Not ma."
After that I thought it was right comical: he acting so bewildered and willing and dead for sleep and gaunt as a bean-pole, and thinking he was so smart with it.
And I wondered who the girl was.
I thought of all I knew that it might be, but I couldn't say for sure.
"Taint any girl," Cash said.
"It's a married woman somewhere.
Aint any young girl got that much daring and staying power.
That's what I dont like about it."
"Why?" I said.
"She'll be safer for him than a girl would.
More judgment."
He looked at me, his eyes fumbling, the words fumbling at what he was trying to say.
"It aint always the safe things in this world that a fellow . . . . . . ."
"You mean, the safe things are not always the best things?"
"Ay; best," he said, fumbling again.
"It aint the best things, the things that are good for him ... A young boy.
A fellow kind of hates to see . . . wallowing in somebody else's mire . . ." That's what he was trying to say.
When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe; since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there's nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.
So we didn't tell, not even when after a while he'd appear suddenly in the field beside us and go to work, without having had time to get home and make out he had been in bed all night.
He would tell ma that he hadn't been hungry at breakfast or that he had eaten a piece of bread while he was hitching up the-team.
But Cash and I knew that he hadn't been home at all on those nights and he had come up out of the woods when we got to the field.
But we didn't tell.
Summer was almost over then; we knew that when the nights began to get cool, she would be done if he wasn't.
But when fall came and the nights began to get longer, the only difference was that he would always be in bed for pa to wake him, getting him up at last in that first state of semi-idiocy like when it first started, worse than when he had stayed out all night.
"She's sure a stayer," I told Cash.
"I used to admire her, but I downright respect her now."
"It aint a woman," he said.
"You know," I said.
But he was watching me.
"What is it, then?"
"That's what I aim to find out," he said.
"You can trail him through the woods all night if you want to," I said.
"I'm not."
"I aint trailing him," he said.
"What do you call it, then?"
"I aint trailing him," he said.
I dont mean it that way."
And so a few nights later I heard Jewel get up and climb out the window, and then I heard Cash get up and follow him.
The next morning when I went to the barn, Cash was already there, the mules fed, and he was helping Dewey Dell milk.
And when I saw him I knew that he knew what it was.
Now and then I would catch him watching Jewel with a queer look, like having found out where Jewel went and what he was doing had given him something to really think about at last.
But it was not a worried look; it was the kind of look I would see on him when I would find him doing some of Jewel's work around the house, work that pa still thought Jewel was doing and that ma thought Dewey Dell was doing.
So I said nothing to him, believing that when he got done digesting it in his mind, he would tell me.
But he never did.
One morning—it was November then, five months since it started—Jewel was not in bed and he didn't join us in the field.
That was the first time ma learned anything about what had been going on.
She sent Vardaman down to find where Jewel was, and after a while she came down too.
It was as though, so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a bland outside.
But now it was like we had all—and by a kind of telepathic agreement of admitted fear—flung the whole thing back like covers on the bed and we all sitting bolt upright in our nakedness, staring at one another arid saying
"Now is the truth.