He glances about.
Back under the trough is a three legged milking stool.
He catches it up and swings it into the planking of the rear wall.
He splinters a plank, then another, a third; we tear the fragments away.
While we are stooping at the opening something charges into us from behind.
It is the cow; with a single whistling breath she rushes between us and through the gap and into the outer glare, her tail erect and rigid as a broom nailed upright to the end of her spine.
Jewel turns back into the barn.
"Here," I say; "Jewel!"
I grasp at him; he strikes my hand down.
"You fool," I say, "dont you see you cant make it hack yonder?"
The hallway looks like a searchlight turned into rain.
"Come on," I say, "around this way."
When we are through the gap he begins to run.
"Jewel," I say, running.
He darts around the corner.
When I reach it he has almost reached the next one, running against the glare like that figure cut from tin.
Pa and Gillespie and Mack are some distance away, watching the barn, pink against the darkness where for the time the moonlight has been vanquished.
"Catch him!"
I cry; "stop him!"
When I reach the front, he is struggling with Gillespie; the one lean in underclothes, the other stark naked.
They are like two figures in a Greek frieze, isolated out of all reality by the red glare.
Before I can reach them he has struck Gillespie to the ground and turned and run back into the barn.
The sound of it has become quite peaceful now, like the sound of the river did.
We watch through the dissolving proscenium of the doorway as Jewel runs crouching to the far end of the coffin and stoops to it.
For an instant he looks up and out at us through the rain of burning hay like a portiere of flaming beads, and I can see his mouth shape as he calls my name.
"Jewel!" Dewey Dell cries;
"Jewel!"
It seems to me that I now hear the accumulation of her voice through the last five minutes, and I hear her scuffling and struggling as pa and Mack hold her, screaming
"Jewell Jewel!"
But he is no longer looking at us.
We see his shoulders strain as he upends the coffin and slides it single-handed from the sawhorses.
It looms unbelievably tall, hiding him: I would not have believed that Addie Bundren would have needed that much room to lie comfortable in; for another instant it stands upright while the sparks rain on it in scattering bursts as though they engendered other sparks from the contact.
Then it topples forward, gaining momentum, revealing Jewel and the sparks raining on him too in engendering gusts, so that he appears to be enclosed in a thin nimbus of fire.
Without stopping it overends and rears again, pauses, then crashes slowly forward and through the curtain.
This time Jewel is riding upon it, clinging to it, until it crashes down and flings him forward and clear and Mack leaps forward into a thin smell of scorching meat and slaps at the widening crimson-edged holes that bloom like flowers in his undershirt.
Vardaman.
When I went to find where they stay at night, I saw something They said,
"Where is Darl?
Where did Darl go?"
They carried her back under the apple tree.
The barn was still red, but it wasn't a barn now.
It was sunk down, and the red went swirling up.
The barn went swirling up in little red pieces, against the sky and the stars so that the stars moved backward.
And then Cash was still awake.
He turned his head from side to side, with sweat on his face.
"Do you want some more water on it, Cash?" Dewey Dell said.
Cash's leg and foot turned black.
We held the lamp and looked at Cash's foot and leg where it was black.
"Your foot looks like a nigger's foot, Cash," I said.
"I reckon we’ll have to bust it off," pa said.