DARL
“J EWEL,” I say, “whose son are you?”
The breeze was setting up from the barn, so we put her under the apple tree, where the moonlight can dapple the apple tree upon the long slumbering flanks within which now and then she talks in little trickling bursts of secret and murmurous bubbling. I took Vardaman to listen. When we came up the cat leaped down from it and flicked away with silver claw and silver eye into the shadow.
“Your mother was a horse, but who was your father, Jewel?”
“You goddamn lying son of a bitch.”
“Don’t call me that,” I say.
“You goddamn lying son of a bitch.”
“Don’t you call me that, Jewel.” In the tall moonlight his eyes look like spots of white paper pasted on a high small football.
After supper Cash began to sweat a little. “It’s getting a little hot,” he said.
“It was the sun shining on it all day, I reckon.”
“You want some water poured on it?” we say. “Maybe that will ease it some.”
“I’d be obliged,” Cash said. “It was the sun shining on it, I reckon. I ought to thought and kept it covered.”
“We ought to thought,” we said. “You couldn’t have suspicioned.”
“I never noticed it getting hot,” Cash said. “I ought to minded it.”
So we poured the water over it. His leg and foot below the cement looked like they had been boiled. “Does that feel better?” we said.
“I’m obliged,” Cash said. “It feels fine.”
Dewey Dell wipes his face with the hem of her dress.
“See if you can get some sleep,” we say.
“Sho,” Cash says. “I’m right obliged. It feels fine now.”
Jewel, I say, Who was your father, Jewel?
Goddamn you. Goddamn you.
