Vernon has not stopped.
He looks up, still sawing.
"You ought to done that at first," he says.
"You knowed it was fixing to rain."
"It's his fever," Cash says.
He looks at the board.
"Ay," Vernon says.
"He'd a come, anyway."
Cash squints at the board.
On the long flank of it the rain crashes steadily, myriad, fluctuant.
"I'm going to bevel it," he says.
“It'll take more time," Vernon says.
Cash sets the plank on edge; a moment longer Vernon watches him, then he hands him the plane.
Vernon holds the board steady while Cash, bevels the edge of it with the tedious and minute care of a jeweler.
Mrs Tull comes to the edge of the porch and calls Vernon.
"How near are you done?" she says.
Vernon does not look up.
"Not long.
Some, yet."
She watches Cash stooping at the plank, the turgid savage gleam of the lantern slicking on the raincoat AS he moves.
"You go down and get some planks off the barn and finish it and come in out of the rain," she says.
"You'll both catch your death."
Vernon does not move.
"Vernon," she says.
"We wont be long," he says.
"We’ll be done after a spell."
Mrs Tull watches them a while.
Then she reenters the house.
"If we get in a tight, we could take some of them planks," Vernon says.
"I'll help you put them back."
Cash ceases the plane and squints along the plank, wiping it with his palm.
"Give me the next one," he says.
Some time toward dawn the rain ceases.
But it is not yet day when Cash drives the last nail and stands stiffly up and looks down at the finished coffin, the others watching him.
In the lantern light his face is calm, musing; slowly he strokes his hands on his rain-coated thighs in a gesture deliberate, final and composed.
Then the four of them—Cash and pa and Vernon and Peabody—raise the coffin to their shoulders and turn toward the house.
It is light, yet they move slowly; empty, yet they carry it carefully; lifeless, yet they move with hushed precautionary words to one another, speaking of it as though, complete, it now slumbered lightly alive, waiting to come awake.
On the dark floor their feet clump awkwardly, as though for a long time they have not walked on floors.
They set it down by the bed.
Peabody says quietly:
“Let's eat a snack.
It's almost daylight.
Where's Cash?"
He has returned to the trestles, stooped again in the lantern's feeble glare as he gathers up his tools and wipes them on a cloth carefully and puts them into the box with its leather sling to go over the shoulder.
Then he takes up box, lantern and raincoat and returns to the house, mounting the steps into faint silhouette against the paling east.
In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep.
And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you.
And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not.
And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.
I dont know what I am.