Note: These sentences are pulled from Barry Hannah’s excellent novel “Ray”, which can be yours on the cheap, if you’d care to shell out just a few coppers for a fine piece of literature.
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The stacked tires, the station wagon half-captured by kudzu and ivy, the fishing boat on wheels, the tops of an ash and a pine rising from the falling ravine behind the backyard, and in front, the house, a peeling eyesore, the complaint of the neighborhood. The Hooches!
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Sister is always in love with somebody, sometimes me. There is a capricious wisdom she has about attaching herself to anybody for very long, although her loyalties are fast. She plays the guitar well and has a nice voice that she keeps to yourself.
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Then I met Sister and my trust came back, my body was flooded with hope.
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She beats the hell out of my wife, who looks like somebody on television.
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One night Charlie was waked up by a noise in his backyard. He caught hold of his hatchet, hoping it was a criminal, for his life had been dull lately.
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Big oaks and an enormous magnolia comforted his yard.
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For the rest of the day he could not eat, and he practiced self-abuse in all possible ways, sort of living in the toilet at the soap factory, moving from stall to stall so as not to invite the looks of the curious and their hellos and how-are-yous.
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Moreover, she had cheated on DeSoto the previous night. The man was not nearly as handsome as DeSoto, but his desire for her was constant, soft, a genial tribute to the shrine of her body, and she recalled that even the Bible said that was okay.
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Westy has an uncommon adventurous warmth to her, a crazy hope in her blue eyes, and a body that will keep a lover occupied. I was gone for her at first sight.
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Sweet God, there is nothing like being married to the right woman.
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For about an hour we went into the beautiful nowhere together.
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I read the paper as I was waiting in the emergency room. Sister is dead, and they have Maynard Castro as probable cause. Three times through her precious brain. Maynard just could not take the beauty. Not a sign of sexual molestation. No sign of nothing except an outright shooting in the nightclub where she sings.
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In their secret hearts, such perversities as Maynard know there are things they can never have, things they have wanted with all their hearts. So they kill them. Most preachers are this way. Their messages seem benevolent, but they are more evil than the rest of us walking pavement.
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Her neck is a longish classic from the old paintings of what’s-his-name.
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She hits me over the head with a pillow.
Violence.
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The backyard is raked and the grass is growing around it like a billiard table.
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I see no pressing reason to get out of bed. The lights are off and it is raining and the covers are the cave I dreamed of when I was a child…The covers tough me like mother hands.
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It was either them or me, by God. I loved those clean choices.
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All we have is together.
