There wasn’t nothing else to do. It was either send him to Jackson, or have Gillespie sue us, because he knowed some way that Darl set fire to it.
And then I believed I knowed how Gillespie knowed about how his barn taken fire. She hadn’t said a word, hadn’t even looked at him, but when the fellows told him what they wanted and that they had come to get him and he throwed back, she jumped on him like a wild cat so that one of the fellows had to quit and hold her and her scratching and clawing at him like a wild cat[.]
She come in just at ten, before the clock had done striking. I let her in and she come in, walking fast . . . I locked the door and turned off the light and went on back. She was waiting. She didn’t look at me now.
Then we see it wasn’t the grip that made him look different; it was his face, and Jewel says, “He got them teeth.”
“It’s Cash and Jewel and Vardaman and Dewey Dell,” pa says, kind of hangdog and proud too, with his teeth and all, even if he wouldn’t look at us. “Meet Mrs Bundren,” he says.