DARL
BEFORE us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again.
It clucks and murmurs among the spokes and about the mules’ knees, yellow, skummed with flotsman and with thick soiled gouts of foam as though it had sweat, lathering, like a driven horse. Through the undergrowth it goes with a plaintive sound, a musing sound; in it the unwinded cane and saplings lean as before a little gale, swaying without reflections as though suspended on invisible wires from the branches overhead. Above the ceaseless surface they stand—trees, cane, vines—rootless, severed from the earth, spectral above a scene of immense yet circumscribed desolation filled with the voice of the waste and mournful water.
Cash and I sit in the wagon; Jewel sits the horse at the off rear-wheel. The horse is trembling, its eye rolling wild and baby-blue in its long pink face, its breathing stertorous like groaning. He sits erect, poised, looking quietly and steadily and quickly this way and that, his face calm, a little pale, alert. Cash’s face is also gravely composed; 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.
“I reckon we’re still in the road, all right.”
“Tull taken and cut them two big whiteoaks. I heard tell how at high water in the old days they used to line up the ford by them trees.”
“I reckon he did that two years ago when he was logging down here. I reckon he never thought that anybody would ever use this ford again.”
“I reckon not. Yes, it must have been then. He cut a sight of timber outen here then. Payed off that mortgage with it, I hear tell.”
“Yes. Yes, I reckon so. I reckon Vernon could have done that.”
“That’s a fact. Most folks that logs in this here country, they need a durn good farm to support the sawmill. Or maybe a store. But I reckon Vernon could.”
“I reckon so. He’s a sight.”
“Ay. Vernon is. Yes, it must still be here. He never would have got that timber out of here if he hadn’t cleaned out that old road. I reckon we are still on it.” He looks about quietly, at the position of the trees, leaning this way and that, looking back along the floorless road shaped vaguely high in air by the position of the lopped and felled trees, as if the road too had been soaked free of earth and floated upward, to leave in its spectral tracing a monument to a still more profound desolation than this above which we now sit, talking quietly of old security and old trivial things. Jewel looks at him, then at me, then his face turns in in that quiet, constant, questing about the scene, the horse trembling quietly and steadily between his knees.
“He could go on ahead slow and sort of feel it out,” I say.
“Yes,” Cash says, not looking at me. His face is in profile as he looks forward where Jewel has moved on ahead.
“He can’t miss the river,” I say. “He couldn’t miss seeing it fifty yards ahead.”
Cash does not look at me, his face in profile. “If I’d just suspicioned it, I could ’a’ come down last week and taken a sight on it.”
“The bridge was up then,” I say. He does not look at me. “Whitfield crossed it a-horse-back.”
Jewel looks at us again, his expression sober and alert and subdued. His voice is quiet. “What you want me to do?”
“I ought to come down last week and taken a sight on it,” Cash says.
“We couldn’t have known,” I say. “There wasn’t any way for us to know.”
“I’ll ride on ahead,” Jewel says. “You can follow where I am.” He lifts the horse. It shrinks, bowed; he leans to it, speaking to it, lifting it forward almost bodily, it setting its feet down with gingerly splashings, trembling, breathing harshly. He speaks to it, murmurs to it. “Go on,” he says. “I ain’t going to let nothing hurt you. Go on, now.”
“Jewel,” Cash says. Jewel does not look back. He lifts the horse on.
“He can swim,” I say. “If he’ll just give the horse time, anyhow . . .” When he was born, he had a bad time of it. Ma would sit in the lamplight, 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,” Cash says. He is leaning a little forward. “I ought to come down last week and sighted. I ought to done it.”
“That’s right,” I say. “Neither his feet nor his head would reach the end of it. You couldn’t have known,” I say.
“I ought to done it,” he says. He lifts the reins. The mules move, into the traces; the wheels murmur alive in the water. He looks back and down at Addie. “It ain’t on a balance,” he says.
At last the trees open; against the open river Jewel sits the horse, half turned, it belly deep now. Across the river we can see Vernon and pa and Vardaman and Dewey Dell. Vernon is waving at us, waving us further downstream.
“We are too high up,” Cash says. Vernon is shouting too, but we cannot make out what he says for the noise of the water. It runs steady and deep now, unbroken, without sense of motion until a log comes along, turning slowly. “Watch it,” Cash says. We watch it and see it falter and hang for a moment, the current building up behind it in a thick wave, submerging it for an instant before it shoots up and tumbles on.
“There it is,” I say.
“Ay,” Cash says. “It’s there.” We look at Vernon again. He is now flapping his arms up and down. We move on downstream, slowly and carefully, watching Vernon. He drops his hands. “This is the place,” Cash says.
“Well, goddamn it, let’s get across, then,” Jewel says. He moves the horse on.
“You wait,” Cash says. Jewel stops again.
“Well, by God——” he says. Cash looks at the water, then he looks back at Addie. “It ain’t on a balance,” he says.
“Then go on back to the goddamn bridge and walk across,” Jewel says. “You and Darl both. Let me on that wagon.”
Cash does not pay him any attention. “It ain’t on a balance,” he says. “Yes, sir. We got to watch it.”
“Watch it, hell,” Jewel says. “You get out of that wagon and let me have it. By God, if you’re afraid to drive it over . . .” His eyes are pale as two bleached chips in his face. Cash is looking at him.
“We’ll get it over,” he says. “I tell you what you do. You ride on back and walk across the bridge and come down the other bank and meet us with the rope. Vernon’ll take your horse home with him and keep it till we get back.”
“You go to hell,” Jewel says.
“You take the rope and come down the bank and be ready with it,” Cash says. “Three can’t do no more than two can—one to drive and one to steady it.”
“Goddamn you,” Jewel says.
“Let Jewel take the end of the rope and cross upstream of us and brace it,” I say. “Will you do that, Jewel?”
Jewel watches me, hard. He looks quick at Cash, then back at me, his eyes alert and hard. “I don’t give a damn. Just so we do something. Setting here, not lifting a goddamn hand . . .”
“Let’s do that, Cash,” I say.
“I reckon we’ll have to,” Cash says.
The river itself is not a hundred yards across, and pa and Vernon and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice. Yet they appear dwarfed. It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality.
It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between. The mules stand, their forequarters already sloped a little, their rumps high. They too are breathing now with a deep groaning sound; looking back once, their gaze sweeps across us with in their eyes a wild, sad, profound and despairing quality as though they had already seen in the thick water the shape of the disaster which they could not speak and we could not see.
Cash turns back into the wagon. He lays his hands flat on Addie, rocking her a little. His face is calm, down-sloped, calculant, concerned. He lifts his box of tools and wedges it forward under the seat; together we shove Addie forward, wedging her between the tools and the wagon-bed. Then he looks at me.
“No,” I say. “I reckon I’ll stay.
