As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Tull’s lane.”
    “He would have rid that horse, too,” pa says, “if I hadn’t a stopped him. A durn spotted critter wilder than a cattymount. A deliberate flouting of her and of me.”
    The wagon moves; the mules’ ears begin to bob. Behind us, above the house, motionless in tall and soaring circles, they diminish and disappear.

ANSE

    I told him not to bring that horse out of respect for his dead ma, because it wouldn’t look right, him prancing along on a durn circus animal and her wanting us all to be in the wagon with her that sprung from her flesh and blood, but we hadn’t no more than passed Tull’s lane when Darl begun to laugh. Setting back there on the plank seat with Cash, with his dead ma laying in her coffin at his feet, laughing. How many times I told him it’s doing such things as that that makes folks talk about him, I dont know. I says I got some regard for what folks says about my flesh and blood even if youhaven’t, even if I have raised such a durn passel of boys, and when you fixes it so folks can say such about you, it’s a reflection on your ma, I says, not me: I am a man and I can stand it; it’s on your womenfolks, your ma and sister that you should care for, and I turned and looked back at him and him setting there, laughing.
    “I dont expect you to have no respect for me,” I says. “But with your own ma not cold in her coffin yet.”
    “Yonder,” Cash says, jerking his head toward the lane. The horse is still a right smart piece away, coming up at a good pace, but I dont have to be told who it is. I just looked back at Darl, setting there laughing.
    “I done my best,” I says. “I tried to do as she would wish it. The Lord will pardon me and excuse the conduct of them He sent me.” And Darl setting on the plank seat right above her where she was laying, laughing.

DARL

    He comes up the lane fast, yet we are three hundred yards beyond the mouth of it when he turns into the road, the mud flying beneath the flicking drive of the hooves. Then he slows a little, light and erect in the saddle, the horse mincing through the mud.
    Tull is in his lot. He looks at us, lifts his hand. We go on, the wagon creaking, the mud whispering on the wheels. Vernon still stands there. He watches Jewel as he passes, the horse moving with a light, high-kneed driving gait, three hundred yards back. We go on, with a motion so soporific,so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress, as though time and not space were decreasing between us and it.
    It turns off at right angles, the wheel-marks of last Sunday healed away now: a smooth, red scoriation curving away into the pines; a white signboard with faded lettering: New Hope Church. 3 mi. It wheels up like a motionless hand lifted above the profound desolation of the ocean; beyond it the red road lies like a spoke of which Addie Bundren is the rim. It wheels past, empty, unscarred, the white signboard turns away its fading and tranquil assertion. Cash looks up the road quietly, his head turning as we pass it like an owl’s head, his face composed. Pa looks straight ahead, humped. Dewey Dell looks at the road too, then she looks back at me, her eyes watchful and repudiant, not like that question which was in those of Cash, for a smoldering while. The signboard passes; the unscarred road wheels on. Then Dewey Dell turns her head. The wagon creaks on.
    Cash spits over the wheel. “In a couple of days now it’ll be smelling,” he says.
    “You might tell Jewel that,” I say.
    He is motionless now, sitting the horse at the junction, upright, watching us, no less still than the signboard that lifts its fading capitulation opposite him.
    “It aint balanced right for no long ride,” Cash says.
    “Tell him that, too,” I say. The wagon creaks on.
    A mile further along he passes us, the horse, archnecked, reined back to a swift singlefoot. He sits lightly, poised, upright, wooden-faced in the saddle, the broken hat raked at a swaggering angle. He passes