Jewel's Mother Is a Horse — As I Lay Dying

It's not your horse that's dead, Jewel, Darl says from the wagon seat. Jewel sits erect, wooden-backed, hat brim drooping across his wooden face like a helmet visor, staring across the valley toward the barn and shaping the invisible horse with his eyes. High above the house buzzards hang in narrowing circles against the quick thick sky, implacable, patient, portentous. But it's not your horse that's dead, Darl says again.

Goddamn you, Jewel answers. Goddamn you. I cannot love my mother because I have no mother, Darl thinks. Jewel's mother is a horse. The buzzards hang motionless while clouds give them an illusion of retrograde. Jewel shapes the horse in a rigid stoop like a hawk, hook-winged, waiting for the moving of it.

He enters the stall and waits until it kicks at him so he can slip past and mount on to the trough, peering out across the stall-tops toward the empty path before he reaches into the loft. Goddamn him. Goddamn him. The buzzards are waiting for us, Darl thinks, ready for the moving of it, ready for him. Darl needled. Jewel cursed. The birds waited while the Jefferson trip loaded behind them. What do you follow when one brother speaks in riddles and the other will only answer through the horse in the barn?