To Hal Smith...

Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cotton-house can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a f...

So I saved out the eggs and baked yesterday. The cakes turned out right well. We depend a lot on our chickens. They are good layers, what few we have left after the possums and such. Snakes, too, in t...

Pa and Vernon are sitting on the back porch. Pa is tilting snuff from the lid of his snuffbox into his lower lip, holding the lip outdrawn between thumb and finger. They look around as I cross the por...

It’s because he stays out there, right under the window, hammering and sawing on that goddamn box. Where she’s got to see him. Where every breath she draws is full of his knocking and sawing where she...

We watch him come around the corner and mount the steps. He does not look at us. “You ready?” he says. “If you’re hitched up,” I say. I say “Wait.” He stops, looking at pa. Vernon spits, without movin...

It was the sweetest thing I ever saw. It was like he knew he would never see her again, that Anse Bundren was driving him from his mother’s deathbed, never to see her in this world again. I always sai...

The first time me and Lafe picked on down the row. Pa dassent sweat because he will catch his death from the sickness so everybody that comes to help us. And Jewel don’t care about anything he is not ...

Anse keeps on rubbing his knees. His overalls are faded; on one knee a serge patch cut out of a pair of Sunday pants, wore iron-slick. “No man mislikes it more than me,” he says. “A fellow’s got to gu...

Durn that road. And it fixing to rain, too. I can stand here and same as see it with second-sight, a-shutting down behind them like a wall, shutting down betwixt them and my given promise. I do the be...

He has been to town this week: the back of his neck is trimmed close, with a white line between hair and sunburn like a joint of white bone. He has not once looked back. “Jewel,” I say. Back running, ...

When Anse finally sent for me of his own accord, I said “He has wore her out at last.” And I said a damn good thing and at first I would not go because there might be something I could do and I would ...

Pa stands beside the bed. From behind his leg Vardaman peers, with his round head and his eyes round and his mouth beginning to open. She looks at pa; all her failing life appears to drain into her ey...

Then I begin to run. I run toward the back and come to the edge of the porch and stop. Then I begin to cry. I can feel where the fish was in the dust. It is cut up into pieces of not-fish now, not-blo...

He could do so much for me if he just would. He could do everything for me. It’s like everything in the world for me is inside a tub full of guts, so that you wonder how there can be any room in it fo...

When they get it finished they are going to put her in it and then for a long time I couldn’t say it. I saw the dark stand up and go whirling away and I said “Are you going to nail her up in it, Cash?...

It was nigh to midnight and it had set in to rain when he woke us. It had been a misdoubtful night, with the storm making; a night when a fellow looks for most anything to happen before he can get the...

The lantern sits on a stump. Rusted, grease-fouled, its cracked chimney smeared on one side with a soaring smudge of soot, it sheds a feeble and sultry glare upon the trestles and the boards and the a...

I made it on the bevel. There is more surface for the nails to grip. There is twice the gripping-surface to each seam. The water will have to seep into it on a slant. Water moves easiest up and down o...

My mother is a fish....

It was ten o’clock when I got back, with Peabody’s team hitched on to the back of the wagon. They had already dragged the buckboard back from where Quick found it upside down straddle of the ditch abo...

“It’s not your horse that’s dead, Jewel,” I say. He sits erect on the seat, leaning a little forward, wooden-backed. The brim of his hat has soaked free of the crown in two places, drooping across his...

“It won’t balance. If you want it to tote and ride on a balance, we will have⁠—” “Pick up. Goddamn you, pick up.” “I’m telling you it won’t tote and it won’t ride on a balance unless⁠—” “Pick up! Pick...

He stoops among us above it, two of the eight hands. In his face the blood goes in waves. In between them his flesh is greenish looking, about that smooth, thick, pale green of cow’s cud; his face suf...

We are going to town. Dewey Dell says it won’t be sold because it belongs to Santa Claus and he has taken it back with him until next Christmas. Then it will be behind the glass again, shining with wa...

He goes on toward the barn, entering the lot, wooden-backed. Dewey Dell carries the basket on one arm, in the other hand something wrapped square in a newspaper. Her face is calm and sullen, her eyes ...

I told him not to bring that horse out of respect for his dead ma, because it wouldn’t look right, him prancing along on a durn circus animal and her wanting us all to be in the wagon with her that sp...

He comes up the lane fast, yet we are three hundred yards beyond the mouth of it when he turns into the road, the mud flying beneath the flickering drive of the hooves. Then he slows a little, light a...

It’s a hard country on man; it’s hard. Eight miles of the sweat of his body washed up outen the Lord’s earth, where the Lord Himself told him to put it. Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hard...

It was just before sundown. We were sitting on the porch when the wagon came up the road with the five of them in it and the other one on the horse behind. One of them raised his hand, but they was go...

