Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter Quotes
"He acted more like a curator, keeping the rooms clean, answering the mail and paying bills, turning on the television at the right times and smiling with the laugh tracks."
"Migrating hummingbirds passed through in September, hovering around the blue salvia, which they seemed to love, chasing one another away from the blooms."
"The tractor threw its long shadow toward the far fence and he turned and began to circle the field, the privet cut back along the bobwire, the trees tall and lush."
"I’d tried letting a couple [chickens] run free, experiments, hoping they’d stay close and use the barn to roost, but the first hen made for the far woods and got under the fence and was never seen again."
"He tasted copper on his tongue. He was cold and sleepy and very thirsty. He thought of his mother. His father. Of Cindy Walker standing in the woods."
"He remembered somebody, Larry Ott, telling him that once a flock of buzzards took to roosting in a tree, the tree began to die."
"His father and the woman called Alice were talking about how cold it was. 'Freeze my dad-blame can off,' his father said."
"Even today, more than a year later, carrying his rifle through the woods, the memory shamed him."
"When an animal’s time come, it goes off to die."
"The rush of freezing air, the sweet steel smell. The change box heavy with quarters and dimes and nickels."
"You’d have to lug water from the creek on the other side of the field, where the trees resumed."
"I thought she worked the early shift. Piggly Wiggly."
"You scared me is all. Sneaking up like that."
"Got a busy one, Ina. Two transmissions and a carburetor."
"The last thing he did was pull at the fingers of his gloves, removing the left one, the right, and erect a stick the shape of a Y in the cold mulch beneath the leaves."
"Silas, who was the first answered prayer he couldn’t tell her about."
"I’m sorry to bother you," Larry Ott’s voice said.
"It’s already one in the chamber," Larry said.
"No, this gun’s a .22 caliber. It shoots long or short cartridges."
"It was a world he wanted no part of. He wanted no part of her."
"His mother and the bus driver pulled him up and helped him back to the pickup, waiting a few blocks away."
"Lord," his mother said to Charles, "the night we’ve give you."
"Well, truth is yall ain’t going to find a motel room this late."
"I’m taking the bus here to a town called Chabot."
"The smile she wore was the one she used around white people."
"What’s wrong, baby? Your voice sounds funny."
"I’m done fighting you so I’ll tell you what I’m gone do."
"We might have to use one of the other ones, then."
"They had em back then, too, Ina, I’m pretty sure they did."
"Well, just Larry, where’d you go to high school?"
"Hell, hoss, I don’t care what you done. I’ll still sell you a dish, you want one."
"You ain’t one of them forty-year-old virgins, are you?"
"Hell no. Him and Momma went over to the dog track."
"Sometimes women can make you crazy, can’t they?"
"I didn’t know it was gone be Larry that brought her."
"You got in a fight with a big-ass pit bull," the ER doctor had said. "Judging from its bite radius, it’s amazing you’re alive." "Yeah," Silas had mumbled. "You should see the other dog."
"He wished you’d been the white one," Larry said.
"I’m still feeding the first ladies," he said. "Getting them eggs. You know what I do? Take em to Miss Marla over at The Hub in Chabot. You know that place? She calls em ‘free-range eggs.’"
"I used to go there," Silas said, pointing to the television. "Wrigley Field. When I was a boy."
"You welcome," Silas said. "But wait. I near bout forgot."