As I Lay Dying

by William Faulkner

  “Let’s go that way, Dewey Dell,” I say.

  “What for?” Dewey Dell says. The track went shining around the window, it red on the track. But she said he would not sell it to the town boys. “But it will be there Christmas,” Dewey Dell says. “You’ll have to wait till then, when he brings it back.”

  Darl went to Jackson. Lots of people didn’t go to Jackson. Darl is my brother. My brother is going to Jackson

  While we walk the lights go around, roosting in the trees. On all sides it is the same. They go around the courthouse and then you cannot see them. But you can see them in the black windows beyond. They have all gone home to bed except me and Dewey Dell.

  Going on the train to Jackson. My brother

  There is a light in the store, far back. In the window are two big glasses of soda water, red and green. Two men could not drink them. Two mules could not. Two cows could not. Darl

  A man comes to the door. He looks at Dewey Dell.

  “You wait out here,” Dewey Dell says.

  “Why cant I come in?” I say. “I want to come in, too.”

  “You wait out here,” she says.

  “All right,” I say.

  Dewey Dell goes in.

  Darl is my brother. Darl went crazy

  The walk is harder than sitting on the ground. He is in the open door. He looks at me. “You want something?” he says. His head is slick. Jewel’s head is slick sometimes. Cash’s head is not slick. Darl he went to Jackson my brother Darl In the street he ate a banana. Wouldn’t you rather have bananas? Dewey Dell said. You wait till Christmas. It’ll be there then. Then you can see it. So we are going to have some bananas. We are going to have a bag full, me and Dewey Dell. He locks the door. Dewey Dell is inside. Then the light winks out.

  He went to Jackson. He went crazy and went to Jackson both. Lots of people didn’t go crazy. Pa and Cash and Jewel and Dewey Dell and me didn’t go crazy. We never did go crazy. We didn’t go to Jackson either. Darl

  I hear the cow a long time, clopping on the street. Then she comes into the square. She goes across the square, her head down clopping . She lows. There was nothing in the square before she lowed, but it wasn’t empty. Now it is empty after she lowed. She goes on, clopping . She lows. My brother is Darl. He went to Jackson on the train. He didn’t go on the train to go crazy. He went crazy in our wagon. Darl She has been in there a long time. And the cow is gone too. A long time. She has been in there longer than the cow was. But not as long as empty. Darl is my brother. My brother Darl

  Dewey Dell comes out. She looks at me.

  “Let’s go around that way now,” I say.

  She looks at me. “It aint going to work,” she says. “That son of a bitch.”

  “What aint going to work, Dewey Dell?”

  “I just know it wont,” she says. She is not looking at anything. “I just know it.”

  “Let’s go that way,” I say.

  “We got to go back to the hotel. It’s late. We got to slip back in.”

  “Cant we go by and see, anyway?”

  “Hadn’t you rather have bananas? Hadn’t you rather?”

  “All right.” My brother he went crazy and he went to Jackson too. Jackson is further away than crazy

  “It wont work,” Dewey Dell says. “I just know it wont.”

  “What wont work?” I say. He had to get on the train to go to Jackson. I have not been on the train, but Darl has been on the train. Darl. Darl is my brother. Darl. Darl

  DARL

  Darl has gone to Jackson. They put him on the train, laughing, down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of owls when he passed. “What are you laughing at?” I said.

  “Yes yes yes yes yes.”

  Two men put him on the train. They wore mismatched coats, bulging behind over their right hip pockets. Their necks were shaved to a hairline, as though the recent and simultaneous barbers had had a chalk-line like Cash’s. “Is it the pistols you’re laughing at?” I said. “Why do you laugh?” I said. “Is it because you hate the sound of laughing?”

  They pulled two seats together so Darl could sit by the window to laugh. One of them sat beside him, the other sat on the seat facing him, riding backward. One of them had to ride backward because the state’s money has a face to each backside and a backside to each face, and they are riding on the state’s money which is incest. A nickel has a woman on one side and a buffalo on the other; two faces and no back. I dont know what that is. Darl had a little spy-glass he got in France at the war. In it it had a woman and a pig with two backs and no face. I know what that is. “Is that why you are laughing, Darl?”

  “Yes yes yes yes yes yes.”

  The wagon stands on the square, hitched, the mules motionless, the reins wrapped about the seat-spring, the back of the wagon toward the courthouse. It looks no different from a hundred other wagons there; Jewel standing beside it and looking up the street like any other man in town that day, yet there is something different, distinctive. There is about it that unmistakable air of definite and imminent departure that trains have, perhaps due to the fact that Dewey Dell and Vardaman on the seat and Cash on a pallet in the wagon bed are eating bananas from a paper bag. “Is that why you are laughing, Darl?”

  Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying light in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.

  “Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.”

  DEWEY DELL

  When he saw the money I said, “It’s not my money, it doesn’t belong to me.”

  “Whose is it, then?”

  “It’s Cora Tull’s money. It’s Mrs Tull’s. I sold the cakes for it.”

  “Ten dollars for two cakes?”

  “Dont you touch it. It’s not mine.”

