It wasn’t nothing else to do. It was either send him to Jackson, or have Gillespie sue us, because he knowed some way that Darl set fire to it. I don’t know how he knowed, but he did. Vardaman see him do it, but he swore he never told nobody but Dewey Dell and that she told him not to tell nobody. But Gillespie knowed it. But he would ’a’ suspicioned it sooner or later. He could have done it that night just watching the way Darl acted.
And so pa said, “I reckon there ain’t nothing else to do,” and Jewel said,
“You want to fix him now?”
“Fix him?” pa said.
“Catch him and tie him up,” Jewel said. “Goddamn it, do you want to wait until he sets fire to the goddamn team and wagon?”
But there wasn’t no use in that. “There ain’t no use in that,” I said. “We can wait till she is underground.” A fellow that’s going to spend the rest of his life locked up, he ought to be let to have what pleasure he can have before he goes.
“I reckon he ought to be there,” pa says. “God knows, it’s a trial on me. Seems like it ain’t no end to bad luck when once it starts.”
Sometimes I ain’t so sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he ain’t. Sometimes I think it ain’t none of us pure crazy and ain’t none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It’s like it ain’t so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.