“It’s not mine, I tell you. If it was, God knows you could have it.”
“Where did you get ten dollars?”
“Pa. Pa.”
“You won’t tell me. Did you come by it so shameful you dare not?”
“It’s not mine, I tell you. Can’t you understand it’s not mine?”
“It’s not like I wouldn’t pay it back. But she calls her own father a thief.”
“I can’t, I tell you. I tell you it’s not my money. God knows you could have it.”
“I wouldn’t take it. My own born daughter that has et my food for seventeen years, begrudges me the loan of ten dollars.”
“It’s not mine. I can’t.”
“Whose is it, then?”
“It was give to me. To buy something with.”
“To buy what with?”
“Pa. Pa.”
“It’s just a loan. God knows, I hate for my blooden children to reproach me. But I give them what was mine without stint. Cheerful I give them, without stint. And now they deny me. Addie. It was lucky for you you died, Addie.”
“Pa. Pa.”
“God knows it is.”
He took the money and went out.
CASH
SO when we stopped there to borrow the shovels we heard the graphophone playing in the house, and so when we got done with the shovels pa says, “I reckon I better take them back.”
So we went back to the house. “We better take Cash on to Peabody’s,” Jewel said.
“It won’t take but a minute,” pa said. He got down from the wagon. The music was not playing now.
“Let Vardaman do it,” Jewel said. “He can do it in half the time you can. Or here, you let me——”
“I reckon I better do it,” pa says. “Long as it was me that borrowed them.”
So we set in the wagon, but the music wasn’t playing now. I reckon it’s a good thing we ain’t got ere a one of them. I reckon I wouldn’t never get no work done a-tall for listening to it. I don’t know if a little music ain’t about the nicest thing a fellow can have. Seems like when he comes in tired of a night, it ain’t nothing could rest him like having a little music played and him resting. I have seen them that shuts up like a hand-grip, with a handle and all, so a fellow can carry it with him wherever he wants.
“What you reckon he’s doing?” Jewel says. “I could ’a’ toted them shovels back and forth ten times by now.”
“Let him take his time,” I said. “He ain’t as spry as you, remember.”
“Why didn’t he let me take them back, then? We got to get your leg fixed up so we can start home to-morrow.”
“We got plenty of time,” I said. “I wonder what them machines costs on the instalment.”
“Instalment of what?” Jewel said. “What you got to buy it with?”
“A fellow can’t tell,” I said. “I could ’a’ bought that one from Suratt for five dollars, I believe.”
And so pa come back and we went to Peabody’s. While we was there pa said he was going to the barber-shop and get a shave. And so that night he said he had some business to tend to, kind of looking away from us while he said it, with his hair combed wet and slick and smelling sweet with perfume, but I said leave him be; I wouldn’t mind hearing a little more of that music myself.
And so next morning he was gone again, then he come back and told us get hitched up and ready to take out and he would meet us and when they was gone he said,
“I don’t reckon you got no more money.”
“Peabody just give me enough to pay the hotel with,” I said. “We don’t need nothing else, do we?”
“No,” pa said; “no. We don’t need nothing.” He stood there, not looking at me.
“If it is something we got to have, I reckon maybe Peabody,” I said.
“No,” he said; “it ain’t nothing else. You all wait for me at the corner.”
So Jewel got the team and come for me and they fixed me a pallet in the wagon and we drove across the square to the corner where pa said, and we was waiting there in the wagon, with Dewey Dell and Vardaman eating bananas, when we see them coming up the street. Pa was coming along with that kind of daresome and hangdog look all at once like when he has been up to something he knows ma ain’t going to like, carrying a grip in his hand, and Jewel says,
“Who’s that?”
Then we see it wasn’t the grip that made him look different; it was his face, and Jewel says, “He got them teeth.”
It was a fact. It made him look a foot taller, kind of holding his head up, hangdog and proud too, and then we see her behind him, carrying the other grip—a kind of duck-shaped woman all dressed up, with them kind of hard-looking pop eyes like she was daring ere a man to say nothing. And there we set watching them, with Dewey Dell’s and Vardaman’s mouth half open and half-et bananas in their hands and her coming around from behind pa, looking at us like she dared ere a man. And then I see that the grip she was carrying was one of them little graphophones.
It was for a fact, all shut up as pretty as a picture, and every time a new record would come from the mail order and us setting in the house in the winter, listening to it, I would think what a shame Darl couldn’t be to enjoy it too. But it is better so for him. This world is not his world; this life his life.
“It’s Cash and Jewel and Vardaman and Dewey Dell,” pa says, kind of hangdog and proud too, with his teeth and all, even if he wouldn’t look at us. “Meet Mrs. Bundren,” he says.
The End