The signboard comes in sight. It is looking out at the road now, because it can wait. New Hope. 3 mi. it will say. New Hope. 3 mi. New Hope. 3 mi. And then the road will begin, curving away into the t...

After they passed I taken the mule out and looped up the trace chains and followed. They were setting in the wagon at the end of the levee. Anse was setting there, looking at the bridge where it was s...

He sits the horse, glaring at Vernon, his lean face suffused up to and beyond the pale rigidity of his eyes. The summer when he was fifteen, he took a spell of sleeping. One morning when I went to fee...

So they finally got Anse to say what he wanted to do, and him and the gal and the boy got out of the wagon. But even when we were on the bridge Anse kept on looking back, like he thought maybe, once h...

Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant,...

Cash tried but she fell off and Darl jumped going under he went under and Cash hollering to catch her and I hollering running and hollering and Dewey Dell hollering at me Vardaman you vardaman you var...

When I told Cora how Darl jumped out of the wagon and left Cash sitting there trying to save it and the wagon turning over, and Jewel that was almost to the bank fighting that horse back where it had ...

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 paintbrus...

It wasn’t on a balance. I told them that if they wanted it to tote and ride on a balance, they would have to⁠—...

One day we were talking. She had never been pure religious, not even after that summer at the camp meeting when Brother Whitfield wrestled with her spirit, singled her out and strove with the vanity i...

In the afternoon when school was out and the last one had left with his little dirty snuffling nose, instead of going home I would go down the hill to the spring where I could be quiet and hate them. ...

When they told me she was dying, all that night I wrestled with Satan, and I emerged victorious. I woke to the enormity of my sin; I saw the true light at last, and I fell on my knees and confessed to...

On the horse he rode up to Armstid’s and came back on the horse, leading Armstid’s team. We hitched up and laid Cash on top of Addie. When we laid him down he vomited again, but he got his head over t...

But time I give him another sup of whisky and supper was about ready, he had done already bought a team from somebody, on a credit. Picking and choosing he were by then, saying how he didn’t like this...

Now there are seven of them, in little tall black circles. “Look, Darl,” I say; “see?” He looks up. We watch them in little tall black circles of not-moving. “Yesterday there were just four,” I say. T...

I happened to look up, and saw her outside the window, looking in. Not close to the glass, and not looking at anything in particular; just standing there with her head turned this way and her eyes ful...

“Here’s a place,” pa says. He pulls the team up and sits looking at the house. “We could get some water over yonder.” “All right,” I say. “You’ll have to borrow a bucket from them, Dewey Dell.” “God k...

Darl and Jewel and Dewey Dell and I are walking up the hill behind the wagon. Jewel came back. He came up the road and got into the wagon. He was walking. Jewel hasn’t got a horse any more. Jewel is m...

“Jewel,” I say, “whose son are you?” The breeze was setting up from the barn, so we put her under the apple tree, where the moonlight can dapple the apple tree upon the long slumbering flanks within w...

She was under the apple tree and Darl and I go across the moon and the cat jumps down and runs and we can hear her inside the wood. “Hear?” Darl says. “Put your ear close.” I put my ear close and I ca...

Against the dark doorway he seems to materialize out of darkness, lean as a racehorse in his underclothes in the beginning of the glare. He leaps to the ground with on his face an expression of furiou...

When I went to find where they stay at night, I saw something. They said, “Where is Darl? Where did Darl go?” They carried her back under the apple tree. The barn was still red, but it wasn’t a barn n...

We have been passing the signs for some time now: the drugstores, the clothing stores, the patent medicine and the garages and cafés, and the mile-boards diminishing, becoming more starkly re-accruent...

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...

I said, “I reckon a man in a tight might let Bill Varner patch him up like a damn mule, but I be damned if the man that’d let Anse Bundren treat him with raw cement ain’t got more spare legs than I ha...

It happened I am back of the prescription case, pouring up some chocolate sauce, when Jody comes back and says, “Say, Skeet, there’s a woman up front that wants to see the doctor and when I said What ...

Now it is wider and lighter, but the stores are dark because they have all gone home. The stores are dark, but the lights pass on the windows when we pass. The lights are in the trees around the court...

Darl has gone to Jackson. They put him on the train, laughing, down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of owls when he passed. “What are you laughing at?” I said. “Yes yes yes yes...

When he saw the money I said, “It’s not my money, it doesn’t belong to me.” “Whose is it, then?” “It’s Cora Tull’s money. It’s Mrs. Tull’s. I sold the cakes for it.” “Ten dollars for two cakes?” “Don’...

So when we stopped there to borrow the shovels we heard the graphophone playing in the house, and so when we got done with the shovels pa says, “I reckon I better take them back.” So we went back to t...