Work Text:
fireproof
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you’re a needle in the hay
you’re the water at the door
you’re a million miles away
doesn’t matter anymore
- fireproof, the national
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VARDAMAN
Ma’s birthday or what woulda been her birthday but ain’t no more comes round and it comes slow but it still gets here and no one says happy birthday Ma, no one really says nothing atall because Pa’s got that music machine playing all the time and The New Mrs. Bundren sings along in a voice like swamp water so no one’s got any space to say happy birthday Ma even if they wanted to.
But I say it real quiet-like to myself, cup the words in my palms like I’m holding tadpoles, happy birthday Ma, like the words are tadpoles and I’ve gotta keep them in my hands or else they’ll slip out into the water and swim down the river just like Ma almost did that one time we went to lay down her life, Darl said.
Today Jewel’s got this face on that says don’t come near me if you come near me I’ll do something real bad so I stay away from him. Jewel’s always got that face on but today it’s really there and it’s bright and sharp like needles. So I stay away from him but I watch him, I watch him from far away with those tadpoles in my palms and I wish I could give him one or maybe two. He sits on the step of the barn in the sunlight and it falls on him in big red streaks, the sunlight does, and it lights up his white eyes so they’re almost see-through like two pieces of chipped glass in his face. That’s what Darl used to say about him, that Jewel’s eyes are like things that aren’t supposed to be there in someone’s face. Things like glass and wood and pieces of cups and plates. Cold things and fake things. But if those things ain’t real then that means Jewel ain’t real neither. But Jewel is real, I know he’s real because he’s sitting right there on the barn step and the light is touching him all over with red-painted palms and I know he’s real. Darl went to Jackson and Darl’s still real, I think. He went on a train and none of us went with him.
So I sit real quiet-like a little ways from the barn where Jewel is and I watch him and the light. His white eyes are saying lots of things and saying a lot of nothing too. Darl used to say Jewel’s got a wooden face like a doll’s got. But one time I saw him get a cut on his cheek and he bled like the rest of us and like the fish did before it wasn’t a fish no more and I don’t think wooden things are supposed to bleed like that. So that means Jewel is real because he bleeds. When Dewey Dell’s belly started getting bigger Jewel told me it’s because she ain’t bleeding no more but Dewey Dell is still real I think
From where I’m sitting a little ways from the barn I can hear the music machine mumbling like Pa used to mumble before he got them teeth. Now he smiles all the time and talks all the time about the same old things but not about Ma. So I can hear the music mumbling through the window and I can hear The New Mrs. Bundren’s voice like swamp water trying to drown everything. Lucky for me and Ma the words in my hands are tadpoles so they won’t drown, they swim on and on and on and on in my hands, happy birthday Ma happy birthday to you
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CASH
Only thing Jackson let us send Darl is letters but no one writes him none. I reckon nobody’s got much to say to him, ‘cept some real poisonous things, Jewel and Dewey Dell specially. Lately I been getting the notion that Pa don’t even remember him or just don’t want to remember him so he don’t write him no letters. Mrs Bundren ain’t got a clue about him so she don’t write him no letters telling him he got a new Ma. Vardaman can’t even write none, he don’t get the words right on the paper even when he tries, they get all scrambled up like eggs in a skillet, so Vardaman don’t write Darl no letters. I still ain’t so sure my own words wouldn’t get all scrambled if I tried to write him a little something so I don’t write Darl no letters. I ain’t got no lists for him, nothing to list out in numbers and measurements that make sense to me. So now my brother sits in a cell in Jackson with no letters in his lap and I get to wondering if that ever makes him laugh that spooky sorta empty sorta laugh I still hear in my sleep some dark nights when the wind don’t blow.
That record player spins all day long and I can hear it now, music talking to me through the walls. It’s a nice thing, music is. Reckon if I could seal up some of that there music in an envelope and send it to Darl in Jackson then maybe that might tell him some of the things I can’t write down, but I don’t send Darl no letters and neither does no one else. Anyways you can’t put music in an envelope just like you can’t put a woman in a box upside down.
Today’s Ma’s birthday. I hear Vardaman just yonder of the open window saying happy birthday Ma happy birthday to you. I sure hope Jewel don’t hear him. Lord knows he been looking so much like a statue these days ever since Mrs Bundren joined the house. Hardly ever moves from that step on the barn, waiting for a horse that ain’t coming back.
Now I don’t tell this to no one, but sometimes it makes me wanna shout at him, seeing him sitting all the time on that step when he could be out walking or running or swimming. I can’t walk no more and my legs itch to move and everyone else just sits round like they ain’t got no legs at all. But I don’t tell that to no one. It don’t bother none, if I ain’t thinking about it so much like Darl mighta done if it’da been him.
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DEWEY DELL
It just sorta happened. One day they didn’t know and then one day they did, and I remember how I got to thinking that maybe Darl sent them something, a letter or some such, telling them everything. But then I looked down at myself. It just sorta happened, just sprouted up in a big rush and then my dresses didn’t fit no more and there wasn’t no hiding it from anyone. And they all knew, like it dawned on them all at once instead of in a slow trickle. And no one said a word. No one but Jewel. And all he said was, “Well shit.” And that was it.
We sit in the silence sometimes, me and him, looking out at nothing and thinking nothing but our own thoughts. Darl ain’t there to breech those thoughts no more and poison them like he once did. We get to be quiet now.
