But he can do anything.
Cut off a piece here, sew it on there.
Made the Hominy man a nose with a piece of shinbone.
Couldn’t tell it.
Ought to be possible.
Cut all the strings, tie them up again.
While you wait.
Sort of job for McGuire — rough and ready.
They’ll do it some day.
After I’m gone.
Things standing thus, unknown — but kill you maybe.
Bull’s too big.
Soon now the Spring.
You’d die.
Not big enough.
All bloody in her brain.
Full filling fountains of bull-milk.
Jupiter and what’s-her-name.
But westward now he caught a glimpse of Pisgah and the western range.
It was more spacious there.
The hills climbed sunward to the sun.
There was width to the eye, a smoking sun-hazed amplitude, the world convoluting and opening into the world, hill and plain, into the west.
The West for desire, the East for home.
To the east the short near mile-away hills reeked protectively above the town.
Birdseye, Sunset.
A straight plume of smoke coiled thickly from Judge Buck Sevier’s smut-white clapboard residence on the decent side of Pisgah Avenue, thin smoke-wisps rose from the nigger shacks in the ravine below.
Breakfast.
Fried brains and eggs with streaky rashers of limp bacon.
Wake, wake, wake, you mountain grills!
Sleeps she yet, wrapped dirtily in three old wrappers in stale, airless yellow-shaded cold.
The chapped hands sick-sweet glycerined.
Gum-headed bottles, hairpins, and the bits of string.
No one may enter now.
Ashamed.
A paper-carrier, number 7, finished his route on the corner of Vine Street, as the car stopped, turned eastwards now from Pisgah Avenue toward the town core.
The boy folded, bent, and flattened the fresh sheets deftly, throwing the block angularly thirty yards upon the porch of Shields the jeweller; it struck the boarding and bounded back with a fresh plop.
Then he walked off with fatigued relief into time toward the twentieth century, feeling gratefully the ghost-kiss of absent weight upon his now free but still leaning right shoulder.
About fourteen, thought Gant.
That would be Spring of 1864. The mule camp at Harrisburg.
Thirty a month and keep.
Men stank worse than mules.
I was in third bunk on top. Gil in second.
Keep your damned dirty hoof out of my mouth.
It’s bigger than a mule’s.
That was the man.
If it ever lands on you, you bastard, you’ll think it is a mule’s, said Gil.
Then they had it.
Mother made us go.
Big enough to work, she said.
Born at the heart of the world, why here?