DARL
B EFORE us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur
become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again.
It clucks and murmurs among the spokes and about the mules’ knees, yellow, skummed with flotsman and with thick soiled gouts of foam as though it had sweat, lathering, like a driven horse. Through the undergrowth it goes with a plaintive sound, a musing sound; in it the unwinded cane and saplings lean as before a little gale, swaying without reflections as though suspended on invisible wires from the branches overhead. Above the ceaseless surface they stand—trees, cane, vines—rootless, severed from the earth, spectral above a scene of immense yet circumscribed desolation filled with the voice of the waste and mournful water.
Cash and I sit in the wagon; Jewel sits the horse at the off rear-wheel. The horse is trembling, its eye rolling wild and baby-blue in its long pink face, its breathing stertorous like groaning. He sits erect, poised, looking quietly and steadily and quickly this way and that, his face calm, a little pale, alert. Cash’s face is also gravely composed; he and I look at one another with long probing looks, looks that plunge unimpeded through one another’s eyes and into the ultimate secret place where for an instant Cash and Darl crouch flagrant and unabashed in all the old terror and the old foreboding, alert and secret and without shame. When we speak our voices are quiet, detached.
“I reckon we’re still in the road, all right.”
“Tull taken and cut them two big whiteoaks. I heard tell how at high water in the old days they used to line up the ford by them trees.”
“I reckon he did that two years ago when he was logging down here. I reckon he never thought that anybody would ever use this ford again.”
“I reckon not. Yes, it must have been then. He cut a sight of timber outen here then. Payed off that mortgage with it, I hear tell.”
“Yes. Yes, I reckon so. I reckon Vernon could have done that.”
“That’s a fact. Most folks that logs in this here country, they need a durn good farm to support the sawmill. Or maybe a store. But I reckon Vernon
could.”
“I reckon so. He’s a sight.”
“Ay. Vernon is. Yes, it must still be here. He never would have got that timber out of here if he hadn’t cleaned out that old road. I reckon we are still on it.” He looks about quietly, at the position of the trees, leaning this way and that, looking back along the floorless road shaped vaguely high in air by the position of the lopped and felled trees, as if the road too had been soaked free of earth and floated upward, to leave in its spectral tracing a monument to a still more profound desolation than this above which we now sit, talking quietly of old security and old trivial things. Jewel looks at him, then at me, then his face turns in in that quiet, constant, questing about the scene, the horse trembling quietly and steadily between his knees.
“He could go on ahead slow and sort of feel it out,” I say.
“Yes,” Cash says, not looking at me. His face is in profile as he looks forward where Jewel has moved on ahead.
“He can’t miss the river,” I say. “He couldn’t miss seeing it fifty yards ahead.”
Cash does not look at me, his face in profile. “If I’d just suspicioned it, I could ’a’ come down last week and taken a sight on it.”
“The bridge was up then,” I say. He does not look at me. “Whitfield crossed it a-horse-back.”
Jewel looks at us again, his expression sober and alert and subdued. His voice is quiet. “What you want me to do?”
“I ought to come down last week and taken a sight on it,” Cash says.
“We couldn’t have known,” I say. “There wasn’t any way for us to know.”
“I’ll ride on ahead,” Jewel says. “You can follow where I am.” He lifts the horse. It shrinks, bowed; he leans to it, speaking to it, lifting it forward almost bodily, it setting its feet down with gingerly splashings, trembling, breathing harshly. He speaks to it, murmurs to it. “Go on,” he says. “I ain’t going to let nothing hurt you. Go on, now.”
“Jewel,” Cash says. Jewel does not look back. He lifts the horse on.
“He can swim,” I say. “If he’ll just give the horse time, anyhow . . .” When he was born, he had a bad time of it. Ma would sit in the lamplight, holding him on a pillow on her lap. We would wake and find her so. There would be no sound from them.
“That pillow was longer than him,” Cash says. He is leaning a little forward. “I ought to come down last week and sighted. I ought to done it.”
“That’s right,” I say. “Neither his feet nor his head would reach the end of it. You couldn’t have known,” I say.
“I ought to done it,” he says. He lifts the reins. The mules move, into the traces; the wheels murmur alive in the water. He looks back and down at Addie. “It ain’t on a balance,” he says.
At last the trees open; against the open river Jewel sits the horse, half turned, it belly deep now. Across the river we can see Vernon and pa and Vardaman and Dewey Dell. Vernon is waving at us, waving us further downstream.
“We are too high up,” Cash says. Vernon is shouting too, but we cannot make out what he says for the noise of the water. It runs steady and deep now, unbroken, without sense of motion until a log comes along, turning slowly.
“Watch it,” Cash says. We watch it and see it falter and hang for a moment, the current building up behind it in a thick wave, submerging it for an instant
before it shoots up and tumbles on.
“There it is,” I say.
“Ay,” Cash says. “It’s there.” We look at Vernon again. He is now flapping his arms up and down. We move on downstream, slowly and carefully, watching Vernon. He drops his hands. “This is the place,” Cash says.
“Well, goddamn it, let’s get across, then,” Jewel says. He moves the horse on.
“You wait,” Cash says. Jewel stops again.
“Well, by God——” he says. Cash looks at the water, then he looks back at Addie. “It ain’t on a balance,” he says.