He’s out on the barn step, his head bowed against the sun. I see them scars on his back and the sight makes my insides feel sick. The thing inside me gags. Not out of the ugliness of them - the scars ain’t ugly - but out of the memory of them, the fire that birthed them scars on his back. I still don’t know if he heard me screaming for him when he flew into that fire like a wild bird but none of us do any talking about that night so I’ll never know now. Guess it don’t matter. It’s all over.
I go out to the barn step. I walk carefully like I’m coming up upon a wild animal but I know Jewel don’t bite no more, he’s too tired for the biting of things, he barely eats these days. He don’t look at me when I come out but I know he knows I’m here in how the air round him shifts a little like it’s making room for me, even though he himself don’t move atall.
We sit quiet. I don’t touch him with my shoulder or my knee or my toes and he seems right content with that, with not being touched. I don’t wanna be touched these days neither, with that thing inside me touching all over my blood day in and day out. That’s why we get to be quiet like this because we don’t need nothing but the silence and the knowing that someone’s there to be silent with. Then he turns his back to me and I get to braiding the long paleness of his hair and we don’t speak till he says with a strange suddenness, “Can’t even go to her grave on her goddamn birthday.”
I keep at the braiding. He gets finicky when I stop, like a cat gets when you stop petting it behind the ears. So I keep at the braiding.
“Thought about stealin’ one of the neighbor’s horses,” he says in a hard whisper like he’s trying not to let the clouds hear him. “Just gittin’ it and runnin’ off to Jefferson to stand at her grave and not say a word. Just bein’ there with her, standin’ quiet with her, like she woulda wanted.”
I keep at the braiding.
“Everyone brings all their….their goddamn flowers to folk’s graves and she woulda hated that, flowers on the dirt above her. Flowers look pretty for a while and then they die just like people do. Them flowers they bring don’t mean nothin’ like folk think they do. They just things to make the dirt look pretty. Reckon they don’t give an honest lick ‘bout the person under the dirt but them flowers sure make it look like they do.”
I keep at the braiding and I think about the flowers I threw down onto her coffin before the dirt and I don’t really feel anything because I’ve gotten tired of feeling things and so I’ve stopped. The thing inside me has stolen that from me too.
“I’da just stood there with her,” Jewel says, quiet, fierce. “I wouldn’ta said a word. We coulda just been quiet, me and her, me above all the dirt and her beneath it.”
I wrap the bottom of the braid tight with a strand of his hair so that it stays put. I try not to look at his scars but my eyes go to them anyway, they always go to them.
“Darl woulda talked her damn head off,” Jewel mutters. “Never let her get one second’a peace and quiet. Bet she woulda clawed her way out the dirt and scratched his eyes out. What a sight that woulda been.”
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DARL
In my mind’s eye I can see him now, sitting there on the barn step, silver-haired and white-eyed in the crash of sunlight screaming down on him like a bright banshee. The light turns all of his blond to white so that he sits carved out of alabaster, unmoving and omnipotent, a portrait of a human but inhuman in its material. His hair has grown out to the middle of his back now, river-washed, curling at the ends where the hairs split in two in fuzzy, broken disarray; he wears no shirt to show off his burn scars that are raised and mottled along the forever darkened skin of his back. For a moment, he moves; his shoulder blades shift beneath the skin, leonine. Then, just as soon as he had moved, he goes still again, a statue blessed with motion but for only an ephemeral glance before it is spent and thus extinguished.
Darl has gone to Jackson but I can still see him now, the sunlight swelling and cutting around him in violent streaks of wild gold. His eyelashes jut out against the backdrop of light like long white needles.
It doesn’t matter where Darl is. It doesn’t matter if Darl is in a cell in Jackson or if he’s right beside you. He can still always see how the light falls on that marble statue on the step outside the barn, and he can always see the record player going round and round and singing its praises to that godforsaken house, and he can always see the bed that Addie Bundren died in now being a nest of renewed consummation, and he can always see Dewey Dell ballooning plump and ripe like a poisonous berry, and he can always see Vardaman lingering by wooden boxes, pressing his ear to their smooth surfaces, waiting for whatever is inside to tell him its secrets.
But I see him now, Jewel, his glass eyes flickering with fire in the flood of sundown. He takes in a deep breath but barely moves for it. He holds it for one, two, three; the only indication that he exhales is in the slight relaxing of the corner of his sharp, pale mouth.
The earth is waiting for the day he’ll take up flight and burn a hole clean through the sky, leaving only smoke and ash behind, dizzying swirls of white-red-gold until the sky stitches itself back up and swallows him whole. The earth will sing and scream for him and then - silence, total and complete, unbreakable, unfettered, his lost shadow burned into the barn step where Dewey Dell sits at his side, braiding his hair. Her hands will be suspended in motion, fingers still outstretched. It will take her a full minute to register his absence. Anse won’t notice. Mrs. Bundren is afraid of the boy so she’ll admit some quiet, unspoken relief to herself but never speak it aloud. Cash will sigh in his bed and scratch his leg and think I reckon I saw it coming he always had this look in his eyes like he was about to take off running and never come back hell I can scarcely say I blame him I’d run if I could run but it don’t bother none it don’t bother none. Vardaman will cry because he won’t understand; he’ll listen closer to wooden boxes, wondering if that’s where Jewel’s soul was sucked into, just like Addie’s. But he won’t find him. No one will. Just how Jewel wants it.
But I’ll always be there, in that silence he thinks is so inpenetrable, in those still and sunlit moments when he thinks no one is watching the light bend over him like a living thing. No one has to send me any letters to tell me the happenings of that house. I already know.