As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner Page A

was all right.
    It was ma that got Dewey Dell to do his milking, paid her somehow, and the other jobs around the house that Jewel had been doing before supper she found some way for Dewey Dell and Vardaman to do them. And doing them herself when pa wasn’t there. She would fix him special things to eat and hide them for him. And that may have been when I first found it out, that Addie Bundren should be hiding anything she did, who had tried to teach us that deceit was such that, in a world where it was, nothing else could be very bad or very important, not even poverty. And at times when I went in to go to bed she would be sitting in the dark by Jewel where he was asleep. And I knew that she was hating herselffor that deceit and hating Jewel because she had to love him so that she had to act the deceit.
    One night she was taken sick and when I went to the barn to put the team in and drive to Tull’s, I couldn’t find the lantern. I remembered noticing it on the nail the night before, but it wasn’t there now at midnight. So I hitched in the dark and went on and came back with Mrs Tull just after daylight. And there the lantern was, hanging on the nail where I remembered it and couldn’t find it before. And then one morning while Dewey Dell was milking just before sunup, Jewel came into the barn from the back, through the hole in the back wall, with the lantern in his hand.
    I told Cash, and Cash and I looked at one another.
    “Rutting,” Cash said.
    “Yes,” I said. “But why the lantern? And every night, too. No wonder he’s losing flesh. Are you going to say anything to him?”
    “Wont do any good,” Cash said.
    “What he’s doing now wont do any good, either.”
    “I know. But he’ll have to learn that himself. Give him time to realise that it’ll save, that there’ll be just as much more tomorrow, and he’ll be all right. I wouldn’t tell anybody, I reckon.”
    “No,” I said. “I told Dewey Dell not to. Not ma, anyway.”
    “No. Not ma.”
    After that I thought it was right comical: he acting so bewildered and willing and dead for sleep and gaunt as a bean-pole, and thinking he was so smart with it. And Iwondered who the girl was. I thought of all I knew that it might be, but I couldn’t say for sure.
    “ ’Taint any girl,” Cash said. “It’s a married woman somewhere. Aint any young girl got that much daring and staying power. That’s what I dont like about it.”
    “Why?” I said. “She’ll be safer for him than a girl would. More judgment.”
    He looked at me, his eyes fumbling, the words fumbling at what he was trying to say. “It aint always the safe things in this world that a fellow.……”
    “You mean, the safe things are not always the best things?”
    “Ay; best,” he said, fumbling again. “It aint the best things, the things that are good for him.…… A young boy. A fellow kind of hates to see.……wallowing in somebody else’s mire.……” That’s what he was trying to say. When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.
    So we didn’t tell, not even when after a while he’d appear suddenly in the field beside us and go to work, without having had time to get home and make out he had been in bed all night. He would tell ma that he hadn’t been hungry at breakfast or that he had eaten a piece of bread while he was hitching up the team. But Cash and I knew that he hadn’t been home at all on those nights and he had come up out of the woods when we got to the field. But we didn’t tell.Summer was almost over then; we knew that when the nights began to get cool, she would be done if he wasn’t.
    But when fall came and the nights began to get longer, the only