Whose Son Are You, Jewel — As I Lay Dying

Jewel, Darl says, whose son are you? The breeze was setting up from the barn, so they put her under the apple tree where moonlight dapples the long slumbering flanks within which now and then she talks in little trickling bursts. Darl took Vardaman to listen. A cat leaped down and flicked away with silver claw and silver eye into the shadow.

Your mother was a horse, Darl says, but who was your father, Jewel? You goddamn lying son of a bitch, Jewel answers twice, his eyes like spots of white paper pasted on a high small football in the tall moonlight. After supper Cash's cement leg began to sweat from the sun shining on it all day. They poured water over it and his leg below the cement looked like it had been boiled. I'm obliged, Cash says. It feels fine.

Jewel, Darl says again, who was your father, Jewel? Goddamn you. Goddamn you. Dewey Dell wipes Cash's face with her dress hem while they tell him to sleep and Cash says he is right obliged. The moon holds Darl's question and Jewel's curse beside a leg that looks boiled and still feels fine. Will Vardaman put his ear to the wood and believe she is looking at him through it?