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21 " Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them. —CORMAC MCCARTHY, Child of God, 1973 "
― William Gay , Provinces of Night
22 " It was a place if not hell then certainly the room across the hall from it. "
23 " From a high point of cupping the breast of the prettiest girl in a three-county area things could only go downhill... "
24 " He could tell Fleming he was a musician but he could not communicate what the music said to him or said to the people he played it for. The music told itself, it made some obscure connection for which there were no words. The music was its own story, but a man could dip into the vast reservoir of folk and blues lines and phrases and images and construct his own story: though upon performing it and without it losing any relevance to his own life it now belonged to the audience as well. It was something he could not fathom. The old songs with juryrigged verses like bodies cobbled up out of bones from a thousand skeletons. Songs about death and lost love and rambling down the line because sometimes down the line was the only place left. Songs that treated the most desperate of loss with a dark sardonic humour. "I'm going where the climate suits my clothes", the song said, not saying the frustration and despair that created it, saying that in the sheer lonesomeness of the sound, in the old man's driving banjo. There was an eerie timelessness about it that said it could have been written a thousand years ago, or it could have been an unfinished song about events that had not yet played themselves out. "
25 " He seemed to be drawing inward toward some point at which he would be reduced to the fundamental essence of himself. "
26 " Folks called this place haunted, felt the emanations of an unspeakable act moving outward like ripples on water. "
27 " Bloodworth was not fooled, he had these folks' number, he'd been reading their mail walking a lifetime in their shoes. Beyond the mothriddled light their faces were rapt and transfixed, he sang about death as if it was the only kept promise out of all life's false starts and switchbacks, all there was at the end of the dusty road, his voice told them about calm and quiet and eternal rest. No landlord, no cotton to chop, no ticket at the company store growing like a cancer. Just time itself frozen like leaves in winter ice and nothing in the round world to worry about or dread. "
28 " As night deepened all he could see was the shifting line of fire, like some malfunction in the wiring of the world itself, as if the very night had combusted and was creeping incrementally toward him. "
29 " But blood is never left up to you, blood will call to blood. You can’t deny your own kin. "
30 " Came then plague days of desolation when loss ravaged him like a fever. The house was empty and dead without her. A place of ice, of perpetual winds. He heard her voice at odd times, echoes of things she’d said. He awoke once in the night and her soft laughter had just faded into silence. Once he distinctly felt her hand lie on his shoulder. Before she’d shared his bed, life had been pointless, but now it had become unbearable. She had appeared from nowhere and returned to it, but she’d taken over his life, left with a lien on his body, a mortgage on his soul. "
31 " Songs about death and lost love and rambling down the line because sometimes down the line was the only place left. "
32 " After a while a three-quarter moon eased up over the treeline and the dusty road went white as milk, Rorshach patches of grass bleeding through the white dust that rose and subsided with Boyd's footfalls. "
33 " You don't learn that, she said. It's just there. It sounds like he spent his whole life trying to unlearn it. Trying to forget it. "
34 " He went through the back door into the long narrow kitchen, feeling as he always did the sudden onslaught of time, enthralled by the myriad smells of the kitchen: coffee and cloves and cinnamon, the heavy fruity odor of basketed apples and the faintly sour smell of dried peaches, and some other odor, rich and dark and mysterious, that was the odor of time itself, of days the old woman had stacked into years as carefully as a mason lays one stone atop another to construct a wall. "
35 " a moving river of light that flowed above the dark water like its negative image and attained a transient and fragile dominion over the provinces of night. BOOK THREE "
36 " Listen, he said vehemently. Somebody's going to have to say what they really mean and then do what they say they will. All this lying. All this bullshit and pretending. It's just wasting lives, wasting time, everything's just a waste.She was looking at him curiously. That's just the way people are. The way the world is. What are you trying to do, fix the world?I don't want to fix the world. Fuck the world. Just the little part of it that I have to live on. You and that old man. Folks starting babies andd walking off like that's got nothing to do with them. People walking off while you're asleep and never coming back. Leaving a note. A Goddamned note. Old people living a half mile apart and wanting to see each other and dying without doing it. Now that's crazy for you. That's what's crazy. "
37 " The screen door opened, slapped loudly shut. An enormous woman had come onto the porch, a woman with a fierce turtle like face and wild frizzy carrot colored hair. She was wearing a bright yellow tent size dress with dark half moons of sweat fanning out from the armpits. "
38 " I can do this, he was thinking. All I have to do is just be as normal as everyone else. All I have to do is just not blow apart like a two-dollar clock. Just pick words and put one of them after the other like a baby learning to walk, like a drunk carefully crossing the street. "
39 " If there’s one thing I never mistook about it’s the sound of a whiskey bottle lid being screwed off. There ain’t nothing else in the world sounds like it. "
40 " He had no faith in the permanence of any of this. What he’d seen of life had shown him that the world had little of comfort or assurance. He suspected that there were no givens, no map through the maze. Here in falling dark with the world rolling simultaneously toward him and away from him everything seemed no more than random. Life blindsides you so hard you can taste the bright copper blood in your mouth then it beguiles you with a gift of profound and appalling beauty. "