As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying

By William Faulkner.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Dedication
4. As I Lay Dying
   1. Darl
   2. Cora
   3. Darl
   4. Jewel
   5. Darl
   6. Cora
   7. Dewey Dell
   8. Tull
   9. Anse
   10. Darl
   11. Peabody
   12. Darl
   13. Vardaman
   14. Dewey Dell
   15. Vardaman
   16. Tull
   17. Darl
   18. Cash
   19. Vardaman
   20. Tull
   21. Darl
   22. Cash
   23. Darl
   24. Vardaman
   25. Darl
   26. Anse
   27. Darl
   28. Anse
   29. Samson
   30. Dewey Dell
   31. Tull
   32. Darl
   33. Tull
   34. Darl
   35. Vardaman
   36. Tull
   37. Darl
   38. Cash
   39. Cora
   40. Addie
   41. Whitfield
   42. Darl
   43. Armstid
   44. Vardaman
   45. Moseley
   46. Darl
   47. Vardaman
   48. Darl
   49. Vardaman
   50. Darl
   51. Vardaman
   52. Darl
   53. Cash
   54. Peabody
   55. Macgowan
   56. Vardaman
   57. Darl
   58. Dewey Dell
   59. Cash
5. Colophon
6. Uncopyright

Imprint

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To
Hal Smith

As I Lay Dying

Darl

Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cotton-house can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.

The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laid-by cotton, to the cotton-house in the centre of the field, where it turns and circles the cotton-house at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision.

The cotton-house is of rough logs, from between which the chinking has long fallen. Square, with a broken roof set at a single pitch, it leans in empty and shimmering dilapidation in the sunlight, a single broad window in two opposite walls giving on to the approaches of the path. When we reach it I turn and follow the path which circles the house. Jewel, fifteen feet behind me, looking straight ahead, steps in a single stride through the window. Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar-store Indian dressed in patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down, and steps in a single stride through the opposite window and into the path again just as I come around the corner. In single file and five feet apart and Jewel now in front, we go on up the path toward the foot of the bluff.

Tull’s wagon stands beside the spring, hitched to the rail, the reins wrapped about the seat stanchion. In the wagon-bed are two chairs. Jewel stops at the spring and takes the gourd from the willow branch and drinks. I pass him and mount the path, beginning to hear Cash’s saw.

When I reach the top he has quit sawing. Standing in a litter of chips, he is fitting two of the boards together. Between the shadow spaces they are yellow as gold, like soft gold, bearing on their flanks in smooth undulations the marks of the adze blade: a good carpenter, Cash is. He holds the two planks on the trestle, fitted along the edges in a quarter of the finished box. He kneels and squints along the edge of them, then he lowers them and takes up the adze. A good carpenter. Addie Bundren could not want a better one, a better box to lie in. It will give her confidence and comfort. I go on to the house, followed by the

Chuck Chuck Chuck

of the adze.

Cora

So I saved out the eggs and baked yesterday. The cakes turned out right well. We depend a lot on our chickens. They are good layers, what few we have left after the possums and such. Snakes, too, in the summer. A snake will break up a henhouse quicker than anything. So after they were going to cost so much more than Mr. Tull thought, and after I promised that the difference in the number of eggs would make it up, I had to be more careful than ever because it was on my final say-so we took them. We could have stocked cheaper chickens, but I gave my promise as Miss Lawington said when she advised me to get a good breed, because Mr. Tull himself admits that a good breed of cows or hogs pays in the long run. So when we lost so many of them we couldn’t afford to use the eggs ourselves, because I could not have had Mr. Tull chide me when it was on my say-so we took them. So when Miss Lawington told me about the cakes I thought that I could bake them and earn enough at one time to increase the net value of the flock the equivalent of two head. And that by saving the eggs out one at a time, even the eggs wouldn’t be costing anything. And that week they laid so well that I not only saved out enough eggs above what