Cash 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 paintbrush. 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,