William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
Jewel, fifteen feet behind me, looking
straight ahead, steps in a single stride through the window. Still staring
straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the
floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian dressed in
patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down, and steps in a single
stride through the opposite window and into the path again just as I come around
the corner. In single file and five feet apart and Jewel now in front, we go on
up the path toward the foot of the bluff.
[...]
When we enter she turns her
head and looks at us. She has been dead these ten days. I suppose it's having
been a part of Anse for so long that she cannot even make that change, if change
it be. I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon
of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind and that of the
minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end;
the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single
tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.
She looks at us. Only her eyes seem to move. It's like they touch us, not with sight or sense, but like the stream from a hose touches you, the stream at the instant of impact as dissociated from the nozzle as though it had never been
there. She does not look at Anse at all. She looks at me, then at the boy.
Beneath the quilt she is no more than a bundle of rotten sticks.
[...]
She watches me: I can feel her eyes. It's like she was shoving at me
with them. I have seen it before in women. Seen them drive from the room them
coming with sympathy and pity, with actual help, and clinging to some trifling
animal to whom they never were more than pack-horses. That's what they mean by
the love that passeth understanding: that pride, that furious desire to hide
that abject nakedness which we bring here with us, carry with us into operating
rooms, carry stubbornly and furiously with us into the earth again. I leave the
room. Beyond the porch Cash's saw snores steadily into the board. A minute later
she calls his name, her voice harsh and strong.
"Cash," she says; "you, Cash!"
http://www.scribd.com/doc/976219/Wil...As-I-Lay-Dying
