“Are you sick?” ma said. “Don’t you feel all right?”
“Yes,” Jewel said. “I feel all right.”
“He’s just lazy, trying me,” pa said, and Jewel standing there, asleep on his feet like as not. “Ain’t you?” he said, waking Jewel up again to answer.
“No,” Jewel said.
“You take off and stay in the house to-day,” ma said.
“With that whole bottom piece to be busted out?” pa said. “If you ain’t sick, what’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” Jewel said. “I’m all right.”
“All right?” pa said. “You’re asleep on your feet this minute.”
“No,” Jewel said. “I’m all right.”
“I want him to stay at home to-day,” ma said.
“I’ll need him,” pa said. “It’s tight enough, with all of us to do it.”
“You’ll just have to do the best you can with Cash and Darl,” ma said. “I want him to stay in to-day.”
But he wouldn’t do it. “I’m all right,” he said, going on. But he wasn’t all right. Anybody could see it. He was losing flesh, and I have seen him go to sleep chopping; watched the hoe going slower and slower up and down, with less and less of an arc, until it stopped and he leaning on it motionless in the hot shimmer of the sun.
Ma wanted to get the doctor, but pa didn’t want to spend the money without it was needful, and Jewel did seem all right except for his thinness and his way of dropping off to sleep at any moment. He ate hearty enough, except for his way of going to sleep in his plate, with a piece of bread half-way to his mouth and his jaws still chewing. But he swore he was all right.
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.
One night she was taken sick and when I went to the barn to put the team in and drive to Tull’s, I couldn’t find the lantern. I remembered noticing it on the nail the night before, but it wasn’t there now at midnight. So I hitched in the dark and went on and came back with Mrs. Tull just after daylight. And there the lantern was, hanging on the nail where I remembered it and couldn’t find it before. And then one morning while Dewey Dell was milking just before sun-up, Jewel came into the barn from the back, through the hole in the back wall, with the lantern in his hand.
I told Cash, and Cash and I looked at one another.
“Rutting,” Cash said.
“Yes,” I said. “But why the lantern? And every night, too. No wonder he’s losing flesh. Are you going to say anything to him?”
“Won’t do any good,” Cash said.
“What he’s doing now won’t do any good, either.”
“I know. But he’ll have to learn that himself. Give him time to realize that it’ll save, that there’ll be just as much more to-morrow, and he’ll be all right. I wouldn’t tell anybody, I reckon.”
“No,” I said. “I told Dewey Dell not to. Not ma, anyway.”
“No. Not ma.”
After that I thought it was right comical: he acting so bewildered and willing and dead for sleep and gaunt as a bean-pole, and thinking he was so smart with it. And I wondered who the girl was. I thought of all I knew that it might be, but I couldn’t say for sure.
“ ’Taint any girl,” Cash said. “It’s a married woman somewhere. Ain’t any young girl got that much daring and staying power. That’s what I don’t like about it.”
“Why?” I said. “She’ll be safer for him than a girl would. More judgment.”
He looked at me, his eyes fumbling, the words fumbling at what he was trying to say. “It ain’t always the safe things in this world that a fellow . . .”
“You mean, the safe things are not always the best things?”
“Ay; best,” he said, fumbling again. “It ain’t the best things, the things that are good for him. . . . A young boy. A fellow kind of hates to see . . . wallowing in somebody else’s mire . . .” That’s what he was trying to say. When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.
So we didn’t tell, not even when after a while he’d appear suddenly in the field beside us and go to work, without having had time to get home and make out he had been in bed all night. He would tell ma that he hadn’t been hungry at breakfast or that he had eaten a piece of bread while he was hitching up the team. But Cash and I knew that he hadn’t been home at all on those nights and he had come up out of the woods when we got to the field. But we didn’t tell. Summer was almost over then; we knew that when the nights began to get cool, she would be done if he wasn’t.
But when fall came and the nights began to get longer, the only difference was that he would always be in bed for pa to wake him, getting him up at last in that first state of semi-idiocy like when it first started, worse than when he had stayed out all night.
“She’s sure a stayer,” I told Cash. “I used to admire her, but I downright respect her now.”
“It ain’t a woman,” he said.
“You know,” I said. But he was watching me. “What is it, then?”
“That’s what I aim to find out,” he said.
“You can trail him through the woods all night if you want to,” I said. “I’m not.”
“I ain’t trailing him,” he said.
“What do you call it, then?”
“I ain’t trailing him,” he said. “I don’t mean it that way.”
And so a few nights later I heard Jewel get up and climb out the window, and then I heard Cash get up and follow him. The next morning when I went to the barn, Cash was already there, the mules fed, and he was helping Dewey Dell milk. And when I saw him I knew that he knew what it was. Now and then I would catch him watching Jewel with a queer look, like having found out where Jewel went and what he was doing had given him something to really think about at last. But it was not a worried look; it was the kind of look I would see on him when I would find him doing some of Jewel’s work around the house, work that pa still thought Jewel was doing and that ma thought Dewey Dell was doing. So I said nothing to him, believing that when he got done digesting it in his mind, he would tell me. But he never did.
One morning—it was November then, five months since it started—Jewel was not in bed and he didn’t join us in the field. That was the first time ma learned anything about what had been going on. She sent Vardaman down to find where Jewel was, and after a while she came down too. It was as though, so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a bland outside. 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.”
Then we saw him. He came up along the ditch and then turned straight across the field, riding the horse. Its mane and tail were going, as though in motion they were carrying out the splotchy pattern of its coat: he looked like he was riding on a big pinwheel, barebacked, with a rope bridle, and no hat on his head. It was a descendant of those Texas ponies Flem Snopes brought here twenty-five years ago and auctioned off for two dollars a head and nobody but old Lon Quick ever
