Darl XI (128-136)

"How Jewel Got His Horse"

Darl remembers how Jewel got his horse. For 5 months, Jewel was falling asleep all the time. Turns out he was working at night to save up for the horse.

In the meantime, Addie made the others help with his chores, paying Dewey Dell to do the milking for Jewel because she thought Darl was sick. Sometimes she'd secretly make things for Jewel and hide them. Darl realized Jewel was gone every night because of the lantern and at first thought it was a woman. Cash followed him one night and learned the truth, but doesn't tell.

Note Addie's hypocrisy:

"She would fix him special things to eat and hide them for him. And that may have been when I first found it out, that Addie Bundren should be hiding anything she did, who had tried to teach us that deceit was such that, in a world where it was, nothing else could be very bad or very important, not even poverty" (130).

There is also the 800 lb. gorilla in the room:

"It was as though, so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a bland outside" (134).

This isn't all about the horse, though:

"Jewel looked at pa, his eyes paler than ever. 'He wont never eat a mouthful of yours,' he said. 'Not a mouthful. I'll kill him first...'"

And at this moment, Darl knows he knows the big 'secret' about Jewel:

"And then I knew that I knew. I knew that as plain on that day as I knew about Dewey Dell on that day." (136)