“You better stay here tonight,” I says, “and get a early start for New Hope tomorrow morning.” I was just sorry for them bone-gaunted mules. I told Rachel, I says, “Well, would you have had me turn them away at dark, eight miles from home? What else could I do,” I says. “It won’t be but one night, and they’ll keep it in the barn, and they’ll sholy get started by daylight.” And so I says, “You stay here tonight and early tomorrow you can go back to New Hope. I got tools enough, and the boys can go on right after supper and have it dug and ready if they want,” and then I found that girl watching me. If her eyes had a been pistols, I wouldn’t be talking now. I be dog if they didn’t blaze at me. And so when I went down to the barn I come on them, her talking so she never noticed when I come up.
“You promised her,” she says. “She wouldn’t go until you promised. She thought she could depend on you. If you don’t do it, it will be a curse on you.”
“Can’t no man say I don’t aim to keep my word,” Bundren says. “My heart is open to ere a man.”
“I don’t care what your heart is,” she says. She was whispering, kind of, talking fast. “You promised her. You’ve got to. You—” Then she seen me and quit, standing there. If they’d been pistols, I wouldn’t be talking now. So when I talked to him about it, he says,
“I give her my promise. Her mind is set on it.”
“But seems to me she’d rather have her ma buried close by, so she could—”
“It’s Addie I give the promise to,” he says. “Her mind is set on it.”
So I told them to drive it into the barn because it was threatening rain again, and that supper was about ready. Only they didn’t want to come in.