More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Kenneth Rattner, which was his name.
East of Knoxville Tennessee the mountains start, small ridges and spines of the folded Appalachians that contort the outgoing roads to their liking.
Marion Sylder
carpenter’s apprentice for Increase Tipton,
Marion Sylder
S aturday afternoons Marion Sylder would come in the store
this affluent son returned upon them bearing no olive branch but hard coin
He turned twenty-one in August.
he was a lover of storms.
a concrete tank set in the ground that had once been used to mix insecticide. These six years past it had served as a crypt which the old man kept and guarded.
cutting a spiderstick as he went to clear the way where huge nets were strung tree to tree across the path
far in the distance the long purple welts of the Great Smokies.
In spring the mountain went violent green, billowing low under the sky. It never came slowly. One morning it would just suddenly be there and the air rank with the smell of it.
He wondered vaguely how people remembered smells
Senescence
Cats troubled the old man’s dreams
Captain Kenneth Rattner,
Sylder
Switch
mute and patient as a draft horse.
old women with faces like dried fruit
old man’s
Garland had to carry the whiskey up the mountain now to a den in the honeysuckles just below the circle and leave it there for Marion Sylder to pick up and haul to Knoxville.
It was four o’clock in the morning when Sylder heard the old man shoot the first hole in the tank.
Marion Sylder drove to town.
Marion Sylder meets old man
His light played on the wet mudbanks among roots and stumps,
Young man
John Wesley, you better come on in
Marion said to the boy
Four weeks old, the man was saying. That’s the best’n, but you can pick whichever one you want. Do what? His daddy’s a blooded bluetick—half bluetick half walker, the pups. Makes as good a treedog as they is goin. You like that’n? Yessir, he said. Well, he’s yourn then. You can take him home with ye in about another month, say.
Ain’t talkin about him, the constable said. Come on, if you’re ready. It had begun to rain a little by then. Believe it may warm up for a spell, Gifford said. If it don’t turn snow.
Sheriff from No Country... Same character
they had a vulturous look about them,
It ain’t so much that as it is one thing’n another. An assemblage of nods to this.
the old man
a cardinal shot like a drop of blood.
He closed his eyes for a moment,
Old mans memory
He couldn’t catch cowshit in a warshtub.
Here, come take a look at your pup; he’s fat as a butterball.
the sweep of the cutter’s lights on the stanchions of the bridge,
Italics = memory
thoop thoop of the bullets in the passing water.
Sylder went to the rear of the coupe and opened the decklid.
Prohibition
Why was that old man shooting holes in the government tank on the mountain?
A warm wind on the mountain and the sky darkening,
RAIN
Arthur Ownby’s
querulous harridans,
he went to his traps again,
Marion Sylder finally left the house.
in the dawn quiet first birdcalls fell like water on stone.
carrying a limp and greasy paper bag of the curious twisted roots with which he bartered.
Brogan and cane and cracked pad clatter and slide on the shelly rocks
Changes to present tense
the wreckage of dog padding at his heels,
the dirty little sack between his knees,
may be a man steals from greed or murders in anger but he sells his own neighbors out for money and it’s few lie that deep in the pit, that far beyond the pale.
I’m what you might call Brushy bound.
Rough sleeper. Homeless.
