Peabody on Raw Cement — As I Lay Dying

They just aimed to ease it some, Cash says, and Peabody answers with aimed hell. On his table in Jefferson, the country doctor strips raw cement from a leg that rode six days on a springless wagon with a broken bone because the odour was getting noticeable and the family never had time to wait. Peabody says Bill Varner might patch a man like a mule in a pinch, but the man who let Anse Bundren treat him with hardware cement has more spare legs than Peabody has.

Cash claims the ride never bothered him much. Peabody will not hear it. You mean it never bothered Anse much, he says, no more than it bothered him to throw that poor devil down in the public street and handcuff him like a murderer. Peabody lists the skin Cash will lose getting the concrete off and the short leg he may hobble on for life. He bitterly imagines Anse feeding the leg through a sawmill blade and curing the whole family at once. When Peabody asks if it hurts, Cash says not to speak of, and sweat big as marbles runs down a face about the colour of blotting-paper.

Where is Anse now? Cash says he is taking back the spades he borrowed to bury his wife. Of course he borrowed tools for the grave and could not borrow the hole itself, Peabody snaps. Cash ends with it is what pa says, still speaking for the father while the doctor removes the trip's worst fix. If a builder trained to endure keeps calling the ordeal fine, what will next summer look like when the skin is gone and Anse is still returning favours?