He stops in the middle of the floor, the saw against his leg, his sweating arms powdered lightly with sawdust, his face composed.
"If you get in a tight, maybe some of themll get here tomorrow and help you," pa says.
"Vernon could."
Cash is not listening.
He is looking down at her peaceful, rigid face fading into the dusk as though darkness were a precursor of the ultimate earth, until at last the face seems to float detached upon it, lightly as the reflection of a dead leaf.
"There is Christians enough to help you," pa says.
Cash is not listening.
After a while he turns without looking at pa and leaves the room.
Then the saw begins to snore again.
"They will help us in our sorrow," pa says.
The sound of the saw is steady, competent, unhurried, stirring the dying light so that at each stroke her face seems to wake a little into an expression of listening and of waiting, as though she were counting the strokes.
Pa looks down at the face, at the black sprawl of Dewey Dell's hair, the outflung arms, the clutched fan now motionless on the fading quilt.
"I reckon you better get supper on," he says.
Dewey Dell does not move.
"Git up, now, and put supper on," pa says.
"We got to keep our strength up.
I reckon Doctor Pea-body's right hungry, coming all this way.
And Cash'll need to eat quick and get back to work so he can finish it in time."
Dewey Dell rises, heaving to her feet. She looks down at the face.
It is like a casting of fading bronze upon the pillow, the hands alone still with any semblance of life: a curled, gnarled ineptness; a spent yet alert quality from which weariness, exhaustion, travail has not yet departed, as though they doubted even yet the actuality of rest, guarding with horned and penurious alertness the cessation which they know cannot last.
Dewey Dell stoops and slides the quilt from beneath them and draws it up over them to the chin, smoothing it down, drawing it smooth.
Then without looking at pa she goes around the bed and leaves the room.
She will go out where Peabody is, where she can stand in the twilight and look at his back with such an expression that, feeling her eyes and turning, he will say: I would not let it grieve me, now.
She was old, and sick too.
Suffering more than we knew.
She couldn't have got well.
Vardaman's getting big now, and with you to take good care of them all.
I would try not to let it grieve me.
I expect you'd better go and get some supper ready.
It dont have to be much.
But they'll need to eat, and she looking at him, saying You could do so much for me if you just would.
If you just knew.
I am I and you are you and I know it and you dont know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me and Darl
Pa stands over the bed, dangle-armed, humped, motionless.
He raises his hand to his head, scouring his hair, listening to the saw.
He comes nearer and rubs his hand, palm and back, on his thigh and lays it on her face and then on the hump of quilt where her hands are.
He touches the quilt as he saw Dewey Dell do, trying to smoothe it up to the chin, but disarranging it instead.
He tries to smoothe it again, clumsily, his hand awkward as a claw, smoothing at the wrinkles which he made and which continue to emerge beneath his hand with perverse ubiquity, so that at last he desists, his hand falling to his side and stroking itself again, palm and back, on his thigh.
The sound of the saw snores steadily into the room.
Pa breathes with a quiet, rasping sound, mouthing the snuff against his gums.
"God's will be done," he says.
"Now I can get them teeth."
Jewel's hat droops limp about his neck, channelling water onto the soaked towsack tied about his shoulders as, ankle-deep in the running ditch, he pries with a slipping two-by-four, with a piece of rotting log for fulcrum, at the axle.
Jewel, I say, she is dead, Jewel.
Addie Bundren is dead.
Vardaman
Then I begin to run.
I run toward the back and come to the edge of the porch and stop.
Then I begin to cry.
I can feel where the fish was in the dust.