Fix it in here, Dilsey."
"En you's about sick too," Dilsey says. "You looks like a hant.
You git in bed and I'll fix you a toddy and see kin you sleep.
I bet you aint had a full night's sleep since you lef."
"No," Mother says. "dont you know what the doctor says?
Why must you encourage him to drink?
That's what's the matter with him now.
Look at me, I suffer too, but I'm not so weak that I must kill myself with whiskey."
"Fiddlesticks," Father says. "What do doctors know?
They make their livings advising people to do whatever they are not doing at the time, which is the extent of anyone's knowledge of the degenerate ape.
You'll have a minister in to hold my hand next." Then Mother cried, and he went out.
Went down stairs, and then I heard the sideboard.
I woke up and heard him going down again.
Mother had gone to sleep or something, because the house was quiet at last.
He was trying to be quiet too, because I couldn't hear him, only the bottom of his nightshirt and his bare legs in front of the sideboard.
Dilsey fixed the cradle and undressed her and put her in it.
She never had waked up since he brought her in the house.
"She pretty near too big fer hit," Dilsey says. "Dar now.
I gwine spread me a pallet right across de hall, so you wont need to git up in de night."
"I wont sleep," Mother says. "You go on home.
I wont mind.
I'll be happy to give the rest of my life to her, if I can just prevent--"
"Hush, now," Dilsey says. "We gwine take keer of her.
En you go on to bed too," she says to me. "You got to go to school tomorrow."
So I went out, then Mother called me back and cried on me a while.
"You are my only hope," she says. "Every night I thank God for you."
While we were waiting there for them to start she says Thank God if he had to be taken too, it is you left me and not Quentin.
Thank God you are not a Compson, because all I have left now is you and Maury and I says, Well I could spare Uncle Maury myself.
Well, he kept on patting her hand with his black glove, talking away from her.
He took them off when his turn with the shovel came.
He got up near the first, where they were holding the umbrellas over them, stamping every now and then and trying to kick the mud off their feet and sticking to the shovels so they'd have to knock it off, making a hollow sound when it fell on it, and when I stepped back around the hack I could see him behind a tombstone, taking another one out of a bottle.
I thought he never was going to stop because I had on my new suit too, but it happened that there wasn't much mud on the wheels yet, only Mother saw it and says I dont know when you'll ever have another one and Uncle Maury says,
"Now, now.
Dont you worry at all.
You have me to depend on, always."
And we have.
Always.
The fourth letter was from him. But there wasn't any need to open it.
I could have written it myself, or recited it to her from memory, adding ten dollars just to be safe.
But I had a hunch about that other letter.
I just felt that it was about time she was up to some of her tricks again.
She got pretty wise after that first time.
She found out pretty quick that I was a different breed of cat from Father.
When they begun to get it filled up toward the top Mother started crying sure enough, so Uncle Maury got in with her and drove off.
He says You can come in with somebody; they'll be glad to give you a lift.
I'll have to take your mother on and I thought about saying, Yes you ought to brought two bottles instead of just one only I thought about where we were, so I let them go on.
Little they cared how wet I got, because then Mother could have a whale of a time being afraid I was taking pneumonia.
Well, I got to thinking about that and watching them throwing dirt into it, slapping it on anyway like they were making mortar or something or building a fence, and I began to feel sort of funny and so I decided to walk around a while.
I thought that if I went toward town they'd catch up and be trying to make me get in one of them, so I went on back toward the nigger graveyard.
I got under some cedars, where the rain didn't come much, only dripping now and then, where I could see when they got through and went away.