Mohawk

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

...he had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any at all.

Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.

He wasn't always trying to say witty things, and when he did say them, he felt no need to repeat them for changing company.

She looked like a woman who had spent her whole life waiting in line.

She had always seemed to him to be deep-down wild, the wilder because she harnessed that wildness most of the time.

I’m not hurting. That’s the strange part. I don’t mind losing the house, or anything in it. I know I should, and I’ll probably feel better when I do, but right now I just feel bored. I’d even feel better if I thought there was some tragic flaw, some error in judgment I could trace everything to. If I could look back and say I’d missed a sign, and that if I hadn’t, things would’ve been different.

The old woman could inspire random violence moment to moment, but for the big things could be counted on, provided that sacrifice and not intervention was called for. Anne smiled to herself. There was, after all, something to be said for sacrifice.

Randall continued to hear the fundamental insincerity of the man, but also knew that the most effective lies were those liberally laced with truth. The lie could be ninety-nine parts truth to one part falsehood, the one tarnished part mingling with the pure until it was all tainted, more false than pure fabrication.

Mather Grouses can’t have no friends. Can’t fight, can’t talk, can’t fuck. Not really.” No, Randall thought, but not because we don’t want to. It’s because our minds keep drifting from the fighting and the fucking, always back to the me—what about me, is this a me I can live with, that I can suffer people to see, that I can suffer myself to see. His grandfather had felt all of this, surely. All Mather Grouses felt it; the same perverse self-consciousness that had driven Randall into the old hospital that day. Concern for Wild Bill Gaffney had come later, after everyone had told him why he had done it and he had believed them. He had been fearless, selfless, they said, never suspecting that what had pushed him forward through the falling debris was in fact fear. Fear that someone would witness him standing there and know he had done nothing.

Why did people say things like that about him, Randall wondered. It was as if someone had started a rumor when he was a baby and by now everybody had heard it. He never seemed strange to himself, despite the conventional wisdom.

He throws sidearm. I can’t break him of it.” “And that prevents him from being a true son of yours.” “I guess not,” Price admitted, grinning suddenly at his own seriousness. “But sidearm is a tough way to go through life. I’d spare him if I could.” “Did it ever occur to you that he might end up a lawyer?” “There are sidearmed lawyers, too. The majority, come to think of it.” “You have the soul of a satirist.” “Bullshit,” he said. “I have the soul of a third baseman.

Anne herself was no stranger to adversity, but she had always hated any situation that could only be endured. She was able to summon the necessary courage for a bold, confident stroke, but simply getting by left her dispirited, and it seemed that the older she got, the more frequent these situations became.

Her mother told everyone that he had died “peacefully, as he lived.” Which seemed plainly untrue, as least the last part. His existence had been full of hard work and dust and noise and shameful worry over money. Anne was glad that it was his heart that finally gave up, that he had not choked to death, gasping for oxygen, because he’d already had a lifetime of choking want and restriction. A peaceful death didn’t begin to balance the scales. Mather Grouse was owed a great deal, and now he couldn’t collect.

But I’ll feel better about you in Connecticut. People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake. They can devote their whole lives to it.

They might have been interesting if the people beneath had done the writing, but the living had nothing worthwhile to say about the dead.

But for some reason, these periods of melancholy were important to him, and he rode them out the way some people did migraines.

Of late, Mrs. Grouse had come to see virtually everything he enjoyed as a potential source of upset. She seemed intent on making his remaining years one long Lenten season. When he objected, she reminded him that objections were upsetting. “Send

If you’re all worked up about the law, there’s a game upstairs right now. Gambling’s still against the law, so you can start right here where it’s convenient. And when you’re finished, there’s some other things. I can tell you about who’s stealing leather over to the Tucker Tannery, and who’s cutting and selling it, too. Unless maybe you already know. And then you can go after Old Man Tucker himself and jail his ass for all that shit in the crick that’s making the whole county sick. You could clean up the whole town, Gaff. Be a regular goddamn hero instead of chasing around the goddamn county after unfortunate retards like Billy that nobody cares nothing about until there’s trouble.

The fact that the two were friends added a bittersweet quality and made the whole thing seem even more noble. The fact that so much damage had been traded over a girl elevated the contest into the realm of heroism.

It was perhaps the oddest thing about his wife that she could be so open about her delights yet so secretive about her wounds, always retreating into some dark inner place to nurse herself back to health rather than admit to having been injured or reveal the scar. At her center was a code, something formulated when she was so young that the reason for it was long forgotten, a code that governed her most intimate thoughts and behavior and made her so fundamentally decent that she could never be otherwise. If Dan both admired and regretted any single quality in his wife, it was this profound spiritual stability.

Even pain was preferable to numbness, at least for a while, and hope, once indulged, was only as delicious as it was short-lived.

They would be on the brink of a serious falling out when suddenly the danger would pass as if it had never existed—“like a fart in a gale of wind,” as Dan liked to say. He had a way of saying the most patently offensive things, plain or profane, without offending. A rare gift, she concluded. The other men in her life somehow always managed to offend even when they were tiptoeing.

Neither beauty nor innocence nor the best of intentions can alter that which has always been.

At three in the morning Main Street was so quiet that Dallas could hear the street light change from red to green a block away. There was nothing sadder and lonelier in the world, he decided, especially when you were all alone when it happened.

That’s crazy. Nobody lives the way they want.