DARL
C ASH lies on his back on the earth, his head raised on a rolled garment. His
eyes are closed, his face is grey, his hair plastered in a smooth smear across his forehead as though done with a paint-brush. His face appears sunken a little, sagging from the bony ridges of eye-sockets, nose, gums, as though the wetting had slacked the firmness which had held the skin full; his teeth, set in pale gums, are parted a little as if he had been laughing quietly. He lies pole- thin in his wet clothes, a little pool of vomit at his head and a thread of it running from the corner of his mouth and down his cheek where he couldn’t turn his head quick or far enough, until Dewey Dell stoops and wipes it away with the hem of her dress.
Jewel approaches. He has the plane. “Vernon just found the square,” he says. He looks down at Cash, dripping too. “Ain’t he talked none yet?”
“He had his saw and hammer and chalk-line and rule,” I say. “I know that.”
Jewel lays the square down. Pa watches him.
“They can’t be far away,” pa says. “It all went together. Was there ere a such misfortunate man.”
Jewel does not look at pa. “You better call Vardaman back here,” he says.
He looks at Cash. Then he turns and goes away. “Get him to talk soon as he can,” he says, “so he can tell us what else there was.”
We return to the river. The wagon is hauled clear, the wheels chocked (carefully: we all helped; it is as though upon the shabby, familiar, inert shape of the wagon there lingered somehow, latent yet still immediate, that violence which had slain the mules that drew it not an hour since) above the edge of the flood. In the wagon-bed it lies profoundly, the long pale planks hushed a little with wetting yet still yellow, like gold seen through water, save for two long muddy smears. We pass it and go on to the bank.
One end of the rope is made fast to a tree. At the edge of the stream, knee- deep, Vardaman stands, bent forward a little, watching Vernon with rapt absorption. He has stopped yelling and he is wet to the armpits. Vernon is at the other end of the rope, shoulder-deep in the river, looking back at Vardaman. “Further back than that,” he says. “You git back by the tree and hold the rope for me, so it can’t slip.”
Vardaman backs along the rope, to the tree, moving blindly, watching Vernon. When we come up he looks at us once, his eyes round and a little dazed. Then he looks at Vernon again in that posture of rapt alertness.
“I got the hammer too,” Vernon says. “Looks like we ought to done already got that chalk-line. It ought to floated.”
“Floated clean away,” Jewel says. “We won’t get it. We ought to find the saw, though.”
“I reckon so,” Vernon says. He looks at the water. “That chalk-line, too.
What else did he have?”
“He ain’t talked yet,” Jewel says, entering the water. He looks back at me.
“You go back and get him roused up to talk,” he says.
“Pa’s there,” I say. I follow Jewel into the water, along the rope. It feels alive in my hand, bellied faintly in a prolonged and resonant arc. Vernon is watching me.
“You better go,” he says. “You better be there.”
“Let’s see what else we can get before it washes on down,” I say.
We hold to the rope, the current curling and dimpling about our shoulders.
But beneath that false blandness the true force of it leans against us lazily. I had not thought that water in July could be so cold. It is like hands moulding and prodding at the very bones. Vernon is still looking back toward the bank.
“Reckon it’ll hold us all?” he says. We too look back, following the rigid bar of the rope as it rises from the water to the tree and Vardaman crouched a little beside it, watching us. “Wish my mule wouldn’t strike out for home,”
Vernon says.
“Come on,” Jewel says. “Let’s get outen here.”
We submerge in turn, holding to the rope, being clutched by one another while the cold wall of the water sucks the slanting mud backward and upstream from beneath our feet and we are suspended so, groping along the cold bottom. Even the mud there is not still. It has a chill, scouring quality, as though the earth under us were in motion too. We touch and fumble at one another’s extended arms, letting ourselves go cautiously against the rope; or, erect in turn, watch the water suck and boil where one of the other two gropes beneath the surface. Pa has come down to the shore, watching us.
Vernon comes up, streaming, his face sloped down into his pursed blowing mouth. His mouth is bluish, like a circle of weathered rubber. He has the rule.
“He’ll be glad of that,” I say. “It’s right new. He bought it just last month out of the catalogue.”
“If we just knowed for sho what else,” Vernon says, looking over his shoulder and then turning to face where Jewel had disappeared. “Didn’t he go down ’fore me?” Vernon says.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I think so. Yes. Yes, he did.”
We watch the thick curling surface, streaming away from us in slow whorls.
“Give him a pull on the rope,” Vernon says.
“He’s on your end of it,” I say.
“Ain’t nobody on my end of it,” he says.
“Pull it in,” I say. But he has already done that, holding the end above the water; and then we see Jewel. He is ten yards away; he comes up, blowing, and looks at us, tossing his long hair back with a jerk of his head, then he looks toward the bank; we can see him filling his lungs.
“Jewel,” Vernon says, not loud, but his voice going full and clear along the water, peremptory yet tactful. “It’ll be back here. Better come back.”
Jewel dives again. We stand there, leaning back against the current, watching the water where he disappeared, holding the dead rope between us like two men holding the nozzle of a fire-hose, waiting for the water. Suddenly Dewey Dell is behind us in the water. “You make him come back,” she says.
