We can make out."
"We wouldn't be beholden," Bundren says.
"I thank you kindly."
So I left them squatting there.
I reckon after four days they was used to it.
But Rachel wasn't.
"It's a outrage," she says.
"A outrage."
"What could he a done?" I says.
"He give her his promised word."
"Who's talking about him?" she says.
"Who cares about him?" she says, crying.
"I just wish that you and him and all the men in the world that torture us alive and flout us dead, dragging us up and down the country—"
"Now, now," I says.
"You're upset."
"Dont you touch me!" she says.
"Dont you touch me!"
A man cant tell nothing about them.
I lived with the same one fifteen years and I be durn if I can.
And I imagined a lot of things coming up between us, but I be durn if I ever thought it would be a body four days dead and that a woman.
But they make life hard on them, not taking it as it comes up, like a man does.
So I laid there, hearing it commence to rain, thinking about them down there, squatting around the wagon and the rain on the roof, and thinking about Rachel crying there until after a while it was like I could still hear her crying even after she was asleep, and smelling it even when I knowed I couldn't.
I couldn't decide even then whether I could or not, or if it wasn't just knowing it was what it was.
So next morning I never went down there.
I heard them hitching up and then when I knowed they must be about ready to take out, I went out the front and went down the road toward the bridge until I heard the wagon come out of the lot and go back toward New Hope.
And then when I come back to the house, Rachel jumped on me because I wasn't there to make them come in to breakfast.
You cant tell about them.
Just about when you decide they mean one tiling, I be durn if you not only haven't got to change your mind, like as not you got to take a rawhiding for thinking they meant it.
But it was still like I could smell it.
And so I decided then that it wasn't smelling it, but it was just knowing it was there, like you will get fooled now and then.
But when I went to the barn I knew different When I walked into the hallway I saw something.
It kind of hunkered up when I come in and I thought at first it was one of them got left, then I saw what it was.
It was a buzzard.
It looked around and saw me and went on down the hall, spraddle-legged, with its wings kind of hunkered out, watching me first over one shoulder and then over the other, like a old bald-headed man.
When it got outdoors it begun to fly.
It had to fly a long time before it ever got up into the air, with it thick and heavy and full of rain like it was.
If they was bent on going to Jefferson, I reckon they could have gone around up by Mount Vernon, like MacCallum did.
He’ll get home about day after tomorrow, horseback.
Then they'd be just eighteen miles from town.
But maybe this bridge being gone too has learned him the Lord's sense and judgment.
That MacCallum.
He's been trading with me off and on for twelve years.
I have known him from a boy up; know his name as well as I do my own.
But be durn if I can say it.
Dewey Dell.
The signboard comes in sight.
It is looking out at the road now, because it can wait.
New Hope. 3 mi. it will say.
New Hope. 3 mi.
New Hope. 3 mi.