“Then go on back to the goddamn bridge and walk across,” Jewel says.
“You and Darl both. Let me on that wagon.”
Cash does not pay him any attention. “It ain’t on a balance,” he says. “Yes, sir. We got to watch it.”
“Watch it, hell,” Jewel says. “You get out of that wagon and let me have it.
By God, if you’re afraid to drive it over . . .” His eyes are pale as two bleached chips in his face. Cash is looking at him.
“We’ll get it over,” he says. “I tell you what you do. You ride on back and walk across the bridge and come down the other bank and meet us with the rope. Vernon’ll take your horse home with him and keep it till we get back.”
“You go to hell,” Jewel says.
“You take the rope and come down the bank and be ready with it,” Cash says. “Three can’t do no more than two can—one to drive and one to steady
it.”
“Goddamn you,” Jewel says.
“Let Jewel take the end of the rope and cross upstream of us and brace it,”
I say. “Will you do that, Jewel?”
Jewel watches me, hard. He looks quick at Cash, then back at me, his eyes alert and hard. “I don’t give a damn. Just so we do something. Setting here, not
lifting a goddamn hand . . .”
“Let’s do that, Cash,” I say.
“I reckon we’ll have to,” Cash says.
The river itself is not a hundred yards across, and pa and Vernon and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice. Yet they appear dwarfed. It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between. The mules stand, their forequarters already sloped a little, their rumps high. They too are breathing now with a deep groaning sound; looking back once, their gaze sweeps across us with in their eyes a wild, sad, profound and despairing quality as though they had already seen in the thick water the shape of the disaster which they could not speak and we could not see.
Cash turns back into the wagon. He lays his hands flat on Addie, rocking her a little. His face is calm, down-sloped, calculant, concerned. He lifts his box of tools and wedges it forward under the seat; together we shove Addie forward, wedging her between the tools and the wagon-bed. Then he looks at me.
“No,” I say. “I reckon I’ll stay. Might take both of us.”
From the tool-box he takes his coiled rope and carries the end twice around the seat stanchion and passes the end to me without tying it. The other end he pays out to Jewel, who takes a turn about his saddle-horn.
He must force the horse down into the current. It moves, high-kneed, arch- necked, boring and chafing. Jewel sits lightly forward, his knees lifted a little; again his swift alert calm gaze sweeps upon us and on. He lowers the horse into the stream, speaking to it in a soothing murmur. The horse slips, goes under to the saddle, surges to its feet again, the current building up against
Jewel’s thighs.
“Watch yourself,” Cash says.
“I’m on it now,” Jewel says. “You can come ahead now.”
Cash takes the reins and lowers the team carefully and skilfully into the stream.
I felt the current take us and I knew we were on the ford by that reason, since it was only by means of that slipping contact that we could tell that we were in motion at all. What had once been a flat surface was now a succession of troughs and hillocks lifting and falling about us, shoving at us, teasing at us with light lazy touches in the vain instants of solidity underfoot. Cash looked back at me, and then I knew that we were gone. But I did not realise the reason for the rope until I saw the log. It surged up out of the water and stood for an instant upright upon that surging and heaving desolation like Christ. Get out
and let the current take you down to the bend, Cash said. You can make it all right. No, I said, I’d get just as wet that way as this.
The log appears suddenly between two hills, as if it had rocketed suddenly from the bottom of the river. Upon the end of it a long gout of foam hangs like the beard of an old man or a goat. When Cash speaks to me I know that he has been watching it all the time, watching it and watching Jewel ten feet ahead of us. “Let the rope go,” he says. With his other hand he reaches down and reeves the two turns from the stanchion. “Ride on, Jewel,” he says; “see if you can pull us ahead of the log.”
Jewel shouts at the horse; again he appears to lift it bodily between his knees. He is just above the top of the ford and the horse has a purchase of some sort for it surges forward, shining wetly half out of water, crashing on in a succession of lunges. It moves unbelievably fast; by that token Jewel realizes at last that the rope is free, for I can see him sawing back on the reins, his head turned, as the log rears in a long sluggish lunge between us, bearing down upon the team. They see it too; for a moment they also shine black out of water. Then the downstream one vanishes, dragging the other with him; the wagon sheers crosswise, poised on the crest of the ford as the log strikes it, tilting it up and on. Cash is half turned, the reins running taut from his hand and disappearing into the water, the other hand reached back upon Addie, holding her jammed over against the high side of the wagon. “Jump clear,” he says quietly. “Stay away from the team and don’t try to fight it. It’ll swing you into the bend all right.”
“You come too,” I say. Vernon and Vardaman are running along the bank, pa and Dewey Dell stand watching us, Dewey Dell with the basket and the package in her arms. Jewel is trying to fight the horse back. The head of one mule appears, its eyes wide; it looks back at us for an instant, making a sound almost human. The head vanishes again.
“Back, Jewel,” Cash shouts. “Back, Jewel.” For another instant I see him leaning to the tilting wagon, his arm braced back against Addie and his tools; I see the bearded head of the rearing log strike up again, and beyond it Jewel holding the horse upreared, its head wrenched around, hammering its head with his fist. I jump from the wagon on the downstream side. Between two hills I see the mules once more. They roll up out of the water in succession, turning completely over, their legs stiffly extended as when they had lost contact with the earth.
