”
He has returned to the trestles, stooped again in the lantern’s feeble glare as he gathers up his tools and wipes them on a cloth carefully and puts them into the box with its leather sling to go over the shoulder. Then he takes up box, lantern and raincoat and returns to the house, mounting the steps into faint silhouette against the paling east.
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. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not.
Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, 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.
CASH
IMADE it on the bevel.
- There is more surface for the nails to grip.
- There is twice the gripping-surface to each seam.
- The water will have to seep into it on a slant. Water moves easiest up and down or straight across.
- In a house people are upright two-thirds of the time. So the seams and joints are made up-and-down. Because the stress is up-and-down.
- In a bed where people lie down all the time, the joints and seams are made sideways, because the stress is sideways.
- Except.
- A body is not square like a cross-tie.
- Animal magnetism.
- The animal magnetism of a dead body makes the stress come slanting, so the seams and joints of a coffin are made on the bevel.
- You can see by an old grave that the earth sinks down on the bevel.
- While in a natural hole it sinks by the centre, the stress being up-and-down.
- So I made it on the bevel.
- It makes a neater job.
VARDAMAN
MY mother is a fish.
TULL
IT was ten o’clock when I got back, with Peabody’s team hitched on to the back of the wagon. They had already dragged the buckboard back from where Quick found it upside down straddle of the ditch about a mile from the spring. It was pulled out of the road at the spring, and about a dozen wagons was already there. It was Quick found it. He said the river was up and still rising. He said it had already covered the highest water-mark on the bridge-piling he had ever seen. “That bridge won’t stand a whole lot of water,” I said. “Has somebody told Anse about it?”
“I told him,” Quick said. “He says he reckons them boys has heard and unloaded and are on the way back by now. He says they can load up and get across.”
“He better go on and bury her at New Hope,” Armstid said. “That bridge is old. I wouldn’t monkey with it.”
“His mind is set on taking her to Jefferson,” Quick said.
“Then he better get at it soon as he can,” Armstid said.
Anse meets us at the door. He has shaved, but not good. There is a long cut on his jaw, and he is wearing his Sunday pants and a white shirt with the neckband buttoned. It is drawn smooth over his hump, making it look bigger than ever, like a white shirt will, and his face is different too. He looks folks in the eye now, dignified, his face tragic and composed, shaking
