I jerk my hand, cursing her like Jewel does.
"Git, now."
I stoop my hand to the ground and run at her.
She jumps back and whirls away and stops, watching me.
She moans.
She goes on. to the path and stands there, looking up the path.
It is dark in the barn, warm, smelling, silent.
I can cry quietly, watching the top of the hill.
Cash comes to the hill, limping where he fell off of the church.
He looks down at the spring, then up the road and back toward the barn.
He comes down the path stiffly and looks at the broken hitch-rein and at the dust in the road and then up the road, where the dust is gone.
"I hope they've got clean past Tull's by now.
I so hope hit."
Cash turns and limps up the path.
"Durn him.
I showed him.
Durn him."
I am not crying now.
I am not anything.
Dewey Dell comes to the hill and calls me.
Vardaman.
I am not anything.
I am quiet.
You, Vardaman.
I can cry quiet now, feeling and hearing my tears.
"Then hit want.
Hit hadn't happened then.
Hit was a-layin right there on the ground.
And now she's git-tin ready to cook hit."
It is dark.
I can hear wood, silence: I know them.
But not living sounds, not even him.
It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components—snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a co-ordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is.
I see him dissolve—legs, a rolling eye, a gaudy splotching like cold flames and float upon the dark in fading solution; all one yet neither; all either yet none.
I can see hearing coil toward him, caressing, shaping his hard shape—fetlock, hip, shoulder and head; smell and sound.
I am not afraid.
"Cooked and et.
Cooked and et."
Dewey Dell.
He could do so much for me if he just would. He could do everything for me.
It's like everything in the world for me is inside a tub full of guts, so that you wonder how there can be any room in it for anything else very important.
He is a big tub of guts and I am a little tub of guts and if there is not any room for , anything else important in a big tub of guts, how can it be room in a little tub of guts.
But I know it is there because God gave women a sign when something has happened bad.
It's because I am alone.
If I could just feel it, it would be different, because I would not be alone.
But if I were not alone, everybody would know it.
And he could do so much for me, and then I would not be alone.
Then I could be all right alone.
I would let him come in between me and Lafe, like Darl came in between me and Lafe, and so Lafe is alone too.
He is Lafe and I am Dewey Dell, and when mother died I had to go beyond and outside of me and Lafe and Darl to grieve because he could do so much for me and he dont know it.