Rose Brooke’s Reviews > Winter in the Blood > Status Update

“I'll bet she was all alone. As if a girl like that could ever be alone."…
"Don't try to change the subject," she said, slapping Ferdinand Horn on the arm. "Did you bring her back?"
"Yes," I said. "She's in at the house now. Do you want to see her?"
"You mean you brought her back?" She sounded disappointed.
"You want to see her?"…
"We're late enough," she said.

"And the half-breed, Doagie!" But the laughter again racked my throat. He wasn't Teresa's father; it was you, Yellow Calf, the hunter!

Bird farted.
And it came to me, as though it were riding one moment of the gusting wind, as though Bird had had it in him all the time and had passed it to me in that one instant of corruption.

"But when he died, her beauty worked against her," I said.
"That's true, but it was more than that. When you are starving, you look for signs. Each event becomes big in your mind.
His death was the final proof that they were cursed. The medicine man, interpreted the signs. They looked at your grandmother, she had brought despair and death. And her beauty—it was as if her beauty made a mockery of their situation."

Finally they saddled you-didn't you try to kick them when they reached under your belly for the cinch?-and a man climbed on your back for the first time. Only you can tell me how it felt to stand quivering under the weight of that first man, dumbfounded until-was it? —panic and anger began to spread through your muscles and you erupted, rearing, lunging

You weren't born that way; you were born to eat grass and drink slough water, to nip other horses in the flanks the way you do lagging bulls, to mount the mares. So they cut your balls off to make you less temperamental, though I think they failed at that. They haltered you, blindfolded you, waved gunnysacks at you and slapped you across the neck, the back with leather.

But don't think I haven't seen it in your eyes those days when the clouds hide the sun and the cattle turn their asses to the wind. Those days your eyes tell me what you feel. It is the fault of the men who trained you to be a machine, to react to the pressure of a rein on your neck, spurs in your ribs, the sound of a voice. A cow horse.

I saw the futile lurch of the car as the brake lights popped, the horse's shoulder caving before the fender, the horse spinning so that its rear end smashed into the door, the smaller figure flying slowly over the top of the car to land with the hush of a stuffed doll.
…I felt my knee strike something hard, a rock maybe, or a culvert, then the numbness.

but mostly, I had had enough of myself. I wanted to lose myself, to ditch these clothes, to outrun this burning sun, to stand beneath the clouds and have my shadow erased, myself along with it.

“Except for a gaunt darkness beneath her cheekbones, she could have been a grade-school girl.” Pg 84

“She smiled and wrapped her arms around me. Her breath was warm and pleasant like a child's.” Pg 92

“I sat up and looked at her. A kind of pity rose within me. Her naked body seemed so vulnerable, so innocent, that I wanted to cover her with my own.” Pg 93