draw too. And all of mine! I would have heard if anything—he would have told me. I’ll never go that way. All right above the waist. If anything happens it will be down below. Eaten away. Whisky holes through all your guts. Pictures in Cardiac’s office of man with cancer. But several doctors have to agree on it. Criminal offense if they don’t. But, if worst comes to worst—all that’s outside. Get it before it gets up in you. Still live. Old man Haight had a flap in his belly. Ladled it out in a cup. McGuire— damned butcher. But he can do anything. Cut off a piece here, sew it on there. Made the Hominy man a nose with a piece of shinbone. Couldn’t tell it. Ought to be possible. Cut all the strings, tie them up again. While you wait. Sort of job for McGuire—rough and ready. They’ll do it some day. After I’m gone. Things standing thus, unknown—but kill you maybe. Bull’s too big. Soon now the Spring. You’d die. Not big enough. All bloody in her brain. Full filling fountains of bull-milk. Jupiter and what’s-her-name.
But westward now he caught a glimpse of Pisgah and the western range. It was more spacious there. The hills climbed sunward to the sun. There was width to the eye, a smoking sun-hazed amplitude, the world convoluting and opening into the world, hill and plain, into the west. The West for desire, the East for home. To the east the short near mile-away hills reeked protectively above the town. Birdseye, Sunset. A straight plume of smoke coiled thickly from Judge Buck Sevier’s smut-white clapboard residence on the decent side of Pisgah Avenue, thin smoke-wisps rose from the nigger shacks in the ravine below. Breakfast. Fried brains and eggs with streaky rashers of limp bacon. Wake, wake, wake, you mountain grills! Sleeps she yet, wrapped dirtily in three old wrappers in stale, airless yellow-shaded cold. The chapped hands sick-sweet glycerined. Gum-headed bottles, hairpins, and the bits of string. No one may enter now. Ashamed.
A paper-carrier, number 7, finished his route on the corner of Vine Street, as the car stopped, turned eastwards now from Pisgah Avenue toward the town core. The boy folded, bent, and flattened the fresh sheets deftly, throwing the block angularly thirty