“Jewel!” she says. He comes up again, tossing his hair back from his eyes. He is swimming now, toward the bank, the current sweeping him downstream quartering. “You, Jewel!” Dewey Dell says. We stand holding the rope and see him gain the bank and climb out. As he rises from the water, he stoops and picks up something. He comes back along the bank. He has found the chalk- line. He comes opposite us and stands there, looking about as if he were seeking something. Pa goes on down the bank. He is going back to look at the mules again where their round bodies float and rub quietly together in the slack water within the bend.
“What did you do with the hammer, Vernon?” Jewel says.
“I give it to him,” Vernon says, jerking his head at Vardaman. Vardaman is looking after pa. Then he looks at Jewel. “With the square.” Vernon is watching Jewel. He moves toward the bank, passing Dewey Dell and me.
“You get on out of here,” I say. She says nothing, looking at Jewel and Vernon.
“Where’s the hammer?” Jewel says. Vardaman scuttles up the bank and fetches it.
“It’s heavier than the saw,” Vernon says. Jewel is tying the end of the chalk-line about the hammer shaft.
“Hammer’s got the most wood in it,” Jewel says. He and Vernon face one another, watching Jewel’s hands.
“And flatter, too,” Vernon says. “It’d float three to one, almost. Try the plane.”
Jewel looks at Vernon. Vernon is tall, too; long and lean, eye to eye they stand in their close wet clothes. Lon Quick could look even at a cloudy sky and tell the time to ten minutes. Big Lon I mean, not little Lon.
“Why don’t you get out of the water?” I say.
“It won’t float like a saw,” Jewel says.
“It’ll float nigher to a saw than a hammer will,” Vernon says.
“Bet you,” Jewel says.
“I won’t bet,” Vernon says.
They stand there, watching Jewel’s still hands.
“Hell,” Jewel says. “Get the plane, then.”
So they get the plane and tie it to the chalk-line and enter the water again.
Pa comes back along the bank. He stops for a while and looks at us, hunched, mournful, like a failing steer or an old tall bird.
Vernon and Jewel return, leaning against the current. “Get out of the way,”
Jewel says to Dewey Dell. “Get out of the water.”
She crowds against me a little so they can pass, Jewel holding the plane high as though it were perishable, the blue string trailing back over his shoulder. They pass us and stop; they fall to arguing quietly about just where the wagon went over.
“Darl ought to know,” Vernon says. They look at me.
“I don’t know,” I says. “I wasn’t there that long.”
“Hell,” Jewel says. They move on, gingerly, leaning against the current, reading the ford with their feet.
“Have you got a holt of the rope?” Vernon says. Jewel does not answer. He glances back at the shore, calculant, then at the water. He flings the plane outward, letting the string run through his fingers, his fingers turning blue where it runs over them. When the line stops, he hands it back to Vernon.
“Better let me go this time,” Vernon says. Again Jewel does not answer;
we watch him duck beneath the surface.
“Jewel,” Dewey Dell whimpers.
“It ain’t so deep there,” Vernon says. He does not look back. He is watching the water where Jewel went under.
When Jewel comes up he has the saw.
When we pass the wagon pa is standing beside it, scrubbing at the two mud smears with a handful of leaves. Against the jungle Jewel’s horse looks like a patchwork quilt hung on a line.
Cash has not moved. We stand above him, holding the plane, the saw, the hammer, the square, the rule, the chalk-line, while Dewey Dell squats and lifts Cash’s head. “Cash,” she says; “Cash.”
He opens his eyes, staring profoundly up at our inverted faces.
“If ever was such a misfortunate man,” pa says.
“Look, Cash,” we say, holding the tools up so he can see; “what else did you have?”
He tries to speak, rolling his head, shutting his eyes.
“Cash,” we say; “Cash.”
It is to vomit he is turning his head. Dewey Dell wipes his mouth on the wet hem of her dress; then he can speak.
“It’s his saw-set,” Jewel says. “The new one he bought when he bought the rule.” He moves, turning away. Vernon looks up after him, still squatting.
Then he rises and follows Jewel down to the water.
“If ever was such a misfortunate man,” pa says. He looms tall above us as we squat; he looks like a figure carved clumsily from tough wood by a drunken caricaturist. “It’s a trial,” he says. “But I don’t begrudge her it. No man can say I begrudge her it.” Dewey Dell has laid Cash’s head back on the folded coat, twisting his head a little to avoid the vomit. Beside him his tools lie. “A fellow might call it lucky it was the same leg he broke when he fell offen that church,” pa says. “But I don’t begrudge her it.”
Jewel and Vernon are in the river again. From here they do not appear to violate the surface at all; it is as though it had severed them both at a single blow, the two torsos moving with infinitesimal and ludicrous care upon the surface. It looks peaceful, like machinery does after you have watched it and listened to it for a long time. As though the clotting which is you had dissolved into the myriad original motion, and seeing and hearing in themselves blind and deaf; fury in itself quiet with stagnation. Squatting, Dewey Dell’s wet dress shapes for the dead eyes of three blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which are the horizons and the valleys of the earth.
