As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner Page B

to the barn and tried to talk to Bundren about it.
    “I give her my promise,” he says. “Her mind was set on it.”
    I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping. And like he would be kind of proud of whatever come up to make the moving or the setting still look hard. He set there on the wagon, hunched up, blinking, listening to us tell about how quick the bridge went and how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn’t act like he was proud of it, like he had made the river rise himself.
    “You say it’s higher than you ever see it before?” he says. “God’s will be done,” he says. “I reckon it wont go down much by morning, neither,” he says.
    “You better stay here tonight,” I says, “and get a early start for New Hope tomorrow morning.” I was just sorry for them bone-gaunted mules. I told Rachel, I says, “Well, would you have had me turn them away at dark, eight miles from home? What else could I do,” I says. “It wont be but one night, and they’ll keep it in the barn, and they’ll sholyget started by daylight.” And so I says, “You stay here tonight and early tomorrow you can go back to New Hope. I got tools enough, and the boys can go on right after supper and have it dug and ready if they want” and then I found that girl watching me. If her eyes had a been pistols, I wouldn’t be talking now. I be dog if they didn’t blaze at me. And so when I went down to the barn I come on them, her talking so she never noticed when I come up.
    “You promised her,” she says. “She wouldn’t go until you promised. She thought she could depend on you. If you dont do it, it will be a curse on you.”
    “Cant no man say I dont aim to keep my word,” Bundren says. “My heart is open to ere a man.”
    “I dont care what your heart is,” she says. She was whispering, kind of, talking fast. “You promised her. You’ve got to. You——” then she seen me and quit, standing there. If they’d been pistols, I wouldn’t be talking now. So when I talked to him about it, he says,
    “I give her my promise. Her mind is set on it.”
    “But seems to me she’d rather have her ma buried close by, so she could——”
    “It’s Addie I give the promise to,” he says. “Her mind is set on it.”
    So I told them to drive it into the barn, because it was threatening rain again, and that supper was about ready. Only they didn’t want to come in.
    “I thank you,” Bundren says. “We wouldn’t discommode you. We got a little something in the basket. We can make out.”
    “Well,” I says, “since you are so particular about yourwomenfolks, I am too. And when folks stops with us at meal time and wont come to the table, my wife takes it as a insult.”
    So the girl went on to the kitchen to help Rachel. And then Jewel come to me.
    “Sho,” I says. “Help yourself outen the loft. Feed him when you bait the mules.”
    “I rather pay you for him,” he says.
    “What for?” I says. “I wouldn’t begrudge no man a bait for his horse.”
    “I rather pay you,” he says; I thought he said extra.
    “Extra for what?” I says. “Wont he eat hay and corn?”
    “Extra feed,” he says. “I feed him a little extra and I dont want him beholden to no man.”
    “You cant buy no feed from me, boy,” I says. “And if he can eat that loft clean, I’ll help you load the barn onto the wagon in the morning.”
    “He aint never been beholden to no man,” he says. “I rather pay you for it.”
    And if I had my rathers, you wouldn’t be here a-tall, I wanted to say. But I just says, “Then it’s high time he commenced. You cant buy no feed from me.”
    When Rachel put supper on, her and the girl went and fixed some beds. But wouldn’t any of them come in. “She’s been dead long enough to get over that sort of