  “You never had them cakes. It’s a lie. It was them Sunday clothes you had in that package.”

  “Dont you touch it! If you take it you are a thief.”

  “My own daughter accuses me of being a thief. My own daughter.”

  “Pa. Pa.”

  “I have fed you and sheltered you. I give you love and care, yet my own daughter, the daughter of my dead wife, calls me a thief over her mother’s grave.”

  “It’s not mine, I tell you. If it was, God knows you could have it.”

  “Where did you get ten dollars?”

  “Pa. Pa.”

  “You wont tell me. Did you come by it so shameful you dare not?”

  “It’s not mine, I tell you. Cant you understand it’s not mine?”

  “It’s not like I wouldn’t pay it back. But she calls her own father a thief.”

  “I cant, I tell you. I tell you it’s not my money. God knows you could have it.”

  “I wouldn’t take it. My own born daughter that has et my food for seventeen years, begrudges me the loan of ten dollars.”

  “It’s not mine, I cant.”

  “Whose is it, then?”

  “It was give to me. To buy something with.”

  “To buy what with?”

  “Pa. Pa.”

  “It’s just a loan. God knows, I hate for my blooden children to reproach me. But I give them what was mine without stint. Cheerful I give them, without stint. And now they deny me. Addie. It was lucky for you you died, Addie.”

  “Pa. Pa.”

  “God knows it is.”

  He took the money and went out.

  CASH

  So when we stopped there to borrow the shovels we heard the graphophone playing in the house, and so when we got done with the shovels pa says, “I reckon I better take them back.”

  So we went back to the house. “We better take Cash on to Peabody’s,” Jewel said.

  “It wont take but a minute,” pa said. He got down from the wagon. The music was not playing now.

  “Let Vardaman do it,” Jewel said. “He can do it in half the time you can. Or here, you let me——”

  “I reckon I better do it,” pa say
s. “Long as it was me that borrowed them.”

  So we set in the wagon, but the music wasn’t playing now. I reckon it’s a good thing we aint got ere a one of them. I reckon I wouldn’t never get no work done a-tall for listening to it. I dont know if a little music aint about the nicest thing a fellow can have. Seems like when he comes in tired of a night, it aint nothing could rest him like having a little music played and him resting. I have seen them that shuts up like a hand-grip, with a handle and all, so a fellow can carry it with him wherever he wants.

  “What you reckon he’s doing?” Jewel says. “I could a toted them shovels back and forth ten times by now.”

  “Let him take his time,” I said. “He aint as spry as you, remember.”

  “Why didn’t he let me take them back, then? We got to get your leg fixed up so we can start home tomorrow.”

  “We got plenty of time,” I said. “I wonder what them machines costs on the installment.”

  “Installment of what?” Jewel said. “What you got to buy it with?”

  “A fellow cant tell,” I said. “I could a bought that one from Suratt for five dollars, I believe.”

  And so pa come back and we went to Peabody’s. While we was there pa said he was going to the barbershop and get a shave. And so that night he said he had some business to tend to, kind of looking away from us while he said it, with his hair combed wet and slick and smelling sweet with perfume, but I said leave him be; I wouldn’t mind hearing a little more of that music myself.

  And so next morning he was gone again, then he come back and told us to get hitched up and ready to take out and he would meet us and when they was gone he said,

  “I dont reckon you got no more money.”

  “Peabody just give me enough to pay the hotel with,” I said. “We dont need nothing else, do we?”

  “No,” pa said; “no. We dont need nothing.” He stood there, not looking at me.

  “If it is something we got to have, I reckon maybe Peabody,” I said.

  “No,” he said; “it aint nothing else. You all wait for me at the corner.”

  So Jewel got the team and come for me and they fixed me a pallet in the wagon and we drove across the square to the corner where pa said, and we was waiting there in the wagon, with Dewey Dell and Vardaman eating bananas, when we see them coming up the street. Pa was coming along with that kind of daresome and hangdog look all at once like when he has been up to something he knows ma aint going to like, carrying a grip in his hand, and Jewel says,

  “Who’s that?”

  Then we see it wasn’t the grip that made him look different; it was his face, and Jewel says, “He got them teeth.”

  It was a fact. It made him look a foot taller, kind of holding his head up, hangdog and proud too, and then we see her behind him, carrying the other grip—a kind of duck-shaped woman all dressed up, with them kind of hardlooking pop eyes like she was daring ere a man to say nothing. And there we set watching them, with Dewey Dell’s and Vardaman’s mouth half open and half-et bananas in their hands and her coming around from behind pa, looking at us like she dared ere a man. And then I see that the grip she was carrying was one of them little graphophones. It was for a fact, all shut up as pretty as a picture, and everytime a new record would come from the mail order and us setting in the house in the winter, listening to it, I would think what a shame Darl couldn’t be to enjoy it too. But it is better so for him. This world is not his world; this life his life.

  “It’s Cash and Jewel and Vardaman and Dewey Dell,” pa says, kind of hangdog and proud too, with his teeth and all, even if he wouldn’t look at us. “Meet Mrs Bundren,” he says.

