She hadn’t said a word, hadn’t even looked at him, but when them fellows told him what they wanted and that they had come to get him and he throwed back, she jumped on him like a wild cat so that one of the fellows had to quit and hold her and her scratching and clawing at him like a wild cat, while the other one and pa and Jewel throwed Darl down and held him lying on his back, looking up at me.
“I thought you would have told me,” he said. “I never thought you wouldn’t have.”
“Darl,” I said. But he fought again, him and Jewel and the fellow, and the other one holding Dewey Dell and Vardaman yelling and Jewel saying,
“Kill him. Kill the son of a bitch.”
It was bad so. It was bad. A fellow can’t get away from a shoddy job. He can’t do it. I tried to tell him, but he just said, “I thought you’d ’a’ told me. It’s not that I,” he said, then he began to laugh. The other fellow pulled Jewel off of him and he sat there on the ground, laughing.
I tried to tell him. If I could have just moved, even set up. But I tried to tell him and he quit laughing, looking up at me.
“Do you want me to go?” he said.
“It’ll be better for you,” I said. “Down there it’ll be quiet, with none of the bothering and such. It’ll be better for you, Darl,” I said.
“Better,” he said. He began to laugh again. “Better,” he said. He couldn’t hardly say it for laughing. He sat on the ground and us watching him, laughing and laughing. It was bad. It was bad so. I be durn if I could see anything to laugh at. Because there just ain’t nothing justifies the deliberate destruction of what a man has built with his own sweat and stored the fruit of his sweat into.
But I ain’t so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what ain’t. It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.
Peabody
I said, “I reckon a man in a tight might let Bill Varner patch him up like a damn mule, but I be damned if the man that’d let Anse Bundren treat him with raw cement ain’t got more spare legs than I have.”
“They just aimed to ease hit some,” he said.
“Aimed, hell,” I said. “What in hell did Armstid mean by even letting them put you on that wagon again?”
“Hit was gittin’ right noticeable,” he said. “We never had time to wait.” I just looked at him. “Hit never bothered me none,” he said.
“Don’t you lie there and try to tell me you rode six days on a wagon without springs, with a broken leg and it never bothered you.”
“I never bothered me much,” he said.
“You mean, it never bothered Anse much,” I said. “No more than it bothered him to throw that poor devil down in the public street and handcuff him like a damn murderer. Don’t tell me. And don’t tell me it ain’t going to bother you to lose sixty-odd square inches of skin to get that concrete off. And don’t tell me it ain’t going to bother you to have to limp around on one short leg for the balance of your life—if you walk at all again. Concrete,” I said. “God Amighty, why didn’t Anse carry you to the nearest sawmill and stick your leg in the saw? That would have cured it. Then you all could have stuck his head into the saw and cured a whole family. … Where is Anse, anyway? What’s he up to now?”
“He’s takin’ back them spades he borrowed,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said. “Of course he’d have to borrow a spade to bury his wife with. Unless he could borrow a hole in the ground. Too bad you all didn’t put him in it too. … Does that hurt?”
“Not to speak of,” he said, and the sweat big as marbles running down his face and his face about the colour of blotting-paper.
“ ’Course not,” I said. “About next summer you can hobble around fine on this leg. Then it won’t bother you, not to speak of … If you had anything you could call luck, you might say it was lucky this is the same leg you broke before,” I said.
“Hit’s what paw says,” he said.
Macgowan
It happened I am back of the prescription case, pouring up some chocolate sauce, when Jody comes back and says, “Say, Skeet, there’s a woman up front that wants to see the doctor and when I said What doctor you want to see, she said she want to see the doctor that works here and when I said There ain’t any doctor works here, she just stood there, looking back this way.”
“What kind of a woman is it?” I says. “Tell her to go upstairs to Alford’s office.”
“Country woman,” he says.
“Send her to the courthouse,” I says. “Tell her all the doctors have gone to Memphis to a Barbers’ Convention.”
“All right,” he says, going away. “She looks pretty good for a country girl,” he says.
“Wait,” I says. He waited and I went and peeped through the crack. But I
