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Kindle Notes & Highlights
WERE THERE DARKER PROVINCES of night he would have found them.
FATE’S ALL RIGHT. HE’S plainspoken but I like him. I’ve rode with him a lot of times.
All the trouble I ever was in, said Ballard, was caused by whiskey or women or both. He’d often heard men say as much. All the trouble I ever was in was caused by gettin caught, said the black.
Canis Major.
McCormac knows the constellations and still write about these people.
You never would be satisfied with it, said the smith. I can get a new one for four dollars. I’d better to have thisn and it right than two new ones. Well. Tell me somethin. All right. The smith stuck the axe in the fire and gave the crank a few turns. Yellow flames spat out from under the blade. They watched. You want to keep your fire high, said the smith. Three or four inches above the tuyer iron. You want to lay a clean fire with good coal that’s not laid out in the sun.
He really does just launch into teaching him with no explaination....I didn't get this until the second time I read it. It illuminates both their personalities and inability to connect.
They waited while the axe heated. The smith took a splayed cigarstub from his apron pocket and lit it with a coal from the forge.
this means he's getting relaxed and into it.
It’s like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye’d just as well to do it all wrong.
He heard the back door shut. He saw her go along the muddied rut of a path to the outhouse. He looked at the woman. She was rolling out biscuits at the sideboard. He looked quickly back out the window. The girl opened the outhouse door and closed it behind her. Ballard lowered his face into the steam from his cup.
what an odd juxtaposition
I’ll say one thing about Lester though. You can trace em back to Adam if you want and goddamn if he didn’t outstrip em all. That’s the god’s truth. Talkin about Lester … You all talk about him. I got supper waitin on me at the house.
I did not get the first time that this is the narrator talking talking to unknown people (maybe the reder) about Lesters predecesors and that doesn't even explain what is to come
BALLARD STOOD AT THE door. There was no car in the driveway.
why would you say there is no car?
He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he’s sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man’s life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of
...more
this paragraph is an interlude in the scene. It's great . Read it slowly.
He had not stopped cursing. Whatever voice spoke him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity, a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath.
he's going crazy
As he neared the town the roosters were calling. Perhaps they sensed a relief in the obscurity of night that the traveler could not read, though he kept watch eastward. Perhaps some freshness in the air. Everywhere across the sleeping land they called and answered each to each. As in olden times so now. As in other countries here.
Read this carefully. McCormac writes beatufully.
