"You take off and stay in the house today," ma said.
"With that whole bottom piece to be busted out?" pa said.
'If you aint sick, what's the matter with you?"
"Nothing," Jewel said.
"I'm all right."
"All right?" pa said.
"You're asleep on your feet this minute."
"No," Jewel said.
"I'm all right."
"I want him to stay at home today," ma said.
"I’ll need him," pa said.
"It's tight enough, with all of us to do it."
"You'll just have to do the best you can with Cash and Darl," ma said.
"I want him to stay in today."
But he wouldn't do it.
"I'm all right," he said, going on.
But he wasn't all right.
Anybody could see it.
He was losing flesh, and I have seen him go to sleep chopping; watched the hoe going slower and slower up and down, with less and less of an arc, until it stopped and he leaning on it motionless in the hot shimmer of the sun.
Ma wanted to get the doctor, but pa didn't want to spend the money without it was needful, and Jewel did seem all right except for his thinness and his way of dropping off to sleep at any moment.
He ate hearty enough, except for his way of going to sleep in his plate, with a piece of bread halfway to his mouth and his jaws still chewing.
But he swore he was all right.
It was ma that got Dewey Dell to do his milking, paid her somehow, and the other jobs around the house that Jewel had been doing before supper she found some way for Dewey Dell and Vardaman to do them.
And doing them herself when pa wasn't there.
She would fix him special things to eat and hide them for him.
And that may have been when I first found it out, that Addie Bundren should be hiding anything she did, who had tried to teach us that deceit was such that, in a world where it was, nothing else could be very bad or very important, not even poverty.
And at times when I went in to go to bed she would be sitting in the dark by Jewel where he was asleep.
And I knew that she was hating herself for that deceit and hating Jewel because she had to love him so that she had to act the deceit.
One night she was taken sick and when I went to the barn to put the team in and drive to Tull's, I couldn't find the lantern.
I remembered noticing it on the nail the night before, but it wasn't there now at midnight.
So I hitched in the dark and went on and came back with Mrs Tull just after daylight.
And there the lantern was, hanging on the nail where I remembered it and couldn't find it before.
And then one morning while Dewey Dell was milking just before sunup, Jewel came into the barn from the back, through the hole in the back wall, with the lantern in his hand.
I told Cash, and Cash and I looked at one another.
"Rutting," Cash said.
"Yes," I said.
"But why the lantern?
And every night, too.
No wonder he's losing flesh.
Are you going to say anything to him?"
"Wont do any good," Cash said.
"What he's doing now wont do any good, either."
"I know.
But he'll have to learn that himself.
Give him time to realise that it'll save, that there'll be just as much more tomorrow, and he'll be all right.
I wouldn't tell anybody, I reckon."
"No," I said.
"I told Dewey Dell not to.
Not ma, anyway."
"No.