As I Lay Dying: Sections 29–45

He sits the horse, glaring at Vernon, his lean face suffused up to and beyond the pale rigidity of his eyes.

It was as though, so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a bland outside.

Cash’s face is also gravely composed; he and I look at one another with long probing looks, looks that plunge unimpeded through one another’s eyes and into the ultimate secret place where for an instant Cash and Dari crouch flagrant and unabashed in all the old terror and the old foreboding, alert and secret and without shame.

he and I look at one another with long probing looks, looks that plunge unimpeded through one another’s eyes and into the ultimate secret place where for an instant Cash and Dari crouch flagrant and unabashed in all the old terror and the old foreboding, alert and secret and without shame.

It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality.

It moves unbelievably fast; by that token Jewel realises at last that the rope is free, for I can see him sawing back on the reins, his head turned, as the log rears in a long sluggish lunge between us, bearing down upon the team.

"It would be sacrilege to try to.”

At the edge of the stream, knee-deep, Vardaman stands, bent forward a little, watching Vernon with rapt absorption.

“Jewel,” Vernon says, not loud, but his voice going full and clear along the water, peremptory yet tactful.

And she said “My daily life is an acknowledgment and expiation of my sin” and I said “Who are you, to say what is sin and what is not sin?"

I said, “Just because you have been a faithful wife is no sign that there is no sin in your heart, and just because your life is hard is no sign that the Lord’s grace is absolving you.”

I would think of sin as I would think of the clothes we both wore in the world’s face, of the circumspection necessary because he was he and I was I; the sin the more utter and terrible since he was the instrument ordained by God who created the sin, to sanctify that sin He had created.

I woke to the enormity of my sin; I saw the true light at last, and I fell on my knees and confessed to God and asked His guidance and received it.

“Just let me not perish before I have begged the forgiveness of the man whom I betrayed,” I prayed; “let me not be too late; let not the tale of mine and her transgression come from her lips instead of mine."

Praise to Thee in Thy bounteous and omnipotent love; O praise.