“Jewel,” Vernon says, not loud, but his voice going full and clear along the water, peremptory yet tactful. “It’ll be back here. Better come back.”
Jewel dives again. We stand there, leaning back against the current, watching the water where he disappeared, holding the dead rope between us like two men holding the nozzle of a fire-hose, waiting for the water. Suddenly Dewey Dell is behind us in the water. “You make him come back,” she says. “Jewel!” she says. He comes up again, tossing his hair back from his eyes.
He is swimming now, toward the bank, the current sweeping him downstream quartering. “You, Jewel!” Dewey Dell says. We stand holding the rope and see him gain the bank and climb out. As he rises from the water, he stoops and picks up something. He comes back along the bank. He has found the chalk-line. He comes opposite us and stands there, looking about as if he were seeking something. Pa goes on down the bank. He is going back to look at the mules again where their round bodies float and rub quietly together in the slack water within the bend.
“What did you do with the hammer, Vernon?” Jewel says.
“I give it to him,” Vernon says, jerking his head at Vardaman. Vardaman is looking after pa. Then he looks at Jewel. “With the square.” Vernon is watching Jewel. He moves toward the bank, passing Dewey Dell and me.
“You get on out of here,” I say. She says nothing, looking at Jewel and Vernon.
“Where’s the hammer?” Jewel says. Vardaman scuttles up the bank and fetches it.
“It’s heavier than the saw,” Vernon says. Jewel is tying the end of the chalk-line about the hammer shaft.
“Hammer’s got the most wood in it,” Jewel says. He and Vernon face one another, watching Jewel’s hands.
“And flatter, too,” Vernon says. “It’d float three to one, almost. Try the plane.”
Jewel looks at Vernon. Vernon is tall, too; long and lean, eye to eye they stand in their close wet clothes. Lon Quick could look even at a cloudy sky and tell the time to ten minutes. Big Lon I mean, not little Lon.
“Why don’t you get out of the water?” I say.
“It won’t float like a saw,” Jewel says.
“It’ll float nigher to a saw than a hammer will,” Vernon says.
“Bet you,” Jewel says.
“I won’t bet,” Vernon says.
They stand there, watching Jewel’s still hands.
“Hell,” Jewel says. “Get the plane, then.”
So they get the plane and tie it to the chalk-line and enter the water again. Pa comes back along the bank. He stops for a while and looks at us, hunched, mournful, like a failing steer or an old tall bird.
Vernon and Jewel return, leaning against the current. “Get out of the way,” Jewel says to Dewey Dell. “Get out of the water.”
She crowds against me a little so they can pass, Jewel holding the plane high as though it were perishable, the blue string trailing back over his shoulder. They pass us and stop; they fall to arguing quietly about just where the wagon went over.
“Darl ought to know,” Vernon says. They look at me.
“I don’t know,” I says. “I wasn’t there that long.”
“Hell,” Jewel says. They move on, gingerly, leaning against the current, reading the ford with their feet.
“Have you got a holt of the rope?” Vernon says. Jewel does not answer. He glances back at the shore, calculant, then at the water. He flings the plane outward, letting the string run through his fingers, his fingers turning blue where it runs over them. When the line stops, he hands it back to Vernon.
“Better let me go this time,” Vernon says. Again Jewel does not answer; we watch him duck beneath the surface.
“Jewel,” Dewey Dell whimpers.
“It ain’t so deep there,” Vernon says. He does not look back. He is watching the water where Jewel went under.
When Jewel comes up he has the saw.
When we pass the wagon pa is standing beside it, scrubbing at the two mud smears with a handful of leaves. Against the jungle Jewel’s horse looks like a patchwork quilt hung on a line.
Cash has not moved. We stand above him, holding the plane, the saw, the hammer, the square, the rule, the chalk-line, while Dewey Dell squats and lifts Cash’s head. “Cash,” she says; “Cash.”
He opens his eyes, staring profoundly up at our inverted faces.
“If ever was such a misfortunate man,” pa says.
“Look, Cash,” we say, holding the tools up so he can see; “what else did you have?”
He tries to speak, rolling his head, shutting his eyes.
“Cash,” we say; “Cash.”
It is to vomit he is turning his head. Dewey Dell wipes his mouth on the wet hem of her dress; then he can speak.
“It’s his saw-set,” Jewel says. “The new one he bought when he bought the rule.” He moves, turning away. Vernon looks up after him, still squatting. Then he rises and follows Jewel down to the water.
“If ever was such a misfortunate man,” pa says. He looms tall above us as we squat; he looks like a figure carved clumsily from tough wood by a drunken caricaturist. “It’s a trial,” he says. “But I don’t begrudge her it. No man can say I begrudge her it.” Dewey Dell has laid Cash’s head back on the folded coat, twisting his head a little to avoid the vomit. Beside him his tools lie. “A fellow might call it lucky it was the same leg he broke when he fell offen that church,” pa says. “But I don’t begrudge her it.”
Jewel and Vernon are in the river again. From here they do not appear to violate the surface at all; it is as though it had severed them both at a single blow, the two torsos moving with infinitesimal and ludicrous care upon the surface. It looks peaceful, like machinery does after you have watched it and listened to it for a long time. As though the clotting which is you had dissolved into the myriad original motion, and seeing and hearing in themselves blind and deaf; fury in itself quiet with stagnation. Squatting, Dewey Dell’s wet dress shapes for the dead eyes of three blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which are the horizons and the valleys of the earth.
CASH
IT wasn’t on a balance. I told them that if they wanted it to tote and ride on a balance, they would have to——
CORA
ONE day we were talking. She had never been pure religious, not even after that summer at the camp meeting when Brother Whitfield wrestled with her spirit, singled her out and strove with the vanity in her mortal heart, and I said to her many a time, “God gave you children to comfort your hard human lot and for a token of His own suffering and love, for in love you conceived and bore them.” I said that because she took God’s love and her duty to Him too much as a matter of course, and such conduct is not pleasing to Him. I said, “He gave us the gift to raise our voices in His undying praise” because I said there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner than over a hundred that never sinned. And she said “My daily life is an acknowledgment and expiation of my sin” and I said “Who are you, to say what is sin and what is not sin?
It is the Lord’s part to judge; ours to praise His mercy and His holy name in the hearing of our fellow mortals” because He alone can see into the heart, and just because a woman’s life is right in the sight of man, she can’t know if there is no sin in her heart without she opens her heart to the Lord and receives His grace. I said, “Just because you have been a faithful wife is no sign that there is no sin in your heart, and just because your life is hard is no sign that the Lord’s grace is absolving you.” And she said, “I know my own sin. I know that I deserve my punishment. I do not begrudge it.”
And I said, “It is out of your vanity that you would judge sin and salvation in the Lord’s place. It is our mortal lot to suffer and to raise our voices in praise of Him who judges the sin and offers the salvation through our trials and tribulations time out of mind amen. Not even after Brother Whitfield, a godly man if ever one breathed God’s breath, prayed for you and strove as never a man could except him,” I said.
Because it is not us that can judge our sins or know what is sin in the Lord’s eyes. She has had a hard life, but so does every woman. But you’d think from the way she talked that she knew more about sin and salvation than the Lord God Himself, than them who have strove and laboured with the sin in this human world. When the only sin she ever committed was being partial to Jewel that never loved her and was its own punishment, in preference to Darl that was touched by God Himself and considered queer by us mortals and that did love her. I said, “There is your sin. And your punishment too. Jewel is your punishment. But where is your salvation? And life is short enough,” I said, “to win eternal grace in. And God is a jealous God. It is His to judge and to mete; not yours.”
“I know,” she said.
