She'll want it so.
She was ever a particular woman.
On the third day they got back and they loaded her into the wagon and started and it already too late.
You'll have to go all the way round by Samson's bridge.
It'll take you a day to get there.
Then you'll be forty miles from Jefferson.
Take my team, Anse.
We'll wait for ourn.
She'll want it so.
It was about a mile from the house we saw him, sitting on the edge of the slough.
It hadn't had a fish in it never that I knowed.
He looked around at us, his eyes round and calm, his face dirty, the pole across his knees.
Cora was still singing.
"This aint no good day to fish," I said,
"You come on home with us and me and you'll go down to the river first thing in the morning and catch some fish."
"It's one in here,' he said.
"Dewey Dell seen it."
"You come on with us.
The river's the best place."
“It's in here," he said.
"Dewey Dell seen it."
“I'm bounding toward my God and my reward," Cora sung.
Darl.
It's not your horse that's dead, Jewel," I say.
He sits erect on the seat, leaning a little forward, wooden-backed.
The brim of his hat has soaked free of the crown in two places, drooping across his wooden face so that, head lowered, he looks through it like through the visor of a helmet, looking long across the valley to where the barn leans against the bluff, shaping the invisible horse.
"See them?" I say.
High above the house, against the quick thick sky, they hang in narrowing circles.
From here they are no more than specks, implacable, patient, portentous.
"But it's not your horse that's dead."
"Goddamn you," he says.
"Goddamn you."
I cannot love my mother because I have no mother.
Jewel's mother is a horse.
Motionless, the tall buzzards hang in soaring circles, the clouds giving them an illusion of retrograde.
Motionless, wooden-backed, wooden-faced, he shapes the horse in a rigid stoop like a hawk, hook-winged.
They are waiting for us, ready for the moving of it, waiting for him.
He enters the stall and waits until it kicks at him so that he can slip past and mount onto the trough and pause, peering out across the intervening stall-tops toward the empty path, before he reaches into the loft.
"Goddamn him.
Goddamn him."
Cash.
It wont balance.
If you want it to tote and ride on a balance, we will have—"
"Pick up.
Goddamn you, pick up."
"I'm telling you it wont tote and it wont ride on a balance unless—"
"Pick up!
Pick up!, goddamn your thick-nosed soul to hell, pick up!”
It wont balance.
If they want it to tote and ride on a balance, they will have.