Similepedia - Category - Title-AsILayDying

Pa looks at him, his face streaming slowly. It is as though upon a face carved by a savage caricaturist a monstrous burlesque of all bereavement flowed.

Pa comes back along the bank. He stops for a while and looks at us, hunched, mournful, like a failing steer or an old tall bird.

So it was Cash holding to the horse when it come splashing and scrambling up the bank, moaning and groaning like a natural man.

Soon as the wagon got tilted good, to where the current could finish it, the log went on. It headed around the wagon and went on good as a swimming man could have done. It was like it had been sent there to do a job and done it and went on.

The buzzard is as still as if he were nailed to it.

Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian ….

Standing in a litter of chips, he is fitting two of the boards together. Between the shadow spaces they are yellow as gold, like soft gold, bearing on their flanks in smooth undulations the marks of the adze blade; a good carpenter, Cash is.

Jewel sits on his horse like they were both made out of wood, looking straight ahead.

Jewel’s eyes look like pale wood in his high-blooded face.

It was a buzzard. It looked around and saw me and went on down the hall, spraddle-legged, with its wings kind of hunkered out, watching me first over one should and then over the other, like a old baldheaded man.

It’s like they touch us, not with sight or sense, but like the stream from a hose touches you, the stream at the instant of impact as dissociated from the nozzle as though it had never been there.

It must have been like a piece of rotten cheese coming into an ant-hill, in that ramshackle wagon that Albert said folds were scared would fall all to pieces before they could get it out of town ….

It looks peaceful, like machinery does after you have watched it and listened to it for a long time.

It was just like he knowed, like he could see through the walls and into the next ten minutes.

It was like he was outside of it too, same as you, and getting mad at it would be kind of like getting mad at a mud-puddle that splashed you when you stepped in it.

Jewel and Vernon are in the river again. From here they do not appear to violate the surface at all; it is as though it had severed them both at a single blow, the two torsos moving with infinitesimal and ludicrous care upon the surface.

Its head flashes back, tooth-cropped; its eyes roll in the dusk like marbles on a gaudy velvet cloth as he strikes it upon the face with the back of the curry-comb.

It wheels up like a motionless hand lifted above the profound desolation of the ocean; beyond it the red road lies like a spoke of which Addie Bundren is the rim.

The first harsh, sparse, swift drops rush through the leaves and across the ground in a long sigh, as though of relief from intolerable suspense.

The path looks like a crooked limb blown against the bluff.

Vardaman comes back and picks up the fish. It slides out of his hands, smearing wet dirt onto him, and flops down, dirtying itself again, gapmouthed, goggle-eyed, hiding into the dust like it was ashamed of being dead, like it was in a hurry to get back hid again.

Upon the end of it a long gout of foam hangs like the beard of an old man or a goat.

Upon the dark ground the chips look like random smears of soft pale paint on a black canvas.

Upon his face the rain streams, slow as cold glycerin.

Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in cedar trees smells.

We can hear the saw in the board. It sounds like snoring.

When I reach the spring and get down and hitch the team, the sun has gone down behind a bank of black cloud like a topheavy mountain range, like a load of cinders dumped over there, and there is no wind.

When I looked back at my mule it was like he was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated outen it like it was the more the sweat, the broader the land; the more the sweat, the tighter the house because it would take a tight house for Cora, to hold Cora like a jar of milk in the spring: you got to have a tight jar or you’ll need a powerful spring, so if you have a big spring, why then you have the incentive to have tight, wellmade jars, because it is your milk, sour or not, because you would rather have milk that will sour than to have milk that wont, because you are a man.

We could watch the rope cutting down into the water, and we could feel the weight of the wagon kind of blump and lunge lazy like, like it just as soon as not, and that rope cutting down into the water hard as a iron bar. We could hear the water hissing on it like it was red hot. Like it was a straight iron bar stuck into the bottom and us holding the end of it, and the wagon lazing up and down, kind of pushing and prodding at us like it had come around and got behind us, lazy like, like it just as soon as not when it made up its mind.

This time Jewel is riding upon it, clinging to it, until it crashes down and flings him forward and clear and Mack leaps forward into a thin smell of scorching meat and slaps at the widening crimson-edged holes that bloom like flowers in his undershirt.

They put him on the train, laughing, down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of owls when he passed.

The trees look like chickens when they ruffle out into the cool dust on the hot days.

The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads ….

The saw sounds like it is asleep.

The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July ….

… the two flames glare up for a steady instant. Then they go out as though someone had leaned down and blown upon them.

The water was cold. It was thick, like slush ice.

They are like two figures in a Greek frieze, isolated out of all reality by the red glare.

Then the sound of Cash’s sawing comes in from that way. It is like a dog outside the house, going back and forth around the house to whatever door you come to, waiting to come in.

Then he said suddenly, driving his eyes at me like two hounds in a strange yard: “That’s what I come to see you about.”

