-
GARLAND
- The University Press of Kentucky
- Chapter
- Additional Information
GARLAND: A thousand wonders, the high holy man says. Relax, there's more terrible things could still happen. It's crazy—people smashed, lives tore up forever, and folks say, Well, it's a thousand wonders it wasn't worse than it was. Yeah. The car that killed her kid could have run into her house, blowed up, and burnt it down. Tell me to be thankful. Count my blessings. Buddy, all my fingers and toes is occupied counting the dead. There's that boy from Travis got hit by a drunk driver. Now I drink—I'm no angel on that score—but the only wheel I ever get behind, the only wheel I got, is the one in First Bus. And First Bus ain't rolled an inch in twenty years. Second Bus don't even have a wheel. I give it to Curtis Ballard for his little boy. Then there's them boys fooling around in a parking lot down at Calvary Creek. Been to a dance or something. I don't know. Anyway, one of them had a gun. Now I have a gun, too, but I don't take it off my hill and no stranger comes close enough for me to shoot. Them boys started joking, daring one another—one bullet, six chambers, four boys—and goddamn us all if one of them younguns didn't blow his head off. Clyde Napier's boy. Had a scholarship at the university to play ball. Was smart and clean and good to his mammy. And he's as far underground as if he was ninety years old. 79 WITH A HAMMER FOR MY HEART You going to tell me it's lucky there wasn't two bullets, lucky his mother's heart didn't stop when the preacher brought her the news? Now this ruin made out of me and Lawanda. You can have your luck. What we've got is grief. You know why I got to live up on the ridge? Because I don't meet nobody at the corner of my bus. I don't pass nobody in the aisles. No old women bowing to the Lord's will, no men saying his country will be proud. A thousand wonders. My thousand wonders is that, given what we know, any of us goes on. 80 ...