As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

say nothing. He sets humped up, mumbling his mouth. “If it was just up, we could drive across it,” he says.
    “Come on,” Jewel says, moving the horse.
    “Wait,” Cash says. He looks at the bridge. We look at him, except Anse and the gal. They are looking at the water. “Dewey Dell and Vardaman and pa better walk across on the bridge,” Cash says.
    “Vernon can help them,” Jewel says. “And we can hitch his mule ahead of ourn.”
    “You aint going to take my mule into that water,” I say.
    Jewel looks at me. His eyes look like pieces of a broken plate. “I’ll pay for your damn mule. I’ll buy it from you right now.”
    “My mule aint going into that water,” I say.
    “Jewel’s going to use his horse,” Darl says. “Why wont you risk your mule, Vernon?”
    “Shut up, Darl,” Cash says. “You and Jewel both.”
    “My mule aint going into that water,” I say.

DARL

    He sits the horse, glaring at Vernon, his lean face suffused up to and beyond the pale rigidity of his eyes. The summer when he was fifteen, he took a spell of sleeping. One morning when I went to feed the mules the cows were still in the tie-up and then I heard pa go back to the house and call him. When we came on back to the house for breakfast he passed us, carrying the milk buckets, stumbling along like he was drunk, and he was milking when we put the mules in and went on to the field without him. We had been there an hour and still he never showed up. When Dewey Dell came with our lunch,pa sent her back to find Jewel. They found him in the tie-up, sitting on the stool, asleep.
    After that, every morning pa would go in and wake him. He would go to sleep at the supper table and soon as supper was finished he would go to bed, and when I came in to bed he would be lying there like a dead man. Yet still pa would have to wake him in the morning. He would get up, but he wouldn’t hardly have half sense: he would stand for pa’s jawing and complaining without a word and take the milk buckets and go to the barn, and once I found him asleep at the cow, the bucket in place and half full and his hands up to the wrists in the milk and his head against the cow’s flank.
    After that Dewey Dell had to do the milking. He still got up when pa waked him, going about what we told him to do in that dazed way. It was like he was trying hard to do them; that he was as puzzled as anyone else.
    “Are you sick?” ma said. “Dont you feel all right?”
    “Yes,” Jewel said. “I feel all right.”
    “He’s just lazy, trying me,” pa said, and Jewel standing there, asleep on his feet like as not. “Aint you?” he said, waking Jewel up again to answer.
    “No,” Jewel said.
    “You take off and stay in the house today,” ma said.
    “With that whole bottompiece to be busted out?” pa said. “If you aint sick, what’s the matter with you?”
    “Nothing,” Jewel said. “I’m all right.”
    “All right?” pa said. “You’re asleep on your feet this minute.”
    “No,” Jewel said. “I’m all right.”
    “I want him to stay at home today,” ma said.
    “I’ll need him,” pa said. “It’s tight enough, with all of us to do it.”
    “You’ll just have to do the best you can with Cash and Darl,” ma said. “I want him to stay in today.”
    But he wouldn’t do it. “I’m all right,” he said, going on. But he wasn’t all right. Anybody could see it. He was losing flesh, and I have seen him go to sleep chopping; watched the hoe going slower and slower up and down, with less and less of an arc, until it stopped and he leaning on it motionless in the hot shimmer of the sun.
    Ma wanted to get the doctor, but pa didn’t want to spend the money without it was needful, and Jewel did seem all right except for his thinness and his way of dropping off to sleep at any moment. He ate hearty enough, except for his way of going to sleep in his plate, with a piece of bread half way to his mouth and his jaws still chewing. But he swore he