More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Since the Lord had gone to all the trouble of making them, he thought the least a man could do was go and look at them.
He’s worked like the world was on fire and nobody but him to put it out. It’s a shame to see him getting old.” I nodded. Grandpa had been hard on all of us. He’d kept himself stubborn and lonely, not allowing any of us to know him; we saw him and he saw us through his loneliness. But his loneliness and stubbornness humbled us too. We had to admire him.
Once we’d passed him we could never be behind again. We’d have to stay in front, and it was a lonely and a troublesome place.
We were the way we were; nothing could make us any different, and we suffered because of it. Things happened to us the way they did because we were ourselves. And if we’d been other people it wouldn’t have mattered. If we’d been Mushmouth or Jig Pendleton or that dog with the roman candle tied to his tail, it would have been the same; we’d have had to suffer whatever it was that they suffered because they were themselves. And there was nothing anybody could do but let it happen.
“Well,” Uncle Burley said, “they’ll grieve in this old land until you’d think they were going to live on it forever, then grieve some more because they know damn well they’re not going to live on it forever. And nothing’ll stop them but a six-foot hole.”
Grandpa had owned his land and worked on it and taken his pride from it for so long that we knew him, and he knew himself, in the same way that we knew the spring. His life couldn’t be divided from the days he’d spent at work in his fields. Daddy had told us we didn’t know what the country would look like without him at work in the middle of it; and that was as true of Grandpa as it was of Daddy. We wouldn’t recognize the country when he was dead.