It is the cow; with a single whistling breath she rushes between us and through the gap and into the outer glare, her tail erect and rigid as a broom nailed upright to the end of her spine.

It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between.

He has put on a clean shirt; his hair, wet, is combed smooth down on his brow, smooth and black as if he had painted it onto his head.

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 glares a moment longer at me, then at the roof overhead, then he leaps toward the stall where the horse screams. It plunges and kicks, the sound of the crashing blows sucking up into the sound of the flames. They sound like an interminable train crossing an endless trestle.

He begins to move slowly backward from the bed, his eyes round, his pale face fading into the dusk like a piece of paper pasted on a failing wall, and so out of the door.

He is looking down at her peaceful, rigid face fading into the dusk as though darkness were a precursor of the ultimate earth, until at last the face seems to float detached upon it, lightly as the reflection of a dead leaf.

He looked at me, his eyes round and black in the middle like when you throw a light in a owl’s face.

He looks back at us, his eyes and mouth three round holes in his face on which the freckles look like english peas on a plate.

He looked like he was laying there in the water on his face, rocking up and down a little, looking at something on the bottom.

He looked just like a old bundle of clothes kind of washing up and down against the bank.

He and Anse are on the porch when I come out, the boy sitting on the steps, Anse standing by a post, not even leaning against it, his arms dangling, the hair pushed and matted up on his head like a dipped rooster.

For the Lord aimed for him to do and not to spend too much time thinking, because his brain it’s like a piece of machinery: it wont stand a whole lot of racking.

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 traveling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again.

Because I said If you wouldn’t keep on sawing and nailing at it until a man can’t sleep even and her hands laying on the quilt like two of them roots dug up and tried to wash and you couldn’t get them clean.

Back running, tunneled between the sets of bobbing mule ears, the road vanishes beneath the wagon as though it were a ribbon and the front axle were a spool.

Against the jungle Jewel’s house looks like a patchwork quilt hung on a line.

Below the sky sheet-lightning slumbers lightly; against it the trees, motionless, are ruffled out to the last twig, swollen, increased as though quick with young.

Beside his chair his brogans sit. They look as though they had been hacked with a blunt axe out of pig-iron.

Cash made it clockshape, like this with every joint and seam beveled and scrubbed with the plane, tight as a drum and neat as a sewing basket, and they had laid her in it head to foot so it wouldn’t crush her dress.

But now it was like we had all – and by a kind of telepathic agreement of admitted fear – flung the whole thing back like covers on the bed and we all sitting bolt upright in out nakedness, staring at one another ….

But I did not realize the reason for the rope until I saw the log. It surged up out of the water and stood for an instance upright upon that surging and heaving desolation like Christ.

He looks like right after the maul hits the steer and it no longer alive and dont yet know that it is dead.

He looms tall above us as we squat; he looks like a figure carved clumsily from tough wood by a drunken caricaturist.

I strike at them, striking, they wheeling in a long lunge, the buggy wheeling onto two wheels and motionless like it is nailed to the ground and the horses motionless like they are nailed by the hind feet to the center of a whirling plate.

I saw Vardaman rise and go to the window and strike the knife into the fish, the blood gushing, hissing like steam but I could not see.

I noticed then how he was beginning to hump – a tall man and young – so that he looked already like a tall bird hunched in the cold weather, on the wagon seat.

I knew that it had been, not that they had dirty noses, but that we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching, and that only through the blows of the switch could my blood and their blood flow as one stream.

I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the dark land talking of God’s love and His beauty and His sin; hearing the dark voicelessness in which the words are the deeds, and the other words that are not deeds, that are just the gaps in people’s lacks, coming down like the cries of the geese out of the wild darkness in the old terrible nights, fumbling at the deeds like orphans to whom are pointed out in a crowd two faces and told, That is your father, your mother.

I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless ….

It clucks and murmurs among the spokes and about the mules’ knees, yellow, skummed with flotsam and with thick soiled gouts of foam as though it had sweat, lathering, like a driven horse.

In the tall moonlights his eyes look like spots of white paper pasted on a high small football.

In the lamp his saw-dusted arms look like sand.

… I knew something was passing but I couldn’t even think of time then all of a sudden I knew that something was it was wind blowing over me it was like the wind came and blew me back from where it was I was not blowing the room and Vardaman asleep and all of them back under me again and going on like a piece of cool silk dragging across my naked legs.

I had not thought that water in July could be so cold. It is like hands molding and prodding at the very bones.

Her eyes look like lamps blaring up just before the oil is gone.

Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks.

He sounded like a cricket in the grass, a little one.

His eyes are closed, his face is gray, his hair plastered in a smooth smear across his forehead as though done with a paint brush.

His eyes look like pieces of a broken plate.

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

… his teeth, set in pale gums, are parted a little as if he had been laughing quietly.

His mouth is bluish, like a circle of weathered rubber.

About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it’s liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.

Title-As I Lay Dying