Re: Louise Erdrich--Love Medicine

看板EngTalk (全英文聊天)作者fizeau (Gratias ad Opus)時間18年前 (2007/12/29 15:53)推噓0(0推 0噓 0→)

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※ 引述《fizeau (Gratias ad Opus)》之銘言： : "On to greener pastures, as they say. It was down through Spokane and : across Idaho then Montana and very soon we were racing the weather right : along under the Canadian border through Columbus, Des Lacs, and then we : were in Bottineau County and soon home. We'd made most of the trip, that : summer, without putting up the car hood at all. We got home just in time, : it turned out, for the army to remember Henry had signed up to join it. : I don't wonder that the army was so glad to get my brother that they turned : him into a Marine. He was built like a brick outhouse anyway. We liked to : tease him that they really wanted him for his Indian nose. He had a nose : big and sharp as a hatchet, like the nose on Red Tomahawk, the Indian who : killed Sitting Bull, whose profile is on signs all along the North Dakota : highways. Henry went off to training camp, came home once during Christmas, : then the next thing you know we got an overseas letter from him. It was 1970, : and he said he was stationed up in the northern hill country. Whereabouts I : did not know. He wasn't such a hot letter writer, and only got off two before : the enemy caught him. I could never keep it straight, which direction those : good Vietnam soldiers were from. : I wrote him back several times, even though I didn't know if those letters : would get through. I kept him informed all about the car. Most of the time : I had it up on blocks in the yard or half taken apart, because that long : trip did a hard job on it under the hood." --The Red Convertible (1974), : Lyman Lamartine. pp. 184-185 "When he came home, though, Henry was very different, and I'll say this: the change was no good. You could hardly expect him to change for the better, I know. But he was quiet, so quiet, and never comfortable sitting still anywhere but always up and moving around. I thought back to times we'd sat still for whole afternoons, never moving a muscle, just shifting our weight along the ground, talking to whoever sat with us, watching things. He'd always had a joke, then, too, and now you couldn't get him to laugh, or when he did it was more the sound of a man choking, a sound that stopped up the throats of other people around him. They got to leaving him alone most of the time, and I didn't blame them. It was a fact: Henry was jumpy and mean. I'd bought a color TV set for my mom and the rest of us while Henry was away. Money still came very easy. I was sorry I'd ever bought it though, because of Henry. I was also sorry I'd bought color, because with black-and-white the pictures seem older and farther away. But what are you going to do? He sat in front of it, watching it, and that was the only time he was completely still. But it was the kind of stillness that you see in a rabbit when it freezes and before it will bolt. He was not easy. He sat in his chair gripping the arm- rests with all his might, as if the chair itself was moving at a high speed and if he let go at all he would rocket forward and maybe crash right through the set." -- ※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) ◆ From: 122.120.97.250