her umbrella and her Bible wrapped up in the oilcloth, and him sitting on a upturned bucket on the stove-zinc where she had put him, dripping on to the floor. “I can’t get nothing outen him except about a fish,” she says. “It’s a judgment on them. I see the hand of the Lord upon this boy for Anse Bundren’s judgment and warning.”
“The rain never come up till after I left,” he says. “I had done left. I was on the way. And so it was there in the dust. You seen it. Cash is fixing to nail her, but you seen it.”
When we got there it was raining hard, and him sitting on the seat between us, wrapped up in Cora’s shawl. He hadn’t said nothing else, just sitting there with Cora holding the umbrella over him. Now and then Cora would stop singing long enough to say “It’s a judgment on Anse Bundren. May it show him the path of sin he is a-trodding.” Then she would sing again, and him sitting there between us, leaning forward a little like the mules couldn’t go fast enough to suit him.
“It was laying right yonder,” he says, “but the rain come up after I taken and left. So I can go and open the windows, because Cash ain’t nailed her yet.”
It was long a-past midnight when we drove the last nail, and almost dust-dawn when I got back home and taken the team out and got back in bed, with Cora’s nightcap laying on the other pillow. And be durned if even then it wasn’t like I could still hear Cora singing and feel that boy leaning forward between us like he was ahead of the mules, and still see Cash going up and down with that saw, and Anse standing there like a scarecrow, like he was a steer standing knee-deep in a pond and somebody come by and set the pond up on edge and he ain’t missed it yet.
It was nigh toward daybreak when we drove the last nail and toted it into the house, where she was laying on the bed with the window open and