Fandom: As I Lay Dying.
Author: Epigone.
Pairing: Dewey Dell/Lafe.
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: Sexual innuendo, abortion, language, first-person narration, present tense.
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: Lafe takes care of business.
Date Written: November(?) 2002.
Author's Notes: Written as an English assignment, based on William Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying.
Feedback: Can be sent to kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
Responsibility
Yesterday she said we was over. We was over, because I put it there inside her, and Darl knew, and soon they'd all know.
What man can say what she wants? I went picking with her, down in the high-blowing cotton, but I been picking all my life, and didn't nothing ever come of it before but horsefly bites and burnt skin on the back of my neck. I gathered the cotton and put it in the burlap bag, maybe, but she was right alongside me, gathering and bagging, too. That's a fact. I ain't seen her since, either, excepting the other morning when she told me about what she had inside her.
I still see that brother of hers sometimes, though, the one she says knows about what we done in the field. That ain't my concern, but still I see him when I'm passing by on the dust road toward town, and he stands like one of them white-barked dead old trees on the hill and watches me. He's up on that hill now, I reckon, but I don't look. I just rein in the mules and slide off my seat and don't think about his eyes. They've all of 'em got them same eyes, even her: funny eyes, flat, fast to follow you when you make a movement; Pa said he never trusted nary a man with eyes that looked more to belong to a cat than a person, and I'm inclined to agree. Don't trust nary a woman of that sort, neither. Darl looked at me with those eyes when I pulled out with the wagon last time, and she looked at me the same when I seen her yesterday at Tull's. Like I can't plant or harvest a field without someone needing to tell me I done wrong.
She was coming to borrow eggs, because their chickens ain't getting fed -- not with Anse all the time ducking to stay out of the sun and Jewel wandering around silent and Darl always up on that hill, watching the road -- and so they sure ain't laying. And then Tull was offering me all of fifteen dollars to help with splitting rails up there that same day. Somehow, I think she planned it to turn out that way. She got hold of me when I drove up, and we went behind the barn, and she said I'd done it.
It can't be more'n strawberry size yet, but I figure she'll show, sooner or later, and once she's that far gone there ain't nothing more to do. I won't have her pointing to it and putting my name on it -- I didn't do nothing but pick, and she can't say it's otherwise. I got a good farm to take over from Pa in a few years' time, and the crops are coming up hardy; there's plenty of cash on the way, and damned if I'm going to have to use any of it to keep some old ragged-clothes girl with shifty cat-eyes and a bulge she'll bear and credit to me. I can spare ten dollars now, sure, to stave that off down the road.
The dust is a thick red around my ankles, sticky and pulling, but I think that this too shall pass; this is not blood money, but insurance. I got a good time to wait for. I can give up ten dollars today and still have it to wait for.
Darl ain't in the yard to watch me come in, but the littler one is, Vardaman, gawking up at the crinkling green in my hand. He ain't who I come for, and he ain't who I have to answer to, if there's ere a man I have to answer to. I don't pay him no mind.
I look for her instead. I got something to pay her, here and now, but then it's done and clean and gone. And it'll never have been mine at all.
~Fin~
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