After reading The Passenger and Stella Maris, I wanted more McCarthy, so I read The Orchard Keeper.
Notes and quotes…
2773 He sat up, half rose from the cot, would call him back to say That’s not true what I said. It was a damned lie ever word. He’s a rogue and a outlaw hisself and you’re welcome to shoot him, burn him down in his bed, any damn thing, became he’s a traitor to boot and maybe a man steals from greed or murders in anger but he sells his own neighbors out for money and it’s few lie that deep in the pit, that far beyond the pale.
2960 He gazed at the floor between his shoes, out of the bell-flared tops his shinbones rising hairless, pale and polished as shafts of driftwood and into his trouser legs. Get older, he said, you don’t need to count. You can read the signs. You can feel it in your ownself. Knowed a blind man oncet could tell lots of things afore they happent. But it’ll be hot and dry. Late frost is one sign if you don’t know nothin else. So they won’t but very little make because folks thinks that stuff grows by seasons and it don’t. It goes by weather. Game too, and folks themselves if they knowed it. I recollect one winter, I was jest a young feller, they wadn’t no winter. Not hardly a frost even. It was a sight in the world the things that growed. That was a seventh year seventh and you’ll be old as me afore it comes again.
- Read The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy