We have never yet been, and she will rest quieter for knowing it and that it was her own blood sawed out the boards and drove the nails.
She was ever one to clean up after herself."
“It means three dollars," I say.
"Do you want us to go, or not?"
Pa rubs his knees.
"We’ll be back by tomorrow sundown."
"Well ..." pa says.
He looks out over the land, awry-haired, mouthing the snuff slowly against, his gums.
"Come on," Jewel says.
He goes down the steps.
Vernon spits neatly into the dust.
"By sundown, now," pa says.
"I would not keep her waiting."
Jewel glances back, then he goes on around the house.
I enter the hall, hearing the voices before I reach the door.
Tilting a little down the hill, as our house does, a breeze draws through the hall all the time, upslanting.
A feather dropped near the front door will rise and brush along the ceiling, slanting backward, until it reaches the down-turning current at the back door: so with voices.
As you enter the hall, they sound as though they were speaking out of the air about your head.
Cora
It was the sweetest thing I ever saw.
It was like he knew he would never see her again, that Anse Bundren was driving him from his mother's death bed, never to see her in this world again.
I always said Darl was different from those others.
I always said he was the only one of them that had his mother's nature, had any natural affection.
Not that Jewel, the one she labored so to bear and coddled and petted so and him flinging into tantrums or sulking spells, inventing devilment to devil her until I would have trailed him time and time.
Not him to come and tell her goodbye.
Not him to miss a chance to make that extra three dollars at the price of his mother's goodbye kiss.
A Bundren through and through, loving nobody, caring for nothing except how to get something with the least amount of work.
Mr Tull says Darl asked them to wait.
He said Darl almost begged them on his knees not to force him to leave her in her condition.
But nothing would do but Anse and Jewel must make that three dollars.
Nobody that knows Anse could have expected different, but to think of that boy, that Jewel, selling all those years of self-denial and down-right partiality—they couldn't fool me: Mr Tull says Mrs Bundren liked Jewel the least of all, but I knew better.
I knew she was partial to him, to the same quality in him that let her put up with Anse Bundren when Mr Tull said she ought to poisoned him—for three dollars, denying his dying mother the goodbye kiss.
Why, for the last three weeks I have been coming over every time I could, coming sometimes when I shouldn't have, neglecting my own family and duties so that somebody would be with her in her last moments and she would not have to face the Great Unknown without one familiar face to give her courage.
Not that I deserve credit for it: I will expect the same for myself.
But thank God it will be the faces of my loved kin, my blood and flesh, for in my husband and children I have been more blessed than most, trials though they have been at times.
She lived, a lonely woman, lonely with her pride, trying to make folks believe different, hiding the fact that they just suffered her, because she was not cold in the coffin before they were carting her forty miles away to bury her, flouting the will of God to do it.
Refusing to let her lie in the same earth with those Bundrens.
"But she wanted to go," Mr Tull said.
'It was her own wish to lie among her own people."
"Then why didn't she go alive?" I said.
"Not one of them would have stopped her, with even that little one almost old enough now to be selfish and stone-hearted like the rest of them."
"It was her own wish," Mr Tull said.
"I heard Anse say it was."
"And you would believe Anse, of course," I said.
"A man like you would.
Dont tell me."
"I'd believe him about something he couldn't expect to make anything off of me by not telling," Mr Tull said.
"Dont tell me," I said.
"A woman's place is with her husband and children, alive or dead.
Would you expect me to want to go back to Alabama and leave you and the girls when my time comes, that I left of my own will to cast my lot with yours for better and worse, until death and after?"