“He give it to me. Ten dollars. He said that would be enough.”
“A thousand dollars wouldn’t be enough in my store and ten cents wouldn’t be enough,” I said. “You take my advice and go home and tell you pa or your brothers if you have any or the first man you come to in the road.”
But she didn’t move. “Lafe said I could get it at the drug-store. He said to tell you me and him wouldn’t never tell nobody you sold it to us.”
“And I just wish your precious Lafe had come for it himself; that’s what I wish. I don’t know: I’d have had a little respect for him then. And you can go back and tell him I said so—if he ain’t half-way to Texas by now, which I don’t doubt. Me, a respectable druggist, that’s kept store and raised a family and been a church-member for fifty-six years in this town. I’m a good mind to tell your folks myself, if I can just find who they are.”
She looked at me now, her eyes and face kind of blank again like when I first saw her through the window. “I didn’t know,” she said. “He told me I could get something at the drug-store. He said they might not want to sell it to me, but if I had ten dollars and told them I wouldn’t never tell nobody . . .”
“He never said this drug-store,” I said. “If he did or mentioned my name, I defy him to prove it. I defy him to repeat it or I’ll prosecute him to the full extent of the law, and you can tell him so.”
“But maybe another drug-store would,” she said.
“Then I don’t want to know it. Me, that’s——” Then I looked at her. But it’s a hard life they have; sometimes a man . . . if there can ever be any excuse for sin, which it can’t be. And then, life wasn’t made to be easy on folks: they wouldn’t ever have any reason to be good and die. “Look here,” I said. “You get that notion out of your head. The Lord gave you what you have, even if He did use the devil to do it; you let Him take it away from you if it’s His will to do so. You go on back to Lafe and you and him take that ten dollars and get married with it.”
“Lafe said I could get something at the drug-store,” she said.
“Then go and get it,” I said. “You won’t get it here.”
She went out, carrying the package, her feet making a little hissing on the floor. She bumbled again at the door and went out. I could see her through the glass going on down the street.
It was Albert told me about the rest of it. He said the wagon was stopped in front of Grummet’s hardware store, with the ladies all scattering up and down the street with handkerchief to their noses, and a crowd of hard-nosed men and boys standing around the wagon, listening to the marshal arguing with the man. He was a kind of tall, gaunted man sitting on the wagon, saying it was a public street and he reckoned he had as much right there as anybody, and the marshal telling him he would have to move on; folks couldn’t stand it.
It had been dead eight days, Albert said. They came from some place out in Yoknapatawpha county, trying to get to Jefferson with it. It must have been like a piece of rotten cheese coming into an ant-hill, in that ramshackle wagon that Albert said folks were scared would fall all to pieces before they could get it out of town, with that home-made box and another fellow with a broken leg lying on a quilt on top of it, and the father and a little boy sitting on the seat and the marshal trying to make them get out of town.
“It’s a public street,” the man says. “I reckon we can stop to buy something same as airy other man. We got the money to pay for hit, and hit ain’t airy law that says a man can’t spend his money where he wants.”
They had stopped to buy some cement. The other son was in Grummet’s, trying to make Grummet break a sack and let him have ten cents’ worth, and finally Grummet broke the sack to get him out. They wanted the cement to fix the fellow’s broken leg, someway.
“Why, you’ll kill him,” the marshal said. “You’ll cause him to lose his leg. You take him on to a doctor, and you get this thing buried soon as you can. Don’t you know you’re liable to jail for endangering the public health?”
“We’re doing the best we can,” the father said. Then he told a long tale about how they had to wait for the wagon to come back and how the bridge was washed away and how they went eight miles to another bridge and it was gone too so they came back and swum the ford and the mules got drowned and how they got another team and found that the road was washed out and they had to come clean around by Mottson, and then the one with the cement came back and told him to shut up.
“We’ll be gone in a minute,” he told the marshal.
“We never aimed to bother nobody,” the father said.
“You take that fellow to a doctor,” the marshal told the one with the cement.
“I reckon he’s all right,” he said.
“It ain’t that we’re hard-hearted,” the marshal said. “But I reckon you can tell yourself how it is.”
“Sho,” the other said. “We’ll take out soon as Dewey Dell comes back. She went to deliver a package.”
So they stood there with the folks backed off with handkerchiefs to their faces, until in a minute the girl came up with that newspaper package.
“Come on,” the one with the cement said, “we’ve lost too much time.” So they got in the wagon and went on. And when I went to supper it still seemed like I could smell it. And the next day I met the marshal and I began to sniff and said,
“Smell anything?”
“I reckon they’re in Jefferson by now,” he said.
“Or in jail. Well, thank the Lord it’s not our jail.”
“That’s a fact,” he said.
DARL
“HERE’S a place,” pa says. He pulls the team up and sits looking at the house. “We could get some water over yonder.”
“All right,” I say. “You’ll have to borrow a bucket from them, Dewey Dell.”
“God knows,” pa says. “I wouldn’t be beholden, God knows.”
“If you see a good-sized can, you might bring it,” I say. Dewey Dell gets down from the wagon, carrying the package. “You had more trouble than you expected, selling those cakes in Mottson,” I say. How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-strings: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls. Cash broke his leg and now the sawdust is running out. He is bleeding to death is Cash.
“I wouldn’t be beholden,” pa says. “God knows.”
“Then make some water yourself,” I say. “We can use Cash’s hat.”
When Dewey Dell comes back the man comes with her. Then he stops and she comes on and he stands there and after a while he goes back to the house and stands on the porch, watching us.
“We better not try to lift him down,” pa says. “We can fix it here.”
“Do you want to be lifted down, Cash?” I say.
“Won’t we get to Jefferson to-morrow?” he says. He is watching us, his eyes interrogatory, intent, and sad. “I can last it out.”
“It’ll be easier on you,” pa says. “It’ll keep it from rubbing together.”
“I can last it,” Cash says. “We’ll lose time stopping.”
“We done bought the cement, now,” pa says.
“I could last it,” Cash says. “It ain’t but one more day. It don’t bother to speak of.” He looks at us, his eyes wide in his thin grey face, questioning. “It sets up so,” he says.
“We done bought it now,” pa says.
I mix the cement in the can, stirring the slow water into the pale-green thick coils. I bring the can to the wagon where Cash can see. He lies on his back, his thin profile in silhouette, ascetic and profound against the sky. “Does that look about right?” I say.
“You don’t want too much water, or it won’t work right,” he says.
“Is this too much?”
“Maybe if you could get a little sand,” he says. “It ain’t but one more day,” he says. “It don’t bother me none.”
Vardaman goes back down the road to where we crossed the branch and returns with sand. He pours it slowly into the thick coiling in the can. I go to the wagon again.
“Does that look all right?”
“Yes,” Cash says. “I could have lasted. It don’t bother me none.”
We loosen the splints and pour the cement over his leg, slow.
“Watch out for it,” Cash says. “Don’t get none on it if you can help.”
“Yes,” I say. Dewey Dell tears a piece of paper from the package and wipes the cement from the top of it as it drips from Cash’s leg.
“How does that feel?”
“It feels fine,” he says. “It’s cold. It feels fine.”
“If it’ll just help you,” pa says. “I asks your forgiveness. I never forseen it no more than you.”
“It feels fine,” Cash says.
If you could just ravel out into time. That
