As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner Page A

us swiftly, without looking at us, the horse driving, its hooves hissing in the mud. A goutof mud, backflung, plops onto the box. Cash leans forward and takes a tool from his box and removes it carefully. When the road crosses Whiteleaf, the willows leaning near enough, he breaks off a branch and scours at the stain with the wet leaves.

ANSE

    It’s a hard country on man; it’s hard. Eight miles of thesweat of his body washed up outen the Lord’s earth, where the Lord Himself told him to put it. Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hardworking man profit. It takes them that runs the stores in the towns, doing no sweating, living off of them that sweats. It aint the hardworking man, the farmer. Sometimes I wonder why we keep at it. It’s because there is a reward for us above, where they cant take their autos and such. Every man will be equal there and it will be taken from them that have and give to them that have not by the Lord.
    But it’s a long wait, seems like. It’s bad that a fellow must earn the reward of his right-doing by flouting hisself and his dead. We drove all the rest of the day and got to Samson’s at dust-dark and then that bridge was gone, too. They hadn’t never see the river so high, and it not done raining yet. There was old men that hadn’t never see nor hear of it being so in the memory of man. I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth,so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.
    But now I can get them teeth. That will be a comfort. It will.

SAMSON

    It was just before sundown. We were sitting on the porch when the wagon came up the road with the five of them in it and the other one on the horse behind. One of them raised his hand, but they was going on past the store without stopping.
    “Who’s that?” MacCallum says: I cant think of his name: Rafe’s twin; that one it was.
    “It’s Bundren, from down beyond New Hope,” Quick says. “There’s one of them Snopes horses Jewel’s riding.”
    “I didn’t know there was ere a one of them horses left,” MacCallum says. “I thought you folks down there finally contrived to give them all away.”
    “Try and get that one,” Quick says. The wagon went on.
    “I bet old man Lon never gave it to him,” I says.
    “No,” Quick says. “He bought it from pappy.” The wagon went on. “They must not a heard about the bridge,” he says.
    “What’re they doing up here, anyway?” MacCallum says.
    “Taking a holiday since he got his wife buried, I reckon,” Quick says. “Heading for town, I reckon, with Tull’s bridge gone too. I wonder if they aint heard about the bridge.”
    “They’ll have to fly, then,” I says. “I dont reckon there’s ere a bridge between here and Mouth of Ishatawa.”
    They had something in the wagon. But Quick had been to the funeral three days ago and we naturally never thought anything about it except that they were heading away from home mighty late and that they hadn’t heard about the bridge. “You better holler at them,” MacCallum says. Durn it, the name is right on the tip of my tongue. So Quick hollered and they stopped and he went to the wagon and told them.
    He come back with them. “They’re going to Jefferson,” he says. “The bridge at Tull’s is gone, too.” Like we didn’t know it, and his face looked funny, around the nostrils, but they just sat there, Bundren and the girl and the chap on the seat, and Cash and the second one, the one folks talks about, on a plank across the tail-gate, and the other one on thatspotted horse. But I reckon they was used to it by then, because when I said to Cash that they’d have to pass by New Hope again and what they’d better do, he just says,
    “I reckon we can get there.”
    I aint much for meddling. Let every man run his own business to suit himself, I say. But after I talked to Rachel about them not having a regular man to fix her and it being July and all, I went back down