That Old Country Music

My 9 highlights

• His small feet were nervous in tan brogues and swam greasily in their socks.

• February is an awful fucking month just about everywhere.

• There was something antique in his bearing. The rain that he drew down upon himself seemed to be an old, old rain.

• The next day they met not quite by arrangement but by understanding.

• Now the sky makes a lurid note of the day’s ending—there are hot flushes of pink and vermilion that would shame a cardinal.

• There were huge granite boulders around the fields, as if giants had been tossing them about for sport.

• He began to move out from actual occurrences of death to consider in advance the shapes it might yet assume.

• The spring had been long and cold. The wind that came across the lake still had winter’s bite and the house was wearing its age and ached loudly in the wind, as though poorly, and I was myself sick in the bowel, the gut, and the gums. Or the nerves, in other words. Or the soul. I badly needed to get out of County Sligo, and it was word of an imminent death that allowed me to.

• He was not by his nature a finisher of things, he said. He had never said this before or really even thought it and it was a surprise to him.