“Didn’t none of you have more sense than that?” Mr. Gillespie said. “I’d ’a’ thought he would, anyway.”
Jewel was lying on his face. His back was red. Dewey Dell put the medicine on it. The medicine was made out of butter and soot, to draw out the fire. Then his back was black.
“Does it hurt, Jewel?” I said. “Your back looks like a nigger’s, Jewel,” I said. Cash’s foot and leg looked like a nigger’s. Then they broke it off. Cash’s leg bled.
“You go on back and lay down,” Dewey Dell said. “You ought to be asleep.”
“Where is Darl?” they said.
He is out there under the apple tree with her, lying on her. He is there so the cat won’t come back. I said, “Are you going to keep the cat away, Darl?”
The moonlight dappled on him too. On her it was still, but on Darl it dappled up and down.
“You needn’t to cry,” I said. “Jewel got her out. You needn’t to cry, Darl.”
The barn is still red. It used to be redder than this. Then it went swirling, making the stars run backward without falling. It hurt my heart like the train did.
When I went to find where they stay at night, I saw something that Dewey Dell says I mustn’t never tell nobody.
Darl
We have been passing the signs for some time now: the drugstores, the clothing stores, the patent medicine and the garages and cafés, and the mile-boards diminishing, becoming more starkly re-accruent: 3 mi. 2 mi. From the crest of a hill, as we get into the wagon again, we can see the smoke low and flat, seemingly unmoving in the unwinded afternoon.
“Is that it, Darl?” Vardaman says. “Is that Jefferson?” He too has lost flesh; like ours, his face has an expression strained, dreamy, and gaunt.
“Yes,” I say. He lifts his head and looks at the sky. High against it they hang in narrowing circles, like the smoke, with an outward semblance of form and purpose, but with no inference of motion, progress or retrograde. We mount the wagon again where Cash lies on the box, the jagged shards of cement cracked about his leg. The shabby mules droop rattling and clanking down the hill.
“We’ll have to take him to the doctor,” pa says. “I reckon it ain’t no way around it.” The back of Jewel’s shirt, where it touches him, stains slow and black with grease. Life was created in the valleys. It blew up on to the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That’s why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.
Dewey Dell sits on the seat, the newspaper package on her lap. When we reach the foot of the hill where the road flattens between close walls of trees, she begins to look about quietly from one side of the road to the other. At last she says,
“I got to stop.”
Pa looks at her, his shabby profile that of anticipant and disgruntled annoyance. He does not check the team. “What for?”
“I got to go to the bushes,” Dewey Dell says.
Pa does not check the team. “Can’t you wait till we get to town? It ain’t over a mile now.”
“Stop,” Dewey Dell says. “I got to go to the bushes.”
Pa stops in the middle of the road and we watch Dewey Dell descend, carrying the package. She does not look back.
“Why not leave your cakes here?” I say. “We’ll watch them.”
She descends steadily, not looking at us.
“How would she know where to go to if she waited till we get to town?” Vardaman says. “Where would you go to do it in town, Dewey Dell?”
She lifts the package down and turns and disappears among the trees and undergrowth.
“Don’t be no longer than you can help,” pa says. “We ain’t got no time to waste.” She does not answer. After a while we cannot hear her even. “We ought to done like Armstid and Gillespie said and sent word to town and had it dug and ready,” he said.
“Why didn’t you?” I say. “You could have telephoned.”
“What for?” Jewel says. “Who the hell can’t dig a hole in the ground?”
A car comes over the hill. It begins to sound the horn, slowing. It runs along the roadside in low gear, the outside wheels in the ditch, and passes us and goes on. Vardaman watches it until it is out of sight.
“How far is it now, Darl?” he says.
“Not far,” I say.
“We ought to done it,” pa says. “I just never wanted to be beholden to none except her flesh and blood.”
“Who the hell can’t dig a damn hole in the ground?” Jewel says.
“It ain’t respectful, talking that way about her grave,” pa says. “You all don’t know what it is. You never pure loved her, none of you.” Jewel does not answer. He sits a little stiffly erect, his body arched away from his shirt. His high-coloured jaw juts.
Dewey Dell returns. We watch her emerge from the bushes, carrying the package, and climb into the wagon. She now wears her Sunday dress, her beads, her shoes and stockings.
“I thought I told you to leave them clothes to home,” pa says. She does not answer, does not look at us. She sits the package in the wagon and gets in. The wagon moves on.
“How many more hills now, Darl?” Vardaman says.
“Just one,” I say. “The next one goes right up into town.”
This hill is red sand, bordered on either hand by negro cabins; against the sky ahead the massed telephone lines run, and the clock on the courthouse lifts among the trees. In the sand the wheels whisper, as though the very earth would hush our entry. We descend as the hill commences to rise.
We follow the wagon, the whispering wheels, passing the cabins where faces come suddenly to the doors, white-eyed. We hear sudden voices, ejaculant. Jewel has been looking from side to side; now his head turns forward
