Darl Laughing on the Train to Jackson — As I Lay Dying

They put him on the train, laughing, down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of owls when he passed, Darl says of himself. What are you laughing at, he asks. Yes yes yes yes yes comes back. Two men in mismatched coats with bulging hip pockets seat him by the window. Their necks are shaved to a hairline like Cash's chalk-line boards. Is it the pistols you are laughing at, Darl asks. Is it because you hate the sound of laughing?

One guard rides backward because the state's money has a face to each backside and a backside to each face, riding on the state's money which is incest. A nickel has a woman and a buffalo, two faces and no back, and Darl does not know what that is. His spyglass from France showed a woman and a pig with two backs and no face, and he knows what that is. Yes yes yes yes yes yes lengthens while he keeps asking is that why you are laughing.

His mind cuts to the wagon hitched in the square, mules motionless, reins on the seat-spring, looking like any other wagon yet carrying imminent departure like a train. Jewel stands beside it. Dewey Dell and Vardaman on the seat and Cash on a pallet eat bananas from a paper bag. Darl is our brother, our brother Darl, then a cage in Jackson with grimed hands in quiet interstices looking out while he foams. Yes yes yes runs to eight times. If exile is already decided, what picture keeps returning when every answer shrinks to yes?