  EDITORS’ NOTE

  This volume reproduces the text of As I Lay Dying that has been established by Noel Polk. The copy-text for this novel is William Faulkner’s own ribbon typescript setting copy, which has been emended to account for his revisions in proof, his indisputable typing errors, and certain other mistakes and inconsistencies that clearly demand correction. Faulkner typed and proofread this document himself, and it also bears alterations of varying degrees of seriousness by his editors.

  According to Faulkner’s sarcastic testimony in his notorious introduction to the Modern Library Sanctuary in 1932, he wrote As I Lay Dying “in six weeks, without changing a word.” The manuscript and typescript reveal that he did not, of course, write it “without changing a word,” although the dates on the manuscript indicate that he did indeed complete the holograph version in about eight weeks, between October 25 and December 29, 1929. “I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force,” he claimed later. “Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first words, I knew what the last word would be.… Before I began I said, I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I never touch ink again.” He wrote As I Lay Dying at the University of Mississippi power plant, where he was employed as a fireman and night watchman, mostly in the early morning, after everybody had gone to bed and power needs had diminished. He finished the typing, according to the date on the carbon typescript, on January 12, 1930, and sent it to Harrison Smith, who published it with very few editorial changes on October 6, 1930.

  Extant documents relevant to the editing of As I Lay Dying are the holograph manuscript and the carbon typescript, at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, and the ribbon typesetting copy, at the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas. No proof is known to survive; this is unfortunate, since there are a number of differences between the typescript and the published book that must have occurred in proof.

  American English continues to fluctuate; for example, a word may be spelled in more than one way, even in the same work. Commas are sometimes used expressively to suggest the movements of voice, and capitals are sometimes meant to give significances to a word beyond those it might have in its uncapitalized form. Since standardization would remove such effects, this volume preserves the spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and wording of the text established by Noel Polk, which strives to be as faithful to Faulkner’s usage as surviving evidence permits.

  The following notes were prepared by Joseph Blotner and are reprinted with permission from Novels 1930—1935, one volume of the edition of Faulkner’s collected works published by The Library of America, 1985. For further information, consult Calvin S. Brown, A Glossary of Faulkner’s South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Jessie McGuire Coffee, Faulkner’s Un-Christlike Christians: Biblical Allusions in the Novels (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983); André Bleikasten, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, rev. ed., 1973); and William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” ed. by Dianne L. Cox (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984).

  1 AS I LAY DYING] When asked the source of his title, Faulkner would sometimes quote from memory the speech of Agamemnon to Odysseus in the Odyssey, Book XI: “As I lay dying the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes for me as I descended into Hades.”

  2 laidby cotton] A cultivated crop that will require no further attention until it is picked at harvest time.

  3 pussel-gutted] Faulkner defined this to mean “bloated.”

  4 frailed] Variant of flailed. To whip or beat.

  5 laid-by] See note 2.

  6 I … falls.] See Matt. 10:29.

  7 Christmas masts] According to Faulkner, comic masks worn by children at Christmas and Halloween.

  8 sweat … Lord.] Cf. Gen. 3:19 and Matt. 13:12.

  9 I … chastiseth.] Anse’s garbled recollection of Heb. 12:6.

  10 busted out] Plowed or harrowed in preparation for planting.

  11 It … away.] Book Four of The Hamlet (1940) tells the story of the incursion of these “spotted horses” into Yoknapatawpha County in the first decade of the twentieth century.

  12 there … sinned] See Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep in Luke 15:7.

  13 Inverness] A town about ninety miles southwest of Oxford.

  14 aguer] An ague, a malar
ial fever.

  15 Yoknapatawpha county] The first appearance of the name of what Faulkner would call “my apocryphal county.” Mississippi’s Lafayette County, where Faulkner spent most of his life, is bounded on the south by the Yocona River. Some early maps transliterated the river’s Chickasaw name as Yockney-Patafa. According to Faulkner, it meant “water runs slow through flat land.”

  ABOUT THIS GUIDE

  The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group’s reading of three of William Faulkner’s greatest novels: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom! We hope that they will provide you with new ways of thinking and talking about three works that stand as major landmarks in the history of modern American literature, works that exemplify Faulkner’s bold stylistic and formal innovations, his creation of unforgettably powerful voices and characters, and his brilliant insight into the psychological, economic, and social realities of life in the South in the transition from the Civil War to the modern era. In their intellectual and aesthetic richness, these novels raise nearly endless possibilities for discussion. The questions below will necessarily be limited and are meant to open several, but certainly not all, areas of inquiry for your reading group.

  READER’S GUIDE

  1. Which are the most intelligent and sympathetic voices in the novel? With whom do you most and least identify? Is Faulkner controlling your closeness to some characters and not others? How is this done, given the seemingly equal mode of presentation for all voices?

  2. Even the reader of such an unusual book may be surprised to come upon Addie Bundren’s narrative on this page, if only because Addie has been dead since this page. Why is Addie’s narrative placed where it is, and what is the effect of hearing Addie’s voice at this point in the book? Is this one of the ways in which Faulkner shows Addie’s continued “life” in the minds and hearts of her family? How do the issues raised by Addie here relate to the book as a whole?