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41 " When I was your age these warm nights you couldn’t of held me down with a log chain. I’d do anything. I’d wake up in Alaska hung over with my beard froze to the ground. I’d hang around and pick me up one of them young girls that wanders around. Take her down by the tie yard and throw a tool to her. "
― William Gay , Provinces of Night
42 " You afoot, the old man said. I knowed your walk the minute I seen you. You always walked like you had the world in your hip pocket. You ain’t though, have you? Last time I seen you you was in a fine car. You had big plans. "
43 " Sometimes I think you’re just too sweet to die Sometimes I think you’re just too sweet to die Another time I think you oughta be buried alive. —RICHARD “RABBIT” BROWN, James Alley Blues, 1927 "
44 " The last time I saw my woman she had a wine glass in her hand. She was drinking down her troubles with a no good sorry man. "
45 " I seen a pretty woman in a red dress, the old man said. And then I seen her take it off. What else is there? "
46 " Fleming was silent. He’d been given the kiss of death. He did not want to be nice. He wanted to be wild and reckless, a rake and a rambling man, the highwayman who came riding, riding up to the old inn door. "
47 " As dying men are told to have their past unreel before them Fleming had been gainsaid a kaleidoscopic view of his future. In the space of seconds whole sequences unspooled before him. They stood before a Bible-holding preacher. Hand in hand they stood before a crib where lay their firstborn. They stood shoulder to shoulder against a world that did its utmost to drive them to their knees and they prevailed. She knelt before his grave, tousled gray curls swinging, and imbedded into the clay a single white rose. There was a mist of tears in her eyes. He saw all this instantly, not as a future cast in stone but as a swirling maelstrom of events that could be mastered and controlled. It was a future to aspire to. Fleming considered himself a fairly stubborn and persistent person, and he planned to aspire as hard as he could. "
48 " I’ve been through hell and just barely got scorched. "
49 " You always was a skinny child but turn sideways you just ain’t there atall. "
50 " There was something mystic about crossroads, they doubled the options, confused both pursuer and pursued. "
51 " She suddenly heard a wave of sound, cicadas and whippoorwills and crickets that just abruptly assailed her, and she wondered if they'd just begun or if they had already been calling and all she'd heard was the banjo music, ancient and myth-laden and somehow enticing, like sound seeping through the cracks of a place you couldn't get to anymore "
52 " She had grown stingy with words, whole days spent in sullen silence, as if her supply of words was being exhausted and she must parcel them out one by one. "
53 " It ain't never far to a bootlegger "
54 " From the shade of the Ivy covered porch the old men sat in ladder back chairs and watched the hot blacktop. They’d sit day long and wait for something to happen, anything to happen, waiting for the road to entertain them. These were old man in clean shirts and suspenders and pants so roomy they could’ve held another old-timer and shoes split down the sides for comfort. "
55 " Then the babies started comin, the old man went on. They never heard of rubbers, I reckon, or maybe they figured that that would be cheatin. One of the youngest of them girls told me one time, she was drinkin a little or she never would have told it, she said her sisters would bury them babies in widemouth Mason fruit jars. "
56 " He stayed out of the house, he was much of the time in the woods, he felt like some animal half domesticated but ultimately unable to resist the feral ways of the forest. The spring nights were fecund and warm and alive, and there were nights he did not come in at all. "
57 " Together they knitted whole the fabric of night where violence had rent it. Everything was always changing and everything was always the same. "
58 " She was as square and solid and unlovely as a wooden packing crate. Her high complexioned moon shaped face bloomed with the high blood pressure she suffered from and her hair was dyed a hard bright orange that nature would have been hard put to replicate. "
59 " They sold records out of the trunk of the Model A. They sold them with no trouble at all, folks digging up change out of their purses so worn the faces denominating it looked spectral, mere ghosts of themselves. They sold them to folks who did not even own phonographs, who had no prospects of owning one, folks who seemed to regard the records as talismans. Who handled them reverently and turned them to the light and studied the spiraling grooves as if they'd find there some physical evidence of their own provisional existence, as if their very lives were somehow encoded there "
60 " Music had been his undoing, he told the boy in ironic self-deprecation. His bane and his salvation. It had gotten him through tough times that would have otherwise been unbearable and it had made everything else he had gone at twice as hard. "