“We ought to done it,” pa says. “I just never wanted to be beholden to none except her flesh and blood.”
“Who the hell can’t dig a damn hole in the ground?” Jewel says.
“It ain’t respectful, talking that way about her grave,” pa says. “You all don’t know what it is. You never pure loved her, none of you.” Jewel does not answer. He sits a little stiffly erect, his body arched away from his shirt. His high-coloured jaw juts.
Dewey Dell returns. We watch her emerge from the bushes, carrying the package, and climb into the wagon. She now wears her Sunday dress, her beads, her shoes and stockings.
“I thought I told you to leave them clothes to home,” pa says. She does not answer, does not look at us. She sits the package in the wagon and gets in. The wagon moves on.
“How many more hills now, Darl?” Vardaman says.
“Just one,” I say. “The next one goes right up into town.”
This hill is red sand, bordered on either hand by negro cabins; against the sky ahead the massed telephone lines run, and the clock on the courthouse lifts among the trees. In the sand the wheels whisper, as though the very earth would hush our entry. We descend as the hill commences to rise.
We follow the wagon, the whispering wheels, passing the cabins where faces come suddenly to the doors, white-eyed. We hear sudden voices, ejaculant. Jewel has been looking from side to side; now his head turns forward and I can see his ears taking on a still deeper tone of furious red. Three negroes walk beside the road ahead of us; ten feet ahead of them a white man walks. When we pass the negroes their heads turn suddenly with that expression of shock and instinctive outrage. “Great God,” one says; “what they got in that wagon?”