He went to Jackson. He went crazy and went to Jackson both. Lots of people didn’t go crazy. Pa and Cash and Jewel and Dewey Dell and me didn’t go crazy. We never did go crazy. We didn’t go to Jackson either. Darl
I hear the cow a long time, clopping on the street. Then she comes into the square. She goes across the square, her head down clopping . She lows. There was nothing in the square before she lowed, but it wasn’t empty. Now it is empty after she lowed. She goes on, clopping . She lows. My brother is Darl. He went to Jackson on the train. He didn’t go on the train to go crazy. He went crazy in our wagon. Darl She had been in there a long time. And the cow is gone too. A long time. She has been in there longer than the cow was. But not as long as empty. Darl is my brother. My brother Darl
Dewey Dell comes out. She looks at me.
“Let’s go around that way now,” I say.
She looks at me. “It ain’t going to work,” she says. “That son of a bitch.”
“What ain’t going to work, Dewey Dell?”
“I just know it won’t,” she says. She is not looking at anything. “I just know it.”
“Let’s go that way,” I say.
“We got to go back to the hotel. It’s late. We got to slip back in.”
“Can’t we go by and see, anyway?”
“Hadn’t you rather have bananas? Hadn’t you rather?”
“All right.” My brother he went crazy and he went to Jackson too. Jackson is further away than crazy
“It won’t work,” Dewey Dell says. “I just know it won’t.”
“What won’t work?” I say. He had to get on the train to go to Jackson. I have not been on the train, but Darl has been on the train. Darl. Darl is my brother. Darl. Darl
Darl
Darl has gone to Jackson. They put him on the train, laughing, down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of owls when he passed. “What are you laughing at?” I said.
“Yes yes yes yes yes.”
Two men put him on the train. They wore mismatched coats, bulging behind over their right hip pockets. Their necks were shaved to a hairline, as though the recent and simultaneous barbers had had a chalk-line like Cash’s. “Is it the pistols you’re laughing at?” I said. “Why do you laugh?” I said. “Is it because you hate the sound of laughing?”
They pulled two seats together so Darl could sit by the window to laugh. One of them sat beside him, the other sat on the seat facing him, riding backward. One of them had to ride backward because the state’s money had a face to each backside and a backside to each face, and they are riding on the state’s money which is incest. A nickel has a woman on one side and a buffalo on the other; two faces and no back. I don’t know what that is. Darl had a little spyglass he got in France at the war. In it it had a woman and a pig with two backs and no face. I know what that is. “Is that why you are laughing, Darl?”
“Yes yes yes yes yes yes.”
The wagon stands on the square, hitched, the mules motionless, the reins wrapped about the seat-spring, the back of the wagon toward the courthouse. It looks no different from a hundred other wagons there; Jewel standing beside it and looking up the street like any other man in town that day, yet there is something different, distinctive. There is about it that unmistakable air of definite and imminent departure that trains have, perhaps due to the fact that Dewey Dell and Vardaman on the seat and Cash on a pallet in the wagon-bed are eating bananas from a paper bag. “Is that why you are laughing, Darl?”
Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying light in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.
“Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.”
Dewey Dell
When he saw the money I said, “It’s not my money, it doesn’t belong to me.”
“Whose is it, then?”
“It’s Cora Tull’s money. It’s Mrs. Tull’s. I sold the cakes for it.”
“Ten dollars for two cakes?”
“Don’t you touch it. It’s not mine.”
“You never had them cakes. It’s a lie. It was them Sunday clothes you had in that package.”
“Don’t you touch it! If you take it you are a thief.”
“My own daughter accuses me of being a thief. My own daughter.”
“Pa. Pa.”
“I have fed you and sheltered you. I give you love and care, yet my own daughter, the daughter of my dead wife, calls me a thief over her mother’s grave.”
“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
