Words Are No Good — As I Lay Dying

Addie speaks at last, the only time in her own voice, from the spring after school where she hated her students and remembered her father's line that living means getting ready to stay dead. Whipping was the one way her blood touched theirs when words failed. Now you are aware of me, she thought with each switch blow, because teaching trapped her among strangers and only shared pain made her real inside their selfish lives.

She took Anse when he drove four miles out of his way past the schoolhouse and offered a farm and a name while she told him her kin were in the Jefferson cemetery. When Cash was born she learned that words are no good and never fit what they try to say. Anse's love was another empty jar. Cash broke her aloneness without needing a word. Darl brought the Jefferson burial promise as revenge through language. Whitfield came and went dressed in sin like a garment. Jewel's birth by lamplight, cap and suture watched, boiled the wild blood quiet.

She gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel and Vardaman to replace the child she robbed him of, so three children are his and not mine, and then she could get ready to die. Cora prayed over sin and salvation as mere words for people who never sinned nor loved nor feared. Will Whitfield ride through flood to confess to Anse what Addie already cleaned from